The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Edith operated on one rule,” says her sister, Marion Rosenwald Ascoli, the widow of Max Ascoli, founder and editor of the Reporter magazine. “If you didn’t agree with her, you were wrong.” Another of Edgar Stern’s pet names for his wife was “R.A.U.,” which stood for “Right, as usual.” “Right, as usual,” he would say to her whenever she ventured an opinion, to which her usual reply was simply, “Of course.” (At their huge summer camp in the Adirondacks, Edgar Stern had christened the family motor launch the Rau.) She could be more than a little autocratic. Once, after a large dinner at the Royal Orleans Hotel, Edith Stern decided to leave through a side door. Going out the front door would have meant an additional walk of perhaps a hundred feet to her car. But the side door was locked. “Don’t be ridiculous!” cried Edith Stern, and she waited impatiently while a janitor who had the key was summoned and the door she wanted to use was unlocked for her. Her success at revamping New Orleans politics may have owed a lot to the fact that New Orleans politicians had no experience in dealing with such imperious autocracy—and from a woman, at that.

  Who but Edith Stern, for instance, would have had the audacity to give a huge buffet supper honoring a black woman, even though the black woman was Marian Anderson? Now she had gone too far, they said in New Orleans when the invitations were received. New Orleans would just not stand for that. But stand it they did, and turned out, albeit perhaps a bit warily, in droves. Soon it was announced that Edith Stern had been made a trustee of a black college, Dillard University. It was, she explained, merely an extension of her father’s crusade for black education in the South.

  One reason why Edith Stern was so effective was that she employed a kind of tyranny of temper. Her rages, when not everyone immediately agreed that she was right, as usual, were becoming legendary. Powerful businessmen and politicians in New Orleans often did her bidding simply because it was easier than enduring one of her excoriating tirades. Her father had used this technique effectively, too, having discovered that if a polite request did not get him what he wanted right away, a thundering command, coupled with an insult or two, usually worked wonders.* His daughter tackled the New Orleans power structure the way he had run Sears—as a benevolent despot—and her bailiwick soon extended to include, in addition to the Voter Registration Service and Dillard University, the New Orleans repertory theatre, the Symphony Society, the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, and the New Orleans chapter of the Garden Clubs of America. “Don’t worry, I am at the helm,” she would say when confronted with any problem, and it was certainly true that, in her demanding way, she was able to cut through all sorts of confusion and red tape and get things done.

  She ran her household and her family the same way. Her children were always a little afraid of her, and without question her soft-mannered husband was. Whenever Edgar Stern saw a new storm brewing in his wife’s eyes, he made himself scarce, and spent the rest of his time mollifying and cajoling her and assuring her that, as usual, she was right. And yet he adored her, and the Stern children today feel that their parents’ was a particularly happy marriage, a successful partnership, and, despite the tirades, they worshiped her, too, and remember a generally happy childhood with her. (So did her older and younger brothers and sisters.) A lot of it had to do with the fact that her tempers were short-lived. Once a storm had passed, she would flash her enormously bright and winning smile and toss her mane of red hair, as though to say, “Well, now that I’ve got that out of my system, let’s have some fun.” Her love of fun—and wonderful parties—more than balanced her fits of anger. “The thing I remember most about growing up,” her son Philip says, “is Mother clapping her hands and saying, ‘Let’s have a party!’ Then she’d get out her files and notebooks and start organizing it. What she was, really, was an impresario.”

  But like any great impresario, or diva, she was unpredictable. One never knew quite how Edith would react to any given idea. None of the Rosenwalds, for instance, was devout, and neither were the Sterns. Edgar Stern was a pro forma member of the Reform congregation of Temple Sinai, but never went to temple or became involved in any of the congregation’s activities. Edith and her husband were on-and-off Jews. That is, when it was necessary to stand up and be counted, they were Jewish; otherwise they never talked or seemed to think about it. They gave routinely, but not magnificently, to Jewish causes, but their main philanthropic interests lay elsewhere, and the Stern children were raised in a completely a-religious household. Therefore, when Edith’s daughter Audrey was making plans to marry a young New York writer and editor named Tom Hess, Audrey Stern was totally unprepared for her mother’s rage at learning that a rabbi was not going to perform the service. A rabbi was summoned. Then, when the rabbi mentioned that he planned to include in the service the ritual shattering of the wineglass beneath the bridegroom’s foot, with its symbolic meaning of the bride’s loss of her virginity, Edith flew into another rage. She was not going to include that barbaric practice in her daughter’s wedding. She wanted, in other words, a wedding that would be Jewish, but not too Jewish. And, as usual, she got what she wanted.

  She treated her servants in the same high-handed manner, and they too were expected to swallow their mistress’s torrents of abuse whenever some detail in the smooth running of Longue Vue seemed short of the mark she demanded. Also, for all their travail, she followed her father’s example at the store and paid very low wages, though she did regularly present her help with bonuses in the form of shares of Sears stock—with, perhaps, an exaggerated notion of how wealthy these gifts were making them. And yet, again, mysteriously, the servants appeared to worship the imperious lady of the house. At least they were remarkably loyal. They were Johanna and Minnie, Emma and Amanda and Lily and Rita; Philip Bradbury, Adam and Isaac, Vilma, Nancy, and Eloise. These people would serve Edith Stern for twenty, thirty, and, in at least two cases, more than fifty years. It all had to do with her mercurial personality—laughing one minute, screaming the next—and with whatever extraordinary ingredient it was that gave her such power over people.

  Once, when she was involved in litigation with the United States Government over taxes, her son Edgar noticed a sheaf of legal documents on her desk under the heading Edith R. Stern v. The United States of America. Edgar commented, “Hell, that’s not an even contest. The United States of America doesn’t stand a chance!” And it didn’t. Edith, right as usual, won the case. And once, commenting casually to her sister Marion that when she and her husband first moved to Metairie, none of the streets in the town had been paved, Marion exclaimed, “Good God, Edith, don’t tell me you did that too!”

  One afternoon late in 1935, when Edgar Stern was approaching fifty, he came home from his cotton-brokerage office to find the floor of his drawing room at Longue Vue covered with maps, and Edith marching up and down among them, with file folders and notebooks, making notes. What was R.A.U. doing? he wanted to know. Had he forgotten his courtship promise? His fiftieth birthday was at hand, Edith reminded him, and this was the year they would devote to travel, splendid travel, circumnavigating the globe. Edith was working on their itinerary now. The children would be placed in Swiss schools. Reservations had been made for a suite of cabins on the Kungsholm for the first leg of the journey. Edith was organizing everything.

  Edgar had forgotten the promise, but she was right, as usual.

  “My father’s only role in that grand tour,” Philip Stern recalls, “was to grasp Mother’s arm at the last minute and say, ‘My God, have you got the tickets?’”

  It would indeed be a grand tour, with every last detail organized at every stop—the tickets, the hotels, the restaurants, the sightseeing, the theatres, the museums, the contacts with local banks, everything. It would also be the end of Edgar Stern’s business career. From that moment on, the rest of his life would be run by his wife’s capable executive hand.

  * Edith had earlier been briefly and unhappily married, at age eighteen, to a man named Germon Sulzberger—no kin to the New York Sulzber
ger family. Her father bitterly opposed her getting a divorce, but she did it anyway.

  * Only once was J.R. known to have lost his magisterial self-confidence and air of ruling all he surveyed. That occurred one Sunday in 1924. J.R. was in Boston, lunching with his son Bill, then a student at Harvard, in the dining room of the Copley-Plaza. J.R. was in a courtly, paternal mood, and Bill Rosenwald had brought along a young friend from Wellesley named Gladys Fleischman. Lunch was proceeding pleasantly until J.R. was called from the table to answer a telephone call. He returned to the table a few minutes later looking shaken and pale, and Miss Fleischman would never forget the awful change that seemed to have come over him. He looked as though he was about to become violently ill. He had just learned that two Chicago youths, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, had confessed to the “thrill killing” of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. Loeb’s father was a Sears, Roebuck vice-president. Something had finally happened within J.R.’s domain over which he had no control.

  11

  “THE EXAMPLE WE SET”

  Like Belle Gardner, Effie Stern made a great to-do over birthdays, her own especially, and at intervals of not more than five years she saw to it that an especially spectacular gala was given in her honor in some exotic place. For her sixtieth birthday she flew her entire family to Bermuda, where she insisted on taking scuba-diving lessons. For her seventieth, all the relatives were flown to Paris, and for her seventy-fifth it was to Venice. At this point the Rosenwald-Stern clan had grown to such proportions—what with grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and in-laws, ranging in age from eight or nine to almost ninety—that an entire floor of the Gritti Palace Hotel was required to house the week-long party.

  As always, every detail of the adventure was organized by the hostess. During the day, the guests were permitted to come and go as they chose, though printed lists suggesting a visit to this or that church, monument, palace, or museum were distributed daily. And throughout the day the door to the suite belonging to the matriarch—who had seen all the sights of Venice long before—was kept open to receive members of her family while she held court. At six o’clock, everyone was expected to gather in the principal suite for cocktails. Reservations for the entire group would have been made well in advance at a number of the city’s top restaurants, and Edith would read off the list of choices, along with a few words about the atmosphere, setting, and menu specialties of each. Then a vote would be taken, the reservations at the rejected restaurants canceled, and the party would repair to a fleet of gondolas which would carry them all to the elected eating place.

  For her eightieth birthday, in 1975, Edith Stern announced to her family—now grown even larger—that the locale would be Walt Disney World, which had recently opened in Florida. Her sister Marion Ascoli was apprehensive about this choice, and told her so when Edith first mentioned the notion on the phone. Marion was certain that, at the Disney World Hotel, her sister would not find food, service and accommodations at the level she was accustomed to in such places as the Gritti Palace and the Paris Ritz. “But it will be so much fun for the children,” Edith said, determined, as usual, to have her way. At first Marion declined the invitation. But as the date approached, and as Marion sensed her sister’s increasing tension and irritation over little details that kept going wrong—reservations were misplaced, the hotel did not have the number of suites Edith wanted, no limousines were available, only buses—Marion decided at the last minute to fly to Florida and help Edith through what was becoming a sizable ordeal.

  Arriving at the hotel, Marion Ascoli asked for Mrs. Stern’s room, only to be told, “She hasn’t come through the computer yet.” Then, offered no further assistance, Marion set off through the hotel, starting on the top floor and working down, to find her sister’s room by trial and error, knowing that her clue would be the open door. At last she found it and stepped inside. Edith was standing outside on a balcony, furiously flipping through her file folders on the trip—the schedules, the itineraries, the suggestions, the lists of restaurants, all carefully typed, collated, organized. Sensing someone’s presence, Edith turned and, seeing her sister, ran into the room, fell in her arms, and burst into tears. It had taken the huge Disney World organization to defeat Edith Stern.

  Of course, there were still many enormously successful parties—parties at Longue Vue, where luncheons for eighteen were the general rule, and where tables set up in the garden were always matched by identically set tables in the house as insurance in case of rain. There were huge house parties, with guests invited for weeks at a time, at White Pine Camp in the Adirondacks, which during the Coolidge years was lent to the President as a Summer White House. Later Edith acquired a second summer place, outside Lenox, Massachusetts, so her family could enjoy the Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow music and dance festivals. Edith christened this house Austerity Castle. It was hardly austere, but she liked to point out that she had furnished it entirely from the Sears catalogue. During all these house parties her loyal and underpaid servants could not even look forward to the bounty of tips. Tipping any of her staff, Edith explained, was against the rules. This, she said, was because she also entertained a goodly share of struggling young artists as well as ill-paid teachers and university people who could not afford to tip. In the same breath she usually mentioned her Sears stock bonus system, implying that the servants were becoming almost as rich as she.

  Edith hated missing parties as much as she loved giving them. Her husband was proposed for membership in the elite Jewish Century Country Club in New York’s Westchester County, and, not long after joining, he managed to win the club’s golf tournament, along with a $1,500 purse. Edgar Stern was gently reminded that it was a club tradition for the purse winner to use his winnings to throw a party, which he proceeded to do. At the time, his wife was giving birth to their second son, Philip. She was furious because she couldn’t be there.

  Edith and Edgar Stern’s full year of foreign travel was an extended party, and during the course of it Edgar Stern would invent a new pet name for his wife, “The hostess with the mostes’ on the bill.” Edith could never quite grasp the fact, for instance, that her favorite fresh oysters, which she ordered many dozens at a time, were much more expensive in the great restaurants of Rome, Paris, and Madrid than at the fishmongers’ in New Orleans, or understand why they were completely unavailable in Nepal. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she would cry, and the next day a shipment of oysters would be flown in to Katmandu. When she tired of the location of Longue Vue, which had been built on Metairie Lane, it was her iron whim to have the entire house moved to Garden Lane, a few blocks away. While the big Georgian house was being transplanted, which took several days, Edgar Stern would climb aboard the moving house each evening to collect clothes to wear to the office the next morning.

  The Sterns returned to New Orleans from their year of travel in 1936, and it soon appeared that, from the experience, Edgar Stern had lost his taste for business. Though he had risen to the position of president of the Cotton Exchange, cotton trading no longer seemed to interest him. Perhaps a solid year as his wife’s factotum had convinced him that this was the career he was best cut out for. He had become, in a sense, her assistant, and in that role he seemed happy enough. She might be the hostess with the mostes’ on the bill, but she was the one who paid the bills, and there was no clear reason for him to work at all. He sold his business, disposed of his seat on the Exchange, and retired at the age of fifty-one.

  Now he continued as her assistant full-time. The Rosenwald fortune had managed to weather the Depression virtually intact, and Edgar Stern helped Edith set aside some of her money to establish the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund—later renamed the Stern Fund—a foundation to support worthy philanthropic and civic causes. For the next twenty years the Sterns’ principal activities were philanthropic, and, in the process, they endeavored to instill a sense of philanthropic mission in their children.

  Edgar Stern died, at seventy-four, in 1959, and with his death the f
irst rift appeared in the Stern family. (Edith’s daughter Audrey died soon afterward, of that mysterious illness called anorexia nervosa, or prolonged loss of appetite.) The directors of the Stern Family Fund were now sons Edgar, Jr., and Philip, their respective wives, and, of course, Edith.

  There had never been much question that Edith’s favorite son was her younger, Philip. Edgar, Jr., was very much a businessman, and he was good at it. He was on the Sears board of directors, had headed the New Orleans United Fund, was active in the promotion and development of Aspen, Colorado, and had invested in other profitable enterprises. But Philip had both literary and political talent. He had written many magazine articles and published several books, including the controversial The Rape of the Taxpayer. He had graduated with honors from Harvard, studied law, and served as campaign manager and chief speech writer for Adlai E. Stevenson. (Like his mother, in the southern tradition of her adopted state, he was an ardent Democrat.) He had written for The Washington Post, edited scholarly journals, and served on the boards of many charitable institutions. The only enthusiasm he didn’t share with his mother was her fondness for high society. “I keep trying to launch Phil socially,” she often said, “and he keeps sinking.” For every fraction of an inch that Edgar B. Stern, Jr., managed to add to this biographical sketch in Who’s Who in America, his younger brother managed to add just a bit more. That the boys were a mite competitive was a fact that Edith didn’t mind at all, but when she looked for advice she turned to Philip.

  Not long after Edgar Stern, Sr.,’s death, the five-member board of the Stern Family Fund was asked to consider a proposal involving funding for research on corporate responsibility. In particular, the study proposed to investigate certain antisocial activities of the General Motors Corporation. Earlier, Edgar, Jr., had been acutely embarrassed by a Stern Fund grant that paid for a critical study of the broadcasting industry. Among young Edgar’s business interests was his ownership of WDSU Broadcasting in New Orleans. Now, from his position on the Sears, Roebuck board, Edgar felt certain that he would be severely criticized if his family’s fund offered to finance a study that would be anti–big corporation. Sears, after all, was very much in the big-corporation category; it would not look right. Also, Edgar argued, such a move could open him up to stockholder lawsuits. He announced to his mother and to his brother and sister-in-law, “If this grant passes, I will have no choice but to resign.” A family meeting was held to discuss this touchy matter.