by John Glatt
Unfortunately, the only positive thing he could come up with was “the almighty dollar.”
“Once in a while there’s a good show,” he conceded. “Once in a while there is a nice audience. Whereas it used to be nine good [shows], one bad one, five years ago. It’s gotten to be fifty-fifty, sixty-forty, seventy-thirty against. And now it’s once in a while we have a groovy evening.”
At that point, he told his staff, Kip Cohen had walked into his office. “And I just threw up my hands and said, ‘Kip, I’ve had it! I don’t know how, when, where, but it’s got to end.’ ”
Ironically, he explained, this had been the “most lucrative month” since the Fillmore East opened, so his decision was emotional.
“I’m not a good businessman,” he said. “I think I’m a good booker and a pretty good producer, but not good at business.”
Standing on the nape of the stage, “Uncle Bill,” as his staff affectionately called him, now took them into his confidence.
“It’s a frightening thing,” he said. “It’s a frightening thought . . . but I can’t . . . I’ve had it. I pass. It just can’t be done anymore.”
Since making his decision to quit the music business, he had been crunching the numbers with his lawyers and accountants.
“[This] is the biggest moneymaker,” he declared, “and it’s where I’m going to decelerate . . . and begin to withdraw troops.”
Closing the Fillmore East would be only the first step, as he had contractual agreements to keep the Fillmore West open until the end of the summer. And there were also his two record companies and management agency to consider.
“I’m not saying fuck you to the Fillmore East and the people that work here,” he explained. “But I have to start somewhere.”
He then thanked his “Fillmore Family” for their professionalism and the great job they had done.
“This theater has no comparison,” he told them. “There’s nothing to compare with the stage, the productions, with the way the house is run [and] the people who run it. My pride in what you people have done is incredible.
“I hope the closing of this theater, through some miracle, will melt down Madison Square Garden, will set up an invisible picket around that ugly cement factory.”
After a nervous round of applause from his staff, one young male employee asked, “Do you know where we can take panhandling lessons?”
“Yes, in front of the Fillmore West, asshole,” replied Graham as he left the stage.
Eleven days later, Bill Graham held a well-orchestrated press conference at the Fillmore East to announce the closing. Then, to the astonishment of reporters, he attacked the entire music industry, blaming greedy bands, unscrupulous managers, and predatory agents for his demise.
But even worse, he told the flabbergasted reporters, was that he hated his reputation as the “anti-Christ” and “capitalist pig,” so he was getting out of the business.3
A reporter then asked if success had spoiled rock music, creating all these problems he was complaining about.
“No,” he replied. “I think it’s the inability to cope with success that’s spoiled rock. It was the inability to cope with success that killed Janis Joplin and that killed Jimi Hendrix. It wasn’t the drugs. If you spoke with them you would see that they just didn’t know how to handle the adulation that was heaped upon them by the music that they created. Neither you nor I would ever know what it’s like to walk on a stage and have half a million people tell you that you are a queen, that you’re a goddess, and anything you do is just fine.”
PART ONE
THE ROAD TO THE FILLMORES
CHAPTER ONE
The Refugee
Bill Graham was born Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin on January 8, 1931, at the start of Hitler’s rise to power. The youngest child of Russian-born engineer Jacob Grajonca and his wife, Frieda,Wolodia was just two days old when his father was killed in a construction accident.
To support Wolodia and his five elder sisters—Rita, Evelyn, Sonja, Ester, and Tolla—Frieda scraped by working as a dressmaker and making costume jewelry she sold in the market. Life was a constant struggle for the close-knit Jewish family, who lived in two rooms and a kitchen in the roughest slum section of Berlin, known as “The Wedding.” Eventually Frieda was forced to send her two youngest children—Wolodia and Tolla—to live in an orphanage.
As the Nazis tightened their grip on Berlin, it became increasingly dangerous to be Jewish. At school the elder Grajonca girls were expected to salute Nazi-style and cry “Heil Hitler” whenever a teacher entered the classroom. Still, they were constantly mocked by their classmates in the Hitler Youth movement.
Although Wolodia and Tolla lived at the orphanage during the week, they went home on weekends. To the sensitive little boy, his two eldest sisters, Rita and Evelyn, lived an exotic bohemian life, full of dancing and music. They were rebellious and independent, staying out late with boys and having constant arguments with their mother as she attempted to rein them in.
When Rita went to Shanghai to join her boyfriend, Freddy, and became a dancer, Wolodia dreamed of following her. After all, she was earning $150 a month ($2,500 in mid-2010s’ currency).
On November 9, 1938, seven-year-old Wolodia witnessed the infamous Kristallnacht, when the Nazis indiscriminately beat up Jews, destroyed synagogues, and wrecked homes and businesses. It was a horrific experience, and one he would never forget.
In its aftermath, Frieda worried about her children’s safety in Berlin, but she could not afford to move the family out of Germany. On June 5, 1939, less than three months before Hitler invaded Poland and plunged Europe into war, Wolodia and Tolla went to Paris as part of a two-week Jewish exchange program with a French orphanage. Their mother went to the train station to see them off, and it would be the last time they would ever see her.
Eight-year-old Wolodia left Germany grasping a small case containing all his worldly possessions—his yarmulke, Jewish prayer book, and a picture of his parents. And like so many other Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, he grew up feeling his only true possessions were in his pocket or what he could carry away with him.
While Wolodia and Tolla were in Paris, the Nazis banned Jewish immigration and reentry, stranding the orphans in France. Even more tragically the exchanged French Jewish orphans were trapped in Berlin.
Far from the dangers of the Third Reich, the two Grajonca children lived in the Chateau de Quincy, a beautiful old tapestry-filled mansion outside Paris. Wolodia soon settled down, forming a gang with other orphans and going on stealing expeditions to the local shops, where he often got caught. He studied at the public elementary school at Quincy and learned to speak fluent French, impressing his teachers with his love of nature.
Then in May 1940, Hitler invaded France. As the German Army marched toward Paris, Wolodia and the other children helped to build air-raid shelters. Most nights German war planes circled the French capital, and during bombing raids the petrified children hid in damp trenches. One night Wolodia was attacked by a snake, leaving him with a lifelong phobia of them.
A month later, as the German Army surrounded Paris, an International Red Cross representative arrived to escort the Jewish children to safety. Sixty-four children, including Wolodia and Tolla, were then evacuated to a farm in the Forest of Senart and Fontainebleau on the Paris outskirts. One night, armed German soldiers burst onto the farm, and the children narrowly escaped with their lives.
“This group of children has seen the Battle of Paris,” wrote their Red Cross escort. “And lived through all the dangers, discovering certain cruel aspects of fighting which perhaps have left marks on their character. In the case of [Wolodia] Grajonca, however, I dare say with certainty that the moral damage is not serious.”1
“Everybody moved south,” remembered Wolodia almost fifty years later.“There were sixty-four children between the ages
of eight and sixteen. My sister and I were among these. We walked, got on buses, on trains, on carts and ate what we could. When a country is invaded, that’s what happens. All hell breaks loose.”2
Heading south on foot, the children hid by day and then walked twenty-five miles every night under cover of darkness. They scrambled for safety as German planes attacked, often seeing dead bodies on the highway. They survived on berries, and all suffered severe malnutrition.
Just outside Lyon, Tolla caught pneumonia. She and Wolodia were walking hand in hand when she suddenly dropped to the roadside dead. Inconsolable, the nine-year-old cradled his sister’s head in his lap, refusing to be separated from her. The Red Cross escort had to drag Wolodia away because the Germans were close behind. Tolla’s body was left by the side of the road.
From Lyon the children walked two hundred miles to Marseilles, where on August 19 they were issued temporary passports by the American Consulate. Little Wulf (Wolfgang) Wolodia Grajonca, as he was listed on the passport, wore a brave smile in his photograph. It belied the terrible hardship of the four-foot, six-inch-tall boy’s wretched journey across France, which had left him weighing just fifty-five pounds.3
At Marseilles he and the surviving orphans boarded a train to Toulouse and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, traveling through Barcelona to Madrid, where they spent two months in a convent.
“I was living in a convent with eleven children,” Wolodia remembered later. “A stray bomb that was meant for the big city next to us hit the building that I was in. Three of the children did not leave the building.”4
The children then traveled to the port of Lisbon, where on September 10,Wolodia and the ten others—the only survivors of the sixty-four who had left Paris—boarded the ocean liner Serpa Pinto bound for America. After picking up more refugees in Casablanca, the vessel set off across the Atlantic for the two-week voyage to New York. During the crossing the ship was stopped and boarded by a German U-boat and then a British submarine, but it was allowed to continue on its journey.
On Wednesday, September 24, 1941, ten-year-old Wolodia Grajonca arrived at Ellis Island, undernourished and weak. His harrowing journey had been so traumatic that he would block it from his memory for years.
At the dockside to meet Wolodia and the other children was Lotte Marcuse, director of Placements for New York’s German Jewish Children’s Aid, Inc., who would be responsible for him until he was twenty-one. After undergoing a medical examination by seven physicians and a team of Red Cross nurses, Wolodia was fully documented by Immigration.5
His first American meal was a kosher one, and after being given fresh clothing, Wolodia and four other children were put on a bus to Pleasantville Cottage School in upstate New York, which served as a halfway house for young Jewish refugees until they could be adopted. Several hours later, when he arrived at the refugee reception center, Wolodia was given a bath. Then he was taken to a dormitory to spend his first lonely night in this new country.
The next morning he was examined by strangers, who spoke a language he could not understand. During his first interview, via a translator, the caseworker assigned to Wolodia was impressed by his resilience.
“Interviewed Wolodia, who is a blonde, stocky youngster with a mature and self reliant air about him,” she wrote in the official report.“He responded intelligently to my questioning. Wolodia has a good deal of poise about him and although he is not a very attractive child, he has a pleasant manner and intelligence which expresses itself in a cooperative attitude and willingness to participate in whatever chores the group is expected to do.”
Wolodia told the caseworker that he had an American aunt called “Schneider,” whom his mother had told him about. But he had no idea where she lived, and the bureau was unable to trace her. And so each week, along with the other children, Wolodia was put on display for prospective foster parents, who would come to see if there were any kids they wanted to adopt.
After several weeks of not being chosen, Wolodia lost the poise and pleasantness his caseworker had observed, throwing a tantrum, physically attacking staff and children. His behavior so alarmed Lotte Marcuse that she requested he be transferred to a New York care center so she could keep a closer eye on him.6
“Wolodia is one of the children who is extremely insecure and ‘cries’ for individual attention,” wrote the director of placements. “His reaction in the group, to children and to adults alike, is a most destructive one. He scowls most of the time and carries with him the expression of the bullying urchin. He is filthy and has no standards of cleanliness. He won’t accept group action and has no feeling about disturbing adults and children alike.
“Yet yesterday, when I watched a group of children, Wolodia came along—and he had a smile, a really normal smile on his face. He had been told that in America, people ‘keep smiling’ and that this is a slogan that he must accept if and insofar as he wants people to like him. And Wolodia has a great need to be liked.”
Yet few of the Pleasantville staff ever saw his good side. Wolodia’s antisocial behavior had so alienated them that Marcuse expressed concern about his ever finding a foster home.
“Wolodia is very thin, almost emaciated looking,” she noted in her report. “He has a voracious appetite and atrocious table manners. He should not be placed in a foster home in which there are children near him in age, either slightly older or younger.”
For almost a month, Wolodia was rejected by all the prospective foster parents. One by one, all the other children left Pleasantville to begin new lives, but Wolodia always remained. Every night he cried himself to sleep, worrying about his mother and sisters back in Germany and wondering if he would ever see them again.
Wolodia was finally claimed by Alfred and Pearl Ehrenreich, a middle-aged couple who lived in a cramped apartment at 1635 Montgomery Avenue in the Bronx. They mainly selected him to teach their son Roy to speak German and French.7
Alfred Ehrenreich, an insurance salesman, showed little affection for Wolodia, who felt much closer to his new foster mother. Pearl renamed him Billy and began fattening him up with her American home cooking, rubbing him down daily with olive oil for his skin allergies.
The Ehrenreichs received $25 a month from the Foster Home Bureau toward his care, which Billy always suspected was the real reason they had adopted him.
Two months after Billy went to the Bronx, America entered the war. Pearl Ehrenreich enrolled him in P.S. 104, where he was placed in a class of seven-year-olds, as he knew no English. And being German, Billy Grajonca was cruelly bullied by his new classmates, who called him an “Evil Nazi” and stoned him outside school.
“To them I wasn’t a Jew, I was a German,” he would explain later. “I spoke German, I was a Nazi. And I used to get in more fights than I like to think about.”8
Roy looked after his new foster brother, defending him against the bullies who mocked his strong German accent. Realizing that Billy needed to learn English fast to survive, Roy made him read the day’s newspapers out loud in front of the mirror every night. And nine months after setting foot in America, Billy spoke fluent Bronx English without a hint of a German accent.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, all Bronx schools closed early to mark the Allied major offensive, and Billy attended a special afternoon service in his synagogue to pray for the safe return of US servicemen. Although he outwardly appeared to have adapted well to his new life, Billy was deeply depressed and insecure. He developed a nervous twitch of his eyelids and was plagued with various allergies and hay fever.9
In mid-November, the US Committee for the Care of European Children informed Billy that his mother and sisters had probably not survived. The little boy was heartbroken and stayed in his room sobbing for hours. He also threw tantrums at school when he felt the teachers were not paying him enough attention.
“We are planning to have Billy see the agency psychiatrist,” wrote his new caseworker, Mar
jorie Davis, in June 1943. “We want to determine whether or not he is in need of psychiatric treatment at this time.”
The psychiatrist described him as “an insecure, immature child with a fear of aggression and with hostility in his associations,” his bad behavior at school being caused by “personality difficulties.” But psychiatric treatment was not recommended.
During the next few months, Billy’s behavior deteriorated even further. He feared being left alone and would cry uncontrollably if he ever was. He hardly ever washed or combed his hair.
Citing his “peculiar personal habits,” “secretive ways,” and “extreme antagonisms with Roy,” his caseworker advised taking him away from the Ehrenreichs and placing him with Social Services.
Ironically, it was only after he was expelled from P.S. 104 for kicking a teacher that his behavior improved. And he was allowed to remain with Pearl and Alfred Ehrenreich, whom he now called mother and father.
“Were they my parents?” he would be asked later. “She was my mother. He was never my father. He was an okay guy, but I can’t say I loved him or cared deeply about him.”10
Growing into a lanky teenager, Billy became a typical New York street kid. He played stickball or half-court ball with the neighborhood kids, spending his pocket money at Al’s Candy Store.
He looked up to the older kids, who taught him street smarts, and he soon mastered the hustles needed to make extra money for candy and movies. The street became his classroom and taught him a strong moral code.11
“I think that’s what formed my character,” he later explained. “It’s having to live by the book of unwritten rules, starting early on.”12
At age sixteen, Billy joined the Pirates gang, proudly wearing their green-and-yellow jacket at clubhouse meetings. It was a matter of honor for a Pirate to have a girl by his side at the weekend meetings, and Billy was never without one.