Personal History (2 page)

He started as clerk and bookkeeper, living in the general store’s back room. Sometimes he slept on the counter with his gun, to protect the merchandise. As his reputation for reliability and sobriety spread, some of his new friends began leaving money with him, for there were no banks. Within three years, he became a general partner in the store, which came to be known as “The City of Paris.” Within ten years, he and his brother Constant had taken it over. He also started lending money, became director of a bank and organizer of the Los Angeles Social Club, and helped maintain law and order as a member of the Vigilance Committee. He was an incorporator of the city water system, involved in real estate and mining investments, and doubled as the French consular agent. In 1867, he married the sixteen-year-old Harriet Newmark, whose father, a rabbi, performed the ceremony, following which a sumptuous dinner was served at the couple’s new home—complete with ice cream, something new to Los Angeles.

My father, named Eugene Isaac Meyer after his father and grandfather, was born in 1875, the first boy in the family after three girls, Rosalie, Elise, and Florence. Four more children followed: two daughters, Ruth and Aline; and two sons, Walter and the youngest child, Edgar. Harriet, not as strong as her husband, became a more or less permanent invalid—whether from having eight children by the age of thirty-two under pioneering medical conditions or because there was some depression involved, or both. As a result, my father’s mother-figure in his youth was his sister Rosalie, six years older than he, who left school to help raise her siblings.

These early circumstances help me understand my father’s personality. His father was very strict and not particularly loving, as far as I can tell, and the only real mother-figure was a near-contemporary, sweet and sensitive but overwhelmed by being thrust into a position of authority well before she was ready for it. There couldn’t have been much parental love for all those children, with the father ambitious and driven and no real mother. My father himself was never very good at personal relations of the intimate kind; the feelings were there, but they went unexpressed.

Early in 1884, my father moved with his family back to San Francisco, a city by then of 225,000 with much better educational and medical facilities than Los Angeles could offer the large Meyer family. It was also safer. I remember my father saying of his early days in Los Angeles that everyone carried a Derringer and almost every night someone was shot. But though my grandfather may have been pleased with the move, my father,
a young boy of eight, immediately became embattled. He was a loner and a fighter, forced by his family to wear clothes—including a white starched Eton collar—that made him look “different.” Older boys at school would put the younger ones in a circle, pitting them against each other. The fights would stop only when someone had a nosebleed, and this was usually my poor father. Nonetheless, he was forced to learn to fight to defend himself, all the while receiving severe reprimands from his father for his rough behavior. These encounters toughened him to the point where, when the family moved to Alameda, to improve his mother’s health by removing her from San Francisco’s fog, young Eugene outfought the local bully, who had previously ruled the playground. This victory had the dubious effect of making him the top troublemaker, both at school and at home. He led the younger children in rebellion against the housekeeper, generally made mischief, and teased the girls, especially harassing poor Rosalie.

Alameda had done my grandmother no good, and it proved too remote to be practical for my grandfather, so after a short time the family moved back to San Francisco. It was the third change of school for my father. After getting hit in the eye by a baseball, he was forbidden to play, on the grounds that it would worry his mother. Football and sailing on a nearby lake had also been forbidden. He was, however, allowed to take fencing lessons, and boxing lessons from Gentleman Jim Corbett, later heavyweight champion of the world, but these too were stopped when a picture appeared in the paper of the lesson with Corbett, who was seeking publicity. He went on having a difficult time in school, and endured being called a sheeny, along with others who were called wops, micks, and chinks.

The family belonged to a Reformed Jewish congregation, and Eugene was instructed in Jewish history, Hebrew, and the meaning of religion, but when it came time for his bar mitzvah, he declined. Asked to declare “perfect faith,” he said, “I believe some of these things, but I don’t believe them all with
perfect
faith.” He was never overtly religious, yet was later involved in Jewish charities, causes, and international issues. He was not a Zionist, however, believing strongly that he was an American citizen first and foremost.

School didn’t interest him, but he read a lot. When he came out third in his grammar-school class, his father reproached him with not being first, largely because he knew the boy wasn’t working, but eventually Eugene developed a true passion for learning, enhanced when his father included him more and more in his business meetings and discussions of politics and high finance.

Like my father, Rosalie became a strong and dominating person. She married Sigmund Stern, and her next-younger sister, Elise, married Sigmund’s
brother, Abraham. The Sterns were nephews of Levi Strauss, who had gone to San Francisco at the height of the Gold Rush with heavy denim material for tents to sell to the miners. Either it didn’t sell as tent material or it made better pants, sealed with rivets, but Levi Strauss made his fortune through those pants, and “Levi’s” eventually became known throughout the world. Because Strauss was a bachelor, the Sterns, who managed his business, inherited the company, which was handed down through Sigmund and Aunt Ro to their daughter, Elise, and her husband, Walter Haas, and eventually to their children and grandchildren.

My grandfather was offered a partnership in Lazard Frères, and although the family hated leaving San Francisco—which was now the home of the oldest two daughters, who after marrying had built two large houses next door to each other—he saw the offer as a fine opportunity. They made the move to New York in 1893. At that time my father was seventeen and had completed his first year of college at the University of California at Berkeley. For the first time he saw the vastness of this country and the awesome size of New York, then a city of three and a half million, with its great luxuries and contrasting slums.

He went to work as a messenger at Lazard with the full expectation that someday he would succeed to his father’s position there. With just three weeks’ notice and only an average recommendation from Berkeley, he crammed for the Yale entrance examination and was accepted, settling down to an excessively grueling schedule. He knew very few people—he was a lonely Jewish boy from the West—so he studied all the time and took extra credits, with an occasional break for a workout in the gym, no doubt both to compensate for the lack of social life and because he was driven to excel. He emerged as a Phi Beta Kappa, and, with his extra credits, skipped his junior year and graduated in two years—nineteenth in a class of 250. He was not yet twenty.

After a brief stint back at Lazard, he went abroad for a year and a half to be apprenticed in banks in Germany, England, and France. He arrived first in Paris, where he worked without pay but was rewarded with a beautiful pearl stickpin, which he wore always, at least in my early childhood memories. He also started investing in the market with $600 his father had given him for not smoking until he was twenty-one. (Years later, my father offered all of us children the same deal, but I believe no one took him up on it, or possibly none of us made it to twenty-one without experimenting with smoking. No doubt the $1,000 he offered us meant a great deal less to us than the $600 did to him.)

My father’s first exercise in adult independence occurred on his return from Europe. His father had groomed him, and certainly expected him, to enter the firm of Lazard. What he found when he returned there was that
nothing had changed: his year and a half of learning banking counted for nothing. He was started at $12 a week and increased only incrementally. In addition, he was working for his brother-in-law George Blumenthal—a difficult man, with a big ego and a quick temper, whom he never really liked. Already an extraordinary foreign-exchange banker, Blumenthal later became even more successful as head of Lazard in the United States. He had married my father’s much-loved sister Florence, or Florie, as the family called her.

When I first became aware of the Blumenthals, they lived winters in New York and summers in France or on yachts in the Mediterranean. Their enormous and elaborate house in New York occupied half a city block and had an indoor tiled swimming pool. Florie brought home immense quantities of French clothes every year, so many that once, when her trunks were brought down from the attic for packing to leave for Paris, one was discovered full of clothes that had never been unpacked from the previous trip. My father once jokingly moaned to George about my mother’s extravagant taste in clothes, exaggeratedly claiming she hardly ever wore the same dress twice. George turned to him and said in all sincerity, “Eugene, you don’t expect your wife to wear the same dress twice, do you?”

Florie had a perfect figure—one Christmas, instead of cards, they sent out plaster casts of her very delicate foot and ankle. She had only one child, whom George didn’t allow her to nurse lest it spoil her beautiful figure, and she never got over this son’s early death.

In any event, whether it was because of my father’s feelings about George Blumenthal or because of his instinct to go it alone, he began to veer from the path his father had laid out for him. After a variety of adventures and false starts in other fields—he had tried learning law at night, but it bored him—he came upon a book,
The Map of Life
, by William Edward Hartpole Lecky, that suggested “that a man’s life should be planned as a single whole in which each stage would be a prologue to the stage that followed,” and he outlined such a plan for himself. The first twenty years were over—they were generally called “school.” Twenty to forty would be given to growth and experimentation, during which he would earn a “competence,” marry, and start a family. Forty to sixty would be a time for implementing all that he had learned and done prior to this, which, “if feasible,” my father wrote, “should be devoted to public service.” He would retire at sixty to grow old gracefully and help young people.

As he looked around at Lazard and even at his father, he was more than ever convinced of the rightness of his plan for life. The Lazard bureaucracy was hopeless, with older men making all the decisions and little opportunity for a bright young man to make a significant contribution.
The Paris partners controlled the company. He was taking out many young ladies, and there was one in whom he was really interested, Irene Untermeyer, the daughter of the lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. I think this was his only genuine romance before he met my mother. At Lazard, however, he was even now making only $200 a month, and realized—as did Irene’s parents, I’m sure—that he couldn’t support a wife on that.

By this time, the cigarette money had been well invested, and he had $5,000 saved. He parlayed this into $50,000 by investing in railroad stocks and then faced his father with his determination to leave Lazard and start out for himself. It was an emotional moment. His father viewed this decision as the rejection of his lifetime of toil in his son’s behalf. When the younger man went further and told his father that he was going to buy a seat on the stock exchange, his father said he wouldn’t help him, but my father announced that he had accumulated the $50,000 then necessary and could do it without any help. My grandfather said, “Eugene, you’ve been gambling,” which is how he viewed playing the market.

My father’s first move on his own, quite soon after leaving Lazard, turned out to be trouble: he unknowingly affiliated with a bucket shop—a kind of fraudulent brokerage house. When he discovered the nature of his associates, he left immediately. It was a blow, but now his father stood behind him, stating that he wanted his son to invest his own funds and expected others in the family to do the same. Even Blumenthal did.

After this rocky start, my father withdrew to Palm Beach to think things over, and there he drew up a “Plan for Developing a Business.” This memo outlined a very simple but high-minded strategy of associating with the best people, acquiring known securities, staying with them, and being constructive, not destructive. Such thinking led him to start his own firm, Eugene Meyer and Company, which opened in 1904, and gradually, he began to make his mark on Wall Street and to do well for himself and his associates. By 1906, he had made several million dollars. At the time he started the firm, it must have been very difficult competing with the larger and better-known houses. In time, however, he came to know the heads of these firms. I always heard him say he had the greatest admiration for E. H. Harriman, father of Averell, and a very dominant figure. I think he felt very small and insecure next to Harriman, Morgan, and the other then-reigning titans, and he was gratified when they started to notice what he was doing. He quoted one of them as saying, “Watch that fellow Meyer. He’ll have all the money.”

His philosophy of investment involved careful research into companies—the first in-depth economic analysis of its kind. This was typical of his lifelong impulse to get at the facts before making judgments. Eugene Meyer and Company, in fact, had the first research department of any
Wall Street house. As time passed, my father became more and more adept at analyzing economic trends. He foresaw panics and violent swings in the market and got out when he reasoned that things were going to go to pieces. Although he made a large fortune, he was also willing to take great risks, and twice he was wiped out, at least by Wall Street standards.

He was very devoted to his family, then and always, and his great wealth allowed him to improve the situation of his parents. The entire Meyer family remained a close but combative one. My father stayed especially close to his sister Ro. In 1906, when the terrible earthquake and fire hit San Francisco, cutting the city off from telephone communication with the outside world, he decided to go out there immediately to see what he could do to help. He boarded a train in New York with a money belt containing $30,000, a small suitcase, and a pistol.