To Begin to Know

Whose Story is it? To Begin to Know David Leser DCA 2017 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as part of the collaborative doctoral degree and/or fully acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. Signature of Student: Date: Acknowledgements This DCA would never have been possible without the inspiration and cajolements of my supervisor Dr Sue Joseph. My heartfelt thanks. My thanks also to Professors John Dale and Alan Knight who graciously took part in my confirmation. My eternal gratitude to my former wife, Merran Morrison, our daughters Jordan and Hannah, my sister Deborah, my brother Daniel, my mother Barbara, and above all my father, the late Bernard Leser. Table of Contents Abstract Part 1 A manuscript………………………………………………………………………….1 The desert places………………………………………………………………………………2 A fateful meeting…………………………………………………………………………….15 Little Bighorn…………………………………………………………………………………..38 ‘This is not the fucking Jerusalem Post’…………………………………………….69 And the band played on…………………………………………………………………..89 You don’t have to be Jewish…………………………………………………………..125 Welcome to Gaza…………………………………………………………………………..146 Card game……………………………………………………………………………………..156 The journalist and the murderer…………………………………………………….176 To begin to not know……………………………………………………………………..203 Fields of gold………………………………………………………………………………….217 ‘So you think you can dance’?!……………………………………………………….248 Lost illusions…………………………………………………………………………………..264 The silence of an unborn life………………………………………………………….289 ‘Have you got a job yet, ya poor prick?’………………………………………….304 The night has a thousand eyes……………………………………………………….323 Part 2 The exegesis………………………………………………………………………..335 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..336 Chapter 1 Context: my father and his story……………………………………344 Chapter 2 An historical and ethical discussion……………………………….354 Chapter 3 Two case studies……………………………………………………………372 Chapter 4 Reflection………………………………………………………………………383 Chapter 5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..407 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………..411 Abstract This Doctorate of Creative Arts is in two parts: the first, a manuscript (now published; Allen & Unwin 2014) To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of my Father; the second, an exegetical component Whose Story is it: to begin to know. When I set out to write the manuscript, my father, Bernard Leser was still alive. In terms of the exegetical component, this was as professionally daunting as it was personally rewarding. Before he passed away, he read my manuscript, we negotiated sections, and he gave me his blessing. This took us both into a number of deep discussions around ethics, freedom of speech and ownership of stories. It is a tale that involves interrogating the depths of a hybrid memoir: his story and mine, with other family members also in the wings. The exegesis is an attempt to position my memoir on an ethical spectrum, simply answering the question, whose story is it? It comes at a time in literary history when the subject of memoir and ethics has never been more polemical. My conclusion is that this is my story, but with important caveats attached, because no person’s life is lived independently of others. Part 1 To Begin to Know: walking in the shadows of my father A manuscript (published 2014 by Allen & Unwin, Sydney; this manuscript is the final pre-publication word document) 1 THE DESERT PLACES Soon you will have forgotten all things; soon all things will have forgotten you … Marcus Aurelius I began this book out of love and disappointment for my father. I had wanted him to write his own story because I thought that if he could enter into a new dialogue with himself, he’d not only get to make sense of his life in new ways, he might even provide inspiration to others. Filled with my own presumptions, I felt that my father’s later life might have been more gratifying, less disappointing to him, had he been less guarded, better able to investigate his inner needs. That was my wish for him, but not his own wish for himself. As with many men of his generation, and particularly men whose sense of the world was shaped by the horrors of Nazi Germany, my father had no real desire to probe what Robert Frost referred to as the ‘desert places’, the dark psychological regions of his own heart. He was afraid, I think, of that interior country, as I suspect we all are. My father, Bernard Leser, left Germany as a boy on the eve of World War II and then, twenty years later, in 1959, launched Australian Vogue magazine, no small accomplishment when you consider that, at the time, the most stylish thing in Australia was probably the continental supper. 2 From 1976, he then went on to run British Condé Nast Publications, putting him in charge of magazines like Vogue, Brides and House and Garden. During that same period, he bought Tatler and World of Interiors, and, forty years after he’d left Germany, set up German Vogue, before being invited in 1987 to become president of Condé Nast Publications Inc, the magazine empire that included in its stable Vogue, House and Garden, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Glamour, GQ, Condé Nast Traveler, Architectural Digest and Self. This put him behind the wheel of a fabulous global corporation, in the next office along, at Condé Nast’s New York headquarters, from the Sun King himself, S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr, the secretive, enigmatic publishing billionaire who had amassed one of the largest private fortunes in the world. My father became the regent in the Newhouse Kingdom at a time when its magazines were rewriting the rules of American journalism, establishing a new celebrity culture throughout the English-speaking world. By any measure it was an extraordinary career, and testament to the powers of charm, chance and the uncanny ability some people have to re-invent themselves. I wanted him to write his story because it was a good story, possibly a great story, and, besides which, I could see his purpose faltering. After all his years on the mountain top, it seemed, at least from where I was standing, that he had lost his footing, and his view. This book would be a new project, a new routine, a new reason to get out of bed in the morning I told myself, and him. But he never began writing, nor looked like doing so. In his late seventies and into his eighties he was finding greater companionship with the books that other men had written, and this is where he’s stayed, in a way, for the past decade or so, 3 reliving his glory days with increasing wistfulness, buried inside another great man’s biography, a double Scotch on the rocks often by his side. So about ten years ago I offered to write his story for him, and although he deliberated on this for some time, it was an offer I believe he welcomed more than he cared to admit. He was proud of his achievements, proud of what he’d made of his life; and deep down I think he was both flattered and warmed by my gesture of filial devotion. I began gingerly at first, and then with a certain gusto, wading into his years in Germany between the flames of two world wars, then into his early life in New Zealand. I stalled somewhere across the Tasman Sea, at the point in the narrative shortly before he arrived in Australia in 1947 with five pounds in his pocket. I could see the vast stretches I was going to have to cover if I was ever to do him justice— the sharp trajectory of a damaged life turned charmed and successful, sweeping across four continents, from Australia to Canada to London, back to Australia, over to London again, onto Europe and then New York, with a great flourishing of trumpets. I baulked at the task. I couldn’t help but wonder why, at age forty-six, after a lifetime spent trying to get out from under my father’s considerable shadow, I would now deliberately place myself right back in it. Why would I spend years writing about my father’s life, giving him all of my rapt attention, when I now had the opportunity—the duty even—to live my own? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to dimming my own light in order to brighten his? It all came to a head in London in 2005, when I met him for a few days on my way to Los Angeles to interview June Newton, the Australian-born widow of the late 4 fashion photographer, Helmut Newton. It was one of those moments of confluence that had often occurred between us since I’d first become a journalist, writing about a person my father happened to know. He and Helmut Newton had both ended up in Australia after fleeing Berlin on the eve of World War II. Newton had become one of the first photographers to work on Australian Vogue. My father had also arrived in London from Sydney, but while I was jetlagged he embarked with vigour on a relentless social schedule—breakfasts, lunches, afternoon teas, pre-dinner cocktails, after-dinner nightcaps. The Garrick Club. Annabel’s. Harry’s Bar. Editors, publishers, old colleagues, new chums. My father was eighty. I was forty-nine. I could barely keep up. One evening in his hotel room I told him I didn’t think I could continue to write his life story. I was too weighed down by the demands of writing feature stories, trying to help raise two young daughters, dealing with sometimes crippling insomnia, grappling with the politics of a modern marriage.

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