INTERNATIONAL WITSIES

A GPS FOR NAVIGATING LIFE

BY HEATHER DUGMORE

IF YOU WANT TO MAKE IT IN LOS ANGELES YOU NEED CHUTZPAH AND TO WORK HARD, SAYS TALKSHOW AND PODCAST HOST ANTONY GORDON HAS OFFERED HELP TO MANY SEEKING GREATER FULFILMENT IN THEIR LIVES

During the pandemic people have been compelled to do more soul-searching and because of this, my show has seen a spike in listenership,” says Antony. His podcast The Antony Gordon Show is about helping people find more personal fulfilment or what he From here he moved into the financial services induscalls “your GPS for life”. The show reaches large audiences of all ages, on platforms such as Spotify, iTunes, YouTube and Sling.

Antony quickly recognised the power that social al services firm, where he was MD before being recruited media provides to get his message out and develop a following in the highly contested media and entertainment Management Inc, representing super wealthy clients in industry, of which he has been a part for 35 years.

“It all started at Wits, which was a very rich, important part of my life,” he explains. “I was on the SRC, I spearheaded Rag Dynamics and served as the Chair They married in 1993. “I met Lebe when I was studying of the Free People’s Concert (FPC) from 1984 to 1986. The experience I gained from this, was the catalyst for getting involved in the Harvard International Rock for Education Concert after I graduated from Wits and went to Harvard Law School on a Fulbright scholarship to do my Master’s.”

Harvard’s President at the time, Derek Bok, wanted to raise a billion dollars for the Harvard endowment — a critical source of funding for the university. “The Vice-Dean, David Smith, was aware of my role in the FPC as well as the Concert in the Park at Ellis Park in 1985 where Paul Simon performed. He asked me what contribution I could make to the Harvard concert. I said: ‘I know how to put on a music concert’; I then set about planning it for the Harvard football stadium,” says Antony, who found himself on the phone to Bruce Springsteen and Sting.

“It’s all about ‘chutzpah’ (self-confidence and audacity circuit that has taken him from Panama to Mexico City),” laughs Antony. He also reached out to Larry Tisch, London to South Africa. His most recent visit to South the CEO of CBS at the time. “Here was some greenhorn from Johannesburg contacting one of the biggest players in the entertainment industry. I was really surprised and delighted when I was invited to a meeting with Larry. I pointed out to the CEO that based on the Nielsen, CBS had lost the youth. I proposed a solution: give CBS exclusive broadcasting rights to the Rock Education Concert, which I described as ‘a 1990s Woodstock’, which would win back the youth.” Tisch responded well to Antony and speed-dialled some of the other huge entertainment names in America, including Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney and Mike Ovitz of CAA.

Unfortunately the concert never happened as Bok resigned and Antony was fast approaching graduation. But Tisch took the Wits/Harvard alumnus under his wing, and Antony was invited to join a major entertainment law firm in LA, Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell.

From here he moved into the financial services industry, including time with UBS’s Private Client Group and Morgan Stanley, where he rose to Senior Vice-President. In 2017 he joined MGO, a Los Angeles-based professional services firm, where he was MD before being recruited to head the JAF Family Office and Stealth Consulting Management Inc, representing super wealthy clients in the sports, media and entertainment industries.

Today, he lives in LA’s Hancock Park area with his speech therapist wife Lebe Gordon, born and bred in LA. They married in 1993. “I met Lebe when I was studying in Yeshiva (rabbinical school) in Jerusalem. Back in LA I asked her out and took her to Pat’s, the most famous kosher restaurant in LA, owned by a South African couple, Pat and Errol Fine.

“We married soon after, and we have six children — two daughters and four sons — and we still go to Pat’s. In fact, our second oldest son, Joshua, trained at Pat’s from age 13 and is now an accomplished kosher chef working in Orlando.”

Antony chairs the advisory board of America’s Voice in Israel and has regularly taken athletes and celebrities to Israel “to see for themselves if the way Israel is portrayed is accurate or not. It’s so important to transcend our prejudices and differences.”

As a motivational speaker and rabbi, he presents for a range of media and audiences — from the celebrity pop culture channel HollyWire, which has a huge millennial following, to the Jewish speaking circuit that has taken him from Panama to Mexico, London to South Africa. His most recent visit to South Africa in 2016 was through a speaking invitation and he took the opportunity to visit Wits and the house where he grew up in Savoy while attending Bramley Primary School and King David Linksfield High.

His late mother, Hessie Gordon, was a renowned psychiatric social worker who saved the lives of many in despair. “She never clipped my wings, she allowed me to be me and in my family it was completely normal to express emotions”. His late father, Sol Gordon, was a Chartered Secretary with JH Isaacs and Antony credits him with “wonderful humour”.

This year Antony is launching a new 24-part TV series on several digital platforms (Google Play, Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast, Amazon’s Fire TV) targeting 80 million screens worldwide. “My shows dispel several pop culture myths. One of these is that if you are wealthy and famous you have a better chance of being happy and living life with a sense of accomplishment.

“Another myth is that a happy life means a painfree life. It’s absurd, yet the notion of happily ever after is repeated by pop culture and Hollywood as a truism. Across American culture, pain is portrayed as something bad and so people do all sorts of things to take the pain away, including substance abuse and other vices. The small percentage of people who have found the way to lead happy, successful lives have usually had to transcend a lot of pain.

“Through my shows I dispel this illusion that one day you wake up and it’s nirvana, with a great career, money, the perfect spouse and a Labrador in the garden. It takes years and years to hone your skills and get somewhere.”

A HEART ACTIVATED BY NATURE

BY HEATHER DUGMORE

WHERE DO I BELONG? WHERE IS HOME? THESE ARE QUESTIONS HOLLYWOOD SCREENWRITER, AUTHOR AND RHINO CHAMPION HELENA KRIEL (BA DRAMATIC ART 1982) HAS PURSUED THROUGHOUT HER CAREER.

Helena Kriel has been living a nomadic life between her home in Los Angeles’ Santa Monica mountains, her family home in Johannesburg and her “heart home” at a baby rhino rehabilitation sanctuary bordering Kruger National Park. This is the place that inspired her new book, Meditating with Rhinos (Melinda Ferguson Books, 2020) and reappraisal of life.

“I have found a profound sense of belonging in the natural environment, and I have learnt from the rhinos that you grow where life puts you down.”

Helena’s life on the move requires flexibility and robustness. “It gives me a lot of freedom and I have learnt the discipline of sitting down with my laptop and working wherever I am,” she says. She currently rents out her Los Angeles home to fund her freedom and travel.

Before the pandemic this included leading groups on adventures in India, “to extreme and very beautiful landscapes like the Himalayas”. Helena loves wild places — be it mountain ranges in Asia or the Santa Monica mountains. “LA has very beautiful natural areas. My house in Topanga Canyon that I designed with architects and built in 2002 is on an acre and a half in the mountains. It feels incredibly remote and yet it’s 10 minutes from Malibu.”

Her journey began in South Africa as a playwright and actress, followed by a move to America in 1991 with a dream of becoming a screenwriter. She made it to Hollywood’s A-list, with credits and contributions that include The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat (1993), Kama Sutra (1996) and Skin (2008).

“In South Africa I was not initially accepted by the theatrical establishment because the mid-1980s were all about protest theatre, while my writing was about human relationships and the struggle we have with one other, the complexity, the search for ‘the one’, the sexual games and betrayals. My standpoint was ‘aren’t we men and women before politics?’, and ‘shouldn’t we also look at what it means to be a human being?’, and so I would write plays about this, act in them myself, and finance them.”

She persisted and by the late 1980s she had gained recognition in the theatre world and decided it was time to head for Hollywood.

“My audacious plan was that if I won a screenwriting award in America it would be my way in. So I looked at all the awards and writing programmes and came across the Steven Spielberg Award and a programme at UCLA.” She left South Africa in 1991 not knowing if she had been accepted into the programme.

“Fortunately I was, and the lecturer, Hesper Anderson, an Academy Award nominated writer, responded to my work. It had the South African stamp, it was honest, and hard hitting. Hesper took me under her wing and I developed a screenplay called Virtuoso about a South African woman flautist who is a musical prodigy. It’s a brutal love story about creativity and collaboration and how love can be an agent of good and complete destruction.”

She submitted it to the Steven Spielberg Award, was chosen for the finals and was allocated a top Hollywood screenwriter to workshop her script. Scott Frank’s work includes Out of Sight, Godless and The Queen’s Gambit.

"We worked very hard on it and I won! Michael Douglas presented the award and here I was, seven months in America, with this award in hand. I immediately got an agent, doors opened for me and I was in meetings from morning to night. Hollywood is a small place and if you are considered ‘hot’ everyone wants to meet you. Within a month I got my first commission and was a working Hollywood writer. It was a very lucky break.

“Part of what I do now is teach being paid for my work. So it was a screenwriting in a Master’s programme and I see all the crisis time all round; a real low point.” young hopefuls learning the craft with dreams of being In 2013 she decided to head back to South Africa for a paid writer in Hollywood, just as I did. I feel for them a while to reassess her life. Back home she accompanied because it is so tough, and I often cannot believe I pulled her sister in volunteering at an animal sanctuary near the it off.”

For Helena, the 1990s and early 2000s were the “gold- rhinos. en age for Hollywood writers” where each studio had a “Here are these shattered baby rhinos and the expedevelopment branch, working with writers to develop rience of how they turn around emotionally had a great scripts. Less than 5% of developed projects ever became impact on me. As an emotional and creative person it is a movie or TV show, but the model enabled writers to a privilege to have access to these highly emotional and make a good living.

“My theme at the time was the promise and lie of romantic love. We are all trying to make love work; all the pop songs are about love, so much of Shakespeare and Dickens is about love, love is always there and why do we get love wrong? And when we get it wrong love becomes hate.”

That’s when Mira Nair entered the picture and asked Helena to co-write the script of Kama Sutra. From here, she was in the 5% of working writers whose films were getting produced.

Things went well for Helena until 2007/8, when over 12 000 screenwriters went on strike for a better share of the takings. They achieved this but it ended the “payment for development” model, as Helena explains: “You would still develop scripts but it was all on spec. So you would work very hard but most projects would not go into production.”

During this period she she started writing books, her first being Facing Fire (Melinda Ferguson Books, 2019), and she met the person she believed was ‘the one’. “We enacted the whole fantasy of romantic love until everything fell apart and I had to leave the relationship. The romantic hankering I had been fascinated with creatively revealed its shadow side, this time in my own life. Work-wise, I had a lot of high pedigree movies I was hoping would go into production but I was not being paid for my work. So it was a crisis time all round; a real low point."

In 2013 she decided to head back to South Africa for a while to reassess her life. Back home she accompanied her sister in volunteering at an animal sanctuary near the Kruger National Park, which turned out to be for orphan rhinos. “Here are these shattered baby rhinos and the experience of how they turn around emotionally had a great impact on me. As an emotional and creative person it is a privilege to have access to these highly emotional and intelligent wild creatures. I was amazed to see how easily they received my love, respect and fascination.

“It opened my passion for the wild even more. We share our world with these sentient animals, and yet we are not in relationship with the natural environment anymore. It has receded for most people; it has become something in the background or that we occasionally look at through binoculars.”

Today, Helena is interested in a different kind of love — a love for the natural world. “The natural environment is always present and reliable. It is a relationship that has grown and developed and continually delivers.”

Her experience with rhinos has opened a new way forward for her: “I started a non-profit for orphaned rhinos, I wrote my new book, and I wrote an action adventure love story with a baby rhino at the heart of it. Together with South African producer Helena Spring and a Hollywood producer I’m moving forward with it, and in a perfect world it will get produced.”

Helena says her motivation is to reveal that the natural world is our most extraordinary inheritance and that if we don’t reinvent our relationship with it, it is doomed. “This COVID nightmare has revealed this. We are almost at the point of no return and we can only turn things around through the heart because that is when action happens. When our hearts are activated we can do impossible things. And a relationship with the natural world activates the heart.”

PAYING IT FORWARD

BY HEATHER DUGMORE

“IT’S BEEN A WONDERFUL LIFE HERE; THE PEOPLE OF MELBOURNE WELCOMED US AND TRUSTED US, AND AFTER 34 YEARS THEY GAVE ME A MEDAL,” SAYS PHILIP MAYERS (BA 1970, LLB 1973).

“In 1987 we came to Australia as strangers from South Africa and chose to settle in what I call ‘the world’s most livable city’,” says Philip. “It’s because of the warmth of the people. I also love Sydney, it’s very sexy, but for me Sydney is for visiting while Melbourne is for making a home because of the people, and it’s very green with lots of parks.”

For the past 34 years Philip has served in leadership positions on boards of numerous community organisations and charities in Melbourne, where he lives with his Witsie wife Rhona (née Jackson, BA 1970). For his significant service to the community, this Australia Day (26 January) he was honoured with the award of Member of the Order of Australia. The organisations he has served include the Royal District Nursing Service, Freemasons Foundation, Link Health, South Port Uniting Care and, his favourite, Make-A-Wish Foundation International.

Philip, with his son Rick, is the founder director of Mayers Recruitment, which recruits chief executives for community non-profit organisations serving the aged, disabled and indigent, education, sport and the arts.

“Melbourne is a very philanthropic community and top executives apply for the posts. The person naturally has to have all the managerial and leadership competencies, but equally important are ethical values and a good cultural fit.” Prior to this he was in the commercial executive recruitment business and he has appointed over 700 CEOs in 30 years.

Philip says lockdown was very bad for business, but from a personal point of view it gave him a lot more time to spend with Rhona (who teaches) instead of rushing off to work in the city at seven every morning.

“In the beginning, the management of the pandemic in Melbourne was poor and there were 800 deaths last year. But the city of five million quickly adapted to what was required and there have only been a handful of cases since the beginning of 2021. Contacts are immediately traced, anyone who tests positive is instantly quarantined and a snap lockdown for five days is implemented throughout the entire state of Victoria to ‘break the circuit’. Most people think it’s ‘overkill’, as the lockdown affects country communities 400km away in all directions, which have no connection with metropolitan Melbourne.”

Nonetheless, Philip says Australians are very compliant, “they obey the rules”, and during hard lockdown they respected the restriction to remain within a 5km radius from home. “During lockdown we’ve gone to a coffee shop called Saki’s every day since 23 March 2020 for Saki’s fantastic coffee and warm friendship. It’s a kilometre from our 1928 townhouse in our suburb of Toorak.”

He says Toorak is like Rosebank in Johannesburg was 50 years ago, with street shops as well as open air restaurants. “The crime rate is very low and we love to walk the streets of our suburb and go to the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens, which is about 4km from home. It opened in 1846 and it has plants from all over the world and a scientific research institute. On the outside of the gardens is the 4km ‘Tan Track’ and we ‘walk the tan’ . ”

On many occasions they’ve heard a South African immigrant accent. He estimates that approximately 7 000 South Africans have moved to Melbourne since 2011. “It’s terrible because it represents a brain drain and it’s not stopping.” It includes about 1 000 Witsies in Melbourne, where Philip has served as an alumni ambassador for 30 years.

Of all the organisations to which he has devoted his time, his work with Make-A-Wish International and its Australian branch are particularly close to his heart. “These are seriously ill children who show such courage. When their wish is granted, it gives them hope, strength and joy, and you can see the happiness it brings.”

Community commitment is in Philip’s genes. His maternal grandmother, Augusta ‘Gussie’ Sussman, was renowned for her commitment to the health and welfare of communities in Kimberley, South Africa.

In turn, while Philip was a Wits student, he taught mercantile law, economics and commerce at a night school for adult black students. Also at Wits he met Rhona, who was a member of his sales team in the Wits Wits Rag magazine distribution committee. “We sold the magazine on street corners and on the morning that we gathered to do this, I hadn’t eaten breakfast and Rhona gave me an apple. It was the beginning of a wonderful life together.”

After qualifying with his legal degree Philip became a corporate legal advisor for Jacksons Metals in Johannesburg, of which Rhona’s father and uncle were the founders. At the same time, he was asked to join the board of Temple David in Morningside and ultimately became the president of the synagogue.

“Temple David started the Mitzvah School in Sandton in 1986 as a crisis class for matric students from Alexandra Township. It was at the height of the apartheid-era State of Emergency and the student slogan was ‘Liberation before Education’. There were, however, students who wanted to complete their schooling. They felt their parents had worked hard to send them to school and that being involved in politics was not helping them shape a future for themselves.”

The school secretly operated at the synagogue. No one could know that the students were there as it put them at risk of being harmed for going to school. Voluntary teachers helped students pass their matric and two women in particular – Lesley Rosenberg and Molly Smith – were the school’s driving force. The following year Philip, Rhona and their two children, Shaun and Rick, migrated to Australia. “We decided to go as we had always hoped there would be positive change but we had lost heart.”

One of the organisations Philip now chairs that has been a source of friendship for him is the Freemasons Foundation, Victoria. The mention of Freemasons raises a few eyebrows but Philip says their charter is all about friendship and charity. “In my lodge we have Sikhs, Muslims, Jews and Christians and I have good friends from so many backgrounds. To be a member you do need to believe in a supreme being, but how you interpret this is up to you.”

He says that in times gone by the organisation was secret but now they openly talk about it. “Our main focus is to raise funds and we donate about $3 million per year to the health, education and community support sectors. In 2020 we gave to the Monash Children’s Hospital, breast and prostate cancer, and the farmers affected by the devastating bush fires. We look after everybody, not just Freemasons,” says Philip. His ethos is that “life is precious; every person has an equal right to a happy, healthy, joyful life, and I am grateful for every moment.”