With his perfect wife, he collected the best French art and antiques and was a major patron of Broadway and the Metropolitan Opera. An Ivy Leaguer, a millionaire by inheritance, and a multimillionaire by his own efforts, the best-dressed Gilbert, while of Jewish origins, was “clubbable” enough to socialize with Wall Street lions like John Loeb and André Meyer and global moguls like Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos. He was an after-hours high roller as well, a fixture at the casino in Monte Carlo and the money behind not only Le Club but also John Aspinall’s Clermont Club in Berkeley Square, London’s entry in the Jet Set nightlife sweepstakes. In short, Eddie Gilbert was a man after Igor Cassini’s heart.
Gilbert and the Cassinis were close. Geographically, Gilbert’s Fifth Avenue apartment was only a block away from the adjacent Sixty-first Street townhouse offices of Igor and Oleg. The brothers themselves were almost Siamese in connection. They’d joke in Italian, fight in French, and tell secrets in Russian. Igor created a legend for Eddie Gilbert; Oleg created a look. Oleg dressed Gilbert’s wife, Rhoda, transforming her into another sleek, swanlike Jackie Kennedy clone (in Camelot America, there could never be too many Jackies). Once Oleg completed Rhoda’s makeover, Igor would enshrine her on his best-dressed list. That was how the Cassini tag team worked. At their frequent multiple-martini lunches at the Colony, which was the Cassini commissary, Igor would hang on Eddie Gilbert’s every word, especially when it came to money. Igor loved big business, and Eddie was a trophy for him, not to mention a source of stock tips in the go-go years before insider trading acquired its own high profile as Wall Street’s prime “capital” offense.
Edward M. Ginsberg was born in Flushing, Queens, in 1922, to a Lithuanian immigrant father and a Hungarian immigrant mother. The family was in the lumber business and became rich in the twenties building boom. Their company, Empire Millwork, provided enough upward mobility for them to change their name to Gilbert and buy a waterfront mansion in the privileged enclave of Manhasset, Long Island, fittingly the inspiration for Gatsby’s East Egg.
The Gilberts later sent Eddie to be a boarder at the exclusive and then partly residential Horace Mann School in Riverdale, where his best pal and classmate was the unlikely preppy Jack Kerouac, long before he hit the road. Jack did Eddie’s essays; Eddie did Jack’s math. Eddie’s only teenage setback was being rejected by Harvard. While Jack Kerouac went on to Columbia on a football scholarship, of all things, Eddie settled on Cornell as his Ivy fallback. In 1940, after two years of discontent over not being at Harvard, Eddie decided he would rather give his life for Uncle Sam than give his all for Cornell. He dropped out, joined the army, and saw the world.
After serving throughout Europe, Eddie came home to work for Daddy in the New York office. He met Igor in 1948, just as Cassini was beginning to make his mark as the new Cholly Knickerbocker. Eddie became a regular at all Igor’s haunts, the Stork, El Morocco, the Colony, and gave him good copy by carrying on a high-profile courtship with tennis star “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran. The Santa Monica–born, movie star–pretty Moran was the first sex symbol of her sport, less famous for her volley than for her trademark lace panties.
Quickly making his mark as a “player,” Eddie became a disciple, and soon rival, of that player of players, Huntington Hartford, Harvard man and A&P heir. Hartford, who dated more actresses and models than Howard Hughes—from whom he tried to buy RKO Pictures—was an important role model for Eddie as the archetypal preppy playboy. Eventually, however, Eddie settled down into a married lifestyle befitting the young prince who had taken the reins of his father’s empire of wood. At a country-club dance in Westchester, Eddie had met a willowy eighteen-year-old goddess from Central Park West named Rhoda Weintraub, who could have been the mold for Herman Wouk’s bestseller about a Jewish princess, Marjorie Morningstar. Rhoda looked the part to be the princess to Eddie’s prince. But she didn’t sound the part. She had a grating Bronx accent that bespoke her parents’ climb out of that borough. No problem for Eddie, who found Rhoda a vocal coach, adorned her with baubles from Martial client Harry Winston, and then married her on the St. Regis Roof in October 1951. Eddie and Rhoda moved to 817 Fifth Avenue, in the heart of Cassini-land, and he began his social climb of the Manhattan Alps.
Eddie soon realized that to get to the summit, he needed a lot more millions. That was when he discovered the underperforming Memphis-based E. L. Bruce Company, which was as Old South–hidebound as the servant-shined plantation-house hardwood floors it manufactured. Like a Yankee stealth raiding party during the Civil War, Eddie began secretly acquiring Bruce shares until, in March 1958, he had cornered the market in Bruce stock. Market corners were rare; Commodore Vanderbilt had done three of them during his rise in the post–Civil War era. J. P. Morgan and E. H. Harriman had achieved their own corners in the Northern Pacific manipulations of 1901. Eddie quite fancied the swashbuckling image of this tradition. Just as the Rebels in Memphis were no match for their Yankee invaders, the modern Memphians were no match for Commodore Gilbert, to whom they surrendered and, on October 26, 1958, made chairman of the Bruce board of directors.
Two days later, on October 28, Pan Am made the first scheduled commercial flight of its 707 Clipper America from New York to Paris. Eddie Gilbert’s appearance on the front page of many of the country’s newspapers for his fiscal tour de force was virtually simultaneous with Pan Am/Boeing’s cover stories for their technological tour de force. His financial status secure, Eddie set out to fuse the two phenomena into a social tour de force: not just random mentions in Igor Cassini’s column but a permanent place in the Jet Set pantheon. To accomplish this, he set out to become a benefactor of the arts, beginning (with Igor’s aid, of course) by helping to fund Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s new Spoleto Festival, as well as other high-profile cultural events.
In the midst of his social climb, Eddie’s E. L. Bruce became a prime corporate client of Martial. Most of the publicity, though, was given not to the stick-in-the-mud Tennesseans but to the jet-setting Gilberts, who seriously began to dominate the columns after 1960, when they acquired both a second New York residence, a Tudor minicastle on East Seventieth Street to accommodate even grander parties; and the twenty-room Villa Zamir, perched on a Riviera cliff, which The Saturday Evening Post, with Gilbert clearly in their moralizing gunsights, described as a “motel for the jet set, where Edward had to be introduced to his own guests.” The Post described the villa in Fitzgeraldian terms: “it was open house every day with a jazz band for luncheon dancing at the (Olympic) pool and an orchestra at night.”
Other drooling profiles, placed by Igor, described Eddie as a wild and crazy host. “Let’s all go bowling!” he might declare after lunch, and have his fleet of limos ferry fifty guests to Monte Carlo’s four-lane bowling alley. After nocturnal events, Eddie was said to caravan his partiers down the road to Le Pirate, the most exclusive nightclub on the Riviera, the favorite of Onassis and the Golden Greeks, and pick up a check in the thousands of dollars. Temple Fielding had eviscerated Le Pirate as the biggest clip joint on the Mediterranean, but people like Onassis and Gilbert were oblivious to reviews. The more they paid, the better the place. Le Pirate’s money-machine gimmick was that it was a French version of a Greek taverna, with the guests following Hellenic traditions by smashing all the dinnerware in an ouzo-retsina frenzy, at Olympian tabs. It was Eddie Gilbert’s honor to finance such Jet Set orgies. Gatsby never lived as large, and Eddie loved the continual comparisons.
But Gatsby didn’t have Eddie’s culture. He didn’t support the Met or Spoleto. His West Egg walls weren’t hung with Rembrandts, Canalettos, Monets, Bouchers, Sisleys. Eddie became one of the top clients of the Wildensteins, the premier art dealers. Aside from culture, Gatsby wasn’t anywhere as connected as Eddie to the rich and famous. Eddie was a gambler of the highest order, winning and losing half a million dollars a night at the Monte Carlo Casino, playing with Onassis, King Farouk, Aly Khan. He could mix high and low, WASP and Jew, Burke’s Peera
ge, Almanach de Gotha, Social Register, the post office’s most wanted. There was a New Society being made, and Eddie was key in creating it. He was the embodiment of the Jet Set, so much so that he began a clandestine affair with Turid Holtan, a Norwegian Pan Am stewardess whom he met on one of his constant transatlantic jet crossings. Although he had transformed Rhoda into a Jewish Jackie, Eddie was ready to fly on.
But to play like Eddie, you had to pay like Croesus. Money was the common denominator. Rhoda would want a fortune; therefore Eddie would have to make another. That was why he courted the biggest names in finance, in hopes that they might underwrite his Wall Street ambitions. He won over John Loeb of the powerful investment firm Loeb, Rhoades by donating $100,000 to Loeb’s alma mater (and Eddie’s one crushed dream), Harvard. He courted André Meyer of that other great banking house Lazard Frères by wining, dining, and arting the eminence into agreeing to be his “rabbi” on a new deal that he hoped would enshrine him in Fortune and get him a chair at Harvard Business School.
This deal to end all deals was for Eddie’s E. L. Bruce to acquire Celotex Corporation, the building insulation giant based in Chicago and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Celotex was much bigger than Bruce but not too big for Eddie to covet. With the help of André Meyer and the Kennedy bull market, Eddie knew he could be Jonah and swallow the whale. He was so confident of success that he began acquiring Celotex shares personally and on margin, rather than through E. L. Bruce. Going through Bruce would have been cumbersome and time-consuming, with directors’ meetings, SEC filings, and the like. Eddie wanted to do a stealth blitzkrieg-style takeover, selling his shares to Bruce when the deal was done. He was totally confident the surging stock market would enable him to do it his way.
Certain that the deal would set him free, Eddie chose this moment to break the bad news to Rhoda about the Pan Am stewardess and moved to Nevada for a quickie divorce, or what Cholly Knickerbocker, from Maury Paul days, would call a “Reno-vation.” Eddie was actually based in Carson City, and he took full advantage of the new jet age, flying back and forth from there to Chicago and New York within the same twenty-four hours so as not to violate the six-weeks-consecutive-residence requirement to qualify for his Nevada split.
But then the Kennedy bull turned bear, and as the Celotex stock began dropping, Eddie’s margin requirements began to rise. He borrowed from everyone, from Swiss bankers to Italian gangsters, but the market kept going down. Eventually, he had no choice but to invade the Bruce treasury, writing checks of $2 million to pay nonexistent bills to dummy corporations in order to cover his personal margin calls. Even though Eddie had art and real estate that would satisfy the amount easily, those assets were anything but liquid. Besides, he loved his paintings too much to sell them, and to put his mansions on the market would have been a disastrous PR move. So the high roller committed what amounted to grand larceny, praying to the god of chance that the bear would become a bull again in time to cover his tracks.
Instead, what Eddie got was the infamous Blue Monday, May 28, 1962, the century’s second-worst day on the New York Stock Exchange after 1929’s Black Tuesday. He had to rush back to New York, abandoning his Nevada divorce to save his skin. He thought he could also abandon his Celotex takeover bid and return the money to Bruce by selling his Celotex shares to a rival company called Ruberoid. But when that deal fell through, Eddie saw his choice between jail and Brazil, the one relatively civilized country that had no extradition treaty with America.
Eddie went into a huddle with his parents, who encouraged their son to fly away. Then he huddled with Turid Holtan, who gave him back her eight-carat Harry Winston engagement ring to sell, then live on the proceeds, supplementing his suitcase filled with $8,000 in hundreds. It would go a long way in Brazil’s third-world economy, where a room at the top-banana Copacabana Palace Hotel cost under five dollars a night. Turid was a fly girl. Rio was just nine 707 hours away. It was a no-brainer for her, just as it was for Eddie’s confidant Igor Cassini. Go, Igor said, fly away. So off Eddie went, in the century’s highest-profile flight from justice, an escape that captured the public’s imagination and made it surreally glamorous beyond belief to be a Wall Street fugitive. In short, it was a great PR move, orchestrated by the great PR man Igor Cassini, who soon would be fighting the law to save himself. Igor and Eddie, two of the prime poster boys of the Jet Set, were about to become poster boys on the criminal list of the U.S. Department of Justice, America’s Most Glamorous transformed into America’s Most Wanted. No reversal of fortune could have been more dramatic.
WHEN IGOR CASSINI COUNSELED EDDIE GILBERT TO GO TO RIO, IGOR HAD every intention of using his publicity wizardry and formidable connections to bring his client back to America legally unscathed. Given Gilbert’s fiscal malefactions, the case would be a huge challenge, but Igor loved challenges. After the frustration of his diplomatic ambitions in the Trujillo affair, he wanted to prove his and Martial’s preeminence in publicity as never before. He also had ulterior motives, in that his planned tour de force would serve two of his Martial clients and not just one. The second client was the Brazilian national tourist board. Igor saw Eddie’s great escape as a wonderful way to promote Rio as the most romantic, newly accessible city in the Jet Set world.
The Rio where Eddie Gilbert landed in June 1962 already had the potential to become the South American version of the Côte d’Azur, its continuing mystique aided immeasurably by the 1933 Astaire/Rogers classic Flying Down to Rio, which was actually shot mostly in Santa Monica. More recently, Rio had been re-romanticized by another film, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus, a global hit set during the Carnaval bacchanal. Now that Pan Am had cut a multistop twenty-hour ordeal into a nonstop eight-hour sky party, increasing numbers of jet travelers were seriously considering Rio, none more than international female socialites of a certain age who wanted to partake of the rejuvenation magic offered by the grand master of plastic surgery, Dr. Ivo Pitanguy. If the aviation century had a premier fantasy destination, Igor believed Rio was it. He promised the Brazilian government that he would bring down more and more North Americans. Eddie Gilbert would be Igor’s inadvertent advance man.
FLYING DOWN TO RIO. Eddie Gilbert, Wall Street mogul turned Jet Set fugitive in Brazil, 1962. (photo credit 9.1)
For all its alluring images of physical beauty, sex, and samba, Rio had another reputation (obviously glossed over by Igor) as a louche, anything-goes haven for financial scoundrels. America’s “Big Three” defalcators of the current bull market were all living high and free in Rio. The first among these superswindlers was Ben Jack Cage, the “Texas Tornado,” a backslapping hustler who had conned $5 million out of trusting members of Lone Star labor unions in an insurance scam. Then there was another “boy wonder” like Eddie, this one Earl Belle of Pittsburgh, who had bilked three old-line banks out of $1 million in watered stocks. The third scoundrel triumvir waiting to greet Eddie was Lowell Birrell, the son of an Indiana Presbyterian minister. Birrell was a blue-chip Wall Street securities lawyer who had used his technical genius to loot and ruin companies through sophisticated stock maneuvers. Now Fast Eddie was about to join this dubious club, while Igor began to transform the reality of a flight from justice into the fantasy of a flight to paradise.
Eddie initially settled in Ipanema, which the song “The Girl from Ipanema” would put on the map when it became the world’s number one hit in 1964. Two years before that, it was just another suburb, and Eddie found a small hotel across from the stunning broad strand. As he walked the golden sands barefoot, in his Gatsby-esque white linen suit, he saw the international papers plastered with his photograph. They all talked about the $2 million he had stolen and taken to Rio. All the money was gone, gone in vain to pay margin calls. Eddie bristled, despaired, that they had gotten it so wrong. He bought sunglasses, a hat, a nondescript windbreaker. Back at his hotel, he got his first local call. It was none other than Earl Belle, one fleeing boy wonder to another.
Eddie met Belle at a si
dewalk café. They recognized each other from the papers. Four years before in 1958, Belle had been front-page, too. He told Eddie how great Rio was, how safe he felt, especially since he had taken a Brazilian wife and had two Brazilian children, which by law prevented deportation even if the extradition treaty ever got passed. Belle had also gotten rich again here on Brazilian sugar, which was in high demand now that Castro’s sugar supply was embargoed. Life was beautiful.
The next day, Eddie met again with Belle, this time accompanied by Ben Jack Cage, a large, scary man in the Sydney Greenstreet mode. They asked Eddie for $25,000 in protection money, which they claimed would go to certain corrupt Brazilian authorities to ensure Eddie’s safety. They didn’t want to believe $8,000 was all Eddie had. Eddie didn’t mention the Harry Winston diamond. Somehow he convinced the crooks that he was telling them the truth. Belle stopped calling. Theirs was one fraternity that Eddie would not be joining, to Igor’s vast relief. That guilt by association would have been the worst press possible.
Instead, Igor began getting Eddie great press, although deftly managing to stay out of the spotlight as the ringmaster of what would immediately become a media circus. Now that the word was out that Eddie Gilbert was in Rio, the whole world began calling. The attention was the perfect antidepressant for Eddie, who had an insatiable gluttony for publicity. Accordingly, when Igor arranged for Life’s Miami bureau chief to offer him a Kennedy-sized spread, Eddie couldn’t say no—not that Igor would have let him. The layout would be a class act: Eddie would be photographed by the august Cornell Capa and essayed by Jack Kerouac, whom Life would be paying handsomely to profile his old prep-school classmate. Life, after Reader’s Digest, was the highest-circulation magazine in the country. It was in its prime, huge in stature, huge in size. It was the ideal forum for Eddie to resume his glory and plead his case.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 21
