Podcast Episode - Trude Forsher: Holocaust Survivor, Elvis’s Secretary, and Pathbreaking Child Support Researcher

Trude Forsher (top row, middle) with her business partner Adolph Zukor II (top row, left) on the set of TV show they produced in 1962.

The history of child support has some interesting rabbit holes, but I’m excited to share the most fascinating one I’ve ever gone down: the incredible life of Trude Forsher, a Holocaust survivor who became Elvis’s secretary and later co-authored an influential report on the enforcement of child support orders against affluent fathers. 

For our newest podcast we talked to Trude Forsher’s son Dr. James Forsher about his mother’s storied life and remarkable character. We also learned about his own journey, from documentary filmmaker to professor and back again, including his plans for a forthcoming film on Hollywood mogul Adolph Zukor. 

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As part of Child Support Awareness Month, I wanted to look back to a pivotal document embodies much of the fascination the program has for me, touching on the real need for both parents to contribute financially to their children’s upbringing as well as how class, race, and gender intersect in the U.S. in ways that we can never seem to grasp all at once.

From Holocaust Survivor to and the Secretary for the King

The cover of Trude Forsher's The "Love Me Tender" Years Diary.

Born in 1920 into a comfortable Jewish family in Vienna, Trude Forsher turned 18 the same year that Hitler annexed Austria for the Third Reich. Her journey out of Vienna and on to London and then New York and Los Angeles—the subject of an exhibit at the Jewish Museum Vienna and the documentary Elvis and the Girl From Vienna (Elvis und das Mädchen aus Wien)—is the kind of story best told by people who can do justice to all its details. So please do listen to Dr. Forsher narrate it in the podcast.

Her involvement with the early career of Elvis Presley is a different kind of story entirely but also not a simple one. For the full sweep of that experience, I recommend reading The “Love Me Tender” Years Diary, a book-length record, edited by Dr. Forsher, about her experience working for Presley and her fellow European emigree “Colonel” Tom Parker.

Child Support Research

As Dr. Forsher explains in the podcast, her attachment to her work with Elvis and Parker led fairly directly to her divorce from her husband. That divorce and her ex-husband’s failure to pay child support then lit a fire in Forsher that brought her together with Marian P. Winston’s to publish the 1971 RAND Corporation report Nonsupport of Legitimate Children by Affluent Fathers as a Cause of Poverty and Welfare Dependence. 

Rereading the report more than 50 years later, I was struck by how much had changed but also by how many problems they identified five decades ago remain in place. Many of the policy, staffing, and enforcement issues Forsher and Winston identified in their report have been addressed since the creation of the federal child support program in 1975. But a report noting “the difficulty of proving the income of the self-employed” or acknowledging that “[t]he only [child support] cases the public ever hears about are those where considerable wealth or celebrity is involved, with correspondingly sizeable awards” could have been written this week. 

The report provided a carefully researched and sharply argued basis for suggesting that more robust enforcement measures and better funding could reduce the number of families receiving welfare benefits while also striking a blow for gender equality. 

Surely part of the report’s success also lay in its sharp and often barbed prose style. In a section titled “Educating for Incompetence,” Forsher and Winston describe how the American education system effectively prevented middle-class married women from being able to support themselves independently. Their description of the problem begins in the soothingly neutral tones one expects from a RAND report before shifting to one of necessary outrage: “Only in the last year or two have there been any studies of the sex role stereotyping in school textbooks. They all point in the same direction. If the intent had been to train schoolgirls to be stupid, helpless, and utterly lacking in self-confidence, no changes would be needed for the purpose in the reading books to which children are exposed in their earliest schooling.”

Admirably, Forsher and Winston also go out of their way to address disparities in income by race and sex, drawing on seemingly some of the very little data available at the time. Yet the report’s narrow focus on divorced parents in the middle-class and above prevents them from pursuing the question of how enforcement of child support might relate to the structural barriers that create income disparities by race.

Similarly, the report clearly recognizes that enforcing child support orders for divorced parents with solid incomes—the “affluent” parents of its title—differs markedly from other cases. But again, they stop just short of explaining how this might affect policy. 

Though clearly outside the scope of their report, these questions of how to really address differences in the ability to pay support, especially in the context of multiple structural barriers, have haunted child support since the founding of the national program. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to it if researchers as capable as Forsher and Winston had taken up those questions early on.

Trude Forsher with Adolph Zukor II and Ivy Baker Priest (second from left), a former U.S. Treasurer and Treasurer of the State of California, at the bar mitzvah of James Forsher (center) in 1967.

A Remarkable Character

By that time the report appeared, a decade had passed since her work with Elvis had ended. In the meantime, she had co-founded and run a production company with Adolph Zukor II. 

As her son makes clear in the podcast, Forsher never stopped looking for new ways to apply her seemingly boundless energy. By the end of her life she had become a human rights advocate and a force in Los Angeles politics.

Throughout her life she seems to have never backed down from any fight or apologized for wanting to follow her fascinations wherever they led. 

I hope all of you get a chance to listen to the podcast and that you share my interest in Trude Forsher’s remarkable life and pathbreaking career.