The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  By the early 1970s, Edgar’s marriage to the former Ann Loeb was in difficulties. But since his college escapade, with the exception of one or two defiant gestures, Edgar had remained very much under his father’s thumb. When the possibility of a divorce was brought up, his father would not hear of it. He had set his dynastic hopes on Edgar. Edgar and Ann Bronfman had produced five handsome children, four of them sons. Besides, one divorce in the family was enough. “I’ve set it up much better than the Rothschilds,” Sam once said. “They spread the children. I’ve kept them together.” By this he meant that he had kept the money, and the power, of the family firmly in his own direct line. His brothers, and their children, were permitted only the leftovers.

  But the patriarch was growing old, and he was ill and losing his grip. By 1970, even he knew that he was dying of cancer. He died in the summer of 1971—unknighted, still an outsider to both the U.S. and Canadian social establishments he had spent his life trying to join.

  The mantle fell upon Edgar, then forty-two. He responded by almost immediately kicking up his heels in ways not usually associated with “people who are solid.” But then, no doubt he felt that he had earned his stripes, and now that he was his own boss, had the right to exercise the perquisites that went with heading a great family business.

  His first priorities were personal, however. He immediately took steps to divorce his wife, and the marriage was terminated in 1973. Soon after that, his name was sensationally in the newspapers. He was engaged to marry a beautiful, blond twenty-eight-year-old titled Englishwoman, Lady Carolyn Townshend. Lady Carolyn was described as a descendant of Viscount Townshend of Raynham, who introduced scientific fanning to England in 1730 by feeding his cattle turnips during winter months, which had earned him the sobriquet “Turnip Townshend.” Lady Carolyn had been married, and divorced, once before, and she and Edgar had known each other since 1968, when she had gone to work in Seagram’s London offices.

  Edgar’s premarital settlement on Her Ladyship, who explained that she liked financial security, was generous, and well publicized. She would receive $1,000,000 in cash; the deed to Edgar’s country estate in Westchester County would be placed in her name; she was allowed to select $115,000 worth of jewelry; and she was to be given—in addition to all expenses of running a household—an allowance of $4,000 a month as personal pocket money to spend as she chose. A lavish wedding took place in December of 1973 at the Saint Regis Hotel in New York. But the aftermath was considerably less cheerful, according to court testimony that followed soon afterward.

  On their wedding night, Lady Carolyn banished Edgar to his Manhattan apartment, and refused to join him on their nuptial bed. This situation continued, according to Edgar, during their honeymoon in Acapulco. Thus rebuffed, Edgar took Lady Carolyn to court to break the premarital agreement. The testimony was spicy, to say the least. In Acapulco, declared Lady Carolyn, Edgar had spoken bluntly of his desires, which Lady Carolyn did not consider a very gentlemanly or romantic approach. “I told Edgar he was not being very affectionate with me,” she testified. Edgar denied this, and in turn testified that his bride “had a hangup about sex after the marriage”—adding that she had shown no such sexual inhibitions during the courtship period. The impression grew that Lady Carolyn had lost interest in sex as soon as the prenuptial agreement had been signed. In the end, the court took Edgar’s side, and Lady Carolyn was ordered to return the million, the deed, and the jewels. Edgar agreed to alimony of forty thousand dollars a year for eleven years. Naturally, there were some people who expressed surprise that the young president of Seagram’s would go to court to air his sex life in such a public way but, as Edgar explained it, “I hate to be taken.”

  The next Bronfman sensation occurred barely a year later, in the summer of 1975. His twenty-three-year-old son, Samuel Bronfman II, left the family’s Westchester estate one evening to visit friends and a few hours later telephoned the family butler to say, “Call my father. I’ve been kidnapped!” For the next few days, the Bronfman estate was the storm center of frantic comings and goings of police cars, helicopters, and FBI agents, while hundreds of newspaper reporters set up camp outside the gates. At length, a ransom demand was received—for 4.5 million dollars in twenty-dollar bills, the largest ransom ever asked in American kidnapping history. Raising the money, Edgar Bronfman announced, would be no problem. The problem was logistical, since that much money in small bills would fill fourteen ordinary-sized suitcases. Presently, the ransom demand was cut in half, to 2.3 million, and on an August night Edgar handed this amount, stuffed into two large garbage bags, to a solitary figure near New York’s Queensborough Bridge who quickly drove off with the money. The next day, tipped off by a limousine driver named Dominic Byrne, who had been a part of the scheme but who had got cold feet, police found young Sam, bound and blindfolded, in the Brooklyn apartment of a fireman named Mel Patrick Lynch. The youth was unharmed.

  In the lengthy trial that followed, the story grew more lurid and bizarre. Lynch claimed that he had first met young Bronfman in a gay bar in Manhattan, and that the two had become homosexual lovers. Together, with an assist from Byrne, they had cooked up the kidnapping scheme as a means of extracting money from young Sam’s father. Young Sam hotly denied this, and claimed that he had spent his days in Lynch’s apartment lashed to a chair with rope, unable to move, and in terror of his life. But the story began to seem less than likely when a juror asked to examine the rope with which Sam, a strapping six foot three, had been bound. When the juror picked up the rope, it fell apart in several places. Why hadn’t Sam, who had been left alone for several periods, been able to wriggle free? Then there was the puzzling matter of the tape-recorded message that had come from young Sam to his father, imploring Edgar to pay the ransom as quickly as possible. At the end of this entreaty, the youth was heard to turn to his captors and say, in a normal tone of voice, “Hold it, I’ll do it again.” In the end, the jury acquitted both Lynch and Byrne of kidnapping, but found them guilty of the lesser charge of attempted extortion.

  Immediately after the trial, Edgar and young Sam held an angry press conference in the Seagram Building, during which they defended young Sam’s honor, his heterosexuality, his lack of a motive—he had all the money in the world already, young Sam pointed out—and condemned everyone connected with the trial: the judge, the jury, the police, the FBI, and, for good measure, the press itself.

  Three days later, the Bronfman kidnapping story ended with a touch of soap opera—the gala wedding, in Westchester, of Edgar Bronfman to Miss Georgiana Eileen Webb. Like the previous Mrs. Bronfman, she was younger than her husband—just two years older than young Sam—and English, though her background was somewhat different from that of Lady Carolyn Townshend. Her father ran a pub in Finchingfield, northeast of London, where the bride had worked as a barmaid. The pub was called Ye Olde Nosebag, and the press had a good time with “liquor baron weds barmaid” stories. The new Mrs. Bronfman announced her intention of converting to Judaism to please her husband. Meanwhile, someone had come up with the discovery that old Mr. Sam Bronfman’s estate in Tarrytown had been sold to, and converted into the American headquarters of, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

  Not long afterward, young Sam Bronfman himself was married to a Jewish girl named Melanie Mann.

  While the Bronfman family’s private lives were taking on something of an air of a three-ring circus, Edgar Bronfman was also demonstrating an ability to make headlines in the financial pages. He had always been more than a little stage-struck and, in the 1960s—against his father’s wishes—he had joined forces with producer Stuart Ostrow to form Sagittarius Productions, which had as some of its more conspicuous hits the musicals 1776, The Apple Tree, and Pippin, along with some better-forgotten failures. Then, in 1967, Edgar decided to buy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—another decision his father strongly opposed. After Seagram’s had laid out some forty million dollars in the takeover attempt, Mr. Sam nervously called his son aside and said, “Tell me
, Edgar, are we buying all this stock in MGM just so you can get laid?” To which Edgar breezily replied, “Oh, no, Pop. It doesn’t cost forty million dollars to get laid.” Though Edgar briefly succeeded in getting on the MGM board, the takeover eventually failed, and how much the company lost in the process has never been revealed, though the financial press placed the figure in the neighborhood of ten million dollars.

  By 1981 Mr. Sam Bronfman was dead, and that was the year Edgar decided to take another giant plunge, and placed himself at the center of one of the great corporate takeover battles of that year. Seagram’s, it seemed, found itself with the embarrassing sum of 3.7 billion dollars lying about and waiting to be invested. The target Edgar decided to go after was the smallish but very lucrative oil company known as Conoco. Another giant corporation that also had its eye on Conoco was DuPont of Delaware. In the battle of giants that ensued, Seagram bought twenty-seven percent of Conoco’s stock before being outmaneuvered by DuPont. But the fight ended in more or less a draw, and Edgar was not altogether unhappy with the outcome. Nor were Seagram’s losses what they had been in the case of MGM. With the conversion of Conoco to DuPont stock that followed the acquisition, Seagram wound up owning twenty percent of DuPont—more than any single member of the du Pont family,* and enough to send Edgar Bronfman sailing onto DuPont’s board of directors.

  Today, Edgar Bronfman continues to swim upstream in the riskiest financial waters, taking his wins and his losses with the same almost brash élan. Like his father, who once quipped that mankind’s greatest invention was not the wheel, but interest, Edgar is the author of the oft-quoted monetary epigram: “To turn a hundred dollars into a hundred and ten dollars is work. To turn a hundred million into a hundred and ten million is inevitable.” Thus the rich get richer. At the time of the Conoco fight, with all that Seagram money burning holes in his pockets, he told a reporter he had asked himself, “What would my father do?” Then he promptly answered his own question with, “Hell, he never had three-point-seven billion!”

  *Which does not capitalize the d as the company does.

  19

  FROM POLAND TO POLO

  Though they seemed blessed—or cursed, depending on how one looked at it—with extraordinary longevity, the founding Russian-Jewish moguls, the men who, as they said, had made it from Poland to polo in one generation, were going one by one. In January, 1973, Adolph Zukor sat in a suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles waiting to go downstairs to join the gala dinner party that Paramount Pictures was tossing to honor the founder’s one hundredth birthday. No expense had been spared for the party—for such items as seventy crates of rose petals, thirty gross of balloons, and a fourteen-foot-high birthday cake made, appropriately enough, of frosting-coated plywood.

  Understandably, in the months of preparation and planning that had gone into the event—making sure that such people as Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, Anne Baxter, Liv Ullmann, Jimmy Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Bette Davis would all be there—there had been some apprehension on the part of Paramount’s board of directors that the elderly honoree might not make it to his own centennial. And, upstairs in his suite, Mr. Zukor was cross. Though he moved slowly, he was able to move about—to make it unaided from his car, two or three times a week, into the card room of the Hillcrest Country Club, where, though he himself no longer played, he liked to watch his friends play bridge and gently kibitz from time to time. His health was fine, he insisted. But now, in their precautionary state, the men who ran his company were insisting that he make his entrance onto the stage in a wheelchair, like an invalid. Furthermore, lest he become overexcited, his entrance was to be delayed until the moment when the huge cake would be rolled in. Zukor was being required to watch the rest of the festive proceedings on a closed-circuit television screen. Furious, he watched as his guests sipped cocktails and otherwise disported themselves in the ballroom below. Finally, Adolph Zukor would have no more of it. Banging his cane on the floor he cried, “God damn it, if I’m supposed to be the star of this show I’m not going to spend all my time waiting in the wings! Take me down!” He was taken down. He died four years later, at a hundred and four.

  Meanwhile, a whole new Russian-Jewish generation was moving up to fill the shoes, and eventually eclipse the accomplishments, of the oldsters. Brash and young, ambitious and daring and willing to try for the long shot, not all these new entrepreneurs were heirs to great family fortunes like Edgar Bronfman. Some were starting, just as their predecessors had, from scratch, with nothing more than a bright idea and a gambler’s nerve. Once again, assimilation was the goal, and, as the older generation had found, assimilation seemed to involve financial success first, and then, it was hoped, some degree of social acceptance by the American establishment. But, once again with this younger generation, assimilation would prove to be a double-edged sword, involving, as it did, the emotional choice of how much Jewishness to retain and how much to abandon on one’s journey of upward mobility. Sometimes, in order to assimilate into a new culture or new economic stratum it is necessary to totally deny the old, and in the process, something precious may be lost—a sense of who one really is, or where one came from. To assimilate, after all, means to make oneself similar, to adapt, to blend in, to assume the tone and style and coloration of one’s surroundings. But what are the limits of assimilation? At what point does the assimilationist become the apostate? At what point does the assimilationist say good-bye, for instance, to his grandparents or even to his parents? These are questions that many young and successful American Jews of Russian descent would find it difficult to answer in the 1970s.

  Ralph Lauren, for example, would much rather talk about his considerable success as a designer than whether he is, or is not, Jewish. “I’m so sick of being described as a poor little Jewish boy from the Bronx who’s made good,” he says. “Yes, I was born in the Bronx—but in the nice part, the west Bronx, the Mosholu Parkway section, near Riverdale, and I had a wonderful childhood. My parents weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor either.” His father was a painter who specialized in faux bois and faux marbre work, and did an occasional industrial mural. “And I’m sick of hearing about how I changed my name. The name was Lifschitz. Do you know what it’s like growing up as a kid in New York with a name like that? It has ‘shit’ in it. And I didn’t change the name. My older brother suggested the change when I was sixteen. We all changed. Still,” he adds, “I’m told that the name Lifschitz is a very distinguished name in Russia.”*

  After graduating from City College, where he majored in business, a major he hated—“My mother wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or at least an accountant”—he worked as a clerk in various New York stores, including Brooks Brothers, where he was able to buy classically styled clothes at a discount.

  Meanwhile, as the youngest of three boys in the family, Ralph Lauren was often given hand-me-down clothes to wear. Though these outfits were sometimes out of style, Lauren learned to make the most of this fact. An old belted Norfolk jacket, for instance, could, with an upturned collar and the addition of a jaunty scarf, be made to look snappy and debonair. Pleated slacks might have become passé, but with the right belt, shoes, shirt, and other accessories, the young Ralph Lauren—with his close-cropped dark hair, his blue eyes, perfect teeth, and lithe build—could make them look both sporty and sexy. Girls, in particular, began to tell him they liked the way he dressed because he looked “different.” All this was in the late 1950s. While his contemporaries were wearing leather jackets, driving motorcycles, and listening to rock music, Lauren was embracing an earlier tradition—that of the 1920s, and The Great Gatsby, and the Ivy League look. He was already, like Helena Rubinstein a generation earlier, proving himself a clever adapter—a master of juxtaposition and pastiche, taking old styles from the American past and from English country and hunting fashions, and giving them new flair.

  His first job with a manufacturer was with Beau Brummel Ties, which made inexpensive snap-on bow ties. Lauren
, whose fashion idols were such vintage movie stars as Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Cary Grant, along with such public figures as John Lodge, John F. Kennedy, and the Duke of Windsor, asked Beau Brummel if they would let him experiment with marketing wide neckties, such as the Duke of Windsor had made famous. Beau Brummel agreed, and Lauren and his brother Jerry sat up late one night at the kitchen table tossing around ideas for names. “We wanted something that sounded tweedy, sporty, elegant, English, expensive,” Lauren says. The choice of names began to narrow down to those of upper-crust sports. Cricket, rugby, fox hunting, and quail shooting were considered and rejected. Finally, Jerry Lauren suggested polo, the most upper-crust, expensive, exclusive international sport in the world. At first, the sales of Ralph Lauren’s Polo line of neckties were poor. Narrow neckties were the fashion then, and his were a full four inches wide. In his secondhand Morgan sports car—with a wide leather strap across its bonnet in the manner of the old MG—Lauren tooled about the North Shore of Long Island with his ties in a suitcase, trying to convince shop owners that these were the ties Jay Gatsby would have worn. Then Bloomingdale’s hove into view with a small order. The Polo ties were no sooner displayed than they were snapped up.

  Ralph Lauren is the first to admit that, at the time, the four-inch-wide ties did not look quite right with the then-prevailing fashions in men’s wear. “I saw that you needed shirts and suits to go with the ties,” he says. But he was also not really a designer. His drawing ability was amateurish at best. He knew nothing about the sizing of garments. He could not sew, and could not even pin up a hem. He needed someone to execute his ideas. But Beau Brummel, a conservative, old-fashioned firm, was reluctant to branch out into anything beyond neckwear. And so, in 1969, still working out of a drawer—“not an office, a drawer”—in New York’s garment district, Lauren approached Norman Hilton, an established men’s-wear manufacturer, with the idea of producing a full line of men’s clothing under the Polo label. Hilton responded by offering Lauren fifty thousand dollars’ worth of credit and a partnership in the business.