Personal History (5 page)

In addition to his business problems, the first years following his marriage brought a number of personal troubles and tragedies. The worst was the loss of the youngest Meyer, Edgar, his partner and much-loved sibling, who went down on the
Titanic
after putting his wife and baby daughter in the last lifeboat. He was only twenty-eight. My father had been his much older brother—almost a father figure, and certainly a mentor—and he was painfully bereft. He was not close to many people; Edgar had been one of the very few.

He had my mother, of course, who always stood behind him staunchly when he needed it, but who seemed increasingly to resent running the big houses, who disliked social obligations, and who was shocked and discouraged by the pains of childbirth. She asked her obstetrician during Florence’s birth why anyone had a second baby. As she herself wrote, “I became a conscientious but scarcely a loving mother.”

By 1914, she had had my second sister, Elizabeth—or Bis, as she was always known—and was chafing so over what she felt as the “crushing” of her personality that my father encouraged her to go abroad. They initially thought of going together, but the gathering war clouds concerned him and he decided to stay home to look after his, by now, very large business. In addition, given her frustrations in acclimating to marriage and a family, they both saw the need for some distance between them, so they agreed that she would take the trip to Europe alone and they would correspond often. Indeed, all her life my mother found it easier to communicate from a distance, and she conversed with us children at least as much through letters as she did in person. I took this form of communication for granted.

For some reason, when she was in her old age and during my middle years, she suddenly gave me the letters that she and my father had exchanged while she was abroad in 1914. I’m not sure why. The strains between them were ill-concealed in these letters, which freely expressed their differences, his fairly unreasonable anger and jealousy, and her conflicting emotions.

Her first letters to him were written in May 1914, while she was still on the German steamship the
Vaterland
, headed for Bremen. Her very first letter asked why he had left the boat so long before it sailed. She was quite crushed, and ended the letter with “Kiss my babies. I have left my heart with you and them.” She seems to have quickly got over any sadness at leaving them, however, since the next letter was full of details about her active social life on board—she had been taken up by the very distinguished Mrs. Stotesbury of Philadelphia. She alternated these social details with more intimate comments. At one point she asks,

Much of the European trip was a reconstruction of the artistic life she had created as a student there. She looked at and bought books and art in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. She went with de Zayas to see what she called the “ultra-moderns.” She “expected to be horrified”—particularly by Picasso’s work, since she had heard he used “pieces of wallpaper, newspaper and other actual things with which to construct his pictures”—but she found his work “large as life and fascinating” and bought a small still life of “a pipe, a glass, a bottle and some grapes,” the grapes having been set in sawdust. She called it a “real work of art,” and paid $140 for it.

Fairly early on, she committed an almost fatal error from the point of view of her relationship with my father. She went for tea to the apartment of an old friend, Alfred von Heymel, whom she had met in Berlin through her onetime beau Otto Merkel the summer of her student year.

Instead of making things better, as she thought her writing from this distance would, her letter about this unchaperoned visit prompted a wonderfully old-fashioned row. She had told my father quite casually about going to von Heymel’s apartment alone, but added that he should not be shocked, since the place was “full of domestics.” There followed from my father—all carefully preserved—two letters of uncontrolled and repetitive rage at her having “gone alone to a man’s apartment.”

She cabled and wrote back that there was a misunderstanding and tried to give her side of the incident, but it was no use. The details didn’t matter to him; what did matter was that he had to have confidence in her. He enumerated other occasions when he felt she hadn’t used good sense. He felt that the liberty he wanted her always to feel was hers was being abused, and that if she really cared she would understand the serious consequences of her thoughtlessness. Incredibly, after saying all this, he said he hoped “nothing in this sounds like lecturing and preaching,” signing the letter “with fondest love.”

Despite the misunderstandings on both sides about this ill-fated von Heymel visit, she carried on with her trip and her letters. She wrote my father that she recognized that her whole existence had been devoted to life, whereas his had been devoted to work. She also said she hadn’t been giving to him, which she concluded was not entirely her fault: “We have often scarcely seen each other. We have lived in the market place instead of building up a shrine of our own.” She thought even their town house reflected this distance between them: “We have no room where one feels you and I actually live.” She admitted to him that in the last year she had
been terribly restless and dissatisfied and could feel his uneasiness: “I do not blame you. Only a blind man could have failed to be uneasy about the woman who left you but I do not think you will be uneasy about the woman who returns.”

Indeed, in the letters she wrote during this interlude she tried to be supportive of him and analytical about herself, but to little avail. He wrote a final letter complaining that she hadn’t written as often as she had promised, that she was always in a hurry, and that she would be coming home tired instead of rested. This letter ended with:

Her last full week of what turned out to be more than two months in Europe she spent with the Steichens in their simple house in Voulangis, where he was growing and breeding delphiniums, a lifelong passion. With little to do, she wrote my father that she had grown “uneasy about you, the kids, the cook, the strawberries that weren’t being preserved.…”

She sailed for home on a Dutch steamer on July 31, as promised, and luckily, too, since it was one of the last boats to leave Europe before World War I erupted two weeks later. Steichen’s house was near to what became the front as the Germans threatened to break through at the first Battle of the Marne. Ignorant of his extreme danger, Steichen cabled my father asking what he ought to do. “Suggest immediate orderly retreat,” was my father’s firm reply. The Steichens were just able to leave for America and took refuge at Mount Kisco with my parents.

On her way home, my mother had a nightmare in which she saw herself as her father, irresponsible and self-absorbed to the extent of ruining his family’s life and hers. She made up her mind not to be like that. And, in fact, the time away, despite the stormy exchanges, seems to have helped. She returned with a new commitment to this difficult relationship, determined to make it work. In a letter she had mentioned resting up before enduring more of “the baby business.” I suppose her assumption was that she would have one every two years—and, indeed, she had my brother Bill a year later. And two years after that, on June 16, 1917, I was born.

I
N LINE WITH
my father’s “map of life,” the time was right for him to turn his attention to public service. In the immediate years before my birth, he had begun to play a semipublic role in New York. In 1913, he had been elected to the board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange and had worked hard to effect the kinds of changes and reforms he had been espousing in financial circles. He was active in helping manage the various panics that hit the stock exchange as the threat of war in Europe loomed larger, and then later, as the likelihood grew of America’s involvement in the war.

By the fall of 1914, for example, the war in Europe threatened the textile industry, largely because the German dye cartel at that time supplied at least 90 percent of our dyes. My father loaned Dr. William Gerard Beckers, a German-trained chemist, the money for plant facilities and a much-needed laboratory to continue his experimentation with manufacturing dyes. In 1916, Beckers’s company merged with two other corporations to create the National Aniline and Chemical Company, and a few years after the war, my father negotiated a merger of National Aniline with four older companies. The integrated company thus created, the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation, never missed a dividend throughout the Depression. By 1931, his holdings were worth $43 million, and the dividends were later to help cover losses suffered by
The Washington Post
.

Despite several financial setbacks, and even before the huge success of Allied Chemical, my father’s wealth was considerable. By 1915, his fortune was estimated at around $40–60 million. But making money, satisfactory as it was, was never his primary objective. As he did throughout his life, he looked for ways to make his money work for the public good. He had become engaged in many welfare organizations. He was also president of Mount Sinai Hospital, and his interest in mental health was already evident in his support for building clinics. He had set up a fund at his alma mater, Yale, to train young men for public service. At the same time, he
was beginning to hanker for some opportunity to serve the government himself. Being Republican, and having contributed to Republican campaigns and causes, he could see no immediate opportunities, since President Wilson was in office. He got involved in Charles Evans Hughes’s campaign against Wilson in 1916, which, of course, was narrowly unsuccessful.

Shortly after the election, my father, even more eager to work for the government since he was certain America would be pulled into the war, offered his services to his friends Justice Louis Brandeis and Bernard Baruch, and even to Wilson himself. With no specific assignment, he went to Washington as a dollar-a-year man, and, after a few false starts, he eventually got various appointments and high-level government assignments under seven presidents, beginning with service on the Raw Materials Committee and the General Munitions Board, both eventually leading to the War Industries Board.

My father left New York for Washington early in 1917. My mother stayed in Mount Kisco that summer, following my birth in June. In October she joined him in Washington in a large rented house on K Street. For several vague reasons—Washington was crowded, there was a pneumonia epidemic at one point, they viewed their stay as temporary—they left us children in New York for the next four years, three of which they spent mostly in Washington with occasional visits back and forth. It’s odd that they claimed not to have known how long they would be staying, since as soon as he got to Washington my father resigned as a governor of the stock exchange, gave up directorships in several companies, and sold all stocks that might involve him in a conflict of interest. In fact, in August 1917 he decided to dissolve his investment banking firm completely, since he knew even then that he would get deeply involved with the United States Treasury. He left only a small office for his personal business and several people who worked for him buying and selling stocks and paying taxes.

In 1917, we were occupying the entire top floor and half of the floor below at 820 Fifth Avenue, which is where I was born. We—“the babes,” as Mother often referred to us in her diary—lived with Powelly in this Fifth Avenue apartment. A governess, Anna Otth, had been added after Bill was born. I can’t remember the years in New York, and since I was a baby, those very early years of separation and substitute parenting had the least effect on me of any of the children. Only psychiatrists can guess about their effect on my older siblings. Much later, my brother, when he was in the process of being analyzed to become a psychoanalyst himself, got very angry thinking about the separation and testily asked my mother how she could have left her children in New York for those early years. She said, “Well, you were all in school.” But the older children were two,
four, and six, and I was a few months old, when our parents first left for Washington.

W
HEN SHE WENT
to Washington, my mother’s life changed drastically—and for the better. She was part of a team for the first time, going into a strange city in which she and my father were both new. There seems to have been less anti-Semitic prejudice in Washington than in New York. And in Washington, unlike the many women who to this day find the city distasteful because they are regarded as appendages of their husbands, my mother found a wide canvas on which to paint.

She continued to maintain her old interests, particularly in Chinese art, even admitting in her autobiography that “I was so engrossed in translating Chinese texts and in writing a book on the philosophy of Chinese art that it never occurred to me to make any active contribution toward the war effort. In plain truth I sat out the First World War.” At the same time, however, she threw herself into Washington’s social life in a determined way, partly because she enjoyed it but also because she saw immersion in social life as the way she could help further my father’s interests.

Mother began another diary at the time they moved to Washington, which makes it clear how devoted she was to him. She often worried that his talents weren’t sufficiently recognized, and she constantly noted the progress of his career and her faith in his abilities: “He is so big that I want him to be of more help in this terrible situation of chaos produced by incompetence and politics mixed.”