The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Finally, the split with Seagram saddened Levine because he had considered Mr. Sam his personal friend. Levine and his wife had dined often with the Bronfmans at Belvedere Castle. At holiday times the two families had regularly exchanged gifts of fruit and delicacies. The Bronfman and Levine children had gone to summer camp together at Camp Algonquin in the Adirondacks, and a Levine governess had become a Bronfman governess. But Sam Bronfman never forgave a defection, and from that moment all communication between the two families ceased. The grudge would be borne into the next generation. Years later, Calman Levine’s daughter Rita would try to telephone one of her old playmates in New York, only to be told by a secretary, “This call is not welcome.”

  Like the pharaohs of old, who caused the names and achievements of their predecessors to be effaced from their monuments and temples, the name of Calman Levine, who had perfected American blended whiskey and revolutionized the drinking tastes and habits of Americans, was expunged from the corporate history of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons. In The Story of Seagram’s Seven Crown, which the company published in 1972, Levine’s name was not mentioned. Instead, the inventor of the blend had become Samuel Bronfman.

  In the meantime, Sam Bronfman himself may have had good reason for bitterness. None of the honors he had expected from Canada had been bestowed upon him. The knighthood, the governorship of McGill University, a directorship of the Bank of Montreal (where he was the largest depositor), the club memberships, the seat on the Canadian Senate he had tried to buy, the ambassadorships—all had eluded him. In 1951, now in his sixties and perhaps weary of his long and unsuccessful social climb north of the border, Mr. Sam purchased a large estate in Tarrytown, in New York’s Westchester County. Since it overlooked the Hudson at Tappan Zee, he renamed this new castle Belvedere too, and, in a series of elaborate parties, began to woo new American friends.* Next door to Mr. Sam’s new Belvedere stood Lyndhurst, the castle built by the railroad tycoon Jay Gould. In it lived Gould’s daughter Anna, by then the Duchesse de Tallyrand-Périgord. The duchess, however, did not invite her new neighbors to her entertainments.

  Then, in 1953, there were two events that buoyed Sam Bronfman’s spirits somewhat. The first was the marriage of his elder daughter, Minda, to the French banker Baron Alain de Gunzburg, whom she had met while he was a student at the Harvard Business School. In Paris, the Gunzburgs, who were German Jews, were considered bankers almost, if not quite, on the level of the Rothschilds, to whom they were distantly related. (Baron Guy de Rothschild’s mother was a first cousin of Alain de Gunzburg’s grandmother.) Now at least someone in the family had a title, even if it wasn’t Mr. Sam, though the new baroness’s treatment of her rank at her wedding seemed a little cruel. When her father went to kiss the bride, Minda said, “But Father, don’t you know that you should bow to a baroness?”

  The second, just as startling event of that year was the marriage of Mr. Sam’s elder son, Edgar, to Ann Margaret Loeb, the German-Jewish daughter of the John L. Loebs of New York, and the granddaughter of the founder of the investment house of C. M. Loeb Rhoades and Company. Miss Loeb’s mother was a Lehman, her maternal grandmother a Lewisohn, and her paternal grandmother a Sephardic Moses, whose family had been plantation owners in the Old South. The Bronfman-Loeb union shocked New York’s German-Jewish Old Guard. “But those Bronfmans,” said Mrs. Arthur Lehman, “have just come down out of the trees.” It was confidently predicted that the marriage would not last. Indeed, it didn’t.

  Just three years earlier, another intergalactic marriage had equally unsettled the German-Jewish Old Guard. After marrying and divorcing a popular young—and Roman Catholic—Manhattan socialite named Esmé O’Brien, David Sarnoff’s son Bobby had married Felicia Schiff Warburg. If anything, Miss Warburg’s German lineage was even more distinguished than Miss Loeb’s. Her uncle was the banker-yachtsman-philanthropist Felix Warburg. Her grandfather was Jacob H. Schiff. One of her great-grandfathers was Solomon Loeb, the Kuhn, Loeb founding partner, and one of the “old” Loebs. The John L. Loebs, who had come from Germany later and were unrelated, were “new” Loebs. Warburg cousins were Seligmans, Kahns, and Kuhns. At the time of the Warburg-Sarnoff nuptials, Robert Sarnoff was identified by one of the clannish German-Jewish crowd as “the son of that Russian radio man.” It was predicted that this Russian-German mesalliance also would not last, and, indeed, it did not.

  Of course it wasn’t easy being the son of a self-made tycoon. “Somebody up there likes him” became the private joke at NBC about Bobby Sarnoff’s rapid rise from the sales department, in 1948, to the presidency of the network in 1955, at which point he began climbing the corporate ladder of the parent company. He would be named chairman of the board and chief executive officer of RCA by 1970, when still a youthful fifty-two. All these promotions occurred under the watchful eye, and powerful parental thumb, of the founding father. The relationship between father and son was ambivalent. On the one hand, David Sarnoff was proud of his son’s ability to fill his shoes. On the other, he was suspicious, questioning his son’s every move and every idea, openly critical of some of Robert Sarnoff’s more farfetched “predictions.”* It made for a relationship that was uneasy, at best, with each man constantly challenging and testing the other.

  One of the problems with the self-made men was that, as their companies grew from virtual one-man operations to giant multi-national corporations, their businesses exceeded their personal grasp. It was no longer possible for the one man at the top to keep a finger in every part of the corporate pie, to keep track of what every scattered department head was doing. By the 1950s, Mr. Sam Bronfman’s dictum, “I am company policy,” no longer made much sense since, with thousands of stockholders to account to, corps of lawyers and scientists and advertising experts whose advice had to be taken into consideration, Seagram’s company policy was really out of Mr. Sam’s hands altogether. His company had taken on a giant life of its own, and Mr. Sam was little more than a figurehead. Still, men like this had trouble relinquishing their sole and final authority. It was difficult for Mr. Sam to delegate authority to others, and hard for him to accept the fact that there were some decisions that were going to be made without him.

  Still, he continued to try to run Seagram’s as a one-man show, continually poking his head into offices to make sure that his people were doing the jobs assigned them, asking for reports from regional sales heads and account executives, scrutinizing contracts and merger documents that he no longer fully understood, always certain that the moment his attention wandered, dirty deals would be pulled behind his back. Mr. Sam had often said that one of the secrets of his success was “work, hard work,” and it was difficult for him to adjust to the fact that the hardest work was now being done by teams of others, or by sophisticated machines; that much of his company was automated and no longer needed, or wanted, his personal supervision. Still, he would not let go the reins.

  Because of the boss’s mercurial nature, the personnel of the Seagram executive suite lived in a state of perpetual terror, and in a perpetual revolving door. Not even their weekends were free, for Mr. Sam thought nothing of calling a secretary on a Saturday night or a Sunday morning to fire off his orders and commands. Higher-ups learned that the most effective way of dealing with Mr. Sam was to give him a wide berth. In Bronfman Dynasty, the Canadian writer Peter C. Newman tells the tale of Frank Marshall, a director of export sales who so dreaded confrontations with the boss that he arranged to be out of town whenever Mr. Sam was in town—an easy thing to do since Marshall’s duties carried him all over the world. Marshall even kept a packed suitcase in his office so that, in case Mr. Sam made a surprise visit, he could be out the door and on his way to the airport and to some foreign shore where Seagram’s did business before the boss collared him.

  After a while, however, Mr. Sam began to realize that it had been a long time since he had seen his export director, and the word went out: “Find Marshall. Mr. Sam wants to see him.” Still Marshall managed to be elusi
ve.

  In 1951, Seagram’s celebrated Mr. Sam’s “official” sixtieth birthday, though he was actually sixty-two, with a gala dinner in the ballroom of Montreal’s Windsor Hotel. There were the usual windy speeches and presentations extolling the genius and generosity of the company’s worthy founder, and recitations of the successes of all the years past. Then the evening turned to what were intended to be more lighthearted matters. An elaborate film had been prepared as a spoof of some of the activities of Seagram’s executives. A screen was lowered, the lights were dimmed, the movie began, and, as Peter Newman relates it:

  Sam was sitting in the front row … enjoying himself hugely, laughing as he watched scenes of slightly tipsy Egyptian army officers toasting one another with Crown Royal on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. This was followed by a long-shot of a Bedouin riding a camel toward the Pyramids, bottle tucked into his burnoose. The camel approached the camera. Sam suddenly sat up, peering at its swaying rider. The focus was much tighter now, and the “Bedouin,” it became clear, was none other than Frank Marshall in long nightshirt with a fez on his head, brandishing a bottle of V.O.

  Sam leaped out of his chair. Pointing excitedly toward the image of his errant export manager, he bellowed at the screen, “There’s the son of a bitch! That’s where he’s been spending his time! Riding a goddamn camel!”

  It was a while before Sam had calmed down, and the movie could proceed.

  Someone in the company had to take on the job of being Mr. Sam’s handmaiden and at his constant beck and call. In Hollywood a similar system had evolved for the care and feeding of the movie moguls. Sam Marx, a former story editor at MGM, has recalled how once, on the studio lot, he encountered L. B. Mayer strolling down the sidewalk, an attentive secretary at his side. Mayer and Marx fell into a conversation, and the secretary excused herself. Then the two men parted, and walked off in different directions. Presently the secretary reappeared, running down the sidewalk after Mr. Marx, crying, “Where’s L.B.?” Marx replied that he had last seen him walking off in a northerly direction. “My God!” cried the secretary. “He must never be left alone!”

  It was no different with Mr. Sam. On his travels, an underling had to be assigned to accompany him. For one short airplane trip, during which there would be no meal service, an elaborate airborne picnic had been planned. Once they were in the air, however, and Mr. Sam had announced that he was ready to eat, the luckless aide realized that he had left the picnic basket behind in the trunk of his car. Mr. Sam jumped from his seat and began marching up and down the aisle of the plane, pointing at his cowering assistant and shouting to all the other passengers, “See him, there he is! There’s the goddamned fool! I’m surrounded by lunatics!”

  Though Peter Newman’s book, from its title onward, tries to make the case that Sam Bronfman saw himself as the founder of a family “dynasty,” most of the Eastern European tycoons seem to have been rather reluctant dynasts. Unlike the European House of Rothschild, or the interrelated German-Jewish families of New York, where positions of power and trust were doled out to family members generation after generation, the Russian Jews, when they practiced nepotism, tended to give their relatives big titles but little authority, and to keep them close to home, where they could be kept out of trouble, and monitor their every move. Sam and Frances Goldwyn’s son, Sam Jr., was given the title of producer in the Goldwyn organization, but was given almost nothing of importance to do. Helena Rubinstein, who had at least a dozen relatives on her payroll—sisters, nieces, nephews—never let it be forgotten that she, and only she, made all final decisions. On her two sons, Horace and Roy, she continued to blow hot and cold, praising them as geniuses in one breath, calling them stupid fools in the next. The boys would be handed challenging assignments one day, only to have them taken away the day following. Meanwhile, as her cosmetics empire grew, the command post became Madame Rubinstein’s bedroom on the bottom floor of her Park Avenue triplex. Here, on an extraordinary Lucite bed, its head- and footboards eerily illuminated with hidden flourescent lights, the plump little president pushed telephone buttons, scrawled uncertainly spelled memorandums, ate lunch—wiping her fingers on the coverlet and blowing her nose into the satin sheets—and, as she grew older, worked on her will. This massive document was rewritten almost daily, as relatives who had displeased her temporarily were written out of it and then, if they had managed to redeem themselves, written back into it again. It was a will that, on her death in 1965, would reveal her as one of the richest women in the world. She was either ninety-four or ninety-nine, and her personal fortune was over one hundred million dollars. The bulk of it went not to her sons, but to a foundation for “Women and Children.”

  At Seagram, Mr. Sam’s elder son, Edgar, was assumed to be the crown prince and heir apparent. But, again, Edgar Bronfman was given titles in the company but little in the way of authority, as Mr. Sam continued to test his son’s “readiness.” Physically, Edgar resembled his pudgy father not at all. Tall, slender, dark, and handsome—even dashing—he looked like a youthful version of the actor Joseph Cotten. He also had a reputation for enjoying high living—nightclubs, fast cars, motorcycles, and the company of film stars. His father often accused him of being a “playboy.” But there was a toughness about Edgar that he had inherited from his father, and a quick temper, and employees at Seagram quickly learned to treat Edgar Bronfman with extreme respect. Edgar was shrewd. He had waited until he was old enough—shades of the days of the czars’ forced conscriptions of Russian Jews!—to escape being drafted into the United States Army, before he became an American citizen. He and his wife then proceeded to build the first full-scale estate that had been built in Westchester County in over a generation—manor house, tennis court, stables, garages, pool, pool house, helicopter landing pad—hard by what amounted to the family compound of his wife’s German-Jewish relatives, the Lehmans, Lewisohns, and Loebs.

  In the 1950s, a writer for the old Holiday magazine described Edgar’s new house as “a huge Georgian pile,” and Edgar was not amused. The editor of Holiday, Ted Patrick, was summarily summoned to appear, along with the writer of the story, at Edgar’s office to apologize for the slight. The threat, if this was not done, was that Seagram’s would cancel all its advertising in all Curtis magazines. These, at the time, included not only Holiday but the Saturday Evening Post. The Bronfman ultimatum was delivered to Ted Patrick while he was on a train between New York and Washington. Patrick’s reply was: “Tell Mr. Bronfman to fuck himself.”

  Later, Patrick would admit that he had taken this stand with some trepidation. The Saturday Evening Post was already in shaky financial circumstances, and the loss of Seagram’s advertising would amount to several million dollars a year. But, in the end, Patrick’s hunch proved right. Seagram did not cancel its Curtis budget—reportedly because Mr. Sam had called his son into his office and reprimanded him for overstepping himself, muttering gruffly, “We advertise in those magazines because we need them, not because they need us.”

  But though the episode ended as a tempest in a teapot, it showed that Edgar Bronfman was a man to be reckoned with.

  In the summer of 1957, Edgar Bronfman, then twenty-eight, confronted his father and told him that it was time for him to be made president of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons. Mr. Sam disagreed, and took the position that Edgar might be better suited to work in a field other than the liquor business. A stormy scene followed, at the end of which Edgar stood up and said, “If you’re saying that the company isn’t good enough for me, then I don’t want to work for it.” It sounded like another ultimatum and Mr. Sam, after consulting with his wife, knuckled under, and gave Edgar what he wanted.

  This might never have happened, however, had not Mr. Sam, over the previous few years, made an important marketing mistake for Seagram’s—one of the very few mistakes, if not the only one, that he would ever admit to making in his life. He had refused to take seriously the growing popularity of vodka in the United States. He had
been repeatedly advised by others in the company, including his son, of the trend toward vodka, and had been urged to get into the vodka business. But Mr. Sam, ever the believer in the supremacy of blended whiskeys, refused to accept the fact that Americans would take up a drink that had absolutely no taste or aroma, and one that was associated with Soviet Russia to boot. By the late 1950s, with competing companies capitalizing on the new vodka craze, Mr. Sam—while stubbornly maintaining that the fad would not last—reluctantly agreed that his judgment had been wrong. His son then had the exquisite pleasure of telling his overbearing father, “I told you so.”

  A great deal has been written about Italian-American “crime families” in which sons were trained to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. But Jewish criminals, with whom the Italians frequently did business, had different notions. Though, like the Italians, they were family men, the Jews did not have dynastic ambitions for their sons to succeed them in lives of crime—the “Godfather” syndrome, as it were. On the contrary, the Jewish gangsters usually saw to it that their children were educated in the finest boarding schools and colleges, and that they were otherwise steered into lives of traditional American upper-class respectability and civic rectitude. Their sons were educated to be doctors, lawyers, scientists, and they guided their daughters into marriages with solid, upstanding young men who had charge accounts at Brooks Brothers. For the most part, the family of the Jewish gangster was kept unaware of what the breadwinner did for a living. (“In real estate,” Meyer Lansky’s wife would say, which, in a sense, was true.) As Mickey Cohen put it, “We had a code of ethics like the ones among bankers, other people in other walks of life, that one never involved his wife or family in his work.” Like the socialists and reformers, the Jewish gangsters saw an American system that was skewed and bent in favor of the rich and well-established, where the cards were stacked against the immigrant and the poor. Gangsterism offered a simple shortcut, outside the system, to money and power and social mobility. Once these had been achieved, the next generation was supposed to give the family “a good name.”