The Jews in America Trilogy (62 page)

At sixty-four, John Loeb, a governor of the New York Stock Exchange, is held in almost dreadful awe in Wall Street. A tall, slender, handsome, and immaculately tailored man with jet-black hair and dark, beetling brows, he looks half his age. In the Salvador Dali portrait of him that hangs in his house in Westchester, an armored knight on horseback prances in the middle distance; one suspects that this romantic dash and flair were what the artist saw in John L. Loeb. He is a firm believer in rigid exercise, which accounts for his youthful looks and splendid physique.

He has been called an overpowering father, and a tough-minded, high-handed, even ruthless businessman. “Whenever I approach Mr. Loeb,” says an acquaintance half-seriously, “I automatically begin to say, ‘I'm sorry.'” One of Loeb's favorite tactics, when an associate is ushered into his office, is to work busily at some item on his desk for a moment or two, and then look up and inquire, “What time is it?” Recently a visitor was so dismayed by this approach that he replied, “Whatever time you say it is, Mr. Loeb!” Another habit is to receive petitioners—who come, as a rule, with elaborate presentations explaining why Loeb, Rhoades should help finance their companies—to listen to their arguments patiently, to smile and nod sympathetically as they talk, and then, when they finish, to stand up and say, “No.” “It's discouraging,” says one man, “because you never know at which point he might have been willing to bargain or negotiate.”

John Loeb believes that a deal, when set, “is set in concrete,” according to a friend. Not long ago, when a major corporation had sought
out Loeb, Rhoades for a major underwriting venture, the president of the company at the last moment began demanding further concessions. John Loeb turned abruptly to his partners and, suggesting that their time could be better spent on other matters, led them out of the meeting. The next few hours were tense ones at Loeb, Rhoades, for most members of the firm were certain that they had lost an important account. John Loeb, however, had suspected that the corporation needed Loeb, Rhoades money and, sure enough, the president telephoned later in the day to say that he was ready to sign—on Loeb's original terms.

Because of his personal power, to say nothing of the vast financial power he now wields, one approaches John Loeb's special chair under the ormolu chandelier in the Loeb, Rhoades private dining room on tiptoe, always certain of the importance of what one has to say. He has, in other words, the kind of influence and presence that has not been seen on Wall Street since the days of Jacob Schiff.

In many ways, John Loeb is like his friend and contemporary, Robert Lehman, Philip's son and the present head of Lehman Brothers, who has been called “the last of the imperiously rich men” and “the aristocrat of the autocrats.” Robert Lehman's power in the money market is as vast as Loeb's, perhaps even vaster, and the phrase, “Bobby wants to speak to you,” strikes terror in the breast of all at One South William Street. His office in the building is small—many junior partners have larger space—but it gives him a psychological advantage. “When you go into that little office, you really feel crowded out by him,” says one man. He himself, also slight of stature, seems to fill the room.

Lehman, however, in recent years has turned his attention increasingly to his art collection. Started by his father, who bought paintings more for an investment than out of a love of beauty, the Lehman Collection has been so enormously added to by Robert that it is now the largest, and possibly the finest, private art collection in America. The paintings range from thirteenth-century Italian to twentieth-century French, and include Goya's famous
The Countess of Altamira and Her Daughter
, El Greco's
Saint Jerome as Cardinal
, Botticelli's
Annunciation
, and
The Legend of Saints Eligius and Godeberta
by Petrus Christus, plus literally scores of others that are just as fine. The collection also includes Persian and Chinese ceramics, Renaissance medallions and enamels, and the largest assemblage of medieval aquaemanales (water pitchers) outside Nürnberg. The collection—guided by Robert Lehman's straightforward philosophy, which is, “If I see
something I like, I buy it”—hangs in the offices of Lehman Brothers downtown, and also on the walls of Robert Lehman's eighteen-room Park Avenue apartment. But the bulk of it is contained in the late Philip Lehman's town house in Fifty-fourth Street, which his son maintains as a private museum and which outsiders—art scholars only—may see by appointment. Here, heavily guarded, behind gold doors and in rooms covered with deep Persian rugs and hung with gold-fringed red plush, are most of the old masters, the Gothic tapestries, the Renaissance furniture, the Italian majolica, and the other
objets d'art
. Often at night the collector himself visits the house, sometimes with his curator, sometimes alone, and prowls the great, silent rooms like a solitary Croesus contemplating all that he has amassed.

It was once supposed that Robert Lehman, being a banker, would buy art more with an eye to the dollar than with discrimination or taste. There is a concentration, in the collection, on Sienese primitives, which are painted with a great deal of gold leaf, and Lehman's public-relations man, Benjamin Sonnenberg, once commented, “What other kind of paintings would a banker buy than Sienese, with all that gold in them?” At the same time, when some three hundred items from the Lehman Collection were sent for exhibit at the Orangerie of the Louvre in Paris in the summer of 1956, one French critic wrote; “We would like the purchases of our museums to be inspired by a taste as severe as that of which M. Robert Lehman today gives us dazzling evidence.” The exhibition was the talk of Paris, waiting lines formed outside the Orangerie, and over seventeen thousand people saw the show in the first two weeks alone—statistics which gratified the banker in Robert Lehman.

Today Bobby Lehman is seventy-four, and the collection continues to grow. Its total value is now impossible to calculate, and, inheritance taxes being what they are, it is unlikely that Lehman's son or any of his other heirs will be able to maintain the Lehman Collection intact and in the family. The future of the town house in Fifty-fourth Street is uncertain, and the subject of much speculation in the art world. Benjamin Sonnenberg, however, has an answer. He says of his friend and client, “To begin with, Bobby isn't
going
to die. He's firmly convinced he's immortal. And furthermore, if he should turn out to be wrong, being a Lehman he'll figure out some way to take it all with him.”

Robert Lehman himself is quite aware that his death and the disposition of his collection are often discussed, and he is able to view his situation with a certain humor. Not long ago he visited the Sterling and
Francine Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where twin tombs for the museum's founders flank the entrance to the building that houses
their
art collection. Starting up the museum's steps, he paused to gaze solemnly at the marble plaques bearing the names of Mr. and Mrs. Clark. He whispered softly, “What a way to go!”

*
Dillon of Dillon, Read was originally named Lapowski before joining the gentile firm of William Read & Company, which grew to prominence in the early 1920's. Though Jewish, as
Fortune
discreetly put it, Mr. Dillon was never “identified” with the Jewish bankers or the Jewish community of New York.

*
Through Adeline Moses Loeb, her grandchildren today can trace remote cousinships to such people as Mrs. Randolph Churchill, Mrs. William A. M. Burden, Jr, and the Duchess of Norfolk.

*
The substitutes were culled from Loeb's “B-List” of friends. One woman says, “I'd been going to lovely dinners at the Loebs' for years before I discovered that I was one of his guinea pigs—that if I was asked for a Wednesday, the
real
party would be Thursday.”

48

“
FAMILIENGEFÜHL
” … AND NO BARE FEET AT DINNER

After Jacob Schiff's death, Therese Loeb Schiff began to blossom. Under the dominance of her husband, she had always seemed a meek little thing whose most effective form of protest was to burst into tears. Now she began to assert herself. She seemed, of all things, to have a personality. She became, as her husband had been, a person to be reckoned with.

She announced, for one thing, that she had no intention of leaving the big Fifth Avenue house, as her family suggested, and moving to an apartment or, as several widows in the crowd had done, to the Plaza. She would continue to live in the style Jacob Schiff had set, tended to by Joseph, her major-domo. She continued her Tuesdays “at home.” She developed projects for herself. One was her practice of giving each grandson—there were five—a raccoon coat when he entered college. Morti's son, John Schiff, and Frieda's son, Paul Warburg, reached college age at the same time. John was accepted at Yale, but Paul failed his exams. John got his coat, but Paul did not. John's coat was stolen in the middle of his freshman year, whereupon Therese bought him
another. This outraged Paul; John had had
two
coats, and he had had none. Therese was adamant, but Paul took his case to Joseph, who, the boys knew, was one of the few people who had any influence over Mrs. Schiff. He got his coat.

Young Paul Warburg was a great deal like his father, Felix—a prankster, a playboy, a charmer. At the age of twelve he was asked, “What did you do today?” and he airily replied, “I had lunch at Mr. and Mrs. Henry Morgenthau's. Mrs. Morgenthau thinks I'm very well read. We discussed Wells's
Outline of History
and Strachey's
Queen Victoria.
” He had read neither book. He never did go to college. On a summer trip to Paris, after an all-night outing with Jack Straus and two young ladies, Paul wandered back to the Ritz at dawn and, somehow, got into the wrong room. Seeing “something large” on the bed, he flung his black ebony cane at it. It was his mother, who sat up in bed and said with perfect poise, “Your father will speak to you about this in the morning.”

There had been few divorces in the crowd until Paul's generation. He divorced his first two wives. His brother Gerald divorced his first wife. His cousin Jimmy Warburg divorced
his
first two wives. His cousin Renata divorced her first husband, and his brother Edward married a divorcee. For a while, Paul Warburg worked in the bond department of the International Acceptance Bank. One of his jokes was to say, as he entered the office each day, “Good morning, Mr. Carlton,” to the clerk who adjusted the Western Union ticker tape. (The joke was that Newcomb Carlton was chairman of the board of Western Union.) Once a visiting partner from M. M. Warburg in Germany found the ticker out of order and, remembering Paul's greeting, picked up the phone and demanded to speak to Mr. Carlton. He was put through to Newcomb Carlton and said, “Get your tools and get right over here. Our ticker's broken.” Carlton telephoned the bank's president to say, “There are a lot of things I'll do for your bank, but I won't come over and fix your ticker.” Shortly thereafter, Paul Warburg took an office at Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades and, as the family puts it, “began to settle down.”

Paul's nickname was “Piggy,” and his brother Edward's was “Peep” or “Peeper.” This was because his old German nurse had said he was like a little
Piepmatz
, or peeping sparrow. (For a while, his brothers called him “Matz,” but Grandmother Schiff objected.) Edward was interested in art, and wanted to teach. He approached Georgianna Goddard King, head of the art department at Bryn Mawr, who said she would like to hire him but had no budget for another instructor.
Edward offered to work without pay, but Miss King said no one was permitted to do so. “But if I were to receive a check from some anonymous donor for a thousand dollars, that could go for your salary.” Edward Warburg said, “Shall I write the check now?” Miss King replied, “There's no hurry.” Edward's course was a great success, and soon Edward was able to approach Miss King and ask, “Don't you think I should give myself a raise?” Later, Edward Warburg helped organize the film library at the Museum of Modern Art and, with Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, launched the School of American Ballet.

On Edward's twenty-first birthday Felix Warburg had written to his son:

For men like you who have to describe—and want to teach—the impressions which works of beauty make or ought to make on people at large, it is unavoidable to ask yourself “How does that strike me?” But otherwise I have found too much feeling of one's pulse a weakening process, and I would rather watch others' reactions and try to be helpful than self-indulgent or, what is the worst quality, self-pitying. Avoid that always—but pity others with all the noblesse oblige that station requires … remain a gentleman … and you will make people happy by your company, your sympathy, your understanding. The world is full of beauty and some kindly people—find them and be as happy and as lucky as has been so far your

Old devoted Father

He was an unusual father in that he encouraged each of his sons' enthusiasms, and did not insist that any of them go into banking. Gerald became a cellist of some note, and later formed the Stradivarius Quartet, named for the four instruments his father had collected. Only Frederick became a fourth-generation Kuhn, Loeb partner. But of course Felix himself had begun to say, a little sadly, “I was never born to be a banker. I've buried nine partners, and now end up as the sole survivor of this big firm, with nothing but young people around me.”

In summer all the scattered Warburgs liked to gather at Woodlands in White Plains, where both Felix and Paul had houses, and where the children had been given parcels of property and, in some cases, houses of their own. Felix bought two hundred acres adjacent to Woodlands which he called Meadow Farm, and this became Therese Loeb Schiff's summer home. Even though it belonged to the Warburgs, Meadow Farm was always called “Mrs. Schiff's house,” and she grew quite possessive about it. No one, she announced, was to use her bedroom while she was away—except, she added, “Felix may use it if he wishes.” Even
long after Therese's death in 1933 at the age of eighty—on her last Tuesday “at home”—Meadow Farm was still “Mrs. Schiff's house,” and the couple who cared for it would allow no changes, always saying, “Mrs. Schiff liked it this way.”