The Jews in America Trilogy (45 page)

Some Guggenheims were less inconspicuous than others. Benjamin Guggenheim bought an elaborate house at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street which featured a marble entrance hall with a fountain and, on a wall facing the double front door, a stuffed American bald eagle, its wings spread as if in full flight, secured to the marble wall with brass chains. The eagle was Mr. Guggenheim's own touch. He had shot it himself one August at his place in the Adirondacks. Whenever it was pointed out to him that it was against the law to shoot American bald eagles, and also to stuff them, he protested that
he
had never been told of such a law, and that when he had taken the bird to the taxidermist the man had said simply, “Whatever you say, Mr. Guggenheim!”

Upstairs was the “Louis Seize Parlor,” decorated with tall mirrors, tapestried walls and tapestried furniture, along with a concert grand piano. But on the floor was a huge bearskin rug with its mouth open in a vicious snarl. Its teeth were forever falling out, and occasionally its tongue, which was disconcerting, but Mr. Guggenheim liked the bear also, and so it stayed amid the Louis XVI gilt chairs and tables. The central parlor, where Mrs. Guggenheim entertained her lady friends at tea, was decorated with an enormous floor-to-ceiling tapestry depicting the triumphant entry of Alexander the Great into Rome.

The Guggenheims never appeared able to do things with quite the
ease—
or at least the attempt at ease—that others in the crowd did. When they traveled, for instance, the Guggenheims never seemed to understand tipping. As they moved from one grand European spa to the next, vengeful porters and bellhops drew meaningful symbols in chalk on the Guggenheim trunks and suitcases, and the Guggenheims never realized why their luggage was always being dropped and crushed and lost.

Benjamin Guggenheim was the Guggenheim on the
Titanic
who refused a weeping steward's offer of a life vest and, instead, went to his cabin and dressed in his evening clothes in order to go down like a gentleman. He insisted, furthermore, that his young valet do the same and, as a woman was entering one of the lifeboats, Ben Guggenheim placed a note in her hand which read: “If anything should happen to me, tell my wife I've done my best in doing my duty.”
*

But had he done his best? A persistent piece of Guggenheim gossip
has it that a surviving
Titanic
passenger was traveling as “Mrs. Benjamin Guggenheim,” and she has been identified as “a young blond singer.” The family has repeatedly pointed out that the
Titanic's
passenger list contained no such name. Yet Peggy Guggenheim has spoken of the shock at going to the pier to meet the survivors on the
Carpathia
, still not knowing that her father was dead, and watching her father's mistress descend the gangplank.

Ben's brother Will (or “Gatenby Williams”) did not fare much better where women and notoriety were concerned. After separating from his second wife, Will “reverted to his old love, the theatre, taking on a succession of showgirls as protégés.” His protégés often held informal press conferences, and one of these young ladies, an actress playing in
Ballyhoo
, told reporters she had met Will because “I was reading a copy of the
Literary Digest
and that caught his eye.” When Will died, his entire fortune was bequeathed to “Miss America” of 1929, “Miss Connecticut” of 1930, and two other showgirls of roughly the same vintage. The papers speculated avidly on how many millions the four girls would divide, but, alas, Will's second wife, whom he had neglected to divorce, had a claim on the estate. The estate itself, furthermore, had been considerably depleted by Will's spending. The four young ladies divided only $5,229.

But the most spectacular playboy of all the Guggenheims was Dan Guggenheim's son, Meyer Robert. M. Robert had a total of four wives and, at one point, upon marrying the second one, became a Roman Catholic. (“I'm delighted,” said Dan Guggenheim at the time. “My son has always been a very bad Jew. I hope they'll make a better Catholic of him.”) He did not, in any case, remain a Catholic long. M. Robert was briefly the American Ambassador to Portugal. When he was sent home,
persona non grata
, by the Portuguese Government, he laughed off the whole thing, saying that it was all because he had accidentally dropped a teaspoon down the front of a Portuguese lady's dress. Witnesses to the event, however, said that the dropped teaspoon would not have got Robert Guggenheim tossed out of Portugal if only he had not been so insistent on going after the silverware with his hands. His fourth wife was the well-known Washington hostess, Polly Guggenheim, now Mrs. John A. Logan, who took her husband's waywardness with tolerant good humor. After Robert Guggenheim's death, his name popped up in the papers again. The federal government wanted to collect some $169,548 in taxes, which, it claimed, should have been paid on gifts of cash, jewelry, and “a
comparatively modest home in Georgetown” made to “an unidentified woman friend.”

At that point, it was remembered that M. Robert Guggenheim had died one evening while getting into a taxi in front of a comparatively modest home in Georgetown, after dining with a friend there.

*
And for some intensely practical reasons. The 1900 Cudahy kidnapping, with its then-record ransom demand of $25,000, had been a grim reminder of what could happen if one made too much point of being rich.

*
A more touching example of courage in the crowd was provided by Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus, who each refused, on that terrible night, to enter a lifeboat without the other, and went down together.

35

MONSIEUR JOURNET'S NIGHTGOWN

At least two important media for the communication of social news had come into being in New York by 1900, neither of which was entirely reliable. One was a weekly gossip sheet called
Town Topics
. The other was the telephone.
Town Topics
was devoted almost entirely to the shocking carryings on of Vanderbilts, Webbs, Whitneys, Goelets, Goulds, Morgans, Huntingtons, Schwabs, and Ryans. The publication dramatized the fact that to be “in society” had certain drawbacks, for
Town Topics
earned considerable revenue through simple extortion; if a Vanderbilt, Webb, Whitney, Goelet, Gould, Morgan, Huntington, Schwab, or Ryan did not want his latest indiscretion printed, he had to pay up. Because they were not considered society, the families of the crowd were mercifully spared (though Jimmie Speyer was once approached by a
Town Topics
“representative,” and gallantly said, “I don't care what you write about me, as long as you don't say anything disagreeable about my wife.” He was left alone).

Meanwhile, thanks to the telephone, gossip traveled faster and more
efficiently than ever before. Most women of the era spent at least two-thirds of each morning on the telephone, and many felt unable to start their day until the telephoning was done. And all at once (or so it seemed), uptown circuits were busy from nine to noon with talk of mistresses, lovers, showgirls, and scandal. Frieda Schiff Warburg, her children remember, “used to look as if she had been drawn through a knothole” when she emerged from her morning telephoning. And well she might have.

Just how many of the romances and harrowing tales were real and how many were imagined is, obviously, open to great question. The word “mistress” had become so commonplace that any woman a man was seen speaking to at a Schiff Friday night could be labeled his mistress by Saturday morning. One day, Mrs. Alfred Liebmann, the wife of the brewer, was lunching with her friend Hulda Lashanska, the concert singer. Girlishly, Mlle. Lashanska told Mrs. Liebmann when they met that they might be joined by “a beau.” Who should show up but the glamorous “Black Prince”—Felix Warburg! Scandal! News of that affair and “mistress” filled the telephone hours for days afterward. But, since it had been an in-the-crowd lunch, news of it never got outside. (And Lashanska, meanwhile, was a good friend of Frieda Warburg's also, which made it seem like a tempest in a teapot.)

Sometimes, as was the custom of the era, when divorce was “not done” except in a Guggenheim-like emergency, the mistress did indeed join the household and become, in Mary McCarthy's phrase, “a friend of the family.” At other times this proved difficult, and there were permanently bruised feelings all around. There were husbands and wives who, though they traveled and entertained together, never spoke, and there were couples who, even though they went to the same dinner parties, were not on speaking terms with other couples over affairs of the heart.

There was one much-liked member of the crowd whose wife, it was suddenly announced, had taken a lover, himself a married man. The affair eventually terminated itself, and, some time later, the young wife died. Though this might have been considered the end of things, it wasn't, and a family conference was called to see what should be done about the dead wife's shocking treatment of her husband while living. Her desk was searched and, sure enough, certain letters turned up which “proved” her guilt. These were then bundled up and shipped—not to their sender but to his wife as “evidence” of his behavior. It was then deemed necessary to tell the dead wife's young children of
their mother's transgressions. These exchanges of information were harsh, but also protective, for now where else could the talk fly? It had flown full circle, and all “within the family.”

Not all affairs could be terminated with such surgical neatness, as was demonstrated by another unfortunate “family problem,” involving, of all people, the Seligmans. By the turn of the century very little scandal had attached itself to that elegant and redoubtable family, though they had been around longer than anybody else. They had their “peculiar branch,” but otherwise they seemed serenely above the tribulations certain others had to endure. In fact, it didn't seem fair, and the Seligmans were resented for this.

In 1900 the Seligman veneer began to crack. Alfred Lincoln Seligman, Joseph's fifth and last son, was—like a number of his brothers and cousins, like Solomon's two sons Jim and Morris Loeb, and like Ben and Will Guggenheim—not interested in business, and was more disposed to be a gentleman of leisure. Alfred was an easygoing, soft-spoken fellow with a dilettantish interest in the arts. He played the cello nicely, and was also an amateur sculptor. He was fond of children, though he and his wife had none, and gave a charming monument to New York, a bronze statue in Morningside Park, at 114th Street, which depicts a fawn cowering under a rock while a fierce bear crouches above. The inscription reads:

To the children of New York City,

Given by Alfred Lincoln Seligman,

Vice-President of the National Highways Protection Society,

and erected under their auspices, 1914

The fawn's position is symbolic of the position Alfred found himself in fourteen years earlier. He was married to the former Florine Arnold, and he and his wife liked to consider themselves “Bohemian.” They loved to entertain artists, writers, composers, and musicians in their big apartment in the old Murray Hill Hotel. And, wrote the late George S. Hellman in an unpublished account of the Seligmans, “Alfred's kind heart beat with a childish faith in the goodness of human nature—a faith so childish, so unbelievably trustful, that it was to lead to the first profound tragedy of the Seligman family.” (Mr. Hellman is a bit of a romantic when it comes to his Seligman relatives.)

The year 1901, as old New Yorkers will remember, was the year of the great fire in the Murray Hill Hotel. The building was rocked with a series of violent explosions, the wounded and dying lay in the
corridors, and much of the hotel was destroyed. But, for some reason, the Forty-first Street side of the building was completely untouched by the fire, and Alfred's and Florine's apartment was in this northern side. Alfred was out of the building when the fire occurred, but a Seligman nephew happened to be in the neighborhood and, explaining that he had a relative who lived in the building, he was allowed through the fire lines to check on Florine. (Mr. Hellman does not say that he was this nephew but, from the evidence he presents, this seems likely.) “He found Florine,” writes Mr. Hellman, “seated in her drawing-room. She was alone, looking lovelier than ever, with a tinge of excitement heightening the color of her peach-blossom cheeks.” (She was, in other words, exercising perfect Seligman composure in the crisis, and the “tinge of excitement” can be excused by the fact that she was in a burning building, and the noise of the blasts, the screech of the sirens, and the screams of the dying must have been perturbing.) The gallant Mr. Hellman cannot resist adding at this point, “Fair-haired, blue-eyed, perfect nose and mouth, Florine Arnold was one of the most beautiful of New York women.”

Graciously, beautiful Florine Arnold Seligman arose from her chair, thanked her young nephew for so considerately dropping by—“But as you can see, I'm perfectly well”—and then said, almost gaily, “I want to show you how terrific the explosions were!”

She then led him through her own bedroom, into an adjoining bedroom, and said, “Look what's happened to Monsieur Journet's nightgown!”

(A nightgown, Mr. Hellman explains, is what men of the period wore instead of pajamas.)

The nephew looked at the nightgown in question. Clearly male, it had been flung, by the force of the blast, from the surface of the bed where it had obviously been lying, and now hung from the ceiling over the bed, draped across a crystal chandelier. But the young nephew was less impressed by this phenomenon than by the news that Monsieur Journet occupied a bedroom in the Seligman apartment next door to Mrs. Seligman's, while Mr. Seligman's bedroom was across the hall beyond the sitting room.

Monsieur Journet was Marcel Journet, a handsome French opera singer, who was filling an engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House at the time.

“Perfectly astonishing,” murmured the young nephew, recalling, as he said this, certain related facts. Alfred and Florine Seligman had
recently returned from California, traveling with Journet, and they were now due to leave for Europe soon, again accompanied by M. Journet. Clearly, a “situation” had developed that required the most delicate handling by the family.