Yvonne Bornstein - Eleven Days of Hell

I was not far behind. At twelve, I had taught myself the guitar, and I could play forty songs and sing them in an unusually deep voice for a female, though my speaking voice is normally high-pitched. If you don’t know me, hearing me sing you’d think I was a black soul singer—something that was fairly radical in Australia. At fourteen, I entered a talent competition on a TV show called Spotlight. I sang and played the Cat Stevens song ‘Sad Lisa’ and took first prize.

Then, at seventeen, I entered the New Faces competition, a TV talent show which had sent on to stardom Olivia Newton John, among others. The competition played out for over a year, but I got to the final round, where I sang and played ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ in front of a big, lush orchestra. When I sing, I get very emotional, and when the flute began to play, it was so beautiful that I nearly came to tears. I guess the judges were touched by that because when they voted, I was the one left standing.

So, now I heard the calling. I would be a big star. With my $500 in prize money and an expenses-paid trip to Sydney, I waited for a big recording contract. Everyone, it seemed, was promising me one. A New Faces judge was a TV personality named Stuart Wagstaff. He had an office in Sydney and invited me up. ‘We’re going to make a star out of you,’ he told me. I loved Stuart, but I’m still waiting for him to come through. After I went back to Perth, nothing happened.

Not that I didn’t give it my best shot. A few years later, after I had moved to Melbourne, I, at my own expense, cut several demo records, in a kind of funky Motown style. One was a raunchy tune called ‘Emergency Love,’ which was written and produced by a very talented guy named John St. Peters. John arranged a record deal for me, a big deal that would have my records distributed by Polygram.

Everything was ready to go. We had a release date and plans to record an album. We were all giddy, and one night a bunch of us went to a nightclub called Billboard. One of the men in the party was a record-company executive, who at one point backed me into a dark corner and began rubbing his body against mine. Drunk and slurring his words, he mumbled, ‘Sleep with me, Yvonne.’

I was completely shocked and disgusted. Recoiling from him as quickly as I could, I said, politely but firmly, ‘No way.’

He turned vindictive.

‘If you don’t, the deal is off.’

I didn’t know if he was being serious or just issuing an empty threat. I was in business—and I was about life. This was one course in which I was not going to get an ‘A’. I’d been clear, and the guy backed off. I hoped that would be the end of it.

And it was the end of it—my music career, that is. The next day, I was informed that the deal was indeed off. And in the coming weeks, I found that I had been blacklisted all over Melbourne. I went to every record company I could find looking for a deal, only to be told, ‘We’ve got too much on our plate,’ and other such nonsense.

So that was the end of my illustrious singing career. It was a pity, too. I have convinced myself I could have gone where no woman had in show business—a white, Australian Aretha Franklin. That dream dashed, I turned to other, more fundamental matters, such as home, family, and going where no woman had gone before in a very different—and very dangerous—business. Most everything I would do from then on, in fact, would require some form of risk-taking and prepare me to survive horrific events.

What brought me cross-country to Melbourne wasn’t music. It was love. In the summer of 1975, I was at a barbecue in Perth when I met a man named Avi Samuel, who had lived a fascinating life.

Born in Libya, he had lived in Israel until 1965, when he immigrated to the east coast of Australia. He was a dark, swarthy, charming man, short of stature but long on the work ethic. Laboring sixteen hours a day, he had amassed a small fortune by carving a niche for himself by doing business with India. On his first business trip there, he had bought stacks of women’s plastic bracelets, which he sold to department stores in Australia. That began an India-Australia commercial lane through which he imported clothing and other goods. He invested the profits wisely in the stock markets.

At thirty-one, he was twelve years older than I, but I found him smart and suave, with a conniving side that intrigued me—in other words, someone who could nourish me and my own ambitions. Clearly, he found something intriguing about me, because he fell madly in love, and even after he went back home to Melbourne, he began pushing hard for me to visit him. As it happened, I was going to be in Melbourne over the Christmas holiday to visit my oldest sister, Jan, and her husband, Colin, who lived there. So I said yes. A few weeks later, he proposed to me. Sudden as it was, I felt compelled to say yes. I believed I’d fallen madly in love with him. When I went home to Perth, I began packing to move to Melbourne. I also told my parents, whom Avi flew back to Perth to meet.

As soon as his plane landed, Billie, Wally and I greeted him at the airport. They took one look at him and seemed less than ecstatic, sensing something smarmy and threatening. Later, my mother took me aside.

‘Yvonne,’ she said, ‘do not marry this man.’

Me being me, however, I didn’t listen. I was ambitious and stubborn, and Avi seemed to be a perfect match. Within a month, Jan had organised the wedding, which took place on March 22, 1976, at the Toorak Synagogue. It may have been an omen that at the reception I stood too close to a candelabra and my wedding veil caught fire. For one year, we had a relatively calm and loving relationship. In March 1977, almost one year to the day after we married, came the blessed birth of our daughter, Romy. That’s when the marriage seemed to go up in smoke.

It was as if Avi grew jealous of that beautiful little girl for taking my attention from him. For him—as for many Israeli men—love wasn’t an emotion; it was a possession, something of finite value that couldn’t be divvied up between people, even for someone of his own blood. Rather than dealing with his pathological sickness, he began to lash out at me—literally. The hands that once held me lovingly became weapons, flailing in anger and frustration.

One of the most common, yet least understandable of human foibles is women staying in abusive relationships. I was no different. I wanted more than anything else in the world to believe love was always salvageable if it was real, and that Avi wouldn’t have treated me that way unless he loved me. I even found ways to blame myself—maybe I pushed him to it. Because I was so much younger and had my own worldly curiosities, maybe I couldn’t be what he wanted me to be.

Avi no doubt sensed this when I asked to come with him on his business trips to India. He had always been a lone wolf on those treks, on which he could fancy himself the macho world traveller. And I could see how he could feel that way, because it was an exhilarating experience, one not incidentally fraught with danger, which only seemed to whet my appetite.

On one trip, for example, we were in a car with Romy and two friends, Vinod and Vina Chopra, on our way to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal. We were cruising through a small town when suddenly a teenage boy came out of nowhere and hurled himself against the front of the car, hoping to be struck—something poor kids in India do routinely. They’re great stuntmen, knowing how to maneuver themselves to get hit lightly and go down in a heap as if they were killed. They then struggle to their feet and limp around crying, and the driver is so relieved he’ll slip the kid money to forget the whole thing.