The Jews in America Trilogy (32 page)

25

MARRIAGE, SCHIFF STYLE

The morning after Felix's announcement, Moritz Warburg paid a call on the Schiffs. The meeting did not go well. Mr. Warburg stalked out of the Schiffs' suite wearing a face of stone, and Jacob Schiff calmly announced that the family was moving on to Paris.

In Paris the Schiffs went to the races at Longchamp, and who should suddenly show up there but Felix Warburg, who had followed them from Frankfurt. He presented himself to the Schiff party, and stayed very close to Frieda while her father became increasingly agitated. At the end of the afternoon he told Frieda flatly that she was not permitted to see Felix again. “I took her to Europe to get her out of the way of temptation,” he roared, “and now this happens!”

In addition to his wish to preserve Frieda's “innocence,” there were several things that Jacob disliked about Felix Warburg. For one, Felix wasn't a banker. Though New York firms practiced nepotism extensively, there was a rule at the Warburg bank to prevent, or at least control, it: no more than two sons of a senior partner could enter the firm. Since Felix's older brothers, Max and Paul, were already in the bank, Felix could never work for M. M. Warburg & Company. If Frieda wished to marry a Warburg, Jacob said, why didn't she marry Paul or Max? But in any case Jacob would never permit her to marry a man
who would make her live in Germany. Behind these illogical arguments there hung the fact that Schiff distrusted Felix's manner. Felix was witty and lively, and Schiff was uncomfortable when faced with anything as intangible as bounce. He did not like jokes;
bon vivants
alarmed him. Felix's nickname was “Fizzie,” after the Vichy Celestin “fizzie water” he loved to drink, but “fizzie” also described his personality. There was a slight cleft in Felix's chin which Schiff saw as a sign of weakness of character. The real truth, however, was that he didn't want his daughter to marry anyone.

When the Schiffs arrived at Gastein, Felix Warburg turned up again. While Jacob was taking the waters one afternoon, Frieda and Felix met secretly in the park. They walked for a while, and then he stopped her under a plane tree and said, “Isn't it a beautiful day?” “Yes,” said Frieda. “This is a beautiful place,” he said. “Yes,” she agreed. “Would you ever like to live in Germany?” he asked her. Frieda was terrified. She ran home to her mother and gasped, “I think he proposed!”

Immediately, a council of war was called and an elaborate set of plans was developed. It was decided that the Schiff and Warburg families should have a summit conference on the matter, and on neutral territory. Ostend on the Belgian coast was selected. First, a formal dinner was given by the Warburgs at their favorite kosher restaurant. That went reasonably well (Schiff was a great believer in the power of formal dinners to solve most problems). Next, Mr. Schiff gave a luncheon for the Warburgs at his hotel. The headwaiter suggested fresh Channel lobsters, which were nonkosher. Schiff ordered filet of sole. But somehow a mistake was made and the lobsters were served anyway, and Mr. Schiff flew into one of his towering rages. The lunch was a disaster.

A tactic was at last agreed upon, however, which, though not very entertaining for the two young people, assured them of remaining in some sort of communication. Frieda and her family would return to New York, and there, her father explained, Felix would write a weekly letter to Schiff, who would respond with a weekly letter to Felix. Frieda was to institute a similar schedule of letters between herself and Felix's mother. Frieda and Felix were under no circumstances to write each other. This program was to continue until such time as Felix was able to come to New York. The two young people parted without so much as a farewell kiss.

In New York, the letter-writing began. Sometimes her father showed Frieda his letters to Felix before posting them. Written in German, they used the formal “
Sie
,” a form reserved for use when speaking to one or
more persons with whom one is not on familiar terms. But once Frieda noticed that her father had as last written to Felix using “
Du,
” the familiar form. She was overjoyed and hugged and thanked her father for unbending this much. Without a word, Jacob Schiff took out his gold penknife, scratched out every “
Du
,” and substituted “
Sie
” throughout. It was a letter, furthermore, inviting Felix to join Kuhn, Loeb & Company in New York.

Felix Warburg did not particularly want to work for Jacob Schiff. He was never to become a great financier (though he did possess other talents which, in time, became very useful to Schiff). But he did love Frieda, and Schiff had set an unalterable condition: Felix could not have Frieda unless he took, in the bargain, Kuhn, Loeb. As Felix was preparing to leave Germany for New York, his father called him aside and said, “My son, I have just one request to make of you.” Felix was certain that his father was about to make him promise to bring his young wife back to Germany or, at the very least, to ask him to keep the dietary laws. But his father said, “Do not take the iced drinks that spoil Americans' digestions and force them to go to Carlsbad for a cure.” Felix arrived in New York in 1895, and immediately went to work.

Schiff's attitude toward his future son-in-law did not soften much during the “courtship” period that followed. He arranged things so that the young couple saw almost nothing of each other. When they did meet, they were heavily chaperoned. His concern for Frieda's innocence continued, and he enjoined both her mother and her grandmother from mentioning “ugly” truths.

Therese Schiff obeyed her husband, but Grandmother Betty Loeb had her own ideas. She had become interested in nursing and obstetrics, and was getting a reputation as an “advanced” woman. Betty even read the novels of Zola openly! On her book shelves behind locked glass doors were books dealing with the physical side of marriage, and she was determined to have a talk with Frieda. But Jacob got wind of this, and refused to let Frieda see her grandmother unless there was a third person present. Betty Loeb did manage to get Frieda alone one afternoon and to say to her, “It's normal for a girl to be upset and nervous at a time like this. Being engaged is unnatural. A girl should either be not engaged at all or married.” It was some help, but not much.

The dashing young man about to carry off their loveliest young princess was referred to by German Jewish society as “The Black Prince.” As the day of the ceremony approached, tensions in the Schiff household mounted. It was to be an at-home wedding at 932 Fifth, and,
adding to the other complications, was the caterer's news that no more than 125 guests could be fitted into the house, and, a week before the wedding, 145 had accepted. Jacob Schiff struck a seerlike pose and announced, “Twenty will not come.” Later, Frieda Schiff Warburg wrote: “As always his forecast was right. Two days before the ceremony, Mrs. James Seligman died, and her entire family, numbering exactly twenty, couldn't come.”
*

Frieda Schiff's and Felix Warburg's marriage was called “dynastic,” and it did seem to represent a consolidation of Kuhn, Loeb power. There they all were—old Solomon Loeb, who had founded the firm but had withdrawn altogether a few years earlier in favor of his son-in-law, the father of the bride. There was Solomon's old partner, Abraham Wolff, whose daughter Addie was a bridesmaid and who—in another Kuhn, Loeb wedding—would very soon marry another partner, Otto Kahn. There was Solomon's son Morris, not a banker but married that same year to Abe Kuhn's daughter, Eda, another bridesmaid. The bride's aunt, Nina Loeb, was maid of honor, and Paul Warburg had come from Germany to be his brother's best man. These two met for the first time at the wedding and fell in love, which would give Solomon another son-in-law in the firm, which would make Nina her niece's sister-in-law and make Paul Warburg his brother's uncle.

Since the Schiffs belonged to two congregations, Temple Emanu-El and Beth-El, two rabbis performed the ceremony—Dr. Gustav Gottheil and Dr. Kaufmann Kohler. It was a glittering occasion, but the business overtones of the union almost overshadowed the happiness of the newlyweds. While the women speculated about the suitability of Felix as a husband, the men considered his promise as a partner. But the most historically significant fact was that Frieda Schiff had achieved her first victory over her father, and had managed to marry the man she loved.

From the house the couple went to the Plaza, where Felix, in his nervousness, forgot to register his bride. From there, they went on a short trip to Washington, where Frieda, in
her
nervousness, realized that she was without a personal maid for the first time in her life. Faced with the problem of packing suitcases and not knowing how to begin, she burst into tears and Felix had to help her, wrestling manfully with unfamiliar crinolines. They returned to New York long enough to
board the S.S.
Kaiser Wilhelm II
for a cruise to Italy, but this time Jacob Schiff assigned one of his wife's personal maids, Hermine, to accompany Frieda. Hermine proved to be quite a trial. Felix Warburg used to say, “I spent my honeymoon with a German governess.” Hermine would not let Frieda wear any of her trousseau on the boat so that the dresses would be fresh for Italy, where the senior Warburgs were to meet them, and she scolded Frieda whenever she got a spot on any of her other dresses. Also, possibly acting on instructions from Jacob Schiff, she was reluctant to let the newlyweds spend any private moments together. She was forever fussing around the stateroom and seemed miffed that she had not been given an adjoining cabin. Still, Frieda and Felix managed to find some time together. Frieda Warburg became pregnant with her first child on her honeymoon, just as her mother had done.

Frieda was delighted with this news, and said to her mother that she believed in young marriages, and “If this one's a boy, I'm going to take up the rug in his room, take out his bed, and make him sleep on a cot as soon as he's old enough to marry,” to force him out of the nest. Therese Schiff looked disapproving, and announced that, on the contrary, she was turning an upper floor of 932 Fifth into a bachelor's apartment for Morti, “So my son may stay with me as long as he wishes.”

During Frieda's wedding trip, her father wrote:

Dear children,

You shall not come home without receiving at least one letter from me, but as I telegraphed you frequently [using his Western Union franking privilege, of course] I suppose you are in any event satisfied.…

“Satisfied.” On this stiff note he seems to realize how unfeeling he sounds, and suddenly the tone of the letter changes, loosens, expands, letting a bit more of his heart show as he swiftly continues:

… I need not tell you how happy dear Mama and I are in your own young happiness, which, God grant it, may last for many years without a cloud obscuring it, and if trials come, without which hardly any human life exists, your deep love for each other will give you strength to bear whatever God destines for you.

When the young Warburgs returned to New York, they moved to a hotel while their first house was being finished for them. But Jacob, upset at the news of his daughter's condition, at the loss of her precious
innocence, would not come to the hotel to see them, or even telephone, refusing to ask for Frieda by her new name.

Frieda and Felix did go to the Schiffs' house for dinner. At one point during that dinner, Frieda turned to her father and asked him a question. It was a simple question—she could never remember, afterward, just what it was because her father suddenly lost his composure completely and cried out, “
Why do you ask me? You have your husband to turn to turn to now!
”

*
Frieda's nervous state may have played tricks on her memory, because Rosa Content Seligman did not die until twelve years later. But some member of the crowd with twenty relatives apparently did die that week.

26

“THE BATTLE OF THE GIANTS”

Jacob Schiff was never quite sure whether he approved of young Otto Kahn. For one thing, Kahn, though he had not gone as far as August Belmont and changed his name, was something of a religious turncoat. (Otto Kahn has been called “the flyleaf between the Old and New Testament”) Also, Kahn, like his friend and contemporary, Felix Warburg, had a taste for high life and, of all things, Bohemia. Kahn liked to surround himself with painters and poets and playwrights and, as a boy growing up in Mannheim, he had dreamed of being a poet himself. (His mother, however, who steadfastly maintained that he had no talent, finally convinced him to burn all his manuscripts, including two five-act plays in blank verse, so the Otto Kahn works were lost to the world.) Kahn spoke with a clipped English accent, ordered his suits from Savile Row, quoted Ibsen and Walter Pater and Carlyle, and sang in the office—all of which Schiff found disconcerting. But Schiff had to admit that Kahn was a promising financier.

From Mannheim, Kahn had gone to London in 1888, where he became a British subject and worked for the English office of the Deutsche Bank. Within a year he had become the bank's vice manager, and was hobnobbing with such intellectual and theatrical figures of the day as Richard Le Gallienne, H. G. Wells, Beerbohm Tree, Maxine
Elliott, Henry Irving and Harley Granville-Barker. He went to parties with the Prince of Wales, whom he had been told he resembled. He also knew the London Warburgs and, for a while, shared a bachelors' flat with Paul Warburg during the latter's stay in England on family business. At the invitation of Speyer & Company,
*
Kahn had come to New York in 1893. He was then twenty-seven. There he met Abe Wolff's daughter Addie, and in 1896, a few months after Frieda Schiff's marriage to Felix Warburg, he entered Kuhn, Loeb & Company in what was becoming a time-honored way, by marrying a partner's daughter.

Kahn's initial contribution was an unusual one. People, seeing pale, wheezing E. H. Harriman coming down the street toward them, darted into doorways to avoid him. Yet Otto Kahn saw something in this strange little man that was deeper than his unappetizing appearance. Kahn, in fact, found himself getting along with Harriman even better than Schiff did. It was surprising, really, because Kahn's nature was smiling and expansive, Harriman's dour and withdrawn. But because Kahn seemed to understand him and respect him, and was willing to converse with him, Harriman liked and respected Otto Kahn. Jacob Schiff was happy to watch this unusual friendship ripen. He himself had always regarded Harriman more as a business associate than as a friend, and since the Union Pacific reorganization this relationship had been secure.