The Jews in America Trilogy (58 page)

The market collapse found others in embarrassing positions. Otto Kahn's older daughter Maude had married Major General Sir John Marriott, and had moved to England, and, sometime before the crash, Kahn had sold Maude large blocks of five different securities. All five, by 1930, were nearly worthless when Maude gave them back to him, so that he could sell them at a convenient market loss of $117,000. Or so it seemed to the Pecora Investigating Committee in 1933, looking into “under-the-counter” dealings such as this one in an attempt to fix the blame for 1929. Otto Kahn, with his customary urbanity, denied that there had been anything “peculiar” about this intrafamily transaction. When it also turned out that Kahn had paid no income taxes for the years 1930, 1931, and 1932,
*
Kahn politely explained that, “apparently,” he had suffered such heavy losses that he had had no income to declare. When pressed, he admitted that he simply could not explain why he had paid no income taxes. He was, he said, “abysmally igno
rant of income tax returns,” which were handled entirely by an accountant “in whom I have the deepest trust.” As usual in these investigations, no one on Wall Street was really hurt, but the Pecora Investigation did result in a tightening of banking and investment rules, in the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in the end of unrestrained finance.

In those parlous early days of the Great Depression, even families who had come through the crash intact felt it not only wise but fitting to reduce their scale of living. Mrs. Henry Seligman, whose fortune had undergone only small damage, kept De Witt but, to trim expenses for appearances' sake, dismissed her footman, John.

Not so Adolph Lewisohn. While everyone else instituted small economies here and there, he went right on living like a potentate, spending as much as, if not more than, ever. He kept his four houses—at 881 Fifth Avenue, at Elberon, at Prospect Point on Upper Saranac Lake, and “Heatherdale Farm,” at Ardsley-on-Hudson in Westchester County. At the Ardsley place he had, in addition to magnificent hothouses that grew exotic plants of every order, a miniature railroad and his own private blacksmith shop. His wife had died at an early age, and from that point onward, to his family's distress, Adolph kicked up his heels. He became incorrigible. Wringing his hands, his son Sam came to him and cried, “Father! You're spending your capital!” “Who made it?” Adolph Lewisohn replied.

He had always loved music, and had never been able to forget the days when he had been a choirboy in the Hamburg Synagogue. Now, in his seventies, he suddenly took up singing again. He hired a number of singing teachers, including the then well-known J. Bertram Fox. Whenever Adolph entertained—which was often—he required his guests to listen as, in a thin and quavery voice, he sang German
Lieder
, a repertory of songs by Schumann, Schubert, Mozart, and Brahms. To the family, it seemed undignified, but, as if the singing weren't bad enough, at the age of eighty he took up tap dancing. Adolph argued that he enjoyed these pastimes. He said that tap dancing was good exercise, and that singing helped him in public speaking.

He loved to take excursions, by motor or by train. Throughout the depression, he moved grandly about, back and forth to Europe and between his various residences. With him, in a long procession of chauffeur-driven automobiles (or private railroad cars, or roped-off sections of first class) went his retinue—his personal secretary (male), stenographer (female), valet, chef, singing teachers, dancing teachers, a French instructor, and his personal barber, Gustav Purmann. (Purmann's
salary was only $300 a month, but Lewisohn also tipped him regularly with $500 checks, Impressionist paintings, eggs and chickens from “Heatherdale Farm,” and, on at least two occasions, Buick automobiles.) Then there were his friends.

The boy who had enjoyed reading the
Fremdenliste
now liked to surround himself with people of every variety. Perhaps because of his family's hostile attitude toward his spending, Adolph Lewisohn's personal
mishpocheh
was composed of guests and
onhenger
. In return for their board and keep and traveling expenses, he asked only that they keep him pleasant company.

He preferred creative people (some jealous souls said that he also preferred gentiles)—writers, painters, singers, dancers, actors. He favored “unknowns,” whose talents he could discover and help promote. (Basil Rathbone was an early member of the Lewisohn entourage whose promise was fulfilled.) Also, since he was such a merry widower, he had no objection to young ladies who joined his parties and whose function was mostly decorative. Members of the
mishpoche
were always welcome at any and all of the Lewisohn houses, and at times the troupe of followers grew so large that if a friend didn't keep careful track of his host's next-day plans, it was easy to get left behind.

As a host Adolph insisted on a few prerogatives. Though he was more a listener than a talker, he did, whenever he had anything to say, demand that everyone else in the room be silent. He enjoyed playing bridge, but had a highly individual approach to the game. The following is a typical Lewisohn bridge contract:

Lewisohn (dealer): “One club.”

West: “Two diamonds.”

North: “Two spades.”

East: “Five diamonds.”

Lewisohn: “One club.”

The hand was played at one club.

In his gold-and-white ballroom at 881 Fifth Avenue he held, for years, his famous New Year's Eve parties. As originally conceived, they were thrown for a specific list of guests, including all the German Jewish upper crust. But the parties became so popular, and gate-crashers became so numerous, that they became, in effect, great open houses for all New York. One New Yorker, who grew up in the 1930's, recalls that he never knew there was any other way to pass New Year's Eve than to dress up in white tie and tails and go to Adolph Lewisohn's. It was understood that there was only one rule at these parties: No
guest was to remove more than a single bottle of liquor, which could be concealed under a coat.

Looking back, it seems a miracle that no more was ever stolen. But only occasionally did a Lewisohn party get out of hand. Mr. Lewisohn's chief steward always stationed himself at the foot of the marble basement stairs, to keep an eye on the collection of precious stones and jewels that were displayed there in lighted glass cases—many of the stones uncovered during the Lewisohns' mining adventures. And, at one party, an unidentified man in an oversize overcoat appeared, swaying, at the top of the stairs. He shouted once, “Down with the filthy capitalists!” Then he lurched and fell all the way down the stairs amid the exploding champagne bottles that had been concealed about his person.

But under ordinary circumstances the highlight of the evening was when the round-faced little host—looking, indeed, like an elderly choirboy—got to his feet and began to sing.

In New York and Europe he had begun to buy paintings of the Barbizon School—Dupré, Daubigny, Jacque, and Français—which was then “fashionable.” Few people had bought Impressionists in any quantity. But on the advice of a woman friend who had told him that it was more fashionable to be unfashionable, he sold his Barbizon pictures at the top of their market and bought, canvas for canvas, an equal collection of Impressionists at the bottom of their market, turning a tidy profit in the transaction. People thought he was crazy, and giggled about the “cheap paintings” silly Adolph was hanging on his walls—by such painters as Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, and a youngster named Picasso. One little Monet cost him only three hundred dollars in 1919. By the late twenties Adolph was saying proudly, “That little canvas is worth ten thousand dollars!” Today it might bring a hundred thousand.

As he grew older and began to realize his dream of great wealth, he began to cherish another ambition—not only to be “a rich man,” as he put it, but to be loved as “a citizen.” He wanted to be identified was his city and with his country, and he rankled, as did so many others of the crowd, at being labeled “a leading Jew.” As the thirties progressed, and news from his native Germany grew more distressing, this became increasingly important to him.

In his efforts to be a friend to mankind, he began a long program of giving away lordly sums to worthwhile causes and institutions. Many of his philanthropies are well known—the Lewisohn Stadium, the Pathological Laboratory Building at Mount Sinai Hospital, the School
of Mining at Columbia, the Orphanage of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society in Pleasantville, New York. But of other deeds less has been written, such as his work in the cause of prison reform. He once confided to a friend that as a child in Hamburg after his mother's death and his father's remarriage he had often felt like a prisoner in his father's house. His youth, he said, had given him an unhappy taste of what men in confinement suffered. He labored and gave money to improve conditions in prisons, to establish agencies that would help former prisoners find jobs after their release, and dreamed of a day when prisons could be done away with altogether. He was much ahead of his time in this, and was also a regular “prison visitor”—a charitable activity that has never been popular in this country, though it is in England. He used to speak proudly of the time he had dinner with a convicted murderer.

But somehow, for all his work and all his philanthropies, some mysterious ingredient that it took to be loved always eluded him. He never seemed to achieve Jacob Schiff's prestige. For all his entertaining, he never matched the Seligmans' social status, and, when his son Sam married Joseph Seligman's granddaughter, Margaret Seligman, the Seligmans sniffed their disapproval.

He used to say, “I wouldn't mind losing all my money. I don't have to live the way I do—I could live very simply. But I'd hate to be thought a
fool.
” More than anything, he dreaded appearing ridiculous. And yet—with his round little figure, his polished bald head, his nearsighted eyes peering through their comically thick spectacles, in his spotless gray spats and his vests aglitter with shining black buttons; throwing his increasingly unwieldy parties, surrounded by his fawning retinue of “friends”—he did, at times, seem the butt of all jokes. He was a Jewish Great Gatsby in the wrong decade, and, as a result, he always seemed a little inappropriate.

As an old man, he began to dictate his autobiography which he titled, significantly, “The Citizenship of Adolph Lewisohn.” It was never published, and it is a fascinating—and also, in some ways, baffling—document. He mentions his marriage to Emma Cahn of New York in 1878, but never mentions her by her first name again. A few references to her follow—always as “my wife” or “Mrs. Lewisohn.” He took her to England on their wedding trip aboard the Cunarder
Russia
. She complained about their stateroom, which was next to the coal chutes, but nothing could be done about it. It was also a business trip for Adolph, and he wrote: “We could not always be together, for in London I had to be at the office while my wife went out to see the
sights.” He added: “I suppose that generally it would be considered a hardship to have to attend to business while traveling, especially on a wedding trip; but, with the right spirit, business with its interesting contacts not only is a constant education but becomes a splendid pastime.” Adolph's wife then drops from the pages completely.

The rest of the book concerns itself with Adolph's many successes in the copper industry. He does not mention his wife's death in 1916. He never mentions the five children she bore him, or his grandchildren. He seems to have been a man consumed, early in life, by himself.

But his son Sam always stuck by him and, in Adolph's later years, seemed to have been the only one who truly loved him. Sam was a witty, intelligent, and charming man. But even with Sam, Adolph was distant and reserved, too locked in his private grief and loneliness to be father. When Sam married Margaret Seligman, he brought his young bride to live in his father's house. They had their own apartment on an upper floor, but they always took their evening meal with the old gentleman. Their four daughters were born and raised there.

One granddaughter, Joan Lewisohn Simon, wrote an admittedly autobiographical novel called
Portrait of a Father
, in which she has harsh things to say about both her father and grandfather, the latter of whom she describes as looking like “a turtle standing on its hind legs.”

The little girls would dine with their nurse and governess upstairs, and each evening at precisely three minutes past six, just as the liveried butler was removing the service plates, they would hear the creak and rattle of the elevator ascending. Then the gate would clank open and shut, and their grandfather's footsteps would shuffle across the thick carpet toward the dining room. The servants would stiffen and eye the little girls warningly. “Best manners!” hissed the governess as their grandfather walked to the head of the table and removed a little black book from his vest pocket. He would then proceed to read to them, in a thick accent which they couldn't understand, from the book. The girls and the servants would sit in numbed silence until he finished this ritual. Then he would bow slightly, turn, and depart.

The little girls interpreted it as a kind of blessing. It wasn't until years later that they discovered that the black book was his engagement book. He had been reading to them, every night, his list of his week's appointments.

Joan Simon remembers being eighteen in the Fifth Avenue house and “sitting downstairs, waiting nervously for an evening date, on a stiff wooden chair adjoining a long formal table that in a club would have been arrayed with magazines,” and hearing, to her “dismay,” the
elevator landing. It was her grandfather, and he came into the room and sat in another stiff chair—her chair's twin—a table length away from her to wait for his chauffeur to pick him up for a dinner engagement. There they sat, “two occupants of the same house for eighteen years,” and could find nothing to say to each other. Finally they spoke of the weather, then “recoiled into silence.”