The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  It must have embittered Jimmy that his protracted stays in Hamburg had provided an opening for Kay’s affair with George Gershwin to flourish. Staying at Bydale, the Warburg farm in Connecticut, Gershwin wrote and dictated sections of Porgy and Bess to Kay, who jotted down half the original score. He became a fixture around the place. Referring to this decades later, Jimmy still seemed to smart: “I liked Gershwin but resented the way in which our whole life was taken over by this completely self-centered but charming genius.…”43 Gershwin didn’t take ordinary precautions to conceal the affair. In 1932, Random House published George Gershwin’s Song Book, with a dedication from George to Kay. To be cuckolded in public by a celebrity was more than a man of Jimmy Warburg’s ego could bear. The affair also had a very deleterious impact upon the three Warburg daughters, who were openly exposed to it at Bydale. One of the three came upon George and Kay in flagrante delicto and was shattered by the experience.

  While definitely not the marrying sort, Gershwin contemplated marriage with Kay and solicited friends’ views about the wisdom of such a course. Perhaps Gershwin was deterred by the three daughters (he had strained relations with April, the eldest, who saw what was going on) or by Kay not being Jewish. Maybe he feared marrying a divorcée. Gershwin once said, “Why should I limit myself to only one woman when I can have as many women as I want?”44 When Jimmy confronted Gershwin and told him to go ahead and marry Kay if he liked, the composer fled in panic from the offer.45

  The situation became still more tangled when the three members of this love triangle ended up involved with the same psychoanalyst: Gregory Zilboorg, a neighbor of Jimmy and Kay on East Seventieth Street. Bettina, who had trained with Zilboorg, referred Kay to him because she was in a muddle about the Gershwin affair. A flamboyant refugee from the Russian Revolution, Zilboorg was a short, dark Svengali-like figure in glasses who mesmerized the Warburgs until adoration turned to disenchantment. His colorful past cloaked him in a mysterious aura. He had been secretary to the labor minister of Kerensky’s cabinet, was a Cordon Bleu chef, a photographer, a polyglot fluent in more than eight languages, a medical doctor, and the author of a major history of psychiatry. With showmanship and exceptional intelligence, he created a following that ranged from Lillian Hellmann to Marshall Field. A fine diagnostician and brilliant talker, he would, on occasion, reduce patients to tears, extract their innermost secrets, and use them for purposes of control.

  Psychoanalysis was still new and daring in America, with a spice of the forbidden about it, so the venturesome, avant-garde young Warburgs were drawn to it. But far from finding clarity with Zilboorg, Kay ended up being seduced by him on the analytic couch during sessions. According to Kay’s granddaughter, this was much more a matter of selfish manipulation by Zilboorg than of any romantic attraction on Kay’s part. When she broached the subject of divorcing Jimmy, Zilboorg warned her against taking such a step. If she persisted in this, he threatened to poison the minds of Jimmy and Gershwin against her—both of whom he knew—so that neither would have anything to do with her.46 In the end, Kay was not to be dissuaded and called his bluff. In late 1934, she went to Nevada to get a divorce from Jimmy. But though Kay dropped Zilboorg, Jimmy and Gershwin decided to go into therapy with him.

  Kay never married Gershwin, which didn’t surprise friends of the composer. When Kay and Gershwin once entered a nightclub, Oscar Levant quipped, “Ah, here comes George Gershwin with the future Miss Kay Swift.”49 In 1935, she was still his constant companion, presiding over an opening-night party for Porgy and Bess at Condé Nast’s Park Avenue penthouse apartment. When Gershwin went to Hollywood the following year, he and Kay had a tearful farewell at Newark Airport. They never saw each other again, though Gershwin kept abreast of her doings. He died of a brain tumor in July 1937. Kay subsequently married twice—first to a rodeo star and then to a radio announcer—but always kept alive the sacred flame of Gershwin’s memory and music. Scholars would seek her out to discover how Gershwin had played particular passages.

  One side of Jimmy felt extremely bitter and humiliated by the breakup with Kay. Another side thought she’d simply gone haywire and he assigned to her the royalties of the songs they had coauthored. For Jimmy, the world that had crackled with such promising life and energy suddenly exploded. In marrying Kay and traveling in her artistic circles, he had ventured from the family, flouted tradition, and dabbled in a dangerous new kind of life. He had stepped outside the Jewish social ghetto only to find that the glittering world beyond bristled with secret dangers of which he, for all his sophisticated pose, had been innocently unaware.

  CHAPTER 24

  ––

  Blue Boys

  The New York Warburgs were a twice-emancipated family. Their ancestors had been invigorated by the broad opportunities open to Jews in Imperial Germany. Now, in the 1920s and 1930s, they experienced a second burst of freedom as they advanced into the upper echelon of American society, adopting the graces and manners of WASP aristocracy. This new freedom was giddy but perplexing. Rich and cultured, the Warburgs gained access to parties and clubs that excluded other Jews, placing them in a terrible bind by exposing them to the temptation of being token Jews in a Christian world. To be the first Jew in a club or school could be seen either as courageous pioneering or as shameful collusion with the enemy.

  The offspring of Felix Warburg in particular felt a fragmented identity and sometimes seemed exhausted by a Hamlet-like search for their true nature. Compared to the generation of the Famous Five brothers, Felix’s four sons would seem less rounded, less complete, lacking the energy and drive of their ancestors. They would carry the historic ambivalence of German Jews toward Judaism to the logical conclusion of intermarriage and a diluted religious identity. If they did obligatory stints in Jewish fund-raising, it remained peripheral to their lives. (Felix’s youngest son, Edward, was the clear exception.) Gradually the American Warburgs would drop the public leadership role that had been reflexive in the family since the sixteenth century. Ironically, the American Warburgs would shed much of their Judaism, while the persecuted German side of the family would preserve it better.

  The Jazz Age had a potent effect upon the young Warburgs, who craved adventure and wrote off “Our Crowd” as old hat. Seduced by wealth, they traveled in affluent Protestant circles where their religion was a hindrance. To some extent, this transition was characteristic of this generation of “Our Crowd.” Mortimer Schiff had French racing stables and a house in Palm Beach where he entertained Averell Harriman and Joseph Kennedy. The Schiffs and the Kahns entered the Social Register before the Warburgs. But the Warburgs seemed, if anything, even more socially ambitious, as if determined to prove that they could go anywhere and do anything.

  Warburg men had abided, with a few exceptions, such as Aby, by a code of conduct that began to break down. Under that code, they had chosen practical careers in banking or business to serve the family interests; after hours, they could indulge in the extracurricular pleasures of wealth. They could travel in gentile society so long as they contributed to Jewish causes. They could engage in the arts, but only as patrons or connoisseurs. They could have mistresses, if marital concord were preserved. They could date non-Jews, so long as they didn’t foolishly fall in love. And they could participate in sports in amateur gentlemanly style.

  Felix had perfectly executed that balancing act, preserving the best of Europe while cheerfully adapting to America. Having so gracefully straddled the German-American and Jewish-gentile divides, he didn’t understand why his children wrestled with these conflicts. He never realized that his children were products of his own contradictory impulses. He wanted his sons to be red-blooded, well-rounded, all-American kids who went to Middlesex and Harvard and played tennis and touch football. Then he wondered why they lacked an overriding interest in Jewish philanthropy. With his children, Felix could never sort out the confused promptings of his own heart.

  Each of Felix’s children inherited a piece of him, so th
at, collectively, they added up to a rough portrait of him. They had his lively, witty manner, his engaging personality, his splendid sense of fun, but not his steadfast commitment to social causes and a wider political world. They had the Warburg wind in their sails without the ballast. They inherited the sort of great wealth that weakens ambition and shifts priorities to leisure pursuits. Jacob Schiff’s widow, Therese, spoiled her grandchildren terribly, leaving them, when she died in 1933, an estate of $4.6 million, plus a trust fund that had started out with $6 million in 1910. No longer needing to make money, the young Warburgs learned to thumb their noses at whomever they liked.

  ——

  Carola Warburg Rothschild. (Courtesy of Carol Rothschild Noyes)

  Felix’s eldest daughter, Carola, most readily took up her assigned place in the Warburg universe. She was everybody’s favorite, and her home featured good talk and ready cocktails even during Prohibition. Felix doted upon her, saying, “She is like a thoroughbred horse, and has to be ridden with a light hand.”1 In marrying the rich, Princeton-educated Walter Rothschild, she found an easygoing man who negotiated his way handily through the often prickly Warburg clan. As head of the A&S department store, Walter didn’t need to worry about status competition.

  Inheriting her parents’ anglophile tastes, Carola loved horses, dogs, country living. She devoted time to several hospitals, the Girl Scouts, the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, a maternity center, and other Warburg causes and, in many ways, she modeled herself after Frieda. Yet her Jewish activities were more a matter of family pride and homage to the past. When asked if she were a practicing Jew, Carola sighed, “Well, I was married by a rabbi.…”2 Her three children would marry five times in total, all outside the faith.

  Carola’s brothers found the Warburg legacy and wealth more problematic. They were trapped between a heritage that seemed perfected and a future that seemed forbidden. They could never quite find the center of their lives. In business, they were too well-heeled to be aggressive, too pampered to be industrious. Felix didn’t allow them to apply their energies in new ways or stake out a fresh identity. This posed more problems for the sensitive, artistic, pair, Gerry and Eddie, than for the sporty, outgoing Freddy and Paul Felix or “Piggy.”

  Bowing to family duty, Freddy, the eldest, spent virtually his entire career at Kuhn, Loeb. His rugged face, with its broad, balding forehead and bumpy chin, expressed a pugnacious personality. Freddy had a dry, acerbic wit that deflated pomposity. At his teasing best, he could be funny and delightful, a bubbling stream of quips; at his worst, he could be caustic, even hurtful.

  As a great sports fan, Freddy brought international stars to the Woodlands tennis courts. Left to his own devices, he might have edited a sports magazine. Nobody doubted Freddy’s banking ability, but he lacked the fire of his uncles. In the 1930s, he bought a horse farm and stud in Middleburg, Virginia, and cultivated the role of a country gentleman, hunting foxes and raising horses. He had numerous charities—Middlesex School, Harvard, the Boy Scouts, and Smith College—but few with Jewish connections. Some family members think Freddy remained a bachelor until his late forties because of the clause in Schiffs will disinheriting those who married outside the faith. Others think he was just having too much fun to settle down. Whatever the case, he was almost fifty before he married the feisty Wilma Shannon in 1946.

  The third Warburg son, Paul Felix—invariably known by his nickname, Piggy—was cut from the same cloth. A gay blade and raconteur, a delightful fellow who always had a ready quip on his lips, he was the family clown. One summer in Paris, he returned to the Ritz after an all-night binge and stumbled into his parents’ room by accident, throwing his cane at a shape hulking in his bed. It turned out to be Frieda, who straightened up and said, “Your father will speak to you about this in the morning.”3 Most of the time, she roared at his screwball antics, though she disapproved of his philandering.

  Although Piggy never graduated from college, Felix had great affection for this incorrigible, madcap boy. When he left school, Felix got him a humble job with the B&O Railroad in Baltimore and used to write him letters that began “Dear Railroad Magnate.” While working on the railroad, Piggy met another rich young man who persuaded him to invest in his new business and Felix reacted angrily. “I love you dearly,” he told his son, “but if you’re so irresponsible with money as all that, I’m going to put you on an allowance.” The friend was William F. Paley and the investment was the nascent CBS.4

  Piggy did outrageous things in a way that usually caused delight, not offense. While skiing at Sun Valley once, he collided with Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, whom he had never met. As the two sprawled, dazed, in the snow, Piggy turned and said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Rockefeller, I’m Piggy Warburg and I promise to marry you in the morning.”5 Later serving as special assistant to Ambassador Averell Harriman in London, Piggy startled the British royals on a receiving line when he was asked how long he had known his female companion. “Oh, about forty seconds,” he replied.6

  Piggy worked under uncle Paul at the IAB and then served as a vice-president at the Bank of the Manhattan; later he worked at Bache & Company and Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Company. As a ubiquitous figure in café society, he drummed up business among celebrities. He knew many figures in the film world and eventually bagged the accounts of Sylvia Sidney, Dolores del Rio, Eddie Cantor, Miriam Hopkins, and even Babe Ruth. In 1926, he married the first of three wives: Jean Stettheimer, a very pretty, sociable Jewish woman from San Mateo, California, who loved horses and the outdoors and whose father owned a textile company. The marriage lasted eight years and yielded two attractive daughters. Piggy would be active in the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, but most deeply involved in Project Hope, the hospital ship that later brought American medicine to Third World countries.

  Interestingly, Felix had smoother relations with his two jock-and-banker sons than with the aesthetic Gerald and Edward. However roguish in his private life, Felix was a conventional, bourgeois father and Gerald and Edward learned that the Warburg children enjoyed only an illusory freedom. They grew up with enough wealth to do anything, but were hemmed in by secret rules that prevented them from parlaying their interests into successful, sustained careers.

  At first, Felix didn’t consider a musical career suitable for Gerald, but by the late 1920s he had relented. If Gerry was to be a professional cellist, Felix would see that he succeeded. At his son’s prompting, he bequeathed to him his four Stradivarius instruments so that Gerry could form the Stradivarius Quartet. Felix insisted upon selecting the other musicians even though Gerry longed for independence. To make his son a star soloist, Felix had arranged for his Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch. This pushed Gerry into the spotlight prematurely when he needed more training. Despite a beautiful sound and delicate phrasing, Gerry was handicapped by technical gaps in his background and Felix’s aid prevented him from developing the necessary discipline and self-confidence. Gerry also never knew whether he was being invited to play for his talent or to curry Warburg patronage.

  Gerry grew up no less confused about religion. As organist for daily chapel at Middlesex, he was exposed to the music’s religious content, which perhaps seeped into his mind. Baffled by his own contradictions, Gerry called himself a Unitarian, but could never bring himself to sing Christmas carols. On High Holy Days, he sat, unseen, in shirtsleeves in the choir loft of Temple Emanu-El, playing Kol Nidre. As a confirmed assimilationist, Gerry thought it best to mix people of different backgrounds.

  Gerry was the first to defy the family taboo against divorce. While he wanted to flee his German-Jewish background, his beautiful Viennese wife, Marion, enjoyed the elegant Woodlands life. Having shopped with bags of worthless money in postwar Austria, she wanted the security against which her husband rebelled. If sweet and charming, Gerald was also flighty and moody and didn’t provide Marion with much stability. She began to doubt whether he had the talent to bec
ome a famous musician. Already beset by enough doubts, Gerry couldn’t contend with a skeptical wife.

  Marion had become a pet of the Warburgs. When she and Gerry decided to get divorced in 1933, Felix and Frieda were thunderstruck and reacted in a way that implicitly blamed Gerry. Felix not only hired and paid for Marion’s lawyer, but encouraged a generous settlement that strapped Gerry for years. Marion would receive large alimony payments for life, regardless of whether she remarried. Gerry, very upright and correct in such matters, submitted to these terms. Felix and Frieda would remain close with Marion.

  The notion of divorce was shocking for Jewish parents in 1933; the identity of Gerry’s second wife added to the blow. Hard on the heels of the divorce, Gerry married Natica Nast, the daughter of Vogue publisher Condé Nast. Natica was German Methodist on one side, French Catholic on the other, and was raised a Catholic. A tasteful young woman, a good rider, she often served as her father’s hostess; as a teenager she had modeled wedding veils in Vogue. When the wedding took place in Grandpa Nast’s living room, with Freddy as the best man, Frieda and Felix stayed away, much as Charlotte and Moritz had boycotted Aby’s wedding. They scheduled an out-of-town trip and sent a telegram instead. Frieda and Felix favored Jewish marriages—Frieda would say, “The best way was Jewish”—but were never rigid moralists who banished wayward children. Once they had formally registered their objection to the new ways, they would restore family harmony.