The rich and famous flocked to Lotte Berk’s fitness classes in the 1960s. But, as Berk’s daughter has now revealed, behind the glitz was a story of family trauma, child abuse, infidelity and rape. Anthea Gerrie finds out more
August 5, 2010 13:24As an exercise guru, she was swinging London’s most famous; the founder of the personal trainer craze with a long list of celebrity clients. But as a mother, Lotte Berk was a disaster, heaping abuse on her only daughter.
Now that daughter has spoken about the woman whose clients — including Zoë Wanamaker, Britt Ekland and Maureen Lipman — regarded as an inspirational, if eccentric, teacher. It has taken her 76 years, but Esther Fairfax has finally written a moving account of life with her famous mother.
“I never realised I had a story to tell until my sons persuaded me we had an interesting history that it would be good for the grandchildren to know about,” says Esther, who earned her own place as a media-savvy exercise guru in the 1970s after a career as a dancer. “But once I started drafting the book, I was shocked how much sex there was in the story. You couldn’t write about my mother without talking about the sex, so I had to write it more with adults in view.”
Lotte’s predatory sex life — throughout a long marriage, she went through a string of male lovers before starting a passionate and protracted relationship with a woman — is just the half of it. She also sexualised Esther from an early age, encouraging her to pick up men, giving her money to perform oral sex on a date and turning a blind eye when the teenager was raped by a producer and came close to the same fate at the hands of her own father, Ernest.
“What my father did to me at the age of 12 was appalling,” says Esther. “I wish I had known at the time that my mother was angry about it — she only told me later that she warned him that if he ever touched me again, she would leave him.
“I lost my virginity to the producer who raped me at the age of 15, and am horrified now that it happened so easily, and that I accepted my parents’ comment that we mustn’t make a fuss because we would lose our jobs.
“He was producing the variety show in Bournemouth for which my father had choreographed a ballet. My mother was one of the dancers, and I was the sidekick for the comedian, Derek Roy.
“Now I can see that we wouldn’t have lost our jobs at all, but when things are pushed under the carpet, it takes a long time to air your feelings about them.
“But I don’t think it was the sex which unhinged me,” continues Esther, who after surviving her own difficult marriage to the alcoholic poet John Fairfax and raising two sons in extreme poverty, succumbed to years of depression, bulimia and an eventual suicide attempt.
“It was not a love-hate relationship I had with my mother, but a love-war one — a lot of love and a lot of war. Looking back, I can see she was a neglectful mother when I was a child, but she was such fun to be with in the 20 years from the early days of my marriage to her, regarding me as a full-blown rival in the 1970s.”
Esther was born in Cologne in Germany in 1934 and came to Britain with her parents when the family fled the Nazis shortly before war broke out. Before leaving, Lotte, who was a well-known dancer, appeared on stage at a cabaret club, defiantly flouting Nazi laws banning Jews from doing so and risking arrest by the SS. Lotte wanted to emigrate to Palestine, but was persuaded to come to Britain, an easier escape route because the family held UK passports.
Says Esther: “She always called herself a ‘refu-Jew’, and maintained a strong sense of Jewish identity, even though her father, who had been a cantor, turned his back on religion after her mother died.” Lotte’s father and stepmother died at Auschwitz.
A cold, solitary childhood in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, got worse for Esther at the age of eight when her mother sent her to board with a neighbouring family who wanted a companion for their little girl. Bullied mercilessly, Esther could not persuade Lotte to let her return home — and later found out it was because she would have been in the way of one of her mother’s passionate affairs.
But life could be exciting, too. “There were good things about having such unconventional parents,” she says. “They were dancers — I could be a little part of seeing them up there on stage, going to rehearsals, meeting glamorous chorus girls. I loved it all.”
Esther started her own dancing career, performing topless in clubs in Paris’s Pigalle district, where Lotte sent her at the age of 16 after taking her to be fitted for a contraceptive device. And it was in Paris that Esther began a passionate affair with the famous French artist Yves Klein.
The affair — and the dancing life — ended when Esther married Fairfax and somehow raised her boys with not enough money to pay for food, heat and clothing. Meanwhile, Lotte had opened her exercise studio in Marylebone in 1959 and started to develop the famous Lotte Berk method, a series of exercises based on her dancing experience. Visits to the studio were a welcome treat for Esther and she eventually started teaching the method herself.
It should have cemented the adult friendship the two women were forming. Instead, Lotte flew into a jealous rage, accusing Esther of stealing her ideas when she attracted media attention and students of her own.
A vicious letter Lotte wrote Esther in 1978 after failing to persuade her to delay publication of an exercise book before Lotte had had a chance to bring out her own, says it all: “You gave me 39 years of happiness and what you became after that is alien to me — the End of Mother and Daughter!”
A reconciliation took place some years later after Lotte contacted Esther — invoking the spirit of Yom Kippur as a moment for reflection — to re-establish relations. Mother and daughter grew close again, and Lotte even moved to Hungerford in Berkshire where Esther was living.
Lotte died at the age of at 90 seven years ago. Dementia had set in years before, and in her book Esther seems to almost relish describing her mother’s deterioration and loss of dignity, though she denies she is getting her own back for the abuse she suffered. “I’ve never sought revenge, even though I do still have moments of feeling angry.
“When we were friends, in the 1950s, she listened to me and was very open in the way she talked to me; all of that makes for a deep bond.”
‘My Improper Mother and Me’ is
published by Pomona at £7.99