The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The parting with Beau Brummel was friendly, and Ned Brower, the company’s president, cheerfully let Lauren take the Polo name with him, along with a small inventory of neckties. Today, of course, Ned Brower looks back on his 1969 generosity with a certain amount of rue. “Given hindsight, considering what’s happened since,” he says, “I wish I’d asked for five percent of the action. Still, if I’d kept the name and lost the man behind it, it might not have been the same.”

  What happened, according to Ralph Lauren, “is that I got the chance to do my own look. No one had ever done a whole line of men’s wear before me, there were no men’s designers in the United States before me.” And when, in 1973, Ralph Lauren launched his line of clothes for women, he became the first designer to go from men’s wear into women’s wear, and not the other way around. Other popular men’s-wear designers—Pierre Cardin, Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini, Calvin Klein, Yves St. Laurent, and Hardy Amies—started out designing clothes for the opposite sex.

  The rapid rise from itinerant tie peddler to his current preeminent position on the fashion scene was not without its bumpy passages for Lauren. Theoni V. Aldredge, for example, is a well-known costume designer for the Broadway stage and films. When it was announced that she would be designing the clothes for the 1973 remake of the film The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford, Lauren’s star was just beginning to rise, but the movie seemed a natural for him. He telephoned Miss Aldredge and asked for an appointment. They met, she admired his clothes, and he was given the assignment of turning out the men’s clothes for the movie, including Jay Gatsby’s famous pink suit. Miss Aldredge says, “I did all the designs, selected all the colors and fabrics. I got a full-frame credit as costume designer, and an Academy Award to prove it. Ralph Lauren got a much smaller credit—‘Men’s clothes executed by.…’ There’s a big difference between designing and executing someone else’s designs.” The trouble was that the film was one of those in which the clothes got more critical praise than the actors’ performances. According to Miss Aldredge, Ralph Lauren tried to capitalize on this by claiming that he had “created the Gatsby look.” So much publicity to this effect began appearing in the press that Miss Aldredge had to complain bitterly to Paramount and Lauren to get them to stop it.

  Nor has Ralph Lauren’s climb to huge success been without emotional rough spots. Both he and his wife, Ricky—whom he met when she was working as a receptionist for his eye doctor—insist that they are total perfectionists. When they acquired their vast Fifth Avenue duplex with its commanding view of Central Park and the reservoir, Ralph Lauren confessed to a friend that he “practically wound up in a hospital with a nervous breakdown,” because of his inability to come up with a design solution for so much space. At length, the interior designer Angelo Donghia was brought in, and the result is starkly minimalist, all white, mirrored, with glass and chrome furniture, many banana trees, and empty spaces. “The apartment seems all wrong for them,” says another friend. “Perhaps because they’re both quite small, they seem lost in it, like aliens from another planet. They argue over which oversize white sofa they ought to sit in. But they try very hard. When Architectural Digest was photographing the apartment, Ralph made Ricky change her clothes—as though what she was wearing was all wrong. I’ve never seen two people trying to lead such relentlessly perfect lives.”

  Meanwhile, what started as a suitcase enterprise has expanded, in barely a decade’s time, to include complete lines of men’s and women’s clothes and shoes, boys’ wear and girls’ wear, lines called Western Wear and Rough Wear, luggage and small leather goods, men’s and women’s fragrances and cosmetics, and home furnishings—sheets, towels, pillowcases, and even glassware. Franchised are some twenty-two Polo by Ralph Lauren retail stores across the country, concentrated in such wealthy watering places as Carmel, Beverly Hills, and Palm Beach, and more are on the drawing boards. This sudden Lauren empire has provided Ralph and Ricky Lauren and their three children with, in addition to the extraordinary apartment, a getaway house in the Hamptons—“East Hampton, the best Hampton,” Lauren points out; a winter retreat in Round Hill, Jamaica, that formerly belonged to Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon; a sprawling horse and cattle ranch in southwestern Colorado, which Lauren admits he has no idea what to do with; and a private jet to carry the Laurens between these places.

  One wonders what Lauren’s Russian-born parents, who emigrated to the United States after the revolution, think of what has become of little Ralphie Lifschitz who used to play stoop-ball and stickball in the Bronx. But despite repeated efforts on the part of journalists to find an answer to this question, Ralph Lauren’s parents remain an area of his life that he is reluctant to discuss.

  Of course one could argue that Ralph Lauren, at forty-four, has not yet had time to grow into, and adjust to, the role of business tycoon. And though there was perhaps not that much difference between Lauren peddling neckties in a secondhand car in the 1960s and David Sarnoff peddling newspapers in a converted packing crate in 1900, David Sarnoff had become by the 1960s a suave and self-assured paterfamilias of the radio and telecommunications industry, had ripened to his position. His personal trademarks had become the heavy gold watch chain draped across his ample front, the large cigar in the ivory holder that was invariably clenched between two plump fingers, and in his lapel, one or another of the ribbons and decorations he had been awarded by American and foreign governments, including those he had received as a brigadier general in World War II, when he had served as General Eisenhower’s chief of communications. In the process, he had also developed an enormous ego.

  As he moved toward the end of his life, he had begun to think of it as a kind of parable, or Aesopian fable, in which every event had a neat moral attached at the end. There was the strange story, for example, of the mysterious woman who had handed him two hundred dollars to buy his first newsstand. The tale had its payoff, many years later, when Sarnoff himself had become a philanthropist, when dozens of colleges and universities had bestowed honorary degrees in the arts and sciences on him, and New York’s Stuyvesant High School had presented him with an honorary diploma to make up for the one he had never earned. One evening Sarnoff was attending a Jewish philanthropic gathering, and suddenly “found himself staring at a sweet-faced, gray-haired woman, evidently a social worker.” He recognized her as his benefactress from Monroe Street.

  She explained how it had all come about. At the time, she had been a secretary “to a wealthy, big-hearted man who wanted to help people anonymously.” She had been dispatched to the Lower East Side to seek out worthy recipients. Sarnoff’s name had been supplied to her by none other than school superintendent Julia Richman, who had been impressed by young Sarnoff’s spunky stand against the English teacher who had inveighed against the “Jewish traits” of Shylock. Typically, when he told this tale, Sarnoff never supplied a name for either the “social worker/secretary” or her “big-hearted” employer, but the moral was clear: he who stands firm against bigotry will reap spiritual and material rewards.

  Nor, in his role of moralist—or perhaps fabulist—did he forsake his role as prophet. In 1958, he told Wisdom magazine what he foresaw for the year 1978, which he himself would not live to reach. Among other things, he predicted the effective harnessing of solar energy; global, full-color television; automation (including men working only two hours a day and robots taking over nine million clerical tasks); the “farming of oceans for nutritive products”; a life span “within hailing distance of the century mark”; the end of the Soviet republic and the Communist hierarchy; universal communications and speedy transportation shrinking the whole world into a neighborhood; the outlawing of war as an instrument of international policy; and, above all, “as a reaction against current cynicism and materialism, there will be an upsurge of spiritual vitality.”

  But Sarnoff the visionary also remained to the very end Sarnoff the canny businessman. In 1965, when Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, the heads of Random House publish
ers, wanted to sell their company, Sarnoff decided that Random House, which had published such distinguished authors as William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and George Bernard Shaw, would be an elegant capstone to RCA’s communications empire. Naturally, he wanted to acquire this little gem for as little money as possible.

  His first offer was half a share of RCA stock for each share of Random House. This was rejected by Cerf as too low. Sarnoff soon came back with another offer—three-fifths of a share of RCA stock for each Random share, a sixty percent offer instead of fifty, and a considerable increase. But this still did not satisfy Cerf and Klopfer, who asked for sixty-two one-hundredths of a share instead of sixty one-hundredths. Two one-hundredths of a share might not have seemed much to haggle over, but in money it amounted to more than a million dollars.

  Negotiations remained at a standoff for several weeks. Then a High Noon confrontation was scheduled at Sarnoff’s town house on East Seventy-first Street for a Sunday in December. Cerf arrived for the meeting to find Sarnoff’s wife watching a boring and unimportant football game on NBC. Cerf reminded her that the good game that afternoon was on CBS. “I don’t watch CBS,” Lizette Sarnoff replied loyally, and then, remembering Bennett Cerf’s long affiliation with the rival network, added, “The only thing I watch on CBS is What’s My Line?”

  Then the two businessmen got down to the matter at hand. Sarnoff was adamant. Sixty percent was as high as he would go. Cerf was equally firm. Sixty-two percent was as low as he would go, and, Cerf added, since things seemed to have reached a stalemate, they might as well forget the deal and sit back and enjoy the game. Sarnoff paced the room, silently fuming. Finally he exploded.

  “You may not realize it, Bennett,” he shouted, “but you’re dealing with a very arrogant and egotistical man!”

  Cerf replied calmly, “General, I’m just as arrogant and egotistical as you are. Let’s watch the game.”

  “We had better talk tomorrow,” said Sarnoff, to which Cerf replied that there was really no point in further discussion, and besides, he was leaving the next day for California and a holiday.

  Sarnoff was flabbergasted, and said, “You mean to say that with this deal hanging fire, you’re going to go off on vacation?”

  Cerf reminded him that there was no deal hanging fire, since he had already rejected Sarnoff’s final offer.

  There followed several weeks of silence from the board chairman of RCA, during which Cerf began seriously to wonder if he had overplayed his hand and, in the process, lost a sale that would have amounted to some forty million dollars. But a few weeks, it seemed, was the face- and ego-saving period required of Sarnoff before he could capitulate. In the end, Sarnoff came back, grumbling that Cerf was being very difficult, and offering him, as a magnanimous gesture, what Cerf had been asking for all along—sixty-two percent.

  Using the royal first-person plural, Sarnoff said loftily, “We’re not going to argue with you over that two one-hundredths of a share.”

  Ego—it could almost take the place of a religion. Since it was not possible, or even theologically appropriate, to attribute to the Deity the bountiful good fortunes that had fallen upon the shoulders of these Eastern European immigrants, what remained to celebrate was the Self. One could not even credit ancestors, or the importance of good genes, when one looked back at one’s life and saw the awesomeness of everything that had happened. The ancestors, in nearly every case, had been poor, not arrogant, for more generations than anyone could count, and lay in unknown weedy graveyards with their Hebrew inscriptions tipped askew above their heads, in places whose names were no longer on any map. Who else could the self-made man worship but himself? “A very arrogant and egotistical man.…” The closest things to religious holidays became the anniversaries of the self—the birthdays, the wedding commemorations, the funerals.

  For Mr. Sam Bronfman’s funeral in 1971, Jewish tradition was abandoned altogether. Judaism treats death as a very private affair, frowns on pomp and oratory, and particularly opposes the public displaying of the remains of the deceased. But Mr. Sam lay in state, in a silver shroud and an open coffin, in the center of the great rotunda of the Montreal headquarters of the Canadian Jewish Congress. At the funeral services, eulogy followed eulogy from prominent laymen, in defiance of Jewish custom, which dictates a simple homily delivered by a rabbi. The Seagram executives who had planned the ceremony also saw to it that the mourners included as many Christian leaders as possible from both Canadian and U.S. business, political, and academic communities, the irony being that many of these men and women had snubbed him all his life.

  In California, Frances Goldwyn had given lavish birthday parties for her husband for nearly fifty years, and the big house at 1200 Laurel Lane had been the scene of many other grand entertainments. Winston Churchill had dined there, as had President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, not to mention the movie royalty—Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, George Cukor, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and on and on. But by the late summer of 1973, the manicured croquet court at the foot of the sloping lawn lay empty and the house was strangely silent. The only sounds were the periodic beeps of the electronic surveillance system that patrolled the grounds, and the whispered comings and goings of the round-the-clock nurses and doctors who attended the ninety- (or, more likely, ninety-three-) year-old man who lay in an upstairs bedroom, incontinent and uncomprehending: Sam Goldwyn. He had been unable to attend—and had probably not been aware of—the hundredth birthday party of his onetime partner Adolph Zukor, earlier that year. He had lain this way for more than five years.

  Downstairs, Frances Goldwyn, greeting a few friends who had dropped in for a brief call, tried to put as cheerful a face on things as possible. “Oh, we have our little excitements,” she said. “We try, on most nice days, to wheel him out onto the upstairs deck for a little fresh air and sunshine. The other day, when the nurses weren’t looking, he toppled out of his wheelchair and cut himself. Oh, yes, there’s always something going on. He wouldn’t be Sam if there weren’t.” Some months before, President Nixon had come to the house to present Sam Goldwyn with an achievement medal. It had been possible to get the old producer dressed and photographed with the President, receiving the medal. There were even occasional flashes of the old fire, brief moments of lucidity when the old man would seem to realize what was going on—and there were even touches of humor in these. Richard Zanuck had come for a visit, and Goldwyn had suddenly begun berating him for making “a piece of filth like Hello, Dolly!” Bemused, Zanuck replied that while he did indeed plan to produce Hello, Dolly!, filming had not yet begun, and why should Sam describe a light-hearted musical as “a piece of filth”? Sam was insistent—Hello, Dolly!, he said, was “cheap pornography.” Finally, Zanuck thought he saw a connection, and said, “Sam, are you talking about Valley of the Dolls?” And Sam, true to his wife’s observation that, though you could be right, he could not be wrong, snapped back, “That’s right—Hello, Valley of the Dollies.”

  In 1972, when Charlie Chaplin had ended his twenty-year self-exile from America, and returned to Hollywood to receive a special Oscar from the motion picture academy, he was then eighty-three and aged into near senility himself. His picture had appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and a copy of the paper happened to be lying beside the bedridden Sam Goldwyn’s bed. Suddenly Goldwyn noticed it, sat up, and said hoarsely, “Is that Charlie? Is that Charlie?” Then, collapsing back into his pillow, he muttered, “He looks terrible.”

  For years, during the golden era, Sam and Frances Goldwyn had represented one of the most durable partnerships in Hollywood, a town not known for long and stable marriages. He, she often said, made “all the lordly decisions, and I see to it that all the bits and pieces are in good order.” With uncharacteristic modesty, Sam declared that this was too limited an appraisal of her role. “I’d be lost without Frances,” he said. “She’s the only real, close partner I’ve ever had.” It was true that she was one of the few people in Holl
ywood with whom he was able to get along. But the later years had not been easy. In 1969, after experiencing a series of circulatory ailments, Goldwyn named his wife to take over the operation of his studio and the management of his personal fortune, estimated then at twenty million dollars. A court order in Los Angeles approved a petition naming Frances Goldwyn as her husband’s conservator and placed Samuel Goldwyn Productions in her hands—none of which pleased the couple’s only son, Sam Jr. An eventual accord was reached. But from then on, relations between mother and son were strained.

  “Shall we go up and see him?” Frances Goldwyn suddenly suggested to her visitor. They mounted the curved staircase together and entered Sam Goldwyn’s dimly lighted bedroom. He lay—a huge man, grown obese from lack of exercise—hands folded on his stomach, gaze fixed on some indefinite space, flanked by life-sustaining apparatus. “It’s me, Sam,” said Frances. There was no visible response.

  Later, sipping one of her special martinis that she would allow no one else to fix—a special proportion of gin and water that only she understood—she said, “The doctors say that his heart is as strong as a twenty-year-old boy’s. Of course I think it’s mostly guts and pride that’s keeping him alive. This could go on for years and years.” Then, turning her back to be unzipped, Frances Goldwyn prepared to go upstairs again, change into a robe, and have her supper on a tray beside her silent husband.

  It did not go on for years and years. Within the year, Sam Goldwyn died in his sleep. Friends who had hoped that Frances would now be able to enjoy some well-earned freedom and travel were shocked when, not long after her husband’s death, she had a heart attack. Now it was she who lay speechless and immobilized in the upstairs room with nurses around the clock, able to communicate only by writing notes on slips of paper. She died two years later, in the summer of 1976, at seventy-three.