So now I had spots, a mouthful of metal and was virtually bald. Small wonder I excelled at my studies, seeking refuge in the sanctuary of my room where being a swot felt like something I could control. For the next two years, while others played sports on Wednesday afternoons, I sat under a heat lamp, my scalp smothered in a thick white cream, willing my hair to grow back. But it had been so severely nuked by the mistaken application of a double dose of chemicals (due to a change in shift between apprentices who had failed to communicate what stage of the process they were at during the handover), that when my hair grew longer than half an inch, it fell out. Over and over again, it just gave up the will to live. Any vanity I had was scorched along with it. Instead of fulfilling my secret hope of becoming as beautiful of my mother, thereby gaining my father’s unconditional approval, I had found yet another way to disappoint my parents and myself.
Like beauty, fame had currency in my home. The word ‘famous’ was used by my parents with approval, whether applied to chefs, artists or politicians. They made it sound like an attractive quality worthy of respect. My father’s tendency towards hyperbole meant that he often described someone or something he admired as ‘the world’s most famous’ whether it was a conductor or a hamburger. Celebrity was something to strive for, and to be in its orbit was to be elevated into an exclusive realm of privilege and reward. It conferred immortality.
My first brush with fame is second-hand but I don’t have any recollection of it, so I feel it does not count. There are photographs to prove it, but they do not jog my memory one jot, no matter how often the story is repeated. In the photographs I am just a toddler, one speck among other specks playing on a lawn at the home of Josephine Baker, the great American cabaret sensation who danced naked except for a scanty skirt of bananas. The pictures were taken at her home in the south of France while I was playing with the so-called Rainbow Family, children she had adopted from all over the world (long before Brangelina did the same).
At the time, my father was involved in the student travel business and looking for somewhere he could offer budget group accommodation to young American college graduates coming over on vacation. He heard that Baker, who was going broke thanks to her unscrupulous sponge of a husband, was offering to rent out her thirty-bedroom chateau in the Dordogne complete with its sumptuous formal gardens. We went to visit on one of our site-inspection holidays—the ones that always involved traipsing around a new hotel, sometimes as yet incomplete, and assessing rooms for future groups.
Built in 1489 as a Renaissance fortress, Les Milandes was where Baker indulged her idealistic and romantic but impractical dream of raising her brood of a dozen, some of them rescued from appalling circumstances. One had been found in a garbage bin. But she was never there, always busy on tour earning the money to keep the place going. Meanwhile, her bandleader husband, Jo Bouillon, and her staff of nannies robbed her blind, until she could no longer keep the children or the house. I was there in a brief halcyon moment before things went terribly wrong, but according to my mother the children were already pretty feral—unsupervised and bordering on neglected. Eventually Baker turned to her friend Princess Grace to help her out financially and rescue the children, finding new homes for them. Most have led troubled lives ever since.
In my forties, I found the story of Baker and her tribe poignant and intriguing enough to think I might write about it. On a trip to New York, it prompted me to visit a shabby restaurant upholstered in faded red velvet called Chez Josephine, on 42nd Street, run by her son Jean-Claude. He was distinctly unfriendly, suspicious and evasive, and refused to help me find and contact the other children, including his brother Jarry, who was working there as a waiter. In 2015, Jean-Claude took his own life, but the refurbished restaurant with its decor of Baker memorabilia is still a fixture of the theatre district.
My mother caught the fame bug early. While still in her teens, she had met her fair share of people who would become artistic luminaries. Through Arlette Varda, she became an acolyte in the orbit of Jean Vilar, France’s Laurence Olivier, one of the great actor–managers of the twentieth century and the founder of the Avignon Festival. She was in his entourage at the inaugural festival, first minding his children, then as his assistant, mixing with the cream of France’s actors including Jeanne Moreau (‘She was imperious, she knew she was good,’ my mother said). At the second festival she appeared on stage as a tree in La Mort de Danton. While she had no desire to perform, she blossomed in the fellowship of the company. It was perhaps her first experience of another kind of family: an ensemble. The troupe shared long convivial lunches where my ravishing mother more than held her own, according to Arlette, who took the company’s production stills and watched Jacqueline develop a quick, sharp wit, parrying the banter and repartee of her country’s most gifted performers. These were sparkling, carefree days that my mother would remember as the happiest of her life.
Perhaps her interest in fame was sharpened by her affair with Thérond, who was single-handedly responsible for the most intrusive long-lens stalking of celebrities in Europe at the time, making Paris Match the vanguard scandal magazine of the twentieth century.
When we watched French films together, she would suddenly exclaim, in the middle of a scene or watching the credits, ‘Ah celui-là, je le connais!’ (‘Oh, I know that one!’) She speaks rarely of those days except to say that Jean Vilar propositioned her, which left her feeling betrayed. ‘He said I could not come to rehearsals because my presence inflamed him,’ she said with a smirk. When his wife Andrée, whom she adored, did the same, she was equally dismayed: ‘One thing I am not, is a lesbian,’ she told me emphatically at the age of eighty-five.
Her awareness sharpened by her theatre life, my mother developed a keen talent for celebrity spotting. We were holidaying in Spain where my father was attempting to slot his Jaguar into a particularly tight spot, when a man in short shorts appeared and began gesturing dramatically, miming hard steering to help my father slide into position. ‘Isn’t that Laurence Olivier?’ said my mother. Olivier was my father’s idol, a veritable god in his pantheon. A slavish, if not downright obsessive fan, my father had seen him as Shakespeare’s Richard III no less than fourteen times, sometimes sleeping outside theatre box offices in queues for tickets. He had a photograph of Olivier in the role in his study at home. The chance encounter made his day, though Olivier slipped away before my father could thank him.
She was chuffed that our local GP, David Sacks, had a celebrity clientele that included Elizabeth Taylor. When it was time for me to be vaccinated, she suggested he administer the inoculations on the sole of the foot to avoid unsightly scarring on the more traditional arm or thigh. He duly obliged. Many years later, when I first met the awkwardly shy neurologist Oliver Sacks, I was able to break the ice by telling him that his brother had been the family doctor. When I added that his mother had been my own mother’s paediatrician, he hugged me in delight.
The first person I ever interviewed was myself. Typical only child behaviour, you might say, but there was just no one else available at the time. I was maybe six or seven, in a hotel somewhere, and had poured half a bottle of bubble bath into the tub and was now soaking in it, swathed in white foam I pretended was a fluffy fur coat, like one a starlet would wear. I had seen such things on television, so I knew they existed. The foam felt soft and luxurious, so I just started a fantasy conversation aloud, asking my alter ego questions. I replied that I lived in Paris, I was a film star, this was one of my many fur coats but the only one that was white, and my favourite food was a room-service club sandwich followed by chocolate mousse. If asked, I would probably still say that today.
I sustained this dialogue for some minutes before I heard giggling from the next room and realised that in getting carried away with my subject I had completely forgotten that my parents were next door, eavesdropping. Mortified, I ended the interview mid-sentence, pulled the plug and let the bubble bath drain away.
Star-spotting a
necdotes, repeated often and with awe, left me in no doubt that any contact, however brief and impersonal, with people burnished by the flame of fame was to be encouraged. To be in the same restaurant or in their random presence anywhere was a mark of success, as long as they were from the world of the arts, media or politics. But not sports, which my parents had no interest in.
And not pop music, which my father regarded as an abomination. He had a cousin who worked for Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, as the company lawyer, drawing up contracts for its stellar roster of performers. Papa was not impressed. When his cousin sent me a copy of the latest Supremes album, signed on the disc’s label by all of the members of the group, my father broke the record in two and threw it in the bin.
My mother was less uncompromisingly highbrow. I once witnessed her tear the lyrics of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ out of Harpers and Queen in a Harley Street waiting room and fold them into her handbag because she liked them so much. When my father was away we watched Top of the Pops with shared pleasure.
Years later, Maman recognised a couple across the aisle on a flight to Bali as Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. ‘He really doesn’t look bad for someone who has taken so many drugs,’ she said, in a tone suggesting she was contemplating switching from her nightly application of Guerlain potions to his regime.
Fame was a presence at my school, though I was scarcely aware of it. When I mentioned a classmate’s name, my parents often seemed to have a genealogical map of their origins like a social sat nav. According to their radar, Simon, probably the first boy I ever knew with one white and one black parent, was the son of a distinguished actor. A short American boy who had a ferrety face like a young Polanski and scowled at teachers turned out to be the son of one of the world’s greatest writers of musicals. I did not like either of them the more for it, but my parents’ preoccupation with lineage taught me that surnames were like a code to be cracked, that whoever you met had a history that connected them to others in ways that mattered, even if I could not quite see how. Later on I learned that my school was something of a magnet for the rich and famous, from Jacqueline Bissett to Madonna’s daughter Lourdes, and that saying I had attended the French Lycée conferred snobbish cachet that ran parallel with academic achievement.
As a way of earning my parents’ approval, I made an unconscious note to pursue fame as a goal. My ambition in life was to be in its orbit, no matter how small a planet in its galaxy. Long before celebrity became a pop-culture addiction, I believed its reflected sheen and lustre would act like a protective coating, shellacking me against failure and disappointment. But over time, as I saw it up close, its gleam tarnished.
CHAPTER 6
Kindertransport
My schoolfriends called their father ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’, but my father insisted on the European ‘Papa’. I didn’t like it. I wanted to be the same as everyone else. My mother was less fussed about whether she was Mummy or Maman, but Papa it had to be. As an adult, I called my father HB, as he was known to his staff and colleagues. He in turn called me a selection of nicknames, many of them obscure. I was his Tochter aus Elysium, from Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the climax of Symphony No. 9, sometimes just shortened to Tochter, but I was also Clonker (no idea why), Plum Pudding and, equally inexplicably, Ninotchka. If I was in a bad mood I was Sourpuss or Wagner’s troubled daughter of the gods, Brunhilde. But mostly I was just Baby.
My mother’s names for me were similarly exotic but obscure: Bécassine, a reference to her favourite French childhood cartoon character; Rostopchine, the name of a Franco-Russian aristocrat who wrote French children’s books I adored; the idealised Cunégonde from Voltaire’s Candide and Pocahontas, the Native American Indian princess, which was the name she almost saddled me with officially until my father put his foot down. If I was being belligerent, she called me pouffiasse, a French slang word for bitch, or mégère, the word for shrew, or Boadicea, the warrior queen.
Another difference: when I was about nine or ten I noticed that some of my schoolfriends were absent from class on the same days without bringing a note to say they had been ill.
‘Probably Jewish,’ said my father.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked, always keen on acquiring new words and definitions.
He explained that Jews were people whose religion meant they did not believe in Jesus Christ (with whom I was barely familiar, although I knew he appeared in the optional catéchisme classes I did not attend) and who therefore did not go to church but had special days for their own religious holidays.
‘Are we Jewish?’ I asked hopefully, since we did not go to church.
‘I am, Mummy is not. So technically you’re not,’ replied my father, which was altogether too ambiguous for me. To compound my confusion, he then added cryptically: ‘But of course you’d be Jewish enough for the Nazis, because you have a Jewish grandmother.’
‘Who are the Nazis?’
‘Not are. Were. The Nazis are in the past tense, Baby. It’s a long story. Maybe when you’re a bit older.’
That night, as I was about to turn out the light, my father came and stood by my bed and raised his hand as if he were about to bless me. ‘Repeat after me, Baby,’ he said, his voice gentle but charged with emotion. ‘Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.’
I repeated the words until he was satisfied I knew them by heart. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked him.
‘It means “I am the Lord thy God and you shall have no other God but me”,’ said my father without further elaboration. I took this to mean that I was to consider him an all-powerful deity with authority and dominion over everything. Which was pretty well the case.
Within a year or two of this conversation, prompted by a school project, I asked Papa to draw me a family tree. No sooner had he outlined the first branch than he broke down and wept—great heavings as he gulped for air like a fish on a slab—guilty that he could not remember the names of all his Hungarian and Polish cousins. These were children with whom he had played on family holidays, and he could see their faces, but their names were gone.
‘Can’t we ask someone?’ I suggested, which only provoked more tears.
My mother whispered to me that they were all dead.
References to family were always made obliquely to minimise their emotional impact. That special silence, unique to homes traumatised by survivor nightmares, hovered over ours too. There was a perimeter fence around certain subjects, patrolled by invisible guards.
One day my father noticed the pencil I was using to draw with and flew into an instant rage.
‘If I ever see you with a German implement of any kind again, I will DIS-IN-HERIT you!’ he bellowed, separating each syllable for emphasis. I was not sure what that meant but it did not sound desirable.
The spare room in our house was not used except for storage, as we rarely had guests. It was always kept locked. One day while my parents were out, I unlocked the room and examined the bookshelves. There I found the fat blockbusters my father read on holiday. Like so many other adolescents I fell upon the famous wedding party sex scene in The Godfather and, while reading it, became flushed with excitement. Reading and a state of arousal became inextricably linked for me at that moment. Perhaps I chose to make reading central to my life, believing it might trigger such heightened sensations on a regular basis (which it does, though of a different nature).
But another, much darker association was forged in that room: mixed in with the trashy best-sellers were books with pictures of men in striped pyjamas, looking haunted and skeletal, pictures of piles of corpses, their limbs flung this way and that like rag dolls in the disarray and abandon of death, pictures of mountains of suitcases, and piles of shoes, of cell-like rooms captioned as gas chambers. I read a little, snatched a few phrases here and there, recoiled at the horror and wondered: Who were these people? Was there any connection between them and my father’s dead relatives? Why did they look like that? Why were their ghastly images kept here, togethe
r with the books that caused my heartbeat to rise? In that incomplete awareness, was a connection made between sex and death? I never mentioned the room to my parents, never asked about those images. Instinctively, I knew not to.
Some stories keep you warm, like a blanket that wraps you up in comfort, security and identity. Like scraps of fabric saved to make a patchwork quilt, I only have fragments of information. Trying to stitch them together when none of them are evenly shaped or of the same weight makes for an awkward cloth full of holes, as if moths had got at it.
This much I know: immediately after Kristallnacht, when the Nazis burnt and destroyed synagogues across Germany and Austria in November 1938, my grandparents realised that the safety of the family was at risk. Because they were Jews.
Alexander and Laura Baum lived in the heart of Vienna, above a restaurant called Drei Husaren (Three Hussars) in Weihburggasse, not far from St Stephen’s Cathedral which today looks like a very smart bourgeois part of town. But Alexander Baum was not a wealthy man by any means. Solidly middle class, of leftist leanings, he earned a modest living by stamping out small price-tag labels for jewellers using a machine he kept in the bathroom. His wife threaded the labels onto fine cotton and delivered them to shops.
As a cultured, well-read man who loved music, literature and the theatre, Alexander mingled on the periphery of those worlds; his association with Karl Kraus, the biting satirist and dramatist, whom he helped assemble his subversive magazine Die Fackel (The Torch), would later cost him his life.
In the ten years he shared with his son, he passed on his enthusiasms so effectively that they would last a lifetime. Later, my father would write whole paeans to me about artists to whom he was first introduced at this stage of his life and whom he venerated forever. Conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini gave my father an example of what it meant to lead with complete authority that he would later emulate in business.
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