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Los Angeles, CA, USA -
Prologue: Letters From "Aunt Willa"
It must have been in the early 1950s in that paradoxical place of seacoast, desert sun, and brush fires that is Southern California. No fires were burning in the primeval canyons just then, and no great rains were falling. It was simply one of those glorious Southern California summer Sunday mornings when the sun was everywhere in my parents' bedroom.Usually on a Sunday morning, they got their privacy. But sometimes the family assembled in the master bedroom because it admirably served as a family room as well. Part of their room was an entrance to another room that had only one small window and a low ceiling. At night we used that attic as a planetarium and imagined that the stars projected on the ceiling were real. Because the roof was low, in order to use the ceiling for the projector, you had to recline on large pillows on the wooden floor.
It was probably a mild morning, when summer veers into fall. It was not easy for the sun to shine through the windows, hung deep into the two-foot wide walls of the large two-story home where we lived in Long Beach, California.
It all felt very cozy. My parents, Benjamin and Yaltah, were lying in bed, and my brother Robby and I were nearby. My mother had brought out her shoe box full of letters from "Aunt Willa." She read one of the letters which described me as a baby, in most complimentary terms, and laughed at the memories. At other points she cried as she read.
Aunt Willa, she explained, was the mother her own mother Marutha had never been. If not openly, certainly in her heart of hearts, my mother thought of her mother as a witch.
As I watched her life unfold, it was plain to me that Yaltah Menuhin had good reason to feel the way she did. For the last decades of both their lives, mother and daughter had spoken only once, and that was after Yaltah's brother Yehudi had cajoled Marutha and Yaltah into a telephone call. After a valiant attempt, Yaltah hung up and never talked to her mother again.
My mother had been twenty when she married my father, then a young soldier in the Army who had went AWOL to marry her. Amidst a storm of publicity, aided in part by Yaltah's father's open hostility to the marriage, the couple eloped. Moshe Menuhin was if nothing else direct about what he thought, abrasive as that often was. He hated the young lieutenant and told the newspapers he was "worse than Hitler."
Ben Rolfe was not famous, but the woman he married, a pianist, was -- because she was the sister of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, regarded as the greatest musical prodigy of the 20th century.
My mother had grown up without a real understanding of money, a characteristic she maintained even as she grew older and became much poorer.
Her early years as an army wife had left an emotional scar. When I was in my infancy, my crib was often the top drawer of an old bureau in Southern rooming houses and hotels.
Yaltah lived in dreary, cockroach infested places to be close to my father, who was stationed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee where work was proceeding on the atom bomb.
Confronted with the salt-of-the-earth about whom she had only read, Yaltah turned to writing long letters to Willa, and Willa wrote back.?
That summer morning as my mother read the letters it seemed to me as if Cather had been amazingly romantic. She talked about how the pictures my mother had sent her showed I must have been the most beautiful baby in the world. She also advised my mother, who must have been contemplating divorce, to stay with my father even in the face of intense scorn from her parents.
A Life-Long Child
In October, 1941, Yaltah eloped with Ben to Reno and then followed him around from military camp to military camp for four years. Medford, Oregon, where I was born, was one of these.
Lionel Rolfe After the war, my father settled with my mother in San Francisco. That was before my grandparents succeeded in driving them to Los Angeles.
From the beginning, Moshe made various proclamations about Ben, or "Bud," as he was known. At the point he met my mom he was just a soldier, a grunt, an attorney in private life. Moshe and Marutha felt he was not good enough for their daughter. Besides, they felt she was being ungrateful, for they were doing their best to find her a suitable mate.
"We hardly know the boy," Moshe said. "He has visited in our home several times along with other young fellows, but we didn't know which was which."
Moshe issued a statement a bit later, in case his meaning wasn't clear:
"Our three children, Yehudi, Hephzibah and Yaltah, exactly like their mother, are innocent and impractical idealists.They issued several more statements and made various quips indicating it was unlikely Ben would ever be able to prove himself worthy, no matter if he were he a combination of Albert Einstein and Jesus Christ."They are great givers, spiritually as well as materially. All through their life, takers will take advantage of their infinite kindness and sweetness.
"In the case of Bud, all we pray and hope now is that he, after having met Yaltah only two or three times, will prove himself worthy of her."
Take this gem: "I wish to correct an impression that this marriage has our blessing or that I will aid this young man to finance a honeymoon if his soldier pay is not enough.
"He is my daughter's husband, but he is not my son-in-law. He must win our respect and affection, and so far, he is far, far from it ... He must obtain our forgiveness for this absurd undertaking."
I was born on October 21, 1942, a cold gray Oregon morning. My entrance into this world was watched by my grandparents from both sides. Early in the day they had all gone for a ride in the lush countryside. They had stopped at a small market to buy fresh salmon, the local specialty in my birthplace of Medford. Then everyone but my mother climbed back into the car.
Yaltah was slow. She was barely five feet tall, and I must have added twenty pounds to her tiny frame. As she came out of the store, Moshe drove off without her. My mom ran crazily after the car, trembling and crying because she thought her father was leaving her behind. By the time he stopped and turned back, her face was red, and she looked violently ill. Yet all Marutha could do as Yaltah crawled miserably back into the car was to insult her in Hebrew.
Later in the hospital room my mother was holding the hand of my father's mother, who was quite shocked by what she had just seen. "You are a good person, Bea," Yaltah said to her mother-in-law. "My mother, Marutha, is so cold, so very cold."
As I said, my entrance into the world was not entirely pleasant.
When I? was four years old, my mother and I took the train to Los Gatos to celebrate Christmas with the elder Menuhins, as well as my uncle Yehudi. Yehudi brought me Lego and Tinker Toy sets. He got down on the floor and showed me what could be done with them. My father did not come. I think he probably was not invited.
Even as late as 1950, Marutha was complaining how "repulsive" Ben was to them.
Her daughter had brought me to Los Gatos for a visit.
"It was a sweet visit until she began to miss her husband, I guess, and as I am totally allergic to him and would not even mention him, she was not very pleased," Marutha wrote in a letter to family friends Esther and Al Shak.
In that letter in 1950, when my mother went on a European concert tour, Marutha went on to suggest that "a happy wife does not go off for some silly concerts to Europe. So this is the way it stands. She claims she loves him and I am glad if it's true, but he is repulsive in the full sense to both of us."
Yaltah continued touring, and I remember how after she had performed in New Zealand in 1953, she tried to convince my father to move us all there.
"What will I do?" he said. "I'm an American lawyer."
"We could open a cleaners," she said, never astute about financial realities.
Yaltah regarded the tour as "a long and very successful tour ... It was wonderful and I had much joy when Hephzibah joined me from Australia. We also spent one week at her home in Australia after it was all over."
It was in the late '40s that Yehudi rented a mansion in the Florida Everglades for a family reunion. I met Yehudi's and Hephzibah's kids, and after a few days spent in this mansion, we went home. My mom and I had come out from Los Angeles on a TWA Constellation, a curious propeller-driven plane that shuddered and shook a lot but whose odd shape made it look futuristic. Yehudi had developed an enthusiasm for Melvin Page, a pioneer in the early movement against the evils of white sugar and white flour, and he invited Page to lecture us on nutrition.
By 1947, the year Cather died, Yehudi had a persistent suitor. Diana Gould was hovering ever in the background wherever Yehudi was. A gawky, too-tall ballerina from "basement royalty" (her father had been a British naval commander, although he was born in Ireland),? she was determined to marry an intellectual celebrity of some kind.
Her previous target had been a prominent actor who it turned out liked boys better than women.
My dad might be excused if he had bent the truth out of hatred for his in-laws who treated him so badly. But he was a sober-sided judge, not given to inaccuracy. He insisted that Yehudi asked him to put Diana up, to get her out of his hair. And my dad insisted he saw Diana taking out her drug paraphernalia and enjoying some cocaine one night.
One o f the oddest of my recollections from my childhood was riding with my mother in the family Hillman Minx, one of the most notoriously unreliable vehicles ever created. This would have been in the early '50s. My mom would take me and three or four of my neighborhood friends, and we would head out Sunset Boulevard toward the beach.
Back in those days Sunset had a couple of traffic circles, where cars could mingle and change directions.
The traffic circles disappeared a long time ago after too many Saturday night accidents, when drunks and testosterone-driven teenage boys confronted the circle and lost.
My mom was addicted to silliness. It was usually a wonderful kind of silliness, a silliness which no doubt sprang from the fact that she never had a real childhood.
That transcendent silliness is something I've sought in women ever since, I think.?
My mom used to take a carload of kids out to the beach. The highlight of the trip always occurred when we got to a traffic circle. She'd drive around and around like it was an amusement park ride. I was proud, because I had the coolest mother in the world.
Her love of driving around and around and around the traffic circle, laughing wildly, probably was reminiscent of a moment in 1933, when the Menuhins returned from Europe to their hometown of San Francisco. Yehudi was made an honorary San Francisco policeman and fireman, and as a result he got to take his sisters riding in a fire truck downtown on Market Street at 60 miles per hour, while Yaltah furiously banged the alarm.
It must have been a glorious moment in her life.
Yehudi always was her loyal older brother, even though he could sometimes be cruel to her.
When Yehudi was hobnobbing with Nehru and being photographed practicing yoga in Life magazine, my mother suddenly got a spill-over effect. One day in 1956 Marlon Brando called, wanting information on yoga. She was excited. My mother rarely took us to the movies, but she had just taken us to see "Sayonara" and "Teahouse of the August Moon."
Indira Devi was one of the first yoga practitioners in the country to become famous, in part because Yehudi and Gloria Swanson endorsed her work. One day Indira took me to Farmer's Market. I said I would go but I made a scene, insisting that didn't want to eat vegetarian -- I wanted a hamburger. She relented.
In the '50s, my mother did not sound so unhappy with my dad.
"Bud is well and as usual very sweet and helpful. I could not continue with my music if he did not share some of my duties in the house. You should see the four of us vacuuming -- dusting -- shopping -- cleaning like four little children having fun pretending they keep house. It really helps to do it together," she wrote her friends, the Shaks.
There is no doubt that later my mother resented the time her children took away from her music -- and in several letters she expressed her frustration. My brother and I chattered incessantly about cars and bicycles, which we were both obsessed with. That drove her crazy, and she wished we would be interested in "human" things.
She admitted that the exuberance and mischief of her boys drove her crazy.
Still, as late as 1956, she appeared to be the dutiful wife. In a letter to the Shaks, she wrote,? "I am visiting Bud's office and have been writing letters waiting for the 3 o'clock cup of coffee he treats me to when I join him downtown. He comes home for lunch every day and sometimes I drive back to work with him and keep busy while he is working ... Bud is very happy in his work and we love the leisurely lunch hour we can share with the added closeness it brings us. The boys don't give us much time or chance for adult conversation at the evening meal -- so we appreciate our 'stolen hours' at noon when we can chat freely and not be interrupted."
She added: "I enjoy them (the boys) much of the time -- except when I'm weary and they are not."
Once my mom came and spirited me away from school. We went to the airport, flew to Los Gatos, for some reason or another, and stayed in the Adolph Baller cottage at Alma, the five-square-mile estate in the Santa Cruz Mountains Yehudi acquired in the mid-'30s.
The cottage was built at the same time that the main house, known as Villa Cherkess, was finally constructed. Baller had been a piano prodigy. But when he was in concentration camp, the Nazis asked him what he did. "I am a pianist," he said. They took out a ball-peen hammer and broke all his fingers.
He survived concentration camp, and moved to Stanford University where he became a great piano teacher and pedagogue.
The cottage had a library. There was one book in it that particularly struck me. It was about the Holocaust. I forgot the name, but I think it was prepared, I believe, by the United Nations. Two of its main sponsors were Albert Einstein and Yehudi Menuhin.
Back in the '50s in Long Beach, California, where we then lived, I used to get chased home through the back alleys from Woodrow Wilson High School by a gang of Christian thugs. Their leader? was the son of a minister, and oh my God what a bigot was he!
The basic charge was that as a Jew, I was responsible for Christ getting killed. I guess I did it personally. That's what they seemed to be saying. Or something horrible coursed through my veins, and that horrible something was my Jewish ancestors had drunk the blood of Christian children.
The gang leader was, like a lot of the other Midwestern farmer-types in Long Beach, a follower of Gerald L.K. Smith, the notorious anti-Semite from the '30s.
I naturally got interested in what being a Jew meant, and like many other Jews, I read everything I could about the Holocaust and that defined me forever. My favorite novel was It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. It was about fascism in America.
There in the Baller cottage I found not only the UN book, but also other books on the Holocaust that chilled and horrified me.
I discovered these books after my mother told me how Baller came to have his fingers broken.
One thing that should be made clear about my mother. In many ways, she never grew up. She remained a child all her life. It was a blessing and a curse, remaining the eternal child.One could downplay the importance of Aunt Willa in my mother's life because she was mostly, although not entirely, a close childhood friend.
But my mother's whole life was, if nothing else, about her childhood. Much more than is the case with most people.
Maybe that is why the injustice of the Holocaust haunted her throughout her life.
It was not that she always cried out "oh woe is me for I am Jewish." On the contrary, my mother never took that narrow view. She knew that many people had suffered during the war -- suffered plenty, and continue to suffer to this day, just as they had suffered for eons before. After all, six million Jews perished but more than 20 million Russians died fighting Hitler.
The war was a great watershed for her and for many others.?
Yaltah ultimately left my father, her family, after 18 years because her husband, my father, was jealous of her career, although he was torn about it. He loved the chamber music that was played in the front room of our Long Beach home, but he hated the time her touring took away from him and their two sons. Later she married a man who dragged her down musically even more than my father ever had, and because I had agreed with her decision to leave my father, I felt a lot of ambivalence about her third husband, Joel Ryce, a Danish-Irish child prodigy musician from Sterling, Indiana.I had supported my mother's decision to leave my dad in 1960, in part for selfish reasons. Their marriage had obviously gone sour, even though there appeared to be a lot more love and affection in it than she would admit to later.
My father painted and wrote poems which he illustrated in the style of William Blake.
He played the lute and the recorder and was regarded as one of the sharpest minds in his profession.
Before he went to law school, his only intent ion had been to study philosophy, but the fact that it was the Depression came home to him, so he finished his law degree.
Yaltah basked in the reflected glory of her famous brother. But she was rarely an accompanist. She loved chamber music most of all but still she was fiercely her own musician. With chamber music, musicians must talk to each other as equals.That might have been why later in life her sister Hephzibah observed that Yaltah had developed musically more than she.
Marutha's injunctions against Yaltah's piano playing affected her for many years, and only when she dropped all contact with her mother did she begin to flourish.
What Marutha appeared to have given my mother was a self-defeating mechanism, as she struggled between being a wife, a mother and a pianist. The third child syndrome, was how Yaltah described it.
Still, she was proud of the fact that there were those -- Yehudi sometimes among them -- who said she may have been the best musician of the three.
On some level Hephzibah loved music. But mostly music was something she used, at least later in life, as a way to raise money for her social activism. She saw herself as kind of a Robin Hood.
I once asked my mother about Hephzibah and music. I was living at Hephzibah's home at 16 Ponsonby Place, just off the Thames in London, from where she was saving the world.
It was impossible not to notice that Hephzibah, who paid for all the hustle and bustle in the house through her concerts, had only an upright in a hallway that was the main thoroughfare between the kitchen and the living room on the first of three floors.
"That's to play Bac," she said, emphasizing the "a" in Bach so it sounded like "back."
It was quite different from my mother, who at the time had three grand pianos in her apartment. The pianos had belonged to Fou T'song, Yehudi's daughter Zamira's husband at the time.
My mother said Hephzibah loved her music.
She was probably right, but it was a very different kind of love.
Not with intended unkindness, perhaps, Hephzibah told me that Yaltah would have been most happy married to a wealthy gentleman whose sixteenth century gardens she could walk in, pick roses for and write poems to.
That was part of the reason she hated seeing my mother married to Joel Ryce. There is some truth in this slighting remark, but no one denigrated Yaltah's considerable powers when it came to handling some adult matters.
Her relationship with me, her eldest son, shows that.
For many years I believed with all my heart that I had helped my mother try to find her freedom as an artist. But after her marriage to Joel, I became less convinced.
To the end of their lives, there was debate about which of the three children was the most grown up emotionally. Yehudi's wife Diana always felt that Yaltah was hopelessly naive and childish whereas Kron, Hephzibah's oldest child, believed Yaltah became the most developed and interesting of the three.
The lack of a real childhood telescoped and reversed the childish qualities of all three siblings. Since none of the three ever had a real childhood, they remained curiously childlike.
My mother, for better or worse, spent her adult life confronting the buried issues of her childhood.
The next several issues of G21 will carry excerpts from Lionel Rolfe's The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather. The book is available from amazon.com, barnes and noble and american legends.com.
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