by Ron Chernow
—
Despite their strong family resemblance—both had bald pates, brown eyes, and thick, bristling mustaches—Paul and Felix were always defined in contrast to each other. Paul was known as “the sad Mr. Warburg” and Felix as “the happy Mr. Warburg.”11 The stereotype didn’t credit Paul’s wit or the gravity of Felix’s philanthropy, yet it possessed a rough, serviceable truth. Paul could never be as close to Felix as he was to Max. He had internalized the reserve of Hamburg merchants, while Felix didn’t hesitate to flaunt his wealth. As Paul’s son noted, “He was often very much annoyed at his brother, Felix, who was quite gaily ostentatious in the way he lived and gave to various charities.”12 Nina and Paul, if charitable, gave anonymously and usually to individuals rather than organizations. Nevertheless, by any normal measure, Panina’s living standard was inconceivably grand. When they traveled to Kösterberg, they took a valet-butler, a lady’s maid, a nurse or governess, a cook, and one or two extra maids. Their town house at 3 East 82nd Street had electric elevators and Paul bought an electric hansom cab, with a driver posted above the passengers. Some of Paul’s displeasure with Felix’s consumption seems merited, but some probably reflects a repressed, self-conscious man’s discomfort with a freer spirit.
The brothers differed in their attitude toward religion. Paul and Nina cast off religious orthodoxy and went to synagogue only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Like Aby, Paul refrained from any Jewish community involvement, incurring Moritz’s displeasure. As Paul’s son said, in his parents’ household “a professional Jew … was another category for which we had no use.”13 It was a telling remark, since Felix and Frieda became emblems of institutional Jewish charity. Nina had been infused with some embarrassment about being Jewish. As Betty Loeb told her children, “When traveling on a train for short distances, never hurry for the exit when it reaches your stop. People will think you are a pushy Jew.”14
Paul’s children, Jimmy and Bettina, received scant religious instruction. Jimmy only learned he was Jewish in seventh grade and the shock never quite faded. “Religion was an empty space in my family background,” he said.15 Though “confirmed” (a word that replaced “bar mitzvah” in the Warburg lexicon) by Rabbi Judah Magnes, he found the instruction barren.16 If Jimmy and Bettina ended up ambivalent, even hostile, toward their religious background, some of the blame can be traced to the dogmatic zeal of Jacob Schiff, who always lectured the Loebs that they weren’t observant enough. He saturated his religion with a self-righteous, intolerant spirit. As Jimmy remembered, “I felt warmly about Grandfather Warburg’s Friday evenings and loved the sound of Hebrew. On the other hand, I was repelled by the proselytizing religiosity of my New York uncle, Jacob Schiff.”17
Felix and Frieda observed religious form less from true conviction than from respect for Jacob Schiff. Every Friday evening, they would pray together, light Sabbath candles, and hold hands in a family circle. Schiff led the prayers. The absence from the occasion of any sentient Schiff, Loeb, or Warburg in the greater metropolitan area constituted a serious breach of etiquette. Despite his later position in Jewish affairs, Felix was never observant and described his synagogue attendance as an “act de presence.”18 His grandchildren would note his peevish humor when he had to fast on Yom Kippur.
Schiff’s strident moralism provoked a rebellion among Felix’s children, who recited after each meal a prayer of grace that grandpa had written. No child was too young to be spared Schiffs stern precepts. Felix’s youngest son, Edward, took the religious ceremonies more seriously than his impious older brothers. A nurse once suggested to him that he pluck a rose and present it to his grandfather. When the kind-hearted boy complied, Schiff sharply upbraided him. “Do you know what you have done?” Schiff asked. Little Edward stood baffled. “I know you did not mean it,” said Schiff, “but just the same you killed something on the Sabbath, and so that you will remember this, I think it would be a good idea if you did not come down to meals with the grown-ups for the next two days.”19 This made Judaism seem a dreadful affair, a punishment dreamed up by an irrational sadist, and not a deep, joyful, affirmative experience.
For the first thirteen years of marriage, Friedaflix lived in a five-story town house at 18 East 72nd Street with an elevator and a squash court on the top floor. There the couple had five children: a girl, Carola, then four boys, Frederick, Gerald, Paul Felix, and Edward. These children grew up in a home bright with Father’s banter, but somewhat counterbalanced by Mother’s quite strict and definite ways. Suitably enough, Felix meant “happy” in Latin and he was nicknamed “Fizzie” from the sparkling Vichy Celestin soda water he loved and that seemed to sum up his effervescence. His quick smile lit his face like a light bulb. His friends referred to bright, cloudless days as “Felix weather.”20 A dandy, showman, and ladies’ man, he approached life with a blithe, insouciant air quite unlike that of his wife.
Where Paul fretted about the corruption of wealth, Felix took a cheerfully hedonistic pleasure in costly objects. He loved cashmere coats, silk underwear—anything that caressed the senses. Like Max, he enjoyed dressing for dinner each evening. He wore beautifully tailored suits, a white carnation stuck in his buttonhole, and always smelled pleasantly of Pinaud’s hair tonic or some other refreshing fragrance. Even his bald head shone as if polished daily. An avid sportsman, he loved to sail, swim, ride, dance, and play squash and tennis. A man of perpetual motion, he owned one of the first cars—a French De Dion Bouton—and by stamping his cane on the floor stimulated his chauffeur to accelerate to hair-raising speeds. Later, he owned a 102-foot schooner, the Carol that featured polished brass, a crew of fifteen, and luncheons of lobster and squab. He never actually touched the wheel, but was always nattily attired in a yachting cap, blue blazer, and white flannels.
Felix had a consuming devotion to music. Sometimes he attended three concerts in an evening, mapping his itinerary so that he could catch a favorite piece on each program. The tone-deaf Frieda trailed along reluctantly or stayed at home; it is revealing that Felix’s numerous lady friends were usually aspiring young opera singers. As a Kuhn, Loeb partner, Felix had special entree to New York’s music world. In 1903, Jacob Schiff declined a Metropolitan Opera directorship in favor of partner Otto Kahn, who became the opera’s chairman and effective owner four years later. After debuting at the Met, Enrico Caruso formed a close friendship with “Il Otto Kahn,” as he called him.21 In 1908, Kahn brought over La Scala’s chief conductor, Arturo Toscanini. With Otto Kahn on hand, divas and opera scores no less than balance sheets and stock prospectuses floated in a mad swirl around Kuhn, Loeb, even if Schiff flinched when Kahn launched into extemporaneous arias. After he became involved with the Metropolitan Opera, Felix always sat behind the conductor, who would turn and bow to him before raising his baton. Once, Felix’s secretary asked whether he wouldn’t prefer a seat a few rows back. “Oh, no,” he said, quite shocked. “I like to sit there and follow the score as the orchestra plays.”22
In a family known for privacy and discretion, Felix was the only Warburg to build a mansion. In the panic year of 1907, he bought a lot on the north corner of 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue with a generous one hundred feet of frontage facing the Central Park Reservoir. This choice location was sandwiched between Andrew Carnegie’s mansion a block south and brewer Jacob Ruppert’s mansion a block north. An admirer of the Fletcher mansion at 79th Street and Fifth Avenue, Felix enlisted its architect, Charles P. H. Gilbert, to construct a mansion in French Gothic style. Made of Indiana limestone, with steep slate mansard roofs and ogee-arched windows with crocketed gables, this wonderfully gaudy edifice fit into the row of extravagant mansions that lined Fifth Avenue in the aftermath of the Gilded Age. But it was odd for a Jewish banker to choose a style so closely associated in the popular imagination with church architecture.
Jacob Schiff, who lived in a Beaux-Arts mansion a few blocks downtown at 932 Fifth Avenue, was aghast at the preposterous scale and Gothic style of the proposed house. “That’s
terribly conspicuous,” he told Frieda, “and it will add to the social anti-Semitism in New York if a young couple build such an ornate house right on Fifth Avenue.”23 Schiff so abhorred the projected structure that, with a pained look, he averted his eyes as he passed the construction site each Sunday morning en route to the Montefiore Hospital, his pet charity. Unnerved by Father’s displeasure, Frieda thought to herself, “Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s Gothic that upsets him so. Perhaps he’d like it better if we changed it to a Renaissance style.”24 She discussed such a radical change with Gilbert, but construction was already too far advanced, and the residential cathedral was carried through to completion.
Felix, a genial character, usually cajoled and humored his father-in-law into acquiescence. But with the Fifth Avenue house, Schiff drew a line in the sand. Felix told Frieda, “I just don’t think I can go on working with your father under circumstances like these.”25 When Felix offered his resignation, Schiff shot back, “If you leave this company, I’ll see to it that you never work anywhere in America again.”26 After Friedaflix occupied the building in October 1908, Schiff stopped by for a frosty one-hour visit in which he pointedly ignored the surroundings. The next day, he made peace, however, sending a housewarming present of $25,000. Ironically, the building that Schiff thought would stand as disgraceful testimony of Jewish ostentation would later house the Jewish Museum.
Outwardly, 1109 Fifth Avenue seemed about as playful as a basilica. Solemn, handsome, and airless, it was smothered beneath solid damask curtains, thick carpets, tapestries, giant chandeliers, massive woodwork, heavily upholstered furniture, and painted beam ceilings. An enormous oak staircase rose up five flights—the boys spat from the top floor into a spittoon at the base that never had a chance to dry, said Edward—and an elevator was also available. According to the 1910 census, the house deployed a small army of thirteen servants, ranging from a nurse to an engineer. After stepping through a lace-screened glass door, visitors were met by a squadron of liveried footmen. The mansion exhibited Felix’s appreciation of precious objects, but none of his prankish high spirits or offhand manner.
The house came equipped with every comfort. Besides a dining room, the second floor featured a concert grand piano and an electric pipe organ, with a player attachment and numerous classical music and opera rolls. Felix loved to pump and sing along in full-throated style. Another second-floor room, bathed in deep red velvet, displayed Italian art gathered on trips to Rome. With its saints, Madonnas, and other Christian figures, this Red Room was often used for formal entertaining. An adjoining conservatory featured a Madonna and Child attributed to Botticelli. Felix had few distinguished paintings, but he had two rooms full of superb etchings by Rembrandt, Dürer, and Cranach, installed between glass on special rotating pedestals so that both front and back could be viewed. The second-floor dining room, hung with tapestries, accommodated sixty for dinner. On the third floor, Frieda entertained friends for tea and Felix had an office overlooking Central Park. The fourth floor had the children’s rooms and toy trains, while the fifth floor had a squash court where Felix volleyed against a pro each morning. The servants lived on the sixth floor.
This magnificent but overwhelming setting never quite gibed with the five bright, smart-alecky, irreverent children who traded barbs and quips at the table like fast-talking comedians in a madcap Marx Brothers movie. As Edward noted, “Father used to say had he had any idea what kind of family he was going to have he never would have built so formal a house.”27 More in the outrageous Warburg than the straitlaced Schiff mold, the children had a sense of humor that bespoke tacit rebellion against their German-Jewish heritage. Felix joined in. “Children should be obscene but not absurd,” he said, and his crazy wit and puns set the tone.28 Hesitant to discipline the children, he conceived of his fatherly role as something akin to a flamboyant social director on a fancy cruise ship. After breakfast, Felix was escorted down Fifth Avenue by his sons and they would all tip their hats, first left, then right, in perfect unison, as they walked.
As a young woman, Frieda had developed her father’s partial deafness, which excluded her from the quick repartee. Especially in the early years, she took life seriously and tried futilely to instill a sense of economy in the children. She could be as carping with them as Felix was cavalier. She feared that the children would displease her father and this made her tense. To counter Felix’s laissez-faire attitude, she became, by default, the family disciplinarian. “You always think your children are perfect,” she would say.29 Felix would retort, “Why is it that my children are so wonderful and yours seem to be so full of troubles?”30 At the table, Felix and the children would clown sotto voce so Frieda couldn’t hear the sharp-edged witticisms whizzing by. Sometimes the humor was at her expense and she ran crying from the room.
Trying to manage and regulate her children’s lives, she came across as a taskmaster. As daughter Carola said, “she was too critical—her standards were very pedantic—she got much more loosened up later.”31 An anxious hostess, she insisted that the children appear formally before visitors and always selected their clothing. “Things were always laid out for us and we never questioned,” said Edward.32 The same held true for food. Sometimes, the children seemed like marionettes on a short string and even in the country the groom instructed them which way to ride. Frieda paid an emotional price for this strictness. The children warmed more to Felix and to affectionate relatives, such as Nina, than they did to her.
After their fourth child was born in 1904, Felix decided that his brood needed a house for summers and weekends. Until then, Friedaflix spent summers with the Schiffs at their fifty-acre house, “The Terraces,” a stone house with opulent gardens on Rumson Road near Sea Bright, New Jersey. The Jersey shore was receptive to Jewish families—to a point. Though Schiff was a founder of the adjoining Rumson Country Club, he couldn’t obtain membership for other family members. The same thing happened to Felix at the Sea Bright Tennis Club even after he donated tennis courts. Both Schiff and Felix resigned in pique and as a matter of principle from the two clubs.
The two commuted to Wall Street by ferry. Schiff reserved his own private cabin, something like an opera box, with its own outer porch for views and sea breezes. Starting in 1903, the Schiffs and Warburgs began to travel to Bar Harbor each August—every other August Frieda and Felix went to Kösterberg—when Maine was still alien territory for Jews. Since Jacob and Felix were railroad directors, their families traveled from Grand Central Station by private railroad car, a moveable feast of servants, horses, children, and grandchildren. The cars were sumptuous, with a kitchen and dining area on one side. The families slept in the upper and lower berths of brass beds, shielded from one another by curtains, and the children loved to watch the New England countryside flickering by the window.
This annual routine changed in 1904 when Felix bought thirty acres of property in White Plains, adjacent to the Century Country Club—an “Our Crowd” bastion—where his family spent many Sundays. The parcel didn’t look promising to less sanguine eyes. When Nina’s brother, Morris, saw this undeveloped property, he derided it as “Moneysunk.”33 But Felix kept buying additional land to square off the property, as he told Frieda. The original purchase would expand into a magnificent five-hundred-acre estate known as Woodlands. Felix liked to do things with panache, and this weekend hideaway was no modest country retreat. One visitor would describe it as “a tract of land as large as a duchy” in which the “Warburgs held state in considerable grandeur.”34
This hilly, wooded part of Westchester then seemed remote from Manhattan, and the weekend trips were high adventure. The Warburgs drove up in a huge, custom-made Fiat that seated eleven and was equipped with rooftop luggage racks. In winter, they sat bundled up in furs and in summer donned sporty dusters. When they reached the main Woodlands gate, they still had another mile and a half to go before they pulled up before the main house. This gigantic Tudor affair had a central fieldstone tower with French G
othic windows reminiscent of 1109. Woodlands was rich, but also relaxed and rustic. When Frieda gave birth to Edward there, she simply sent a horse and buggy to fetch a doctor at White Plains Hospital.
So that Felix could have white carnations, he constructed an unusual greenhouse. It enclosed a tiled swimming pool, with exercise rings and trapezes dangling above the water. When Frieda lamented the lack of fresh milk for the children, Felix bought a prize herd of Guernsey cattle and named every cow after a different female family member. To teach the children American history, he laid out presidential benches along five miles of bridle path, each rough-hewn bench displaying the names and dates of another president. Friedaflix had a coach with four thoroughbred black show horses that won medals at Madison Square Garden. This particular hobby won Felix the nickname of the Black Prince. Woodlands also had tandem carriages, pair carriages, a pony for each child, and a polo field. Tennis became the family sport, and international stars from Forest Hills or the annual Rye Tennis Tournament often were seen on the grassy courts. All these lavish arrangements upset Jacob Schiff, who expressed his dismay by saying curtly, “I can’t wait to have the children breathe the good sea air at Rumson Road.”35
In many ways, Felix tried to convert Woodlands into an ersatz Kösterberg. He gave thirty acres to Panina, who built a Swiss chalet-style house there in 1912 that paid homage to Germany, and they named it “Fontenay” after the Hamburg street where they had lived. It featured a pretty outdoor study for Paul and rustic peasant furniture. When Nina grew wistful about the Elbe view from Kösterberg, Felix knocked down a whole stand of trees to open up a view of a golf pond at the neighboring Scarsdale Country Club. Because of Nina’s handicap, Felix built a bridge over a gully on the property so that she could negotiate it in her wheelchair. Eventually Fontenay grew to eighty-four acres.
The Panina house was a five-minute stroll from the Friedaflix house, and every afternoon the two brothers played golf on their private Woodlands holes. Everybody was struck by the stark contrast of their homes. The Panina house was dark, quiet, cerebral, a cloistered place of contemplation; an ancient German butler answered the door. For all her warmth and civility, Nina shared some of Paul’s depression and melancholy. The Friedaflix house, on the other hand, was brightly lit and swarmed with sprightly, laughing people. This contrast made a profound impression on Panina’s children, James and Bettina, who yearned for the freedom next door. Felix dashed about like an overly enthusiastic teenager on the first day of summer camp. As he once wrote to his eldest son, Freddy, “I played nine holes of golf, swam, had a horseback ride with the children and rode the four—all before twelve o’clock.…”36 For Felix, the transition to America seemed so easy and natural, while Paul would always retain something of a European formality and stiffness.