‘My relatives were put in an asylum’
When Ruby Wax went on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ the discoveries were as revealing as a lifetime of therapy, she tells Julia Llewellyn Smith
Ruby Wax, former mouthy comedian reinvented as poster-girl for mental health, was first diagnosed with depression at the age of 10, largely the result, she’s always suspected, of her highly dysfunctional childhood.
“My parents were both very, very strange,” she says, tiny and applecheeked, sitting in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt in her immaculate Notting Hill home. “Growing up, I just thought they were monsters.”
Her mother, Berta, was a domestic banshee who suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder and hysteria. Prone to yelling series of disjointed phrases like “Mother murderer” and “Cut my heart out with scissors”, “she was always screaming”. Her father, Edward Wachs, a wealthy sausageskin manufacturer, was angry and violent to both wife and only child; Berta called him a “torturer”.
“They had a hideous relationship,” Wax says.
“Something was very wrong but, as a kid, my parents were just cardboard cuts-out. I had no idea what made them that way.”
Wax, 64, who grew up near Chicago but has lived in London since she was 18, knew her parents were Austrian Jews who had left Vienna on the eve of the Second World War, but they had barely discussed their history with her. “Dad talked about escaping from the Nazis as if it was some adventure. I knew he’d been in prison under them, but he said he was an aerobics instructor there,” she says. “It didn’t sound too hard.”
Then earlier this year, Wax travelled to Vienna for an episode of the BBC family-history series Who Do You
Think You Are?, where everything fell into place. There, she learned, Edward was imprisoned for being Jewish, six weeks after the 1938 Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria.
He spent two months in jail, with “aerobics instructor” turning out to be a euphemism for being forced to take part in “gymnastics” sessions where prisoners were tortured and made to beat each other, leading several to commit suicide. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t tell me about it,” she sighs.
Even more surprising was the discovery of letters from Berta to Edward, describing how she was crying all day, every day, at his imprisonment. “That was a pretty breathtaking moment. Until then, the idea that my mother actually loved my father was unbelievable,” Wax says, shaking her head.
Equally illuminating was her discovery that Berta was living in Vienna during the Kristallnacht, when a series of brutal orchestrated attacks took place on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, something that had surely traumatised her.
“If my mother had once mentioned what happened, it would have broken every barrier down. I thought she was bitter about me,” Wax tells the camera. “People talk of lightbulb moments of forgiveness, but with me it more seeped into my skin. For the first time, I had compassion for my parents,” she says now.
Previously, talking to Wax has been a slightly unnerving experience: she’s friendly, but more subdued than I’d anticipated, frequently responding in monosyllables, her dark eyes darting to and fro. But now she warms to her theme. “I had a picture of my mother when she was young, which had no connection to the person she became in America. I could imagine her as somebody much younger than me, so smart and frustrated by what became of her there.
“I saw the beautiful view she used to look at in Vienna, and thought about her having to leave to live in a dump in Chicago, which she hated. This great beauty… and then everything was nipped in the bud. Her whole life was wasted.”
Released from prison and ordered to leave Austria or be deported to Dachau concentration camp, Edward somehow found the enormous sum of £2,000 to buy an air ticket to Belgium, where he claimed he stowed away on a ship to the US. There, Berta managed to join
him. “How did he get the money in his twenties to get on an aeroplane? It’s a mystery,” Wax muses. “Still, now I understand his rage.”
In Austria, Wax also investigated letters Berta received in 1941, when Jews were being rounded up, from a mysterious Ella and Salo. Historians told her they were from her greataunt and uncle, begging their niece to send them a financial affidavit that would allow them a US visa. “You can’t even imagine how afraid we are,” they wrote to Berta, to whom they were clearly close.
She sent the affidavit but by the time it arrived, the US had changed the rules and it was no longer valid. “Please help us further, do not leave us behind,” read the heartbreaking subsequent letter. Wax discovered the couple both died shortly afterwards in Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with 33,000 other Jews. “In 40 years, my mother never mentioned this to me,” she says, wonderingly.
“America was turning Jews away, literally putting them back on the boat, and we’re doing the same thing now to refugees,” she continues. “When they told me my great-aunt and uncle were murdered, you realise this is what happens to all those people left in countries like Syria.”
Another discovery was that two close relations had spent time in an asylum in Brno, now in the Czech Republic. Her maternal greatgrandmother, who had suicidal tendencies, died there, and her great-aunt had a spell there before being moved to a psychiatric hospital for the “agitated”, meaning patients who, among other things, were subject to screaming fits just like Berta’s.
“That bit was too much. I thought it must be fixed,” Wax smiles. “So now I’m wondering if my mother was the way she was because it was in the genes, or because of what happened in Vienna. That certainly can’t have helped.” She constantly asks the same nurture/nature question of herself: “Just because your parents are crazy doesn’t mean you are but they remain with you, so the question becomes how do you live with this stuff?”
Throughout her childhood, both parents constantly humiliated Wax, dismissing her as an ungainly loser. Desperate to prove them wrong, she moved to London to become an actor. “I was getting away from them, then aeroplanes came along,” she groans, jumping up to make herself toast. “My father was always visiting. If I had to work, he’d say: ‘Hey, I came all this way, can’t you see your father?’”
While the pair boasted to everyone about their only child’s success, to her face they criticised her.
“Classic narcissistic behaviour,” Wax sighs.
When her father saw her perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company, his only comment was: “You still have Ruby Wax’s teeth.”
She found a protector in fellow RSC member, the late Alan Rickman. “So Mum and Dad always went for Alan. I remember he’d been in a not-great film and Dad saying: ‘Alan, that was the worst film I’ve ever seen.’ Mum would go: ‘It was worse than worse’, then Dad would say: ‘I’ve seen films, but that was the worst’, and so it kept going, and Alan would just sit there, saying: ‘Thank you, Mr Wax’.”
However, her parents doted on her children, now 28, 26 and 23, with her director husband Ed Bye. “They couldn’t believe I could produce these wonderful, normal children,” she says. She married the affable Bye, who hovers solicitously in the background and is clearly her domestic rock (she’s said she never attended a parents’ evening) because of his stable “gene pool”.
After decades struggling with depression, things reached a nadir for Wax in 2005, shortly after interviewing Donald Trump for her TV show. “He told me he wanted to be president, and I started laughing and he threw me off his private jet (not literally, but he stopped the interview, calling her “the most obnoxious reporter I’ve ever met”). He was terrifying – oh, he had steel and anger, a true narcissist, and the problem is half the US doesn’t know that a person with mental illness is running the country.”
Soon after this encounter Wax embarked on a masters in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford University. Now she combines her qualified psychotherapist status with showbiz in her one-woman show Frazzled –a comic look at how to tackle the stresses of modern life. “I still get angry, but when I feel those chemicals, I know how to pull the brakes, otherwise it poisons you.”
It would be an exaggeration to say
WDYTYA has cured Wax, but it certainly gave her some catharsis. “Once you know what’s in the blood line, so many things make sense,” she says. “One day of genealogy turned out to be worth more than 30 years of therapy.”