The Jews in America Trilogy (152 page)

In 1925, her name appeared briefly in the papers again when James Graham Phelps Stokes sued his wife for divorce. The Jewish Cinderella tale was over; the glass slipper had not fitted. Graham Stokes was charging his wife with “misconduct,” which was usually interpreted as a euphemism for adultery, but which was the only available grounds for divorce in New York State
at that time. Rose immediately issued an angry statement denying any wrongdoing on her part, denouncing New York's divorce laws, and saying that she and her husband had been agreeably disagreeing on many matters, political and otherwise, for years. Her bitter statement served no clear purpose, except that it brought all the old business of the Kansas City sedition trial out into the newspapers again. It was, however, an attempt to preserve some last shred of
yikhes
. Graham Stokes was granted his divorce later that year.

Not long afterward, he married Lettice Sands, a member of a socially prominent New York family that was related, through marriage, to the Pirie family of Chicago, who had founded Carson, Pirie, Scott. The new Mr. and Mrs. Stokes moved into an apartment at 88 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, not far from the University Settlement House, where he still maintained an active interest, and Hartley House, which he had founded. For some time afterward, Rose kept an apartment on Christopher Street, just across from the tiny park that separates Grove and Christopher streets, within full view of the Stokeses' new apartment. It was as though she had stationed herself there to keep an eye on her former husband and his new wife. The new Mrs. Stokes, however, was unaware of this situation, and if her husband knew, he never spoke of it. But the Stokeses' cook, Anna, who had also worked for Rose, and who liked her, was very much aware of it. In fact, it made Anna very nervous. Only when, after a few years, Rose finally gave up her lonely, angry vigil on Christopher Street, and moved elsewhere in the city, did Anna confess to Lettice Stokes that she had had a recurring nightmare about the two women living in such close proximity. She had been terrified that when Lettice walked her dog, which had also previously belonged to Rose, the dog might recognize Rose on the street, run to her, and there would be an unpleasant confrontation. But in the anonymity of the New York City streets this never happened, and the wife and ex-wife never met.

Throughout the late 1920s, Rose continued to appear as a participant in strikes, demonstrations, and labor rallies in the city—marching, shouting, wielding placards, ever the voluble and fiery militant. In 1929, she was arrested again in a garment workers' strike, and at the time it was revealed that she had
been secretly remarried—to an Eastern European Jew named Isaac Romaine, who was described as a “language instructor.”
*
That same year, a demonstration against the repression of the people of Haiti erupted into violence, and Rose was hospitalized for multiple bruises and contusions. At the time, she and her new husband were living at 215 Second Avenue, a dingy area near Fourteenth Street, where, it was said, poverty became her. She looked even more proud and beautiful than when she had married a rich man two dozen years earlier. She had, however, continued to use the name Rose Pastor Stokes, the name that had made her famous, even though the
Social Register
had long since stopped sending her its little annual questionnaire, and had dropped her from its pages.

*
Astrology was not his strong suit. In fact, he was a Virgo.

*
This, at least, was how the
New York Times
described him. Perhaps because Rose herself was by then slipping into obscurity, there is some confusion about the identity of her shadowy second husband. The
Universal Jewish Encyclopedia
(1943) gives his name as V. J. Jerome, and describes him as a “Marxist writer and editor.”

10

LITTLE CAESARS

Why, one might wonder, did so many Russian-Jewish businessmen—and women—once they had become successful, become more despotic and fearsome than the czars they had fled Russia to escape, the czars who took as their titles the Slavic form of “Caesar”? Was it because they had been too busy building their businesses to learn the subtle nuances of American speaking patterns, manners, and body language that mark the conventional, diplomatic, soft-spoken wealthy WASP? Was it because their success had come with such amazing speed that they had not had time to adjust to it? Was it because they were, for the most part, short in stature (their children and grandchildren, thanks to better nutrition, would tower over them), and had developed the so-called Napoleon complex of short men? Or was it because they had prospered in businesses—liquor, fashion, cosmetics, entertainment—that seemed, au fond, frivolous; that lacked the solid Protestant respectability of commercial banking, insurance, stockbrokerage, automobile manufacturing; that they were secretly ashamed of, and therefore defensive about? All these possibilities have been offered to explain the rough-diamond
qualities of the people who made these first-generation fortunes, and some or all may apply, but the real answer may lie deeper than that, in the kind of terrible compromise the Jew in America had to make between his new situation and his past. It was a compromise that was both psychological and sociological. For centuries, as W. H. Auden has pointed out, the Jews of Eastern Europe had lived under a system where an individual's identity and worth were defined by his lifetime membership in a class. Which particular class was not important, but it was a class from which neither success nor failure—except on an unlikely spectacular scale—could remove him. In the volatile, competitive spirit of America, however, any class or status was viewed as temporary, reversible. Any change in an individual's achievement altered it, and an individual's sense of personal value depended upon the continuous ups and downs of achievement. In this new Diaspora, where the values and desires of the poor were expected to be transformed in the twinkling of an eye to the values and desires of the rich and would-be rich, the result could be severe anxiety. Though the quick-success stories of the Eastern European Jews in the United States might read like fairy tales, they could seem like personal nightmares in real life.

What else but anxiety explains the apparent double identity of a man like, say, Samuel Bronfman—out of his immediate business element a shy, introverted, lost-looking, and uneasy little fellow, but hell on wheels in his office? If Meyer Lansky was the Little Caesar of the Underworld, Bronfman was the Little Caesar of Distilled Spirits. His fits of temper were legendary. A specially reinforced telephone had to be installed for him, because of his habit—whenever he heard something he disliked or disbelieved—of first holding the receiver away from his ear, snarling at it like an enraged wildcat, and then slamming it into its cradle with such force that a number of ordinary instruments had been shattered. He also not infrequently threw the entire telephone across the room, or at a visitor, yanking the cord out of the wall as he did so. Once he hurled a heavy paperweight at an employee, who managed to duck, and only a metal sash prevented the object from flying through a window and out into a busy street below. Trying to make light of this incident, his staff prepared a plaque to mark the point of the
paperweight's impact, in the wistful hope that such an outburst might not occur again.

He had a habit of pouncing into his employees' offices unexpectedly, with questions for which he demanded immediate answers. Woe betided the person who didn't know the answer or, even worse, who pretended that he did, and tried to fake it. Mr. Sam had an impressive vocabulary of abuse, and when aroused to fury, he would string his epithets together so that a son of a bitch would become “that lousy, no-good son of a son of a son of a bitch.” One Seagram executive likened his nature to a tiger's, but a more apt analogy would have been to a man-eating shark. After one particularly blistering outburst, at a dinner meeting, Sam had started throwing his food, and eventually his plate and all the crockery in sight, at a beleaguered associate, and then fired everyone in the room. Later, he was asked if he oughtn't to worry lest his tantrums brought on an ulcer. He growled in reply, “I don't
get
ulcers. I
give
them.” He had a point.

No foe to nepotism, he employed a number of members of his family in his company. Yet there was no question but that Sam was in absolute charge. A nephew might address Sam's brother as “Uncle Allan,” but Mr. Sam was always “Mr. Sam.” And relatives were fired with the same furious abandon as nonrelatives when, in Mr. Sam's opinion, they failed to measure up to his own rigorous standards. He was a notorious penny pincher, and the salaries he paid were among the lowest in the liquor business, yet when anyone complained, he lost his job. Sam was equally reluctant to pass out titles as rewards for loyal service, and a number of valued associates who, in another situation, might have expected to have been made vice-presidents never achieved such rank in the Bronfman organization. Occasionally, however, he begrudgingly conferred a title, if it meant an alternative to a raise—as happened with one man who asked if he didn't deserve the title of general manager. Sam agreed with a wave of his hand, but a few months later the man was fired. “The damn fool … started to
act
like a general manager,” Sam explained. “
I
am the general manager.”

His attitude toward money was peculiar, to say the least. Once, when he was fixing his first drink of the day, which was around ten in the morning, a visitor commented that the
Schweppes soda water he was using had probably cost more than the whiskey. Horrified, Sam buzzed for his secretary and told her not to buy any more Schweppes. “It's expensive!” he bellowed. “Thirty-five cents a bottle!” And yet, hard by his office, there was a fully equipped kitchen staffed with a full-time chef, whose chief duty was to prepare lunch for the boss. Much of the early portion of Mr. Sam's working day was spent planning his midday meal, and he would go over menu selections at length with his secretary, discussing seasonings, sauces, entrées, desserts. For some reason, he called his stomach “Mary,” and when he had settled on a combination of dishes that pleased him, he would rub this part of his anatomy and say, “Mary, you're going to be well fed today!”

He was an inveterate clipper of money-saving coupons from newspapers and magazines, and was forever entering contests that offered cash prizes, though he never won anything to anyone's knowledge. The last few minutes of every business day were spent turning out all the office lights to save on electricity costs, though he tipped Pullman porters with hundred-dollar bills. Once, on a shopping trip to New York with his wife and one of his sisters, Saidye Bronfman admired a hat in a millinery shop. The hat cost fifty-five dollars, and Sam told Saidye that she couldn't buy it. Later, back at their hotel suite, Sam told Saidye to telephone the shop and order the hat. When Saidye asked him why he had changed his mind, he said, “I don't want my sister to know I'd let you spend that much for a hat.”

And yet, for all his crotchets and tyrannical ways, Mr. Sam occasionally revealed a gentler side. He was fond, for example, of Tennyson's poetry, and could quote it at astonishing length from memory. He also had a pungent sense of humor. Asked once what he considered mankind's greatest invention, he snapped back, “Interest!” And asked what he felt was the secret of his success, he said, “Never fire the office boy!” It was true that, particularly among the lower echelons of his organization, he had built up a cadre of employees who would lay down their lives for him.

No less a despot was Helena Rubinstein, who, having made her first fortune, almost by accident, in Australia, having added to it substantially with Maisons de Beauté in London and Paris,
had now made New York her headquarters for a cosmetics empire that would expand throughout the 1920s until it included a hundred countries. Throughout the 1920s, too, her feud with the older, established beauty queen, Elizabeth Arden, would escalate. At one point, Miss Arden hired the entire Helena Rubinstein sales staff away from her. Madame Rubinstein quickly retaliated, and hired Miss Arden's ex-husband, Thomas J. Lewis, as
her
sales manager, crowing at the time, “Imagine the secrets he must know!” (It turned out that he didn't know many, and Lewis was let go not long afterward.) After divorcing her first husband, Helena Rubinstein married a Georgian prince, Archil Gourielli-Tchkonia, for whom she created her House of Gourielli line of men's toiletries. (Rumored to have been a former Parisian taxi driver, Gourielli nonetheless played a mean game of backgammon, which had helped him climb in French society. And, some twenty years Helena Rubinstein's junior—no one knew exactly, since her age was as closely kept a secret as Miss Arden's and their respective beauty formulas—he was still a prince.) Miss Arden retaliated by marrying a prince of her own, Prince Michael Evlanoff. Though the two women were never formally introduced, they had frequent glaring contests across the rooms of fashionable New York restaurants, where Maître d's were careful never to seat them too close together. Refusing to dignify her competitor by name, Madame Rubinstein always referred to Arden as “the Other One.”

Madame Rubinstein's rages were as famous as Sam Bronfman's, and she was always shouting “Dumkopf!” “Nebbish!” “No-good bum!” “Liar!” “Cheat!” and “Thief!” at cowering employees in her loud, whiskey-tenor, heavily accented voice, which could be heard from one end of her offices to the other. New employees were advised by old-timers, “Try not to let her notice you.” Once, a new secretary—all the secretaries were imperiously addressed as “Little Girl” by their employer—was looking for the ladies' room and actually opened, by accident, the door to the facility that was Madame Rubinstein's private toilet. There was a raucous scream, and the luckless girl was fired on the spot.