The Warburgs
Page 8
When the Schiffs went to Bad Gastein for mountain hikes and a cure, Felix coaxed Otto Schiff into going there on a walking tour with him. The power of love defeated Jacob Schiff’s clumsy attempts to arbitrate Frieda’s destiny. On a woodland lane, Felix waylaid his future bride. As they ambled through the gardens, he asked if she would like to spend her life in Germany. “With a wise premonition, I said I would never care to live there,” recalled Frieda. “When I joined my mother, I must have looked quite pale, because she asked me what was wrong, and I made the classic remark: ‘I think that fellow proposed.’ ”16 Frieda’s assent to Felix would prove a blessing for the Warburgs, ensuring a Wall Street connection for M. M. Warburg.
Upset by these unplanned developments, Jacob Schiff tried to reassert control over events. In his exact timetable for Frieda’s development, he hadn’t scheduled marriage for two more years. It especially irked him that he had planned this European trip precisely to forestall such spontaneous romance. Luckily for Felix, Jacob Schiff’s best friend, Ernest Cassel (soon Sir Ernest), pleaded his case. Born in Cologne, Cassel had moved to England as a teenager, amassed a fortune with the house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, converted to Catholicism, and served as Kuhn, Loeb’s foreign agent. An intimate friend and financial adviser to the Prince of Wales, the stout, bearded tycoon was jocularly known as Windsor Cassel. He was as sociable, sporty, and extravagant as Schiff was grimly austere. It was Cassel who had bravely leaped down the precipice at Chamonix to rescue Frieda, giving him moral authority in all matters concerning her. As an epicurean with luxurious tastes, Cassel must have had a natural sympathy with Felix. During a long walk, Cassel tried to reason with the furious Schiff. “Jacob, don’t be silly. There’s nothing wrong with the young man. He’s attractive—he’s healthy; he comes from a good family. If there is anything against him it may be that he’s too young. Why not suggest to him that if he is serious after a year’s time you will consider his proposal if he’s still interested and comes to America.”17
Schiff relented and decided to adopt the suggested one-year waiting period. To settle matters, he had a state visit with Charlotte and Moritz in the Belgian seaside spa of Ostend. In the course of two meals—one ended disastrously when Schiff was served nonkosher lobster and threw a fit—it was decided that for a year, Felix would write to Frieda from Germany. Schiff would open the letters, censor them, and read aloud appropriate portions to his daughter. Then he would reply to Felix on her behalf, allowing Frieda to scan the contents before the reply was sent. One day, when she expressed girlish delight that her father had finally switched to the informal du form, Schiff, with Scrooge-like rigidity, scratched out all the pronouns and verbs and reverted to the formal Sie.
When the year was up, Schiff kept his intentions secret but invited Felix to New York. A few days after his arrival, Schiff held a party and ended it by announcing that Felix and Frieda were engaged—welcome news that stunned the young couple as much as the guests. If Schiff bowed to reality, he was also restoring his imperial control, for he insisted that Felix (whose command of English was still tentative) move to New York and enroll as a Kuhn, Loeb partner under his watchful eye.
Petrified of water, Moritz was loath to chance the Atlantic Ocean and didn’t attend the New York wedding in March 1895. Bidding farewell to Felix, he encouraged him to shun American custom and, especially, avoid iced drinks. Afraid he would fall in love with an American girl, Max refused to go, too, so Paul and sister Olga represented the family, a visit that would ultimately transform both their lives. Felix didn’t know who would attend until Paul stepped down the gangway in New York. Felix cried, “I never expected you!” and Paul replied, “Don’t you remember we made a vow that whenever either of us got married, the other would be there?”18
For the wedding, about 125 guests crowded into a tapestry-hung room of the Schiff mansion at 932 Fifth Avenue. An avalanche of gifts showered down on Felix and Frieda. Afraid of spoiling his children, Schiff was appalled when a splendid sixty-seven-piece silver set, including a forest of candlesticks, arrived from Ernest Cassel. The best man was Paul Warburg, while the maid of honor was Nina Loeb, a daughter from Solomon Loeb’s second marriage and half sister to Jacob’s wife, Therese.
Schiff was patently jealous of Felix. After a trip to Washington, D.C., the newlyweds returned to New York and stayed at the Plaza Hotel. When Jacob called on them, he could scarcely mouth the loathsome new name, Frieda Warburg. At dinner he didn’t mask his blatantly competitive feelings toward Felix. When Frieda asked if he could do something, Jacob grunted in disgust. “Why do you ask me? You now have your husband to turn to.”19 When the young couple sailed to Italy for their honeymoon, Jacob insisted that they take along the Schiff maid, a veteran nag and shameless spy named Hermine Steinmetz. The redoubtable Steinmetz chided Frieda if she got a spot on her dress. Although Steinmetz tailed the young couple everywhere with the tenacity of an amateur sleuth, Frieda managed to become pregnant on the cruise. In later years, Felix loved to quip, “I spent my honeymoon with a German governess.”20
When Felix and Frieda returned home, their life took on a preordained quality, as Jacob Schiff placed them in a stage set of his own careful devising. They moved into a house at 18 East 72nd Street that was fully staffed and furnished, and in 1897 Felix was admitted to a Kuhn, Loeb partnership. The patriotic Schiff believed that immigrants should speedily master the language and customs of the country and this probably explains why Felix was so quickly Americanized. With his charm and ebullience, Felix took to the American milieu with a chameleon adaptability, even though he was the first Warburg to leave Europe in at least fourteen generations.
Paul Warburg and Nina Loeb had already met in 1892 at the close of Paul’s round-the-world tour. Their reunion as best man and maid of honor at Felix’s wedding revived their intense mutual fascination. After the wedding, everybody noticed a magical glow in Nina Loeb. Her face was suddenly fuller, her cheeks were flushed, she seemed radiantly happy. Instead of joining her parents for their customary cure in Carlsbad, she accompanied Paul and Olga on the boat back to Europe. As they crossed the Atlantic, Paul proposed. Back in Hamburg, he awaited a wire from Nina, which invited him to join her in Carlsbad and make things official with her parents. When the favorable news came, Paul was at the bank and joyously flew down the stairs. He met Charlotte coming up the steps and breathlessly shouted, “I am engaged to Nina Loeb!” Instead of congratulating him, Charlotte reproved him: “And you break the news to me on the stairs?”21
In October 1895, Paul and Nina were wed at the Loeb summer home on the New Jersey shore, only half a year after Felix and Frieda, while the Warburgs in Hamburg threw a celebration the same day. To the tune of Hansel and Gretel, they wrote a song bemoaning that after Felix’s marriage, the number of children in Hamburg had dipped from seven to six. Now they expected Paul and Nina to live in Germany and even the score. With “Felix hin, Nina her/Sieben sind wir wie vorher!” (With Felix there and Nina here, We’re seven again as before!) they sang.22
It was ironic that Paul and Felix became the two “Our Crowd” brothers, because they were so antithetical, Felix wearing the comic and Paul the tragic mask. Paul’s personality was mirrored in his fine, sensitive drawings of people. Done in a steady hand, they portrayed pensive people in somber, often solitary settings. Whereas Felix in early photographs radiates a self-confident air, an exhibitionist’s winning ease, Paul has a shy, self-effacing stoop and a nervous glint in his eyes. Unlike the beaming Felix, Paul struggled to smile, as if clutched at by some inner constraint. As his son wrote, “His face was sad, but saddest when he smiled.”23 Everybody noted the contrast between the brothers. “Paul’s mustache turned up, and he had a sad face,” The New Yorker’s Geoffrey Hellman once wrote. “Felix’s mustache turned down, and he had a happy face.”24
When Paul and Nina married, they turned the family tree into a genealogical nightmare. Felix was Jacob Schiff’s son-in-law and Paul now became Schiff’s brothe
r-in-law. This turned Paul into his brother’s uncle. The situation was no less perplexing for Nina, who became the sister-in-law of her beloved niece, Frieda. Paul and Nina’s two children were therefore first and second cousins to Frieda and Felix’s five children.
As the youngest child from Solomon Loeb’s second marriage—Frieda’s mother, Therese, was the only child from the first—Nina was only five years older than her niece, Frieda. The Brearley girls were always highly amused when Frieda shouted up the stairwell, “Aunt Nina!” Sweet, gentle, and intuitive, Nina was Frieda’s early mentor and confidante, a sort of wise, loving older sister, an intimate role she played with many women. Nina liked to tease Frieda affectionately, labeling her the family snob and aristocrat, but Frieda deferred to “Aunt Nina” in many things. Only later did this closeness give way to some suppressed rivalry and mutual carping.
Nina came from a family that resembled the Warburgs more than the Schiff’s. The buxom, energetic Betty Loeb dominated husband Solomon the way Charlotte did Moritz. When Paul first met him, Solomon had keen blue eyes, a bald head, and two fluffy wings of white hair that stood out horizontally on either side. His white handlebar mustache drooped into side-whiskers and, as one Warburg commented, he had the erect bearing of an American colonel.25 He dressed meticulously, had few interests besides business, and was a quiet, reserved figure.
Solomon hadn’t exactly seemed marked out for riches. With his shoes strapped to his back, he had emigrated to America from Worms, Germany, after the 1848 revolution, growing so violently sick at sea that he pleaded with another passenger to pitch him overboard. He then joined a distant relative in the clothing firm of Kuhn, Netter in Cincinnati. After he married Abraham Kuhn’s sister, Fanny, Abraham married Solomon’s sister, Regina, and the tight-knit little firm was renamed Kuhn, Loeb. Fanny gave birth to a daughter, Therese (Jacob Schiff’s wife), but then died during confinement for a second child.
As a widower with a six-year old child, Solomon toured Germany to find a wife and met Betty Gallenberg of Mannheim, a violinist’s daughter training to become a concert pianist. To marry Solomon and move to America, she had to sacrifice her career. Like Charlotte Warburg, Betty Loeb transferred her oversize, thwarted ambitions to her four children and approached the art of mothering much as great generals approach major battles, drilling her little troops to perfection.
Betty Loeb always had a jolly, well-fed air, with a double-chinned face and lively eyes. Bright, sentimental, vivacious, she had a vast range of interests. It was Betty who got Solomon to move to New York from Cincinnati, which she found woefully philistine and provincial and nicknamed “Porkopolis.” In New York she invited musicians to their Murray Hill home, read Émile Zola, and helped Lillian Wald to found the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service. The Loebs were agnostics but belonged to Temple Emanu-El.
The Loebs had four children—Morris, Guta, James, and Nina—and Betty filled these four poor vessels to the brim with education and culture. The children formed a string quartet, with Nina on violin and James on cello. Solomon was tone-deaf and this only deepened his subservience to his wife. Betty had a Jewish mother’s implicit faith that expensive lessons and tightly scheduled days of activity will produce healthy, wealthy, nonneurotic offspring. The four children endured a battery of tutors for sports, dance, riding, music, and languages. Betty was also a strong believer in heavy food, which she ladled out in monstrous portions that evidently overpowered visitors. “Guests, leaving her groaning boards, often had to lie down for several hours,” reports Birmingham.26
Unlike Charlotte, Betty had to deal with a troubled, star-crossed group of children. Nina’s ambition was to be a ballet dancer. But at age eleven, she fell from a goat cart in Central Park and broke her hip, which never properly mended. The surgeons applied a gruesome treatment: They put her in a cast and tried manfully to stretch her leg by heavy weights. For a year, she remained bedridden, reading a good deal. The would-be ballerina progressed from a wheelchair to clumsy steel leg braces. For the rest of her life, Nina had a lopsided walk and needed a cane and a built-up shoe. A game teenager with great physical courage, she tried to dance and ride horseback in the face of her terrible pain. At age eighteen, she even pathetically tried to do ballet for Betty.
As the youngest Loeb child and handicapped into the bargain, Nina received boundless sympathy and became very spoiled. She learned to use her weakness to get her way with people and evade responsibilities. Frieda spoke of Nina’s “Madonna-like beauty,” which may say more about Nina’s sweet, luminous presence than her actual appearance. Nina had a gentle nature and a serene radiance that certainly bespoke inner loveliness. Because she was crippled, people were perhaps excessively quick to credit her facial beauty. When Paul met her, she was slender and dark-eyed but not, at least judging from photos, a beauty.27 Paul was that rare young man who set little store by glamour and surface things. With his stoical, self-denying nature, Paul catered endlessly to Nina, who used her handicap to dominate and even manipulate him. As their daughter, Bettina, recalled, “She acted as though he were her possession. She was sick a lot and this made her center stage. She had to be waited upon. Father was always very solicitous. We all waited on my mother.”28 But she was also loving and highly protective of Paul’s sensitivity.
Paul’s and Felix’s marriages guaranteed that the Warburgs would avoid the great strategic error of the Rothschilds, who had failed to build a major presence on a burgeoning Wall Street. Yet, however well they served Warburg interests, these twin 1895 marriages were prompted less by commercial calculation than by the wayward stirrings of desire. There is no evidence that they were arranged, and the Warburgs and Schiffs even had to conquer their qualms about them. These love matches would prove more beneficial to future Warburg prosperity than the family’s shrewdest business calculations. The Warburgs had arrived in America on the eve of its industrial and financial preeminence. Representing Kuhn, Loeb in Germany, Max Warburg would acquire a new cachet in German banking and political circles. At this point, the Warburgs seemed to be fortune’s favorites, for in the coming decades, Wall Street would prosper as Germany was beset by war, revolution, hyperinflation, depression, and, finally, the most unspeakable dictatorship. The New York tie would give the Hamburg bank a buffer against the blows that German history was about to mete out so liberally to bankers—and to Jewish bankers in particular.
CHAPTER 5
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The Sage and the Serpents
If Paul’s life was forever altered by Felix’s wedding in March 1895, Aby’s life was no less profoundly touched by Paul’s wedding in October. A true nationalist steeped in high German culture, Aby didn’t share the family’s flourishing romance with the Anglo-Saxon world. In New York, he was repelled by what he saw as the brutal, vacuous materialism of America’s East Coast and found the wedding festivities gaudily overdone. A business-obsessed America, he thought, had banished magic and poetry from its shores.
In Aby, the Warburg extremes of light and shadow, hilarity and tragedy, reason and madness contended for supreme mastery. He combined a madcap irreverence with a high-strung, often terrifying temperament and he admitted that his main trait was being easily annoyed.1 The two sides of his nature seemed inseparable, mirth and sadness following each other in alternating waves. Later, his son speculated that Aby started out as a melancholic and gradually evolved into a choleric type.2 Endowed with a certain Warburg clairvoyance that would become marked in his generation, he knew posterity would puzzle over his enigmatic personality and once observed, “I’m just cut out for a beautiful memory.”3 Asked on a questionnaire whom he would be if he could be somebody else, he replied, “Nobody else.”4
In a photo of the thirteen-year-old Aby at the Realgymnasium Johanneum, he stands out among blond classmates for his dark coloring and facial expression. Extremely pleased with himself, he stares into the camera like a presumptuous young monarch. The princely gaze was something of a pose, for Aby was kno
wn not for lordly aplomb, but for temper tantrums. As we recall, he had been traumatized as a boy by his own illness and by Charlotte’s near-fatal brush with typhus, which left him with a morbid fear of sickness. Even news reports of overseas epidemics could trigger full-blown anxiety attacks. During the 1892 cholera epidemic, he fled Hamburg and was criticized by his family for deserting Max.
Aby had an unforgettable appearance. A tiny, dapper man, prone to stoutness in later years, he had dark brown eyes that crinkled with merriment or blazed angrily. Like his brothers, he had a handlebar mustache and shaggy eyebrows. He was a whimsical fellow who could kick up his heels in outrageous dances. To small children, he was either magical or scary, a merry prankster or a dread disciplinarian, with brusque movements that seemed military and theatrical in their precision. He loved to joke in local dialects. As Kenneth Clark recalled, “He himself said that if he had been five inches taller … he would have become an actor, and I can believe it, for he had, to an uncanny degree, the gift of mimesis.”5 An overflowing fountain of aphorisms, witticisms, and anecdotes, he could be a tireless one-man show at a dinner party.
Like his brothers, Aby had a heightened sense of the absurd, and his taste for practical jokes took wickedly funny forms. Once, at a dinner party, Aby noticed that his pretty cousin, Elsa, was trapped beside a lisping bore. For the next five weeks, this lisping man telephoned Elsa and pestered her for a date despite her repeated and insistent refusals. Aby finally revealed himself as the culprit.6
Every great comedian requires a straight man, and Aby had several. One was Gottschalk Sander, Moritz’s barber, who, as mentioned earlier, developed an unfortunate case of trembling hands. The Warburgs got Sander a job at a theater box-office in the Saint Pauli district, where he skimmed money and shortchanged Spanish sailors on exchange rates. When the tolerant Warburgs then made him a house servant at Siegmund’s Alsterufer home, he would decorate the table with flowers stolen from the lakeside park. He also filched food from the breakfast table and Aby devised an ingenious revenge. One morning, he tiptoed into the breakfast room, deposited two soft-boiled eggs on the table, then stole out. A few minutes later, he walked into the room and seeing the eggs missing, squeezed Sander in a hearty embrace until broken eggs came streaming from the thief’s pockets.7