The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Dazed, Rogers and the Lewisohns realized that the “impossible” had happened. Buying out the Guggenheims, they had, simultaneously, put the Guggenheims in control. The Seligmans were this time delighted; they led the syndicate that put the A S & R’s first issue on the market—an offering at par of $40 million worth of preferred stock, which sold with great ease.

  The Rogers-Lewisohn group now tried to retaliate. They hired David Lamar, one of several speculators who had earned the title, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and told him to drive the price of A S & R stock down until the company was ruined. But the Guggenheims had Whitney, who was no less powerful a speculator than Lamar, and who was enjoined to do the opposite. The battle between the two speculative wolves, as a result, ended close to a draw. The stock fell only a meager seven points, and the Guggenheims held fast. Next, Rogers and the Lewisohns took their case to the courts. The law certainly seemed to favor the Rogers group, but, when the Guggenheims agreeably offered to compromise, the result of the compromise seemed to further favor the Guggenheims. When the smoke of the lawsuit disappeared, Daniel Guggenheim was Chairman of the board of the American Smelting & Refining Company, his brother Simon was treasurer, and three other brothers were still on the board.

  Winning control of the A S & R was the greatest single moment in the career of the Guggenheims. It marked them as mining kings of the world, and, from then on, with the self-generative power that money often seems to have, the Guggenheim fortune mounted. Adolph Lewisohn, meanwhile, still had his A S & R shares. The fact that he had lost a battle didn’t seem to matter. At some crucial point in it, he had simply lost interest. He was not that acquisitive. Besides, he was too busy spending and enjoying his own millions.

  Financial historians have described the Guggenheim-Lewisohn struggle for control of the copper industry as “a battle of epic proportions.” But, in terms of the amount of fun both families managed to have afterward with their respective fortunes, it seems to have been all a lark.

  In New York the waltz and the two-step were gradually being edged off the dance floor by the ragtime tempo of such dances as the turkey trot, the grizzly bear, the bunny hug and the Latin Maxixe. Soon, women’s skirts would begin to climb to the accompaniment of whistles, while stuffed birds appeared on umbrella-sized hats. Even “men of distinction,” it was said, were showing up in peg-top pants, two-button shoes and spats.

  Some men of distinction, that is. The Guggenheims refused to be fashion leaders and remained conservative, one foot still in the nineteenth century. The last of Mrs. Astor’s great balls were taking place-balls the crowd had no part of anyway. But the balls and Mrs. Astor’s friends had served their function. If, while gentile society in New York appeared to be growing more factionalized and self-serving, Jewish society could reassure itself that it was becoming more solid and responsible. “Mrs. Astor’s sort of society,” wrote one of the crowd, “was quite a different sort of thing from ours. You might say hers was the opposite. Hers was based on publicity, showiness, cruelty, and striving. Ours was based on family, and a quiet enjoyment of the people we loved.” This is a reasonable estimate of it. The exclusiveness was mutual and double-edged. If gentile society chose to be flashy, the Jewish crowd would be inconspicuous.

  “Inconspicuous,” in fact, had become a key concept in German Jewish life. It was to be inconspicuous that Meyer and Barbara Guggenheim, and so many others, had abandoned the orthodoxy of their parents and become Reformed (or less noticeably Jewish) Jews, and had joined the German Jewish Temple Emanu-El. To be inconspicuous, many Guggenheims had scattered themselves in large, but anonymous, brownstones on the less fashionable West Side. Inconspicuousness was synonymous with decorum. Whenever Meyer Guggenheim took his sleigh or carriage through the park, he drove alone, managing the reins himself, avoiding the showiness of a coachman and footmen. There was almost a rule of thumb: the richer one was, the more decorous and inconspicuous one endeavored to be.*

  Of course it was a little hard to be inconspicuous with the kind of fortune the Guggenheims were amassing. There was also, in the case of the Guggenheims, that unlucky ability to create scandal. The year 1900 was the dawn, in America, of a new attitude toward love and sex. It was the era of the kept woman, and it was naturally assumed that every man of property had one. (Even those who didn’t pretended that they did.) Newspapers devoted yards of chatty print to this or that gentleman of distinguished family who had been “glimpsed looking gay” with this or that “curvaceous miss” or “bit of fluff.” Society, gentile and Jewish alike, buzzed with whispers of “love affairs” and “mistresses” and lovers. Even very young children seem to have been affected because little Peggy Guggenheim was only a child of seven when she said to her father, Benjamin, “Papa, you must have a mistress as you stay out so many nights”—and was banished from the dinner table.

  Meyer Guggenheim’s Barbara died in 1900, and, shortly afterward, who should come forward but a woman named Hanna McNamara, age forty-five, to say that she had been Meyer’s mistress for twenty-four years, charging breach of promise and asking $100,000 in damages. Meyer denied everything, including her assertion that she had been a domestic in the Guggenheim house. He went so far as to offer $10,000 reward to anyone who had ever seen him in the plaintiff’s presence, and the suit was dropped. Still, the episode left the impression that old Meyer, in his seventies, was a rake, and Peggy Guggenheim has said in her autobiography, “When my grandmother died, my grandfather was looked after by his cook. She must have been his mistress.” Peggy based this assertion on having once seen the cook “weep copious tears” when old Meyer Guggenheim was ill.

  Peggy’s father, meanwhile, did indeed have a series of mistresses (several of whom made embarrassing demands on his estate when he died). One of these, technically titled his “masseuse,” lived in his New York house; Benjamin’s lady friends were apparently tolerated by his wife Florette. Another was the Marquise de Cerutti, whom he kept in Paris and always referred to as “T.M.” (for The Marquise). Once, taking their regular morning walk in the Bois de Boulogne, Ben and Florette Guggenheim encountered T.M. out walking also. She was wearing an elegant suit made entirely of baby lamb fur, and Florette scolded Ben for being so extravagant. “You are quite right, my dear,” said Benjamin and, to do the proper thing, gave her the money to buy an identical lamb suit of her own. (A practical woman, Florette took the money and used it to add to her portfolio of stocks.) Though the rest of the crowd—particularly Florette’s family, the Seligmans—was aghast at Ben Guggenheim’s carryings on, he rather enjoyed his reputation as a philanderer. He once told a fourteen-year-old nephew, “Never make love to a woman before breakfast for two reasons. One, it’s tiring. Two, you may meet someone else during the day that you like better.”

  For all this jaunty talk, Ben was not so tolerant of the activities of his brother William, the last of Meyer’s sons, who has been described as “just one Guggenheim too many,” and also as “the handsomest of the boys.” Certainly one of Will’s problems was his feeling that he was a leftover Guggenheim, and also his conviction that he did not look Jewish. He began to nourish a fantasy that he was not a Jew, and somewhere along the line invented another identity for himself, whom he named Gatenby Williams. It was hard to say whether Will Guggenheim admired Gatenby Williams more than Gatenby Williams admired Will Guggenheim; they were lifelong fans of each other. In fact, Gatenby wrote an appreciative book about Will, “in collaboration with Charles Monroe Heath,” in which Gatenby said of Will that all the Guggenheim brothers “except Benjamin and himself were dark,” and that anyone seeing Will’s “light complexion and the cast of his features … would not have surmised his Semitic ancestry.” Will, says Gatenby, “was a nice-appearing young man.… Well proportioned … he carried himself erect and with dignity. His hands were expressive, the gestures indicating refinement.… He dressed neatly.… His eyes were a grayish-blue; his lips met in an even line, yet they seemed extraordinarily sensitive, belying the arduous act
ivities and responsibilities that had long been his.”

  One of Will’s activities and responsibilities that Gatenby Williams kindly does not mention was Will’s marriage in 1900 to Mrs. Grace Brown Herbert, a divorcee from California. Will brought his bride proudly home to his father and brothers, who immediately recognized her as “the fancy woman of a prominent New Yorker.” The Guggenheims presented Will with an ultimatum: get rid of Grace or be disinherited.

  It cost the family $78,000 in cash and a trip to Illinois for Grace’s divorce where, it was hoped, the scandal would not reach the New York newspapers (it did), and even that wasn’t the end. Will married again, had a child, and Grace reappeared, suing to annul the divorce on the grounds of fraud, saying neither she nor Will had been residents of Illinois at the time. Had Grace won this action, she would have made Will not only a party to fraud but a bigamist, and would have illegitimatized his son. Fortunately, Grace’s case was thrown out without further cost to the Guggenheims.

  When Gatenby Williams’ book, William Guggenheim: The Story of an Adventurous Career, was published, a few people noticed that the publisher, the Lone Voice Publishing Company, had the same address, 3 Riverside Drive, as Will Guggenheim. Pride of authorship prevailed when Will prepared his Who’s Who biography, however, and Will’s paragraph read: “Author: William Guggenheim (under pseudonym Gatenby Williams).”

  Some Guggenheims were less inconspicuous than others. Benjamin Guggenheim bought an elaborate house at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street which featured a marble entrance hall with a fountain and, on a wall facing the double front door, a stuffed American bald eagle, its wings spread as if in full flight, secured to the marble wall with brass chains. The eagle was Mr. Guggenheim’s own touch. He had shot it himself one August at his place in the Adirondacks. Whenever it was pointed out to him that it was against the law to shoot American bald eagles, and also to stuff them, he protested that he had never been told of such a law, and that when he had taken the bird to the taxidermist the man had said simply, “Whatever you say, Mr. Guggenheim!”

  Upstairs was the “Louis Seize Parlor,” decorated with tall mirrors, tapestried walls and tapestried furniture, along with a concert grand piano. But on the floor was a huge bearskin rug with its mouth open in a vicious snarl. Its teeth were forever falling out, and occasionally its tongue, which was disconcerting, but Mr. Guggenheim liked the bear also, and so it stayed amid the Louis XVI gilt chairs and tables. The central parlor, where Mrs. Guggenheim entertained her lady friends at tea, was decorated with an enormous floor-to-ceiling tapestry depicting the triumphant entry of Alexander the Great into Rome.

  The Guggenheims never appeared able to do things with quite the ease—or at least the attempt at ease—that others in the crowd did. When they traveled, for instance, the Guggenheims never seemed to understand tipping. As they moved from one grand European spa to the next, vengeful porters and bellhops drew meaningful symbols in chalk on the Guggenheim trunks and suitcases, and the Guggenheims never realized why their luggage was always being dropped and crushed and lost.

  Benjamin Guggenheim was the Guggenheim on the Titanic who refused a weeping steward’s offer of a life vest and, instead, went to his cabin and dressed in his evening clothes in order to go down like a gentleman. He insisted, furthermore, that his young valet do the same and, as a woman was entering one of the lifeboats, Ben Guggenheim placed a note in her hand which read: “If anything should happen to me, tell my wife I’ve done my best in doing my duty.”*

  But had he done his best? A persistent piece of Guggenheim gossip has it that a surviving Titanic passenger was traveling as “Mrs. Benjamin Guggenheim,” and she has been identified as “a young blond singer.” The family has repeatedly pointed out that the Titanic’s passenger list contained no such name. Yet Peggy Guggenheim has spoken of the shock at going to the pier to meet the survivors on the Carpathia, still not knowing that her father was dead, and watching her father’s mistress descend the gangplank.

  Ben’s brother Will (or “Gatenby Williams”) did not fare much better where women and notoriety were concerned. After separating from his second wife, Will “reverted to his old love, the theatre, taking on a succession of showgirls as protégés.” His protégés often held informal press conferences, and one of these young ladies, an actress playing in Ballyhoo, told reporters she had met Will because “I was reading a copy of the Literary Digest and that caught his eye.” When Will died, his entire fortune was bequeathed to “Miss America” of 1929, “Miss Connecticut” of 1930, and two other showgirls of roughly the same vintage. The papers speculated avidly on how many millions the four girls would divide, but, alas, Will’s second wife, whom he had neglected to divorce, had a claim on the estate. The estate itself, furthermore, had been considerably depleted by Will’s spending. The four young ladies divided only $5,229.

  But the most spectacular playboy of all the Guggenheims was Dan Guggenheim’s son, Meyer Robert. M. Robert had a total of four wives and, at one point, upon marrying the second one, became a Roman Catholic. (“I’m delighted,” said Dan Guggenheim at the time. “My son has always been a very bad Jew. I hope they’ll make a better Catholic of him.”) He did not, in any case, remain a Catholic long. M. Robert was briefly the American Ambassador to Portugal. When he was sent home, persona non grata, by the Portuguese Government, he laughed off the whole thing, saying that it was all because he had accidentally dropped a teaspoon down the front of a Portuguese lady’s dress. Witnesses to the event, however, said that the dropped teaspoon would not have got Robert Guggenheim tossed out of Portugal if only he had not been so insistent on going after the silverware with his hands. His fourth wife was the well-known Washington hostess, Polly Guggenheim, now Mrs. John A. Logan, who took her husband’s waywardness with tolerant good humor. After Robert Guggenheim’s death, his name popped up in the papers again. The federal government wanted to collect some $169,548 in taxes, which, it claimed, should have been paid on gifts of cash, jewelry, and “a comparatively modest home in Georgetown” made to “an unidentified woman friend.”

  At that point, it was remembered that M. Robert Guggenheim had died one evening while getting into a taxi in front of a comparatively modest home in Georgetown, after dining with a friend there.

  *And for some intensely practical reasons. The 1900 Cudahy kidnapping, with its then-record ransom demand of $25,000, had been a grim reminder of what could happen if one made too much point of being rich.

  * A more touching example of courage in the crowd was provided by Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus, who each refused, on that terrible night, to enter a lifeboat without the other, and went down together.

  35

  MONSIEUR JOURNET’S NIGHTGOWN

  At least two important media for the communication of social news had come into being in New York by 1900, neither of which was entirely reliable. One was a weekly gossip sheet called Town Topics. The other was the telephone. Town Topics was devoted almost entirely to the shocking carryings on of Vanderbilts, Webbs, Whitneys, Goelets, Goulds, Morgans, Huntingtons, Schwabs, and Ryans. The publication dramatized the fact that to be “in society” had certain drawbacks, for Town Topics earned considerable revenue through simple extortion; if a Vanderbilt, Webb, Whitney, Goelet, Gould, Morgan, Huntington, Schwab, or Ryan did not want his latest indiscretion printed, he had to pay up. Because they were not considered society, the families of the crowd were mercifully spared (though Jimmie Speyer was once approached by a Town Topics “representative,” and gallantly said, “I don’t care what you write about me, as long as you don’t say anything disagreeable about my wife.” He was left alone).

  Meanwhile, thanks to the telephone, gossip traveled faster and more efficiently than ever before. Most women of the era spent at least two-thirds of each morning on the telephone, and many felt unable to start their day until the telephoning was done. And all at once (or so it seemed), uptown circuits were busy from nine to noon with talk of mistresses, lovers, showgirls, an
d scandal. Frieda Schiff Warburg, her children remember, “used to look as if she had been drawn through a knothole” when she emerged from her morning telephoning. And well she might have.

  Just how many of the romances and harrowing tales were real and how many were imagined is, obviously, open to great question. The word “mistress” had become so commonplace that any woman a man was seen speaking to at a Schiff Friday night could be labeled his mistress by Saturday morning. One day, Mrs. Alfred Liebmann, the wife of the brewer, was lunching with her friend Hulda Lashanska, the concert singer. Girlishly, Mlle. Lashanska told Mrs. Liebmann when they met that they might be joined by “a beau.” Who should show up but the glamorous “Black Prince”—Felix Warburg! Scandal! News of that affair and “mistress” filled the telephone hours for days afterward. But, since it had been an in-the-crowd lunch, news of it never got outside. (And Lashanska, meanwhile, was a good friend of Frieda Warburg’s also, which made it seem like a tempest in a teapot.)

  Sometimes, as was the custom of the era, when divorce was “not done” except in a Guggenheim-like emergency, the mistress did indeed join the household and become, in Mary McCarthy’s phrase, “a friend of the family.” At other times this proved difficult, and there were permanently bruised feelings all around. There were husbands and wives who, though they traveled and entertained together, never spoke, and there were couples who, even though they went to the same dinner parties, were not on speaking terms with other couples over affairs of the heart.

  There was one much-liked member of the crowd whose wife, it was suddenly announced, had taken a lover, himself a married man. The affair eventually terminated itself, and, some time later, the young wife died. Though this might have been considered the end of things, it wasn’t, and a family conference was called to see what should be done about the dead wife’s shocking treatment of her husband while living. Her desk was searched and, sure enough, certain letters turned up which “proved” her guilt. These were then bundled up and shipped—not to their sender but to his wife as “evidence” of his behavior. It was then deemed necessary to tell the dead wife’s young children of their mother’s transgressions. These exchanges of information were harsh, but also protective, for now where else could the talk fly? It had flown full circle, and all “within the family.”