Billy and the Joels--The American rock star and his German family story

by Steffen Radlmaier

  In the summer of 1945, 22-year-old GI Helmut futilely searched for relatives and friends in Nuremberg’s completely devastated old town. He tried to trace his old friend Rudi Weber, but he was now a prisoner of war. The only person from the past whom he did chance upon was his father’s old chauffeur, with whom he’d gotten on so well as a child; he’d lost a leg fighting in the Russian campaign. Meeting this acquaintance, who was now a war invalid, moved the homecoming GI intensely.

  And there was one image he never forgot, an image of symbolic relevance: Out of the rubbled ruins of Nuremberg’s southern part of town towered a smokestack that had miraculously survived the bombing, standing out like a defiant exclamation mark. A remnant of the clothing factory. Four huge letters could still be seen; both a memorial and a sign of life:

  J-O-E-L.

  A New Start in New York

  Helmut Joel, who now called himself Howard, was discharged in October 1945 and returned to his parents in New York. The luxury liners “Queen Mary” and “Queen Elizabeth” had been converted to transport ships returning soldiers back home to the USA. During the past four years, the two ships had brought more than two million GIs back over the ocean to be welcomed by cheering onlookers on Manhattan pier.

  One day, completely unexpectedly, Günther, the son of Leon and Johanna Joel, got in touch with them. Somehow or other, with the help of a refugee organization, he’d managed to get from Switzerland to the USA. The two cousins met up a few times, but then lost track of each other again.

  Carl Joel – he now wrote his first name with a ‘C’ instead of a ‘K’ – also met up with his sister Litti and her husband Fred Fleischmann in New York. Together with their son Frederik, they’d also had an adventurous escape from Germany to the USA, via Italy and Ecuador. The Fleischmanns wanted nothing more to do with Germany and made a permanent home of the United States. Frederik even changed his surname to “Linton” in honor of the two American presidents Lin(coln) and (Washing)ton.

  A war veteran at the age of 22, Helmut Joel suppressed his past and tried to start a new life in New York. He began studying to be a television technician; the two-year course was free for ex-soldiers: “Television was still in its infancy and was becoming all the rage. There was a huge demand for specialists and I saw that as big chance for me.”

  His first job was with RCA, but after a few years he left for the giant General Electric Company. Field strength metering, transmission technology and the production of televisions were some of the diverse areas in which the pioneering TV firm worked.

  Helmut Joel and Rosalind Nyman had kept the fire of their love burning throughout the war years, and they married in 1946 – in retrospect, it was much too early. It didn’t turn out to be a storybook marriage. The friction soon started, and not just due to the fact that the two families didn’t get along. The parents’ origins and mentalities were simply too different, despite their Jewish-European backgrounds. The German, Karl Joel, was a middle-class businessman, who had trouble settling down in America; The Briton, Phillip Nyman, amateur author and bohemian, was already very much at home in the New World. Billy Joel remembers: “My father’s parents didn’t get along with my mother or my mother’s family. There was a big division, as a matter of fact; as long as I can remember, there never was any big family thing going on. My mother’s parents lived in Flatbush in Brooklyn, and it was a narrow, dark, typical tenement-style apartment. My father’s parents had this big, open, sunken living room with very nice furniture and Oriental rugs; but I was very young, and I don’t remember them very well.”26

  The young couple moved into a small apartment in the Bronx, not far from the in-laws. In 1948, Helmut and Rosalind adopted Judith Ann, the five-month-old daughter of Rosalind’s sister, who had committed suicide shortly after the baby was born – apparently as a result of post-natal depression.

  Then, on May 9, 1949, Rosalind gave birth to William Martin Joel, known as Billy. Star sign: Taurus.

  The apartment was much too small for the family with their two children so, like many others in the booming metropolis, the Joels went in search of a new home. In the end they decided to move out of the city and into the suburbs – to a brand new town on Long Island, 25 miles east of New York. It was drawn to their attention by a newspaper advertisement. The first bricks for Levittown were laid in 1947, and it was the biggest ever private housing development project in the history of the United States. It was also the world’s first ever satellite town to be conceived on a drawing board. William J. Levitt and his brother Alfred from Brooklyn had developed their revolutionary construction methods during the war years. Now their ideas were being put into practice on a 1,600 hectare potato field. The Levitts transferred the assembly-line principle to the building of houses that – just like Henry Ford’s cars – all looked the same but were fairly cheap to buy. If all went to plan, 36 houses could be built in a single day.

  Once the land had been bulldozed, trucks offloaded the building materials at intervals of 60 feet. Then 27 teams of craftsmen went from lot to lot, each one of them doing just one specific task. Prefabricated sections and modern electric tools ensured the houses could be finished within an unusually short time. When finished, the town became home to 82,000 Americans, all from the white middle-classes. Black Americans didn’t move to Levittown.

  The general conditions of purchase were obviously appealing to the Joels: Initially, the 17,000 houses were reserved for war veterans, who were able to buy a house with a small garden for the sensational price of 8,000 dollars. A low-interest mortgage, which was guaranteed by the GI Bill, made the purchase even more attractive. And the big Long Island Parkway meant New York City was just a one-hour drive away.

  In July of 1950, the Joels moved into 20 Meeting Lane, in the municipality of Hicksville. Their little house was backed by corn and potato fields and looked the same as all the others: living room, kitchen, dining room, two bedrooms and a small backyard. An old piano was pretty much the only luxury they could afford. The house was apparently furnished according to the taste of Meta Joel, who wasn’t particularly fond of her daughter-in-law. Whether she wanted to or not, Rosalind had to comply.

  Like his father before him, Helmut Joel would sit at the piano after work, playing pieces by his favorite composers, Chopin, Brahms and Debussy. It was a cheap white piano, made by Lester, and little Billy would often climb onto his father’s lap to try his hand at playing along. Rosalind liked to sing and listen to recordings of classical music. The proud parents soon realized that their son had inherited their musical talent, and did all they could to encourage him. Helmut remembered: “Billy always had an unbelievably good ear.”

  At the age of five, Billy was able to play a piece by Mozart by heart, and his mother took him to his first piano lesson with Miss Francis, a piano teacher from the neighborhood. “I started piano lessons at the age of five. I can even remember the first piece I learnt. It was in a well-known piano book by John Thompson. The first little piece was called ‘Off We Go to Musicland’. When I look back now, I have to laugh: it sounds like it was a prophecy.”

  It was about this time that things started to get tense between Billy’s parents. Rosalind was of the opinion that her husband’s depressing war experiences had had a negative effect on him. “He wasn’t the same when he returned from the war.” He’d become cynical and pessimistic. On the other hand, Helmut was increasingly irritated by the mood swings of his wife, who often drowned her sorrows in alcohol. Things started to get awkward at home; the couple was stuck in a rut.

  The truth was, not only had Helmut Joel lost a lot of his aspirations while still young, he was also very much prone to depression. He was often tormented by dark periods when he would isolate himself from the outside world. His son inherited a little of this characteristic too.

  Looking back, Billy Joel had this to say about it: “I recall him being different than a lot of other people’s fathers, because he wa
s German and he had a European sense of humor, which was very cynical, very sarcastic, very dark. He would talk to me as if he was talking to someone his own age; he wouldn’t talk in a very condescending way, as parents do with young children. I didn’t always understand what he was talking about, but I thought I was being treated in a special way.”27

  Whatever the case, Helmut Joel was far from happy: “Life is a cesspool” – Billy never forgot how his father would say that.

  But the boy admired his father, his humor and his love of music. “My father was my idol as a pianist as a kid, because he was classically trained and could read music. He would come home from work at General Electric and take Chopin and Bartok pieces and work through them laboriously; this was his entertainment. But he thought he was never good enough; he never gave himself any slack.”28

  Music became vital for both father and son – and the piano became their best friend. Of course, as a child Billy saw the whole thing a little less seriously. He loved to play, but hated the repetition of practicing scales or trying to decipher musical notation. He much preferred to rely on his good ear and equally good memory, and was able to play by heart pieces that he’d only heard a few times before. Or he’d play fantasy passages in the style of the respective composer, without the listener realizing.

  This playful habit of Billy’s evidently earned him a slap in the face from his father, who took classical music very seriously and for whom it was more than just light entertainment. He loathed modern music. That was the reason he reacted so harshly when he caught his son murdering a Beethoven composition with some wild improvisation.

  Billy was by no means a stay-at-home and he loved to run about with his neighborhood pals. The only difference was that music opened up a secret, mystical world to him, in which he could shut himself away if he so wished. He was also a real bookworm and devoured books by the dozen.

  “By six years old, he was writing full songs with stories in them, just like the tales and literature he always heard recited by my storytelling father; my family didn’t have a pot to pee in, but we were cultured English Jews with a lot of pride. By the time he was seven, Billy was a bookworm, and if I went to the library I had to bring home 20 books: illustrated books, storybooks, history books. He was self-sufficient; you could give him a kitchen chair and he’d spent hours pretending it was a choo-choo-train. It didn’t take much to make him happy.”

  That’s how Rosalind Joel described the young Billy to Billboard editor Timothy White in an interview in 1994.

  It wasn’t just Billy’s parents who encouraged their son’s musical talent – his grandfather Phillip Nyman did too. After Billy’s parents separated, the cultured English emigrant became a kind of surrogate father to the boy, who often went to visit him in Brooklyn: “I don’t remember a steady gig the old man ever had, but he was the happiest person I ever knew. He was a total education freak who read everything – algebra books, books about paleontology. He turned me into a reader. I think I got a lot of my romantic notions reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Twain.”29 Billy’s Bohemian grandfather tried to make a living as a jeweler, but it was usually his wife, who was the only one in the family who could speak Yiddish, who earned the family’s keep working as a nanny. Instead, Phillip Nyman took his grandson to classical concerts or to the ballet. He would often slip the doorman a couple of cigarettes so that they could sit in the better seats. This all went a long way to broadening the educational horizons of the young kid from the suburbs.

  In 1954 Billy started attending Fork Lane Elementary School around the corner. He wore white socks and black sneakers, but was a bit smaller and slighter than the others. It didn’t take long for the teachers to become aware of his musical talent. One of those was music teacher Mary Milidantry, who managed to get him interested in the school choir.

  Billy’s father was always on the road. The children missed him, but when he did come home the arguments would usually start. The Joels’ marriage was gradually falling apart. “The time came when it just couldn’t go on”, remembered Helmut Joel, “reconciliation was no longer possible.” And as if in a bad film, one day in 1957 he closed the door in Hicksville behind him, never to return. It was a trauma for the family that resonated for a long, long while – and it was something he didn’t like to talk about.

  “I made a cut. From one day to the next. I left and never spoke a word to Rosalind again. I thought long and hard about leaving, but it was the only way. I knew that according to American law, the mother would get custody of the children. I wanted to spare the kids the never-ending arguments and saw no other way. We’d tried long enough to muddle along. It was futile.”

  Back in Hicksville he’d left behind a deeply hurt wife and two small children who urgently needed their father. Billy Joel remembers: “My mom, I would see her standing by the window, looking out of the kitchen window, and she knew that my dad, he wouldn’t be coming home that day, but she was maybe hoping he would pull up front. I’d say, ‘Mom, what are you doing?’ and sometimes she would say, ‘Just looking out the window. Maybe your father’s coming home.’”30

  For a while, Helmut Joel stayed in New York at his parents’ place, where he lost himself in his work. The children visited him now and again. He went on long business trips for General Electric to Central and South America, before finally deciding to return to Europe. A fugitive once more. For one thing, he wanted to distance himself both mentally and physically from his past life. And he’d never really been happy in the USA either. His home was everywhere and nowhere.

  Atonement

  Meanwhile, Karl and Meta Joel had managed to carve out a modest existence for themselves in New York. They were now able to sell their home-made hair bands to department stores such as Woolworths, although the profits were not exactly making them rich. The tense family situation meant they saw very little of their grandson Billy.

  As soon as the war ended, the former mail-order boss made efforts to recover at least some of his unfairly forfeited assets. It wasn’t so much about the money, but about justice and honor.

  In the autumn of 1945, the Nuremberg Trials before the International Military Tribunal began in Joel’s home town and erstwhile Nazi stronghold. The victorious allied powers wanted to see those responsible for the atrocities made accountable, and to teach the Germans a lesson in democracy. The historic proceedings were of more interest to the outside world than to Germany itself. The Germans were busy suppressing their Nazi past and trying to get on with the depressing reality of the present. The Joels followed the detailed reports from Nuremberg in the American press with satisfaction. Helmut’s old school friend, Arno Hamburger was working for the military tribunal as an interpreter. He’d survived the war in exile in Palestine and had only recently returned home to Germany.

  It must have come as quite a surprise to Karl when, in 1947, he received a letter from textile manufacturer Hugo Wilkens in Germany, putting forward a rather strange business idea. Wilkens was writing in the name of an old acquaintance, Josef Neckermann, the man who had snapped up Joel’s mail-order company for a pittance before the war.

  Joel remained civil when he wrote to Neckermann on March 25, 1947: “Mr. Wilkens will confirm that I am the last person to harbor any feelings of revenge. However, I’m sure you will understand that I am attempting to recover as much as I possibly can of the assets that were taken away from me by the authorities at that time. I’m sure you would do the same if you were in my position.” Joel didn’t want revenge; he wanted to get his money back at last. Nevertheless, he didn’t comply with the request to write a letter that would help de-nazify Neckermann.

  Neckermann had also been through some turbulent times: Within only a few years, the shrewd, scrupulous businessman had expanded what was now ‘his’ mail-order company, and had done great business with the German army during the war. For example, he supplied enormous numbers of uniform jackets and special winter clothing for the R
ussian campaign. He made full use of his contacts within the Nazi leadership, and personally presented his winter collection to Hitler on the Führer’s birthday on April 20, 1942. Hitler had declared Neckermann an ‘indispensable person’ and had commissioned him to produce three million winter uniforms. Business was business.

  But with the end of the war it looked as if Neckermann’s career was at its end: He was arrested by the American occupying forces and sentenced to one year in prison for the violation of a military regulation. On being released he was classed as having a criminal record and, according to American military court statutes, this meant he was strictly forbidden to work. However, it didn’t take him long to forge a plan, but one that was doomed to fail. The audacity Neckermann showed in now wanting to do business with, of all people, Karl Joel, was quite astonishing: Along with textile industrialists Hugo Wilkens, Gustav Schickedanz and Karl Joel, he intended to start a mail-order company that supplied aid packages.

  His curious idea was to put together ‘customized’ packages for the ailing German people according to their particular needs, as a kind of more attractive alternative to the CARE packages that were coming from the USA.

  This is how Neckermann described his idea in his memoirs: “We thought it must be possible to introduce to Germany aid packages that were not pre-packed, but that we would assemble from the individual components. We figured a benefactor would be able to buy a voucher from certain designated places, and the mail-order company would have the components, which had been processed in Germany, ready and waiting and listed in a catalogue. The beneficiary would then choose what he wanted out of the catalogue, to the amount his voucher was worth. At the same time we would be contributing to the reconsolidation of the German economy. But, as I said, it never happened.”31