At a telling point in "Bill Graham Presents," the one-man show based on the life of the late rock 'n' roll impresario, Graham argues with a rabbi who is protesting the dance hall permit he needs to open the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.

The rabbi insists the auditorium is desecrating his temple, which is located next door to the Fillmore. Too much noise, too many people. And Graham, he suggests, couldn't possibly understand, because he doesn't know suffering. "What do you know from persecution?" he asks. "What do you know from what happened to my people?"

The impresario, portrayed by actor Ron Silver, is puzzled for an instant before he realizes the rabbi has no idea he is Jewish. The promoter had picked his American name, Bill Graham, out of the telephone book, after all. The rabbi couldn't possibly know that he was born Wolfgang Grajonza to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1931. Or that he had crossed Europe on foot to flee the Nazis.

Graham begins to speak to the rabbi in Yiddish. "Do you know my mother? Do you know my sister?... Dead," he says. "My whole family, dead."

Needless to say, Graham secured his permit; he went on to become the legendary owner of the Fillmore East and West, where 1960's rock icons like Janis Joplin and Eric Clapton spawned a pop-culture revolution and a billion-dollar worldwide music business.

The pugnacious Graham, once described as "a cross between Mother Teresa and Al Capone," was at the center of it all. "The Fillmore...was the church of rock 'n' roll, and Bill was the shepherd tending the flock," as Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, put it.

Ron Silver as the famed rock promoter in " Bill Graham Presents." Photo by Ken Regan

But "Bill Graham Presents," Bob Greenfield's play now at the Canon Theatre, reveals a lesser-known side of the impresario and concert promoter: Bill Graham, the child survivor of the Holocaust.

Trekking across Europe to escape the camps, as his character says in the play, was his "very first tour." After Kristallnacht, young Wolfgang and his sister, Tolla, joined a group of 64 children who marched south, often with little food. They were severely malnourished, and Tolla fell ill with pneumonia in Lyon, around the time that their mother was being gassed in a railroad car en route to Auschwitz. At the hospital, the grownups told him that Tolla would get well and that the brother and sister would be reunited when she was strong enough to continue the journey.

Graham never saw her again. Instead, he arrived, alone, in America and waited in an army barracks in upstate New York for someone to adopt him. He was emaciated, suffering from rickets. He waited for nine weeks. "Every weekend, Jewish families from the city came to look at us, the way people go to a pet shop to pick out a new family dog," Graham says. "While every other one of the kids I came with gets picked, not me."

For Greenfield, the Holocaust is key to Graham's character, the reason he was so driven to succeed. It is also the reason the impresario lived all by himself in a big Marin County house he named "Masada."

Greenfield describes the photo, decorated with the Nazi Iron Cross, that the boy carried on his German identification card. "That is what the play is about," he says. "That innocent child who never had a chance."

Greenfield, 53, shares with Graham a legacy of music and the Holocaust. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel and play, "Temple," about a young man, obsessed with soul music, who is the grandson of a survivor.

Actually, Greenfield's beloved grandfather was a shoemaker in Vienna before the war; after the Anschluss, he managed to spirit his wife and children out of the country before escaping to Amsterdam. The Nazis seized him just before he boarded the ship that was to have taken him to America; he was sent to the concentration camps.

His arrival in New York was like a scene from Paul Mazursky's film "Enemies: A Love Story," the post-Holocaust saga that also starred Ron Silver. "My grandfather found a cab driver who spoke Yiddish, and they began going door to door looking for my family," Greenfield says. "Neighbors joined in, and by the time they finally found us, they were surrounded by 70 or 80 people."

Greenfield, on that day in early 1947, was a year old; his frail grandfather became his primary caretaker.

The author first encountered Graham, a very different kind of survivor, at the Fillmore East, where he attended his first concert, featuring the Staple Singers and Big Brother and the Holding Company, in the summer of 1968. "It was the greatest show I had ever seen," recalls Greenfield, who went on to see artists from Neil Young to the Allman Brothers in the old movie palace decorated with gilt mirrors and red plush carpeting. "I went every single week and got to be friendly with the doorman, who let me in for free."

Graham was always a singular presence. "I saw him screaming or throwing people out or getting the line in order," Greenfield recalls. "And like everyone else my age, I thought he was a fascist, capitalist jerk."

Greenfield met Graham under more cordial circumstances in the 1970s, when he was a rock journalist and author researching his book "STP: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones." The writer and the impresario later "clicked" while commiserating during a disappointing concert of the Jefferson Airplane. After Graham picked Greenfield to co-author his autobiography, the writer conducted some 120 interviews with Graham's relatives, friends and associates.

But rock stars like Pete Townshend and Jerry Garcia, it turned out, proved more cooperative than Graham himself. Obsessed with his work, the businessman only spoke to Greenfield on weekends or holidays; often, he stayed up late into the evening, scribbling endless memos to himself on yellow notepads.

Greenfield actually lived with him for days at a time at Masada, a mansion filled with shabby couches and rock star memorabilia such as Keith Richards' boots or Janis Joplin's tambourine. "It was like a rock 'n' roll museum," recalls Greenfield, who slept in Graham's son's room and hung out while waiting for the impresario to speak to him. "Bill was not someone you could live with in a comfortable way," Greenfield adds. "He was a very alone person. He was one of the most alone people I have ever known."

It was actor Ron Silver, who portrayed a survivor in "Enemies," who helped push Greenfield to explore Graham-as-survivor in "Bill Graham Presents." The play reveals a man tormented by feelings of unworthiness stemming from his Holocaust experience. "The dark voice. It f---- with me," the character says in one draft of the play. "No matter how many times they name you Humanitarian of the Year, no matter how much money you make, you're still nothing but s---."

Greenfield says he wrote the piece, finally, to give Graham his due. "His life, in its own way, was like 'Death of a Salesman,' " the author explains. "I felt that attention should be paid."

"Bill Graham Presents" runs Wednesdays through Sundays through May 27 at the Canon Theatre, 205 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills. For tickets and information, call (310) 859-2830.