The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  He stood up, an ancient patriarch condemning unrighteousness. His black skullcap set off his white hair and beard. “If you only knew how deep is your ignorance—”

  “What have you ever done with all your knowledge?” I demanded. “While you prayed and gloried in your Torah, your children were in the factory, slaving for bread.”

  His God-kindled face towered over me. “What? Should I have sold my religion? God is not for sale. God comes before my own flesh and blood.…

  “You’re not human!” he went on. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Neither can good come from your evil worship of Mammon. Woe! Woe! Your barren heart looks out from your eyes.”

  His words were salt on my wounds. In desperation, I picked up my purse and gloves and turned toward the door.

  “I see you’re in a hurry, all ready to run away. Run! Where? For what? To get a higher place in the Tower of Babel? To make more money out of your ignorance?

  “Poverty becomes a Jew like a red ribbon on a white horse. But you’re no longer a Jew. You’re a meshumeides, an apostate, an enemy of your own people. And even the Christians will hate you.”

  I fled from him in anger and resentment. But it was no use. I could never escape him. He was the conscience that condemned me.…

  What this scene illustrates is more than a clash of cultures. It is more a clash of faiths, a clash of consciences. In America, a whole history and system of beliefs was being turned upside down, and a people who had been taught to believe in an aristocracy of the poor were trying to adapt to a society that accepted an aristocracy of the rich. Anzia Yezierska was not tough enough, not cynical enough, not heartless enough to escape her Jewish father’s “condemning conscience.” Trapped between two powerful forces, she struggled briefly, then gave up the fight.

  So perhaps one of the things that made Sammy run was the searing inner doubt—a guilt that wouldn’t go away—about the worthiness of success, a very real fear that success was evil, ungodly. Assimilation was not free. One of its prices was constant inner conflict, a crisis of conscience, a divided soul.

  11

  DEALS

  By 1928, it was clear to everyone that repeal of Prohibition was only a matter of time. It had never worked and, it seemed, could never be made to work. Though five more years would pass before Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Repeal amendment in December of 1933, those five years gave Sam Bronfman all the time he needed to draw up his plans to enter—legitimately at last—the lucrative American liquor market. In 1928, he made a decision that would transform him from a millionaire into, literally, a billionaire.

  As long as Prohibition was in force, he figured, Americans would put up with “rotgut” liquor from questionable sources. But, with Repeal, he suspected that drinking tastes would demand fully aged, mellowed, and ripened whiskeys, and that Americans would willingly pay the price for these. On this theory, Bronfman began maturing huge stocks of whiskey in his Canadian warehouses. It was a gamble, of course, and there was considerable risk. It meant withholding his liquor from a lively and thirsty marketplace, and it meant that Seagram’s shareholders would have to endure some belt tightening during this uncertain period. Mr. Sam’s hunch could have been wrong. American tastes could have become so jaded during nearly fifteen years of Prohibition that the average drinker no longer cared what was in his glass. But Mr. Sam, as usual, was certain that he was not wrong. And, as a result, when liquor sales became legal in the United States once more, Seagram’s was in control of the largest stock of fully aged rye and bourbon whiskeys in the world.

  Meanwhile, other preparatory steps had been taken. Office space had been rented in New York’s prestigious new Chrysler Building, then the world’s tallest skyscraper. Learning that the Rossville Union Distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, was for sale, Mr. Sam bought it for $2,399,000 in cash. And in 1930, Mr. Sam imported a bright young Scotsman named Calman Levine, and conferred upon him an Old World title Bronfman had never previously employed in his company—that of master blender.

  Calman Levine had been born in Russia in 1884, and had emigrated at an early age with his family to Scotland. He was mild-mannered, well-spoken—with a British accent, which Mr. Sam admired—a man whose bearing suggested that of a university don rather than a whiskey expert. Indeed, Levine had made a long, scholarly study of liquors—not only of their physical attributes, such as taste, aroma, color, texture, and “feel,” but also of the almost spiritual associations of certain flavors, since, in the end, a blender’s “nose” and palate are based on intuition more than anything else. Levine had grown up in the Scotch business. With a brother-in-law, he had worked as a blender for Ambassador Scotch, and for a while had operated his own small distillery in Glasgow, called Calman Levine and Company, which produced an elegant Scotch called Loch-broom. As the master blender for Lochbroom—most Scotch whiskeys are blends—Levine’s job had been to sample, and spit out, literally thousands of different combinations a day from a huge library of little bottles before coming up with the formulas that he felt, intuitively, would be satisfactory. Mr. Sam had often talked about the “art” of blending, but he really knew very little about it. Now Calman Levine was to be his artist-in-residence. He was introduced to the Seagram staff as its prize corporate showpiece, and he certainly looked the part—a gentleman and a scholar, of all things, in the often deadly North American liquor trade. His assignment was, in a sense, twofold. His presence and his title were to be used to provide prestige and luster for the Seagram name when it made its first respectable debut in the American marketplace. And he was to create, in the process, a flagship blend to carry the Seagram banner proudly to the United States.

  It took Levine nearly four years to come up with what he considered a winning formula, but there was no hurry. A master blender’s art cannot be exercised under a deadline. Millions of combinations were tried in what might seem an endlessly boring routine of sniffing, sipping, rolling whiskeys on the tongue, spitting them out, making notes. But, to carry the artistic metaphor farther, there was always the artist’s reward waiting tantalizingly at the end of the search for the right arrangement of colors on the canvas. By early 1934, Levine and his staff had narrowed their choices down to some two dozen different samples, which were numbered consecutively, and long hours of comparisons began, often lasting well into the night. Finally, a decision was reached. Sample number seven was declared the winner. Now all that was left was to give the new whiskey a name. “We can’t just call it Number Seven,” someone said, to which Mr. Sam replied with a single word: “Crown.” Thus was Seagram’s Seven Crown born.

  Adding the word Crown was characteristic of Mr. Sam. He was awed by royalty, and still harbored the fierce hope that the British Crown might one day make him a knight. “Seagram” and “Seven” were of course already alliterative, and by adding the word Crown, Seagram’s would be saying that this whiskey was their crowning achievement. In the process, Seagram’s would be doffing its corporate hat to the royal family. It was one of many such gestures. Earlier, Mr. Sam had bought the Chivas distillery in Aberdeen primarily because Chivas also operated a fancy-foods division that supplied groceries to the royals during their annual summer visits to Balmoral Castle. Chivas foods had thus earned the royal warrant: “Purveyors of Provisions and Victuals to H. M. the King.” Unfortunately, though he would dearly have loved to have it emblazoned on his label, Mr. Sam was never able to get a royal warrant conferred upon his Chivas Regal Scotch, though he did his best with “Regal.” Other Seagram products would similarly evoke the English aristocracy—Lord Calvert, for example, and Crown Royal, and Royal Salute.

  But Seagram’s Seven Crown was a clever name for other reasons. There were, for instance, the mystical and magical connotations of the number seven—the seven seas, the seven hills of Rome, the seven arts, the seventh seal in Revelation, the seven deadly sins, and the seven trumpets signifying the consummation of God’s plan. But seven was also a popular—
though for no particular reason—number of years for aging a whiskey. Seagram’s Seven Crown was not a whiskey that had been aged for seven years, nor would its advertising ever make such a claim directly.* On the other hand, if the customer chose to infer that the number was the whiskey’s age, that was all right with Seagram’s and with Mr. Sam. Mr. Sam’s next move, after having named Seven Crown, was equally adroit. He proposed that Seagram’s Seven Crown be introduced along with a second brand—Seagram’s Five Crown, which would sell at a lower price. Thus the customer might harmlessly be misled into supposing that, if Seven Crown were aged for seven years, Five Crown must be aged for five. “Besides,” Mr. Sam added, “I always like to have money on two horses in every race.”

  But when Seagram’s Seven Crown and Five Crown joined the other Seagram brands—Seagram’s 83, Seagram’s gin, Seagram’s rye, Seagram’s bourbon, and Seagram’s V.O.†—in the marketplace, Seven Crown was such a clear winner that there didn’t seem to be any need for a second horse. Within two months, Seagram’s whiskeys were outselling all others in the United States and within a decade Seagram’s Seven Crown had become the best-selling whiskey in the world. Five Crown was quietly discontinued, but Calman Levine had done his job well.

  In setting up his distributorships and sales force in the United States, Mr. Sam naturally turned to the men who knew the territory best. These, not surprisingly, turned out to be found among the ranks of the recently unemployed bootleggers—men who, for the previous fifteen years, had been full- or part-time criminals. Still, though the reputation of everyone in the liquor business was more than a little tainted, a facade of respectability had to be maintained. One way was through public relations and advertising, and Seagram’s earliest U.S. ads were replete with Sam Bronfman’s favorite themes—jeweled crowns, orbs, scepters, fancy Olde English lettering, and the slogan “Say Seagram’s and Be Sure,” which left the impression that other brands were not to be trusted. In Seagram’s “Men of Distinction” series for its Calvert line, Seagram’s traded on the reputations of prominent Americans to give its products class and tone and snob appeal.* Its Men of Distinction, the company announced, were paid for their endorsements, but in the form of contributions to their favorite charities, which all true blue bloods had. (The fact that, in a deepening economic depression, a number of Men of Distinction chose themselves as their favorite charity was no concern of Seagram’s.)

  Still, projecting an upper-crust image was a little hard at first. Soon after Repeal, the United States secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.—who happened to be a German Jew—claimed that Canadian distillers such as Bronfman owed the United States some sixty-nine million dollars in duties and excise taxes on the liquor they had illegally shipped into the country during the dry years. An angry argument between the two countries resulted, and at one point, Morgenthau threatened to impose an embargo on all goods imported from Canada until the alleged debt—which many thought a modest estimate of the taxes that had been evaded—was paid. At length, Ottawa agreed to pay a twentieth of the figure, or three million dollars, and Sam Bronfman agreed to pay half of that, and wrote out a check for 1.5 million. With that, he announced, he had paid his debt, even though his Seagram profits during the Prohibition years had amounted to close to eight hundred million dollars.

  Throughout Prohibition, meanwhile, Mr. Sam had been fascinated with an American-born Jew named Lewis Rosenstiel. Seemingly above the law, Lew Rosenstiel had spent the Prohibition years boldly transshipping contraband liquor from England, Europe, and Canada via Saint Pierre and then, by truck, right into Cincinnati, Rosenstiel’s hometown and center of operations. In the process, he was building what would become his giant Schenley Distillers Corporation. Bronfman and Rosenstiel had met often, during the latter’s trips to Canada, and had become gin-rummy-playing friends.

  Lew Rosenstiel, meanwhile, had a personality even more despotic and erratic than Mr. Sam’s. In fact, he may have been a certifiable sociopath. Convinced that everyone in his organization was conspiring against him, he had all of his executives’ telephone lines tapped, and his house was a veritable spy center. At one point during his long reign of terror, he decided to test his employees’ loyalty in an ultimate fashion. He had his secretary phone his top men to tell them that the liquor baron was dying. The men gathered solemnly in their boss’s drawing room. Presently the secretary appeared and murmured, “He’s gone.” Rosenstiel, meanwhile, was in the bedroom with his listening devices. He turned in to what was being said about him, and had the satisfaction of having all his suspicions confirmed as he heard his executives cheering and congratulating one another over the fact that the Grim Reaper had finally done what each of them had always wanted to do. Still in his pajamas, he marched down the stairs and fired the lot of them.

  He had survived one stormy marriage, but his second was even stormier. He had married the former Leonore Cohn, a palely beautiful woman considerably younger than he, who had been traumatized early in life, first, by her mother’s death in an auto accident when she was a child; second, by being raised by a California uncle who happened to be the legendary despot of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn; and, third, by an ill-advised youthful marriage to a rich Las Vegas businessman named Belden Kattleman.

  Soon she was being traumatized again by Lew Rosenstiel. Though he provided her with every conceivable kind of luxury, she was made to pay for it in humiliating ways. When she became pregnant with her second child—her first, a daughter, had been by Mr. Kattleman—Rosenstiel promised to settle a million dollars on the baby when it was born. Then, furious because it was another girl, he reneged on the promise. When she caught the eye of another very rich man, who happened to be Walter Annenberg, she asked Rosenstiel for a divorce. He refused, and instead had both his wife and Annenberg tailed by detectives in an attempt to dig up scurrilous details about the publisher’s private life. Finally, Lee asked for a divorce. Enraged, Rosenstiel confiscated every article of clothing, fur, or jewelry that he had given her during the marriage. When she finally walked out of his house for good to marry Annenberg, she had to undergo the ordeal of being frisked and having her purse searched by Rosenstiel’s bodyguards.

  Rosenstiel and Bronfman had often discussed the possibility of joining forces, and in the early 1930s, with Repeal on the horizon, the two liquor lords had a series of meetings on the subject of a merger that, with any luck, would give them supreme control of the world’s liquor market. Rosenstiel would bring to the partnership his knowledge of the U.S. trade, and Bronfman would bring to it his prestigious connections with the great distillers of Scotland. It was to be a fifty-fifty partnership, and, to this end, Seagram’s began buying Schenley stock in 1933.

  But negotiations began to break down when it suddenly turned out that each man wanted fifty-one percent of the proposed merger, and, naturally, neither was the sort of man who would accept a mere forty-nine percent. And things came to a screaming finish when Mr. Sam visited one of Schenley’s plants and discovered that at least one Schenley brand, Golden Wedding, was being bottled “hot”—right out of the stills, without aging. Sam had done this, too, of course, in the old days, but now he was going legitimate, respectable, and this sort of practice did not at all fit in with the aristocratic image he wanted Seagram to project. Bronfman accused Rosenstiel of lying to him, of trying to cheat him, of selling cheap rotgut, and Rosenstiel countered by calling Mr. Sam a number of unprintable names. In a final meeting on the subject of a merger, the two hurled curses and insults at each other, each man accused the other of having carnal knowledge of his mother, and each man vowed to destroy the other for all time.

  Afterward, whenever Rosenstiel spoke of Mr. Sam it was as “Sam the Bronf.” Bronfman’s name for Rosenstiel was “Rosenschlemiel,” or, simply, “My enemy.” The result of the falling out was furious competition between the two giants for a larger share of the market, and a conviction on the part of both Seagram’s and Schenley’s that spies from the enemy were infiltrating the
ir respective organizations, that certain employees were possibly “double agents.” Valuable employees were forever being lured from one house to the other with offers of money on the theory that they would share their secrets.

  But it was a curious kind of enmity in that it lasted only during business hours. Like Sam Goldwyn and L. B. Mayer, who fought furiously all day long and yet spent many pleasant evenings together playing cards, Mr. Sam and Lew Rosenstiel remained—on a purely social level—backslapping pals. Neither man had anything but abuse for the other from nine to five. But evenings and weekends they still played gin rummy.

  And of course it was part of the nature of the liquor business that there were many secrets, many mysteries, many skeletons in closets. Prohibition had made it a business of bribes, payoffs, secret deals, possibilities for blackmail. Whenever he traveled, for example, Mr. Sam insisted that Seagram brands be placed prominently front and center, their labels facing squarely outward, on bartenders’ shelves and in the window displays of liquor stores. This meant that advance men had to be sent on ahead of Mr. Sam’s visits, and that cash had to be passed under retailers’ and bartenders’ counters. Mr. Sam, furthermore, refused to believe—or pretended to refuse to believe—that such bribes were necessary, and refused to reimburse his men for these outlays, which meant that his men, to stay in his good graces, were required to make these payments out of their own pockets.

  Then there was the curious matter of Mr. Julius Kessler—a mysterious case that is still occasionally pondered by old-timers at Seagram’s, along with the question of who murdered Paul Matoff, and why. Kessler was a spendthrift, devil-may-care fellow who came out of the old Whiskey Trust, much loved for his habit of cheerfully giving away money to almost anyone who asked. Then the brief economic depression of 1921 plunged his already shaky liquor business into bankruptcy. For a while, he tried other fields, including selling corsets, but with little success, and finally he announced his intention to retire to Budapest, where food and wine and women were cheap. Whatever funds he had left he put in the care of a longtime secretary, one Miss Bohmer, in New York. Whenever Julius Kessler needed money, Miss Bohmer cabled it to him.