The Jews in America Trilogy (50 page)

It was, of all things, the Equitable Life affair that first got Otto Kahn involved with the Metropolitan. When James Hazen Hyde went on the Met's board, and when Jacob Schiff became Hyde's banker, it was natural that Schiff should have been more concerned with Hyde's insurance assets than with his opera-house connections. Hyde, however—despite the anti-Semitic cast of the Met—did invite Schiff to sit with him on the Met's board. Schiff declined, suggesting that Hyde consider his young partner, Mr. Kahn.

Kahn, at first, was doubtful whether to accept Hyde's offer. As a banker, he was eager to keep a hand in whatever went on downtown. But he also loved music and the theater, played three instruments, and the romance of the opera appealed to him. He was also worried that an
opera directorship might damage his position as a businessman. As Kahn said,

At that time I was on the threshold of my business career. There were more people then than now looking askance at art.
*
They looked upon the joy of life and art as incongruous elements in the general harmony of the sphere of existence. I was warned by well-meaning friends that I had better not fool with operatic and theatrical matters; that I would lose standing among serious-minded people if I did so; that it was
infra dig
for a staid and reputable banker to have his name connected with an opera company; that my motives would be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Faced with these temptations and warnings and misgivings, Otto Kahn consulted Ned Harriman, who gave him some astonishing advice.

“You just go ahead and do your art job, but don't
dabble
at it,” Harriman told him. “Make it one of your serious occupations. As long as you do not let it interfere with your other work, with your business duties and ambitions and thoughts, it will do you no harm. On the contrary, it will exercise your imagination and diversify your activities. It ought to make a better businessman out of you.”

Kahn became a member of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, and immediately began following Harriman's advice. In those days the structure of an opera company was quite different from what it is today. The Metropolitan Opera and Realty Company was a shareholding corporation which owned the opera house building; the corporation leased the building to an impresario whose responsibility it was to hire the company and put on opera. Otto Kahn initially purchased two hundred shares of stock in the corporation. Hyde had had three hundred shares of Metropolitan Opera stock, and when he departed for Paris, Otto Kahn had bought these. Henry Morgenthau, another director, soon retired, and Kahn bought his three hundred shares. Suddenly Kahn was the opera's leading stockholder. He began buying up opera stock wherever it was available, and presently he had 2,750 shares and virtually owned the Metropolitan Opera. As his mentor, Jacob Schiff, would have agreed, owning the company was the first prerequisite to making it one of his “serious occupations.”

One of his first moves in 1903 was to hire a new impresario from Germany, Heinrich Conried, who, according to critics who instantly materialized, possessed no qualifications whatever. At the time, a writer
for the New York
Herald
commented: “The only explanation of Kahn's motive in the Conried selection was that the latter's very ignorance of music might have given his sponsor a chance to superintend, direct, and manage.” The same writer warned Mr. Kahn that Conried was “out for big game himself,” and was “out to be the head of the opera not only in name but in fact also,” and that Otto Kahn had used “Wall Street tactics” to get Conried appointed—rushing the new director in by getting busy board members to sign over their proxies to Kahn. (Kahn, who had already begun his lifetime practice of demanding that newspapers print retractions of stories he considered inexact, made no comment on this one, so we may assume it contains the truth.) No one noted that a great revolution in the Metropolitan Opera was under way, and Conried's first opening night, which marked the American debut of a young Italian tenor named Enrico Caruso in
Rigoletto
, was received with the same bored languor as usual by the Diamond Horseshoe, and got mixed notices in the press.

It was not until December of Conried's first season that the New York newspapers and the opera-going public realized that an important change had taken place at the stately Met. This was Conried's brilliant staging of the first American performance of Wagner's
Parsifal
, which the critics swooningly called “without doubt the most perfect production ever made on the American lyric stage.” This was followed by another American premiere—Donizetti's
L'Elisir d'Amore
, which revealed that Caruso had an unsuspected flair for comedy—and suddenly it was noticed that there never had been as many as two new operas introduced in a season. When it turned out that both the operas and the chief performers had been selected by Otto Kahn of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, the Diamond Horseshoe didn't know what to think. Neither, for that matter, did Wall Street.

Heinrich Conried would probably have stayed at the Met for many years if it had not been for three unrelated circumstances. There was, for one thing, the apparent great success of Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera, five blocks away. There was also the unfortunate publicity that attached itself to the Met when a New York woman accused Enrico Caruso of molesting her in Central Park. Finally there was Conried's health, which began to fail in 1907, the year that Kahn was elected chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera. Quietly Kahn set about to find a successor, and he soon became convinced that the man should be Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who, for the past ten years, had been general manager of La Scala in Milan.

When Kahn's first letter to Gatti-Casazza arrived in Milan, the
impresario showed it to La Scala's conductor, Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini said he thought Gatti ought to accept and, furthermore, said that he would like to go with him to New York. A meeting between Kahn and Gatti was scheduled in Paris, and, after details of salary and contract had been worked out, Gatti-Casazza delivered the following florid acceptance speech (at least this was how he remembered it in his autobiography):

“Thank you, Mr. Kahn, for the faith you have shown in me. I am well aware that you are besieged and importuned by a large number of persons who aspire to Conried's place. I certainly will not importune you in any way, the more so since at the Scala in Milan I am very well situated in every respect. Nevertheless, if you and your colleagues believe that I am the person suited for the Metropolitan, please let me know, and in that event I hope that we shall be able to come to an agreement, I should wish that in that case an offer should also be made to Maestro Toscanini.”

It was of course a great coup for Kahn, who had managed to capture not one but two of Europe's greatest musical figures for the Met. His opera house, he had begun to say, would one day wear “the blue ribbon of the opera world.” In announcing that he had hired Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini, Kahn, lest anyone think that the emphasis of the company would be “too Italian,” was careful to say that French, German, and Italian operas would be performed with equal frequency.

There were to be other innovations. Kahn announced that, for the first time in the Met's history, the entire management staff would be on salary, and that Gatti-Casazza would not have to concern himself with box-office receipts as previous impresarios had done. Any losses would be absorbed by “the board of the Metropolitan Opera Company,” which pretty much meant Otto Kahn. The newspapers applauded the news as “a change from the old order to the new.… Power has passed from the older generation to the younger.” Art and culture, it was said, were at last coming to America, delivered by the Metropolitan Opera and Otto Kahn.

All at once, he was very much a figure about town. His comings and goings—to the theater, to the opera, to restaurants, to clubs—were chronicled in the papers. One saw him on Fifth Avenue on Sunday mornings, strolling with his dachshunds in his tall silk hat and silver-handled cane. One marveled at the polished tips of his shoes below his spats, the perfection of his mohair gloves, the inevitable large pearl stickpin in his tie, placed just above the V in his velvet-collared Chesterfield. Few men of the day possessed quite such dash. He reminded
many people of Goethe's description of Kahn's home town, Mannheim: “Friendly, serene, and symmetrical.” There was, about his build, a certain elegant frailness. Still, he always stood and walked with ramrod straightness, a relic of his service with the Mainz Hussars, and there was nothing indefinite about his large, blue, appraising eyes under their heavy dark brows, nor anything accidental about his handlebar mustache, so perfectly shaped and brushed that it might have been a clever bit of
trompe l'oeil
painting. He was, in fact, a fashion plate of almost Renaissance proportions.

He also possessed a commodity that had been something of a rarity in New York's German Jewish crowd. He could smile. He smiled often and easily and well, and his smile served him particularly well in an era, and in a city, that was growing used to chilly and ill-mannered millionaires. He could also speak. Unlike Jacob Schiff, whose accent often made him difficult to understand, Kahn was admired for his “beautiful English accent,” which was actually a style of speech called “Continental English”—clipped, flattened, undiphthonged. He was one of the first in the crowd to be often in demand as a public speaker. He was at home on the dais. He adored the spotlight.

Also, though he pretended to have a patrician disdain for personal publicity, he loved it, and his own public and press relations were nearly always perfect. Like Harriman and Jacob Schiff, he believed in personally inspecting railroads in which Kuhn, Loeb had an interest. Once, traveling to Denver to look over a new line, he had descended the steps of his private car to be interviewed by reporters who observed, with wonder, that the great Otto Kahn was “the most simply dressed man there.” (He had had the good sense to omit tall silks, spats, and stickpins in the provinces.) At another time, speaking to a general audience, he had said that there should not be less government control of big business, but more—endearing himself to workingmen. At the Met he adopted the habit of strolling into the press room on opening nights and gathering the reviewers around him. Then he would lead them out into the street—to a nearby saloon for a drink or two, or to enjoy a few vaudeville acts at a nearby theater or, in the days of Minsky, to watch burlesque. He would then guide them back to the opera house, considerably cheered up, for the final aria. His mock-formal invitations—“Would any of you gentlemen perhaps care to accompany me for a few moments?”—became so familiar that the minute Kahn entered the press room the reviewers reached for their coats. Needless to say, Met performances were nearly always favorably reviewed.

He had begun collecting clippings about himself around 1901. From
then on he was engaged in a long love affair with the press. He scanned the newspapers morning and night for mention of his name, and “The sight of his picture in the paper gave him more pleasure than the news that he had made several thousand dollars in a stock transaction,” according to one biographer.
*
Eventually he employed the famous public-relations firm of Ivy Lee to see to it that the press was properly informed of his activities, and he kept all his press cuttings bound in expensive cloth-and-leather volumes of over a hundred pages each. In the end there were a dozen of these. Stamped in gold letters on the spine of each fat volume were the words “
FROM THE PRESS
,” and on the title page were the tiny, extremely modest initials, “
O.H.K
.”

These were the initials that signed his memoranda which set so many things in motion at the Metropolitan Opera Company, and one member of his staff commented that they really stood for “Opera House Kahn.” His memos covered the most minute details of the Met and its operations—new lights for the vestibules, latches for the lobby doors, a wider door for the ladies' room, memos about scenery, costumes, makeup, and lights. In his tiny, European script O.H.K. wanted to know, “Why have the chimes for the temple scene in
Parsifal
not been sent to Philadelphia?” To Gatti-Casazza, he wrote: “President and Mrs. Taft will be at
Aida
on the 15th inst. in Box 35. Please decorate it with a flag and have a nice bouquet, I suggest orchids and lilies of the valley, placed in the box for Mrs. Taft, with the compliments of the Board of Directors.” Next he was writing to an unknown opera goer who had complained about waiting in line for two hours only to find a soldout house. He enclosed two free tickets.

To his Kuhn, Loeb partners, it was all very startling. They were not disapproving but merely mystified. It was hard for them to imagine how he could do his work at the office and still do so much for the Metropolitan Opera. It was even harder when they realized that he
was
the Metropolitan. Actually, Kahn, who said that his family's motto was “
Immer rastlos voran
”—“Ever restlessly forward”—worked as many as eighteen hours a day at his double job, and often was required to combine the two.

There was, for instance, Kahn's handling of the dispute between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Delaware & Hudson, which is considered one of his greatest achievements. At the time, the main lines between New York and Chicago were four: the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, the B & O, and the Erie, in that order of importance. Mr. L. F. Loree of the Delaware & Hudson began to dream of building
a “fifth system” to Chicago and, for that purpose, began secretly buying up large stock holdings in the Nickel Plate, the Wabash, the Western Maryland, and the Lehigh Valley, in hopes of consolidating these lines into a line competitive with the Pennsylvania.

When Kahn learned of Loree's plan, he was horrified. It sounded painfully like the great Union Pacific-Northern Pacific fight of 1901, which had been his memorable introduction to railroading warfare. This, however, was considerably worse. At least rival banking houses had been involved in the Hill-Harriman affair. But both the Pennsylvania and Loree were Kuhn, Loeb clients. There had, in fact, been no situation quite like it in the history of railroading
or
banking.