The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Even before the wedding, Frieda had written to Natica, saying that she understood Natica was beautiful and gracious and regretting that, under the circumstances, they couldn’t meet. Grandma Schiff gave Natica a ring to ease the tension. After the wedding, Gerry and Natica were invited to lunch with Felix and Frieda. Afterward, Frieda asked Natica to take a stroll in the garden while the guests speculated about this tête-à-tête. The two women returned locked in intimate talk. Frieda had evidently decided that the time had come to make peace within the family and move on. She said to Natica, “My dear, you’re so nice, you must be Jewish.”7

  The match between Gerry and Natica was a sensible one. He played his cello while she wrote and painted and they were enormously devoted to each other. To escape Woodlands, they moved to the heavily WASP North Shore of Long Island. When they joined the Creek Club, which banned Jews, Natica became the member of record. Natica didn’t regard this as tokenism or as submitting to prejudice, but as pioneering, an assimilationist idea very congenial to Gerald, who would never resolve his conflicted feelings toward Judaism. When his daughter, Géraldine, became one of the few Friedaflix grandchildren to marry a Jew, Gerry was disappointed.8

  The match to Condé Nast’s daughter didn’t assist Gerald’s career, which already suffered from a perception that he didn’t exactly need the work. But although Gerry never fulfilled his dream of becoming a distinguished cellist, he nonetheless had an interesting, diverse career, becoming a founder and conductor of the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra; a vice-president of the City Center of Music and Drama; and a trustee of the Mannes School. He gave children’s concerts, did a series on Beethoven for public television in New York, and made recordings with the London Royal Philharmonic. He would generously—and anonymously—lend his Stradivarius instruments to young musicians for auditions and competitions.

  It sometimes seemed that the fame of Gerry’s instruments fared better than his own. From Felix, he had inherited La Belle Blonde Stradivarius, later swapping it with the Havemeyer family for the 1711 Duport Stradivarius, considered by some the greatest of all Stradivarius instruments. (Gerry sweetened the swap with cash to even the exchange.) It had been played in performance with both Beethoven and Chopin themselves and supposedly bore scars from Napoleon’s spurs. One night, Gerry invited Mstislav Rostropovich to sample the cello at a postconcert supper. The great cellist savored its rich sound. After Gerry’s death, Natica sold it to Rostropovich for a substantial price and he treasured the splendid instrument. When Gerry’s daughter went backstage to say hello, Rostropovich patted the instrument and said, “That’s Gerry’s soul singing in there.”9

  With his youngest son Edward, Felix again experienced a failure of vision. Edward was short, blue-eyed, and sensitive. A newspaper once described him as “a slender young man with the eyes of a dreamer.”10 His nickname was “Peeper,” since he had reminded his German governess of a Piepmatz, or little bird. Always Frieda’s favorite, he showed great compassion for his mother and often did sweet, thoughtful favors for her. Even their political views gibed: Eddie and Frieda were the house Democrats and Eddie escorted Frieda on trips to Palestine in the 1930s. Wanting to be accepted by his macho older brothers, he ended up being ribbed instead as mother’s little darling. This introduced doubt and insecurity that Eddie would strive to cover up.

  A superb raconteur and inveterate punster, Eddie had a droll, sly, humor that sneaked up and exploded upon the listener. He responded to the avant-garde arts of the day, but Felix wanted him to be a proper Victorian gentleman. On Eddie’s twenty-first birthday in 1929, Felix warned against self-pity. “Avoid that always—but pity others with all the noblesse oblige that station requires.”11 This was the voice of another era. Felix also exhorted Eddie to steer clear of the Social Register crowd into which his children were drifting. “I have avoided the money-mad crowd who only know that measure of success and for that Piping Rock country club crowd I have not much time to spare.”12

  By the time Eddie entered Harvard, he was a short, handsome, dapper young man. As a freshman, he befriended Lincoln Kir stein, whose father ran Filene’s department store in Boston and knew his A&S counterpart, Walter Rothschild. (Kirstein’s father helped to form Federated Department Stores aboard Walter’s yacht.) Along with John Walker III, Eddie and Lincoln rented space above the Harvard Co-op in 1928 and launched an enterprise called the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Started right before the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, it brought many European modernist works to American shores.

  The three young men reacted against the polite, tasteful art esteemed by their affluent families in favor of fresh, bold, rebellious, free-flowing modern works. Art historian Nicholas Fox Weber speculates that as Jewish outsiders at Harvard, Eddie and Kirstein were especially receptive to this art. “Kirstein and Warburg embraced modernism in part because, knowing that they were out of the mainstream anyway, they elected to foster rather than mitigate their sense of difference.”13

  Borrowing pictures from the Rockefellers and other wealthy families, they exhibited works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Brancusi, and many European artists still considered controversial in some American quarters. There was a daring show on recent Parisian art and another on “Modern German Art” that flew in the face of anti-German sentiment. Eddie and his father proved financial mainstays of the venture. This extended Felix’s work with Paul Sachs, who came from another “Our Crowd” family and ran the Fogg Art Museum. Felix was such a munificent benefactor of the Fogg that Frieda often pressed Eddie to find out why Felix never got an honorary degree.

  On January 26, 1930, Eddie went to Back Bay station to pick up Alexander Calder, who was supposed to bring seventeen pieces for exhibition. Instead, as he dismounted from the train, Calder greeted Eddie with three rolls of wire wound around his arm. Back in Eddie’s room, Calder changed into pajamas and began twisting the wire into whimsical shapes. Within forty-eight hours, he had brought forth more figures for his famous circus. Glancing at a photo on Eddie’s desk, Calder whipped off a caricature of Felix, with a Star of David at its base. To signify Felix’s trademark carnation, Calder slid a test tube through the buttonhole. (Eddie bought that and two other Calders with his allowance money!) On January 31, Calder staged the first public performance of his circus at the gallery above the Harvard Co-op.

  One might have thought that Eddie would respond to Uncle Aby’s work. Quite the contrary. On a visit to Hamburg in the summer of 1929, he apparently found Aby an insupportable bore who lectured for hours on remote topics. Eddie liked the spontaneity of modern art, while Aby’s approach seemed stuffily pedantic. The German trip, however, had one momentous result. Having turned twenty-one in June, Eddie had inherited money from Grandpa Schiff. A friend who worked in a Berlin gallery showed him Picasso’s Blue Boy. This downcast, pensive figure enchanted the young Harvard undergraduate who plunked down seven thousand dollars for it. On the trip home, he worried about Felix’s reaction and decided to reduce the amount he had paid by half. When Eddie told the customs officer that he had paid thirty-five hundred dollars for the painting, the man gasped. “You bought a $3,500 picture? You mean you actually paid that for this? Sonny, I’m going down the dock, and when I come back, you change that figure to $1,000.”14 Piggy was there to add comedy to the scene. “Thanks,” he told the customs officer. “You see, we find it cheaper to let him do this than to keep him at Bloomingdales [Westchester Hospital].”15

  At 1109 Fifth Avenue, Eddie had converted the fifth-floor squash court into an art gallery, which enjoyed an outlaw existence. Instead of trying to understand the Picasso, Felix and Frieda dismissed it as obscene and revolting and demanded its removal to the fifth floor. Felix had only grudging respect for Eddie’s precocity in the art world. As he wrote to him about the Harvard gallery, “In regard to your art exhibit and salesroom, I have no objections to the matter in principle, unless it would be that it would detract from your work. If it teaches you business methods, there
will be no harm done.”16 Felix talked about the gallery as if it were a small boy’s lemonade stand, not a serious artistic commitment.

  Money opened doors for Eddie but also sowed inner confusion. After graduating from Harvard, he discussed a teaching post with Georgiana Goddard King of the Bryn Mawr art department, who explained that she lacked the necessary budget to hire him. “But if I were to receive a check from some anonymous donor for a thousand dollars,” she said slyly, “that could go for your salary.” “Shall I write the check now?” Eddie asked. “There’s no hurry,” she said.17 The episode recalled Gerry’s everlasting dilemma as to whether he was a performer or a patron in disguise.

  While teaching at Bryn Mawr, Eddie, age twenty-four, was named a trustee of the new MOMA, making him and Nelson Rockefeller the youngest trustees. In 1933, Eddie moved to New York and worked as a volunteer at MOMA, helping to found its film department and serving as its treasurer. Another young adviser to the museum, architect Philip Johnson, redesigned Eddie’s apartment at 37 Beekman Place. Done in the international style that Johnson would make famous, the apartment had pigskin furniture, sleek black and white lacquered surfaces, fishnet curtains, and a glass wall. It was hard for Felix to savor this style, but he tried to be a good sport. When he visited the apartment, he already had a heart condition, yet climbed the three flights of the brownstone and perched nervously on a metallic, modernist chair. As he bent forward to dial the telephone, the chair collapsed under him and he crashed to the floor, bruising his jaw. “That’s what I like about modern art,” Felix said. “It’s so functional.”18 Frieda was similarly uneasy with avant-garde art. As a patron of Gaston Lachaise, Eddie donated one of the sculptor’s billowing ladies to the museum. The stout Frieda saw the work, implausibly, as a wicked piece of fun at her expense. “All I can say, Edward,” she told him curtly, “is that I think this is a personal insult.”19

  Although Eddie had never even seen a ballet, he wound up as the financial angel of the American Ballet, the forerunner of the New York City Ballet. On European trips, Kirstein had become acquainted with Serge Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet and its choreographer, George Balanchine. America still lacked a national ballet company and it seemed an exotic art form to most Americans. Martha Graham and Denishawn pretty much exhausted the roster of serious dance. In late summer 1933, Lincoln Kirstein, just back from Europe, raced up to see Eddie at Woodlands. As they wandered through the woods, Kirstein said he had convinced George Balanchine to start an American ballet school and company. Eddie agreed to split the cost of bringing over Balanchine and his business manager, Vladimir Dimitriev, to discuss the venture. On October 17, Eddie and Kirstein met the two Russians at the pier and squired them around town, taking them to Radio City Music Hall and the RCA Building.

  The trip was a success, and the fledgling School of American Ballet soon opened in a studio at Fifty-Ninth Street and Madison Avenue. Balanchine set to work on an ethereal new ballet, Serenade, set to Tchaikovsky music. To offset this gossamer work, Eddie thought they should hazard an American subject and suggested that Balanchine try a spoof on a Harvard-Yale football game, complete with flappers and students in raccoon coats. The result was Alma Mater, with the book by Eddie himself. Gershwin declined to write the music but suggested Kay Swift, and the ballet evolved into a very Warburgian endeavor. John Held, Jr., a New Yorker cartoonist, did the sets.

  Eddie was disappointed when Balanchine refused to see a real football game, which didn’t augur well for the project. Friedaflix couldn’t figure out this new phase of Eddie’s life. For his twenty-sixth birthday in June 1934, Eddie asked if the new dance troupe could perform at Woodlands. His parents agreed not just to ballet but to a buffet for two hundred guests. The ballet crowd that swarmed through Woodlands that June night was a far cry from the usual staid guests. “My poor parents had no idea what hit them,” admitted Eddie.20 A platform was set up on the lawn, spotlights were installed on the roof, a piano was tucked in the bushes. While dancers changed in the swimming pool, the audience waited on lawn cushions. Then the dancers appeared for Serenade, lifting their arms to the heavens—which responded with a sudden gust of rain. (Balanchine had altered the opening stiff-arm lift, which reminded Eddie of the Nazi salute.) The guests agreed to return the next night. This didn’t stop Eddie from running about in a dither the next morning. In a tizzy, he asked, “Where’s Lincoln?” and brother Freddy answered, “Booth shot him.”21 The next night, the heavens cooperated and the audience was enthralled. Unfortunately, Alma Mater, Balanchine’s first stab at Americana, proved a flop. It fared far better in December at its first public performance in Hartford. George Gershwin sat in the audience and afterward called Kay Swift in Nevada to express his admiration.

  As financial backer and business manager of the budding American Ballet, Eddie helped to pilot it through an extended financial crisis. He has left a memorable vignette of the company’s first Manhattan season at the Adelphi Theater in 1935. “Lincoln and I sat in the empty house with our hands cupped, covering our eyes. By the third performance, there were about 5 members of the ballet company’s family in the audience.”22 Embarking on a cross-country tour, the company went bankrupt in Scranton when the tour manager absconded with the receipts, sticking Eddie with steep bills. The disaster-prone company teamed up with the Metropolitan Opera for the 1935–36 season. Henceforth, Eddie was only sporadically involved, most notably in 1937, when he commissioned Stravinsky to write a new score, Jeu de Cartes, for a Stravinsky Festival.

  Eddie grew tired of the ballet prima donnas. He also had a nagging sense that Lincoln leaned on him for money, whereas they had split the costs evenly in earlier days. Having felt that people exploited his father’s generosity, Eddie was sensitive on that score. Disillusioned with the avant-garde, Eddie parted company with Kir stein. Kirstein would still be with Balanchine when the New York City Ballet was formed in 1948 and he remained a director of the company for decades. Bruised and bitter, Eddie didn’t attend another ballet for forty years.

  Eddie got only limited praise from his father for his path-breaking work in art and ballet. Felix sympathized with his financial travails, but never quite considered this grown-up business. Sometimes Felix could be lightly mocking, other times damning. At one point, he likened Eddie’s patronage of the ballet to running a house of ill repute.23 He simply couldn’t concede that a career in the arts was a legitimate way for a male Warburg to spend his life.

  Despite his zany, inspiring moments in art and ballet, Eddie realized that he was trying to please others, not himself. “I was a timid guy wanting very much to be included,” he said. “And wanting to be part of the gang. The gang that I wanted to be part of was the young enthusiastic art followers and collectors.”24 He was still little brother trying to please and impress his mocking older brothers. At bottom, it didn’t sit well with him that he had strayed so far from family traditions. By the late 1930s, his life would undergo a radical shift.

  Meanwhile, Eddie succumbed to the craze for psychoanalysis that infected the American Warburgs. Bettina referred him to Gregory Zilboorg for analysis along with Kay Swift. Felix and Frieda were mystified by all this hocus-pocus and, as it turned out, they were absolutely correct. Eddie went to Zilboorg every day for more than twenty years. Instead of fostering autonomy, Zilboorg kept Eddie in a highly profitable state of dependence.25 Zilboorg mingled his professional and social life in an unethical manner. In late 1935, when Eddie and George Gershwin visited Mexico and dined with David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, Zilboorg went along with them. Fearing a hostile reception from the Mexican radical artists, the conservative Zilboorg packed a gun.

  In her biography of psychoanalyst Karen Horney, Susan Quinn points out that by 1934 questions were being raised about Zilboorg’s ethics in connection with bookstore funds at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. One public relations executive complained to the institute in 1940 that he was financially exploited by Zilboorg, who had asked him to help pay his taxes; Zilboorg had
taken five thousand dollars from the man for doubling as his business consultant.26 Before his death, Eddie Warburg told similar bitter tales of making loans to Zilboorg and sometimes being asked to pay Zilboorg’s taxes.27 When Eddie once mentioned that he was buying a mink coat for his wife, Zilboorg got him to buy one for his wife as well.28

  What angered Eddie was not Bettina’s initial referral to Zilboorg, for he believed that she had acted in good faith and honestly erred. But Bettina, evidently, learned that Zilboorg was a rascal long before the rest of the family and never alerted them to the danger. By the time she did, it was too late and the damage had been done. Kay and Jimmy had gotten out of analysis after a brief time, but Eddie didn’t and he never forgave Bettina.29 Gregory Zilboorg finally died in the late 1950s.

  ——

  The magnificent Stockholm wedding of Siegmund and Eva Warburg, November 18, 1926, with two bridesmaids from Eva’s family. (Private collection)

  CHAPTER 25

  ––

  The Country Cousin

  To represent the fifth Warburg generation in the Hamburg bank, destiny chose two second cousins so totally unlike, so visibly mismatched, that they seem to step forth from a family feud as conceived by Thomas Mann. Max’s son, Eric, was like someone born amid a perpetual party. Fair-haired, sociable, fun-loving, he was a good-natured young man, a born diplomat, but not particularly serious. His cousin, Siegmund—grandson of the first Siegmund, son of Georges, nephew of Aby S.—was a dark, brooding young man of great charm and smoldering moods. With a massive intellect, he delivered blunt judgments on a world that often struck him as weak and errant. Eric was casual, modest, and relaxed, and never took himself too seriously. Siegmund carried great hopes and a powerful sense of ambition. Yet both were steeped in Warburg history and tradition and neither yielded to the other in his reverence for the family name.