The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The modest presentation of these heady figures must have satisfied the Hughes committee. At the close of the investigation it was reported that Jacob Schiff “was one of the few men prominently identified with the Equitable who came through unscathed in reputation.” Nevertheless, the investigation led to far stiffer insurance regulations. And it offered, in passing, at least one explanation why the Equitable stock which Ryan had bought from Hyde for $2.5 million yielded such a niggardly dividend income as $3,514 a year. The company’s charter, it seemed, stipulated that all profits except 7 percent of the $100,000 par value of stock should go to policyholders. The stock itself, however, could be used as a massive borrowing tool, to secure loans far in excess of its par valuation. As the investigating committee noted, “The stock must be regarded as affording enormous collateral advantages to those interested in financial operations.” Thomas Fortune Ryan clearly felt that way about it. He went on to buy a huge house on Fifth Avenue, added a private chapel, and converted the house next door into an art gallery which he filled with tapestries, Limoges enamels, and busts, mostly of himself—three of them by Rodin.

  Jacob Schiff, meanwhile, as soon as the investigation was over, quietly resigned from the Equitable board.

  * In similar cases it had been decided that, though such sales were a “technical offense,” they were not “ethically offensive” if the conditions of soundness and fairness of price were met.

  39

  “I ENCLOSE MY CHECK FOR $2,000,000 …”

  Glamour, on a magnificent, even international scale, was introduced to the New York crowd in the person of Otto Kahn. Like his friend and partner, Felix Warburg, Kahn was a blade—and more so. He was so sartorially splendid that, when appearing before the New York Board of Estimate to submit a fiscal plan for the city, the New York World devoted half a column to his remarks and three-quarters of a column to a description of his clothes—the pearl-gray cutaway, the cashmere trousers, the stickpin of an egg-size black pearl, even the tiny orchid in his buttonhole.

  Through Otto Kahn the city’s Jewish and gentile elite would embark on a new relationship, and, for this, Kahn had arrived at exactly the right moment. When Mrs. Astor had died in 1908, it was said that “With her passed not only a social dynasty but also the whole idea of hereditary or otherwise arbitrary social supremacy in America; with her, indeed, passed ‘Society’ in the old sense.” For over thirty years, attendance at her ball had been the one and only test of social importance in New York. “If she invited you, you were in; if she did not, you were out,” explained a contemporary. With the aid of Ward McAllister, she had defined society’s limits, and at the height of her social powers, her box—No. 7—at the Metropolitan Opera House was “a social throne. It was always Mrs. Astor who gave the signal as to the proper time to leave. The time bore no relation to the stage to which the opera had advanced, but was selected because it happened to suit the matron; the time she chose was usually just after an intermission.”*

  American society had for a long time taken a rather proprietary interest in opera. The reason why was fairly simple. In the early days of American cities, when the rich entertained one another, they often found themselves all dressed up with no place to go. After an elaborate dinner party in New York, there was nothing to do but go home and go to bed. As Henry James wrote, “There was nothing, as in London or Paris, to go ‘on’ to; the going ‘on’ is, for the New York aspiration, always the stumbling-block. A great court-function would alone have met the strain … would alone properly have crowned the hour.” In the absence of court functions, opera and the opera season filled this dreary gap. Later, James called opera “the only approach to the implication of the tiara known to American law” and “the great vessel of social salvation.”

  Opera was more fashionable than the theater for several reasons. The theater has always provided a more personal, speculative experience. One never knows what one will encounter at the new play. But the very formality and artificiality of grand opera makes it reliable; in turn-of-the-century New York, one could go to the opera certain that one would hear nothing untoward, “vulgar,” or particularly surprising. In much of Europe opera had belonged to the common man, but by the early 1900’s the situation abroad had begun to change also. The upper classes seized and took over opera. In Berlin the opera season had taken on the appearance of a “court function,” and in England it was said of Edward VII that “he only talked freely when he went to the opera.”

  In America each city had its own set of rules involving the opera. In San Francisco, which had built its opera house and established its “season” while it was no more than a miner’s town with unpaved streets, the fashionable night was Thursday, where one showed that one was able to entertain in style regardless of the convention of “maid’s night off.” In New York the smart night for opera-going was Monday, for the simple reason that Mrs. Astor and McAllister had chosen Monday as their night to go. Mrs. Astor, who established the chic practice of leaving early, also—à la August Belmont—made it fashionable to arrive late. The great horseshoe of gilded boxes surrounding Mrs. Astor’s throne contained others of her “Four Hundred.” Outside the narrow, locked, and curtained door of each box, the boxholder’s name engraved on an oblong brass plate was a kind of proclamation that that person had reached the pinnacle of social success. Aspiring climbers fought in vain for opera boxes of their own, which sold for as much as $30,000 apiece, in the Diamond Horseshoe, and even younger members of old, box-holding families had to wait many years for gilt-and-velvet shrines of their own. The opera boxes had further rules. It was considered “vulgar,” for instance, to visit other boxes until the second intermission. A pair of Lemaire opera glasses, encrusted with diamonds and sapphires and costing $75,000, was, on the other hand, not vulgar. It went without saying that no Jew could be a Metropolitan Opera box holder.

  The opera ritual had become so stiff and studied by the early 1900’s that the quality of the music performed and sung was of extremely small importance. Appearing at the opera had become of far greater concern than hearing it. One spent such a short time at the opera anyway—sort of a digestive interval between dinner and an Assembly ball—that one hardly bothered to listen. Nor, considering the rigid sameness of the programming—it was nearly all Italian—did one really need to listen. Harriet Beecher Stowe, attending the opera, was surprised to hear, during a soft passage in the music, a woman’s voice saying, “I always cook mine in vinegar.” So dilatory was society’s interest in the actual music that the Metropolitan’s impresario had said candidly, “I have never discovered a voice in my life. I don’t go around discovering operas. I am not musician enough for that. Opera is nothing but cold business to me.”

  It was, of all things, the Equitable Life affair that first got Otto Kahn involved with the Metropolitan. When James Hazen Hyde went on the Met’s board, and when Jacob Schiff became Hyde’s banker, it was natural that Schiff should have been more concerned with Hyde’s insurance assets than with his opera-house connections. Hyde, however—despite the anti-Semitic cast of the Met—did invite Schiff to sit with him on the Met’s board. Schiff declined, suggesting that Hyde consider his young partner, Mr. Kahn.

  Kahn, at first, was doubtful whether to accept Hyde’s offer. As a banker, he was eager to keep a hand in whatever went on downtown. But he also loved music and the theater, played three instruments, and the romance of the opera appealed to him. He was also worried that an opera directorship might damage his position as a businessman. As Kahn said,

  At that time I was on the threshold of my business career. There were more people then than now looking askance at art.* They looked upon the joy of life and art as incongruous elements in the general harmony of the sphere of existence. I was warned by well-meaning friends that I had better not fool with operatic and theatrical matters; that I would lose standing among serious-minded people if I did so; that it was infra dig for a staid and reputable banker to have his name connected with an opera comp
any; that my motives would be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

  Faced with these temptations and warnings and misgivings, Otto Kahn consulted Ned Harriman, who gave him some astonishing advice.

  “You just go ahead and do your art job, but don’t dabble at it,” Harriman told him. “Make it one of your serious occupations. As long as you do not let it interfere with your other work, with your business duties and ambitions and thoughts, it will do you no harm. On the contrary, it will exercise your imagination and diversify your activities. It ought to make a better businessman out of you.”

  Kahn became a member of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, and immediately began following Harriman’s advice. In those days the structure of an opera company was quite different from what it is today. The Metropolitan Opera and Realty Company was a shareholding corporation which owned the opera house building; the corporation leased the building to an impresario whose responsibility it was to hire the company and put on opera. Otto Kahn initially purchased two hundred shares of stock in the corporation. Hyde had had three hundred shares of Metropolitan Opera stock, and when he departed for Paris, Otto Kahn had bought these. Henry Morgenthau, another director, soon retired, and Kahn bought his three hundred shares. Suddenly Kahn was the opera’s leading stockholder. He began buying up opera stock wherever it was available, and presently he had 2,750 shares and virtually owned the Metropolitan Opera. As his mentor, Jacob Schiff, would have agreed, owning the company was the first prerequisite to making it one of his “serious occupations.”

  One of his first moves in 1903 was to hire a new impresario from Germany, Heinrich Conried, who, according to critics who instantly materialized, possessed no qualifications whatever. At the time, a writer for the New York Herald commented: “The only explanation of Kahn’s motive in the Conried selection was that the latter’s very ignorance of music might have given his sponsor a chance to superintend, direct, and manage.” The same writer warned Mr. Kahn that Conried was “out for big game himself,” and was “out to be the head of the opera not only in name but in fact also,” and that Otto Kahn had used “Wall Street tactics” to get Conried appointed—rushing the new director in by getting busy board members to sign over their proxies to Kahn. (Kahn, who had already begun his lifetime practice of demanding that newspapers print retractions of stories he considered inexact, made no comment on this one, so we may assume it contains the truth.) No one noted that a great revolution in the Metropolitan Opera was under way, and Conried’s first opening night, which marked the American debut of a young Italian tenor named Enrico Caruso in Rigoletto, was received with the same bored languor as usual by the Diamond Horseshoe, and got mixed notices in the press.

  It was not until December of Conried’s first season that the New York newspapers and the opera-going public realized that an important change had taken place at the stately Met. This was Conried’s brilliant staging of the first American performance of Wagner’s Parsifal, which the critics swooningly called “without doubt the most perfect production ever made on the American lyric stage.” This was followed by another American premiere—Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, which revealed that Caruso had an unsuspected flair for comedy—and suddenly it was noticed that there never had been as many as two new operas introduced in a season. When it turned out that both the operas and the chief performers had been selected by Otto Kahn of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, the Diamond Horseshoe didn’t know what to think. Neither, for that matter, did Wall Street.

  Heinrich Conried would probably have stayed at the Met for many years if it had not been for three unrelated circumstances. There was, for one thing, the apparent great success of Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera, five blocks away. There was also the unfortunate publicity that attached itself to the Met when a New York woman accused Enrico Caruso of molesting her in Central Park. Finally there was Conried’s health, which began to fail in 1907, the year that Kahn was elected chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera. Quietly Kahn set about to find a successor, and he soon became convinced that the man should be Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who, for the past ten years, had been general manager of La Scala in Milan.

  When Kahn’s first letter to Gatti-Casazza arrived in Milan, the impresario showed it to La Scala’s conductor, Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini said he thought Gatti ought to accept and, furthermore, said that he would like to go with him to New York. A meeting between Kahn and Gatti was scheduled in Paris, and, after details of salary and contract had been worked out, Gatti-Casazza delivered the following florid acceptance speech (at least this was how he remembered it in his autobiography):

  “Thank you, Mr. Kahn, for the faith you have shown in me. I am well aware that you are besieged and importuned by a large number of persons who aspire to Conried’s place. I certainly will not importune you in any way, the more so since at the Scala in Milan I am very well situated in every respect. Nevertheless, if you and your colleagues believe that I am the person suited for the Metropolitan, please let me know, and in that event I hope that we shall be able to come to an agreement, I should wish that in that case an offer should also be made to Maestro Toscanini.”

  It was of course a great coup for Kahn, who had managed to capture not one but two of Europe’s greatest musical figures for the Met. His opera house, he had begun to say, would one day wear “the blue ribbon of the opera world.” In announcing that he had hired Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini, Kahn, lest anyone think that the emphasis of the company would be “too Italian,” was careful to say that French, German, and Italian operas would be performed with equal frequency.

  There were to be other innovations. Kahn announced that, for the first time in the Met’s history, the entire management staff would be on salary, and that Gatti-Casazza would not have to concern himself with box-office receipts as previous impresarios had done. Any losses would be absorbed by “the board of the Metropolitan Opera Company,” which pretty much meant Otto Kahn. The newspapers applauded the news as “a change from the old order to the new.… Power has passed from the older generation to the younger.” Art and culture, it was said, were at last coming to America, delivered by the Metropolitan Opera and Otto Kahn.

  All at once, he was very much a figure about town. His comings and goings—to the theater, to the opera, to restaurants, to clubs—were chronicled in the papers. One saw him on Fifth Avenue on Sunday mornings, strolling with his dachshunds in his tall silk hat and silver-handled cane. One marveled at the polished tips of his shoes below his spats, the perfection of his mohair gloves, the inevitable large pearl stickpin in his tie, placed just above the V in his velvet-collared Chesterfield. Few men of the day possessed quite such dash. He reminded many people of Goethe’s description of Kahn’s home town, Mannheim: “Friendly, serene, and symmetrical.” There was, about his build, a certain elegant frailness. Still, he always stood and walked with ramrod straightness, a relic of his service with the Mainz Hussars, and there was nothing indefinite about his large, blue, appraising eyes under their heavy dark brows, nor anything accidental about his handlebar mustache, so perfectly shaped and brushed that it might have been a clever bit of trompe l’oeil painting. He was, in fact, a fashion plate of almost Renaissance proportions.

  He also possessed a commodity that had been something of a rarity in New York’s German Jewish crowd. He could smile. He smiled often and easily and well, and his smile served him particularly well in an era, and in a city, that was growing used to chilly and ill-mannered millionaires. He could also speak. Unlike Jacob Schiff, whose accent often made him difficult to understand, Kahn was admired for his “beautiful English accent,” which was actually a style of speech called “Continental English”—clipped, flattened, undiphthonged. He was one of the first in the crowd to be often in demand as a public speaker. He was at home on the dais. He adored the spotlight.

  Also, though he pretended to have a patrician disdain for personal publicity, he loved it, and his own public and press relations were nearly always perfect. Like Harrim
an and Jacob Schiff, he believed in personally inspecting railroads in which Kuhn, Loeb had an interest. Once, traveling to Denver to look over a new line, he had descended the steps of his private car to be interviewed by reporters who observed, with wonder, that the great Otto Kahn was “the most simply dressed man there.” (He had had the good sense to omit tall silks, spats, and stickpins in the provinces.) At another time, speaking to a general audience, he had said that there should not be less government control of big business, but more—endearing himself to workingmen. At the Met he adopted the habit of strolling into the press room on opening nights and gathering the reviewers around him. Then he would lead them out into the street—to a nearby saloon for a drink or two, or to enjoy a few vaudeville acts at a nearby theater or, in the days of Minsky, to watch burlesque. He would then guide them back to the opera house, considerably cheered up, for the final aria. His mock-formal invitations—“Would any of you gentlemen perhaps care to accompany me for a few moments?”—became so familiar that the minute Kahn entered the press room the reviewers reached for their coats. Needless to say, Met performances were nearly always favorably reviewed.