The Jews in America Trilogy (156 page)

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 their 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.

One day in 1930 a mysterious visitor, identified only as “a Hungarian,” appeared at Miss Bohmer's office and asked to
borrow two hundred thousand dollars of Julius Kessler's money. Miss Bohmer cabled Kessler for instructions. Rather testily, Kessler cabled back that the Hungarian was his friend, and that she should give the man whatever he wanted. Miss Bohmer wrote out the two-hundred-thousand-dollar check, and then wired Kessler to tell him that that was the end of his American money supply. Kessler replied that he was aware of this, and Miss Bohmer then wanted to know how her salary was to be paid. It wasn't, Kessler informed her in his cabled response. He had no further need for a secretary. She was fired. Miss Bohmer, a spinster who had spent many years in Kessler's service, went home that night and, apparently despondent, swallowed a bottle of poison, and died.

Over the next two or three years, Kessler made occasional visits to the United States to look up old friends in the liquor business and to offer his services as a “consultant” for as little as two hundred dollars a month. He was by then almost eighty, and most of his old friends, embarrassed for him, pushed checks across their desks for him while declining his services. Proudly, Kessler tore up the checks and returned to Budapest, and poverty.

Then, in 1934, a mutual friend of Kessler's and Sam Bronfman's named Emil Schwartzhaupt (the mysterious “Hungarian,” perhaps?) came to Mr. Sam with a suggestion that something be done to help out the aging, ne'er-do-well Kessler. Surprisingly—since Mr. Sam barely knew Kessler—Mr. Sam immediately agreed, saying that “to do this good deed would redound to the credit of the Industry.” He then announced the creation, as a subsidiary of the Seagram Corporation, of the Kessler Distilling Corporation, with Julius Kessler as its president and chairman of the board. Master Blender Calman Levine was assigned the job of creating a new blend, to be called Kessler's Special, which was to be of high quality but to sell in the medium-price range. It was a difficult assignment, but Levine eventually came up with a formula that satisfied all the requirements—a superior blend that would be affordable by the workingman.

Levine even stepped outside his normal field of expertise and designed a special bottle and a special label for Kessler's Special, with Mr. Sam kibitzing over his shoulder, saying, “Make the name ‘Kessler' bigger—bigger.” Together, they
planned an elaborate advertising and promotion campaign, and a national marketing strategy for Kessler's Special. In fact, no one at Seagram's could recall Mr. Sam's working so hard over, and giving so much of his personal time to, the launching of a new brand since the Crown brands had been introduced. Even more unusual was the use of the Kessler name on the label. No Seagram brands had ever been given names that sounded remotely Jewish. There was no whiskey called “Bronfman's Special,” nor did the Bronfman name appear, even in the tiniest print, on any Seagram label. Why was Mr. Sam so intent on immortalizing this elderly gentleman?

Mr. Sam even announced that, from now on, Kessler's Special was going to be his personal drink. When the new brand, amid much publicity and hoopla, appeared on the shelves, it was an immediate and huge success. Julius Kessler, in his eighties, became a millionaire. He also became an instant old friend, despite the disparity in their ages—Mr. Sam was then in his lusty early forties—of Sam and Saidye Bronfman, and became a frequent houseguest at Belvedere Palace in Montreal. In fact, Julius Kessler became a part of a frequently told Bronfman family story—told to illustrate the early signs of business acumen on the part of Mr. Sam's elder son Edgar, even as a little boy. Little Edgar, then about six, admired a musical watch that Julius Kessler wore on a watch chain. Kessler said that, if Edgar liked the watch, he would give it to him as a bar mitzvah gift. Said Edgar, “But you're an old man now, and you may not be here for my bar mitzvah.” With that, Kessler removed the watch and presented it to Edgar Bronfman on the spot.

Along the corridors of Seagram's, of course, there were many jokes about Kessler's Special. “Kessler certainly
is
special,” they said, “special to Mr. Sam.” That the boss should have made such a Herculean effort, at such great expense, just to help out an octogenarian whom everyone else had written off as a loser seemed inexplicable. Good deeds on such a scale were not at all Mr. Sam's style. Unless, of course, there was blackmail involved, and Kessler “had something” on Mr. Sam from Prohibition days, when, it was assumed, there had been much dirty work at the crossroads that Kessler could have known about.

There were a number of intriguing pieces to the puzzle, but no clear solution. Who, for instance, was the mysterious Hungarian? Was he part of the scheme, and was the two hundred thousand dollars his fee for helping Mr. Kessler bring it off? But four years had elapsed between the Hungarian's loan and Mr. Sam's magnanimous gesture. Or was this time merely allowed for the scent to cool? And what was to be made of Miss Bohmer's sudden suicide? True, it was 1930, the Great Depression was settling in, her longtime boss had treated her very shabbily, and she may have felt at the end of her rope. Or was it not really a suicide at all? Did Miss Bohmer, in underworld terms, “know too much,” and need to be got rid of?

Then there was the ambiguous role of Emil Schwartzhaupt, the first to suggest the good deed to Mr. Sam. That same year, 1934, Mr. Sam concluded a—for him—rather unusual business deal with Mr. Schwartzhaupt. Schwartzhaupt owned the Calvert distillery at Relay, Maryland, and Mr. Sam wanted to buy it. Instead of making Schwartzhaupt an offer, which would have been customary, and waiting for Schwartzhaupt to come back with a higher price, then agreeing on a figure in the middle, Mr. Sam told Schwartzhaupt to name his figure. Whatever it was, Mr. Sam would pay it. There would be none of the usual haggling. Schwartzhaupt named his price, and was paid. Later, Schwartzhaupt would grumble that he had probably named too low an amount.

Mr. Schwartzhaupt, however, had done all right. He had already become the second-largest shareholder in Schenley's, having sold his Bernheim Distilling Company in Louisville to Lew Rosenstiel, Mr. Sam's bitter rival.

The year 1934, the first full year of Repeal, was a hectic one throughout the revived American liquor industry, a year of fast deals, scrambling for markets, price wars, hastily patched together new laws and regulations, and sudden changes. Many facts that might have come to light were irretrievably lost in the shuffle of that uncertain year, and all the principals in the Kessler affair are now dead. The Seagram Corporation, in response to queries, remains officially unaware of any underhanded dealings that may or may not have gone on, but is also unwilling to forward such queries to the Distilled Spirits Institute,
of which Seagram's is a member. Seagrams offers only one explanation for Mr. Sam's beneficence to Julius Kessler: it was a “good deed.”

If so, Mr. Sam was certainly consistent. Even after Julius Kessler's death, Mr. Sam remained loyal to Kessler's Special whiskey, and devoted special attention to the way the brand was marketed and promoted, loudly announcing, “A Kessler's and soda, please!” whenever he ordered a drink in a public bar or restaurant. But then, after all, Kessler's whiskey had become a money-maker for Seagram's. It still is.

But Mr. Sam himself may have had the last word on the whole subject. Looking over the galley proofs of his company's carefully laundered official history that was to be included in one of Seagram's annual reports to its stockholders, Mr. Sam slammed the pages down and said, “This is so much bullshit. If I only told the truth, I'd sell ten million copies!”

As the dark years of the 1930s marched forward in Europe, and as Nazi Germany grew in power, more and more American Jews were becoming aware of the increasingly institutionalized anti-Semitism that would lead to Hitler's Final Solution for the Jews of Europe. By 1933, it was apparent that Hitler's rantings were more than political rhetoric, and Americans were warily eyeing the deteriorating situation in central Europe. That was the year when Rose Pastor Stokes became ill, and her malady was diagnosed as cancer of the breast. A physician in Germany had announced great strides in the treatment of cancer—the doctors of Germany were still considered the finest in the world—and her husband and friends decided that she should be sent to Germany for medical care. There was no small amount of risk, to be sure, because of the Nazis, and there was also the problem that neither Rose nor her husband had any money.

In April of that year some five hundred of her old friends and admirers held a meeting at New York's Webster Hall to try to raise funds for the trip abroad. The chairman of the gathering, Alexander Trachtenberg, claimed that Rose's cancer had been caused by the brutal kicking and beating she had received from a policeman during the garment strike in 1917. Her new husband confirmed the incident, but said that it was
probably just a contributing factor. Enough money was raised to send Rose to the German doctor.