House of Glass

by Hadley Freeman

  Alex’s celebrity buyers were as international as his museum customers. Edward G Robinson – born Emanuel Goldenberg in Romania – frequently visited the gallery, and he and Alex would converse happily in Yiddish. Similarly, Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch Demsky) who, like Sala’s husband Bill, grew up speaking Yiddish in New York, bought two paintings. ‘Actors get a better price from me,’ Alex told him in Yiddish, to Douglas’s delight. Aristotle Onassis, Peter Lawford, Yul Brynner, Jerry Lewis, Ingrid Bergman and Frank Sinatra all visited the gallery, and Alex’s old friend Maurice Chevalier was a regular, although he never bought anything, leading Alex to gripe forever about Chevalier being cheap. Elizabeth Taylor, on the other hand, was very eager to buy from him. In Richard Burton’s diary entry dated 11 January 1969, he describes going to Alex’s gallery with her: ‘He’s a tiny man who claims to be a great friend of Picasso’s,’ Burton wrote.[22] Despite this somewhat sceptical initial impression, Burton got on well with Alex thanks to, Burton assumes, and probably rightly, ‘my gift of the gab, even in French, and my fame!’. Taylor wanted to buy a Picasso portrait of a woman in blue ‘which made her mouth water’. Burton preferred the Picasso painting of a harlequin on a horse for $40,000. ‘I saw many other paintings and will obviously end up buying one,’ he writes. ‘But the most impressive was two paintings by van Gogh painted on both sides of the canvas – one of a man at a loom and one (the other side) of a man sitting in a chair near a fireplace. But they are beyond even my purse.’

  Every New Year, Alex would send out cards to his favoured customers that were actually lithographs of his latest and favourite new painting. In an undated article from the mid-1960s, Le Figaro breathlessly wrote about Alex sending out lithographs of The Pétanque Players by Cézanne to, among others, Picasso, Onassis and President Nixon.[23] Each lithograph was worth about 15,000 francs (the equivalent of about $115,000 today), meaning Alex spent hundreds of thousands on his New Year cards. But, as the journalist added, ‘That is not very extravagant, if we consider the strength of his bank account.’

  By the late 1960s, Alex was an extremely wealthy man thanks to his art dealing, and his own personal collection of art was at least as impressive as his bank account. The Picasso portrait that made Elizabeth Taylor salivate was part of Alex’s collection at home, and although he never sold his own paintings, ‘Alex has promised to invite us to his home to see it,’ Burton writes in his diary. Alex loved to tell journalists about all the famous people he refused to sell his paintings to, from Taylor to Pompidou (a Nicolas de Staël painting, according to Le Figaro). Once French politicians had tried to kill him, now he had the power to deny them what they wanted. A particularly satisfying instance of that was when André Bettencourt, the then future minister of foreign affairs, begged Alex in vain in the early 1970s to sell him the beautiful painting by Raoul Dufy, Le Port du Havre. Bettencourt had been decorated for his Resistance work, but in 1989 it emerged that during the war he had been a member of a French fascist group and written about Jews in the most anti-Semitic terms for the Nazi propaganda paper La Terre Française. Bettencourt exemplified the moral grey shades that were all too common in mid-to late-twentieth-century French politics, and he eventually, and somewhat begrudgingly, apologised. It would have pleased Alex enormously that a former fascist had begged him for something and he’d defiantly refused.

  Alex’s personal art collection was as fine as any museum’s. He now lived on Avenue Foch, then and still now one of the chicest streets in Paris. His ground-floor apartment was filled with, at various times, works by Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Braque, Cézanne, Manet, Degas and, of course, Picasso. When I would have lunch with Alex in his apartment in the 1990s, even I – a cynical, grouchy teenager – was impressed that in his bathroom, almost as an afterthought, was a Matisse personally inscribed to him. The little boy from the shtetl who had always wanted to live surrounded by beauty created a home for himself filled with the greatest treasures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  When Israel won the Six-Day War in 1967, Alex donated his favourite Picasso painting, Sitting Woman (1949), to Israel, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem still has the work. Just as he had given his most treasured paintings, a Kisling and a Pascin, to the Tel Aviv Museum before going off to war, so he gave his most beloved one to Israel to celebrate the country’s military triumph almost thirty years later. Edmond de Rothschild had a reception at his home in Paris to commemorate Alex’s donation, and the guest speaker was General Koenig, Alex’s general from the Foreign Legion. General Koenig talked about seeing the Jewish legionnaires carrying the Zionist flag in 1941 in Bir Hakeim in Africa, ‘and that immediately made me feel a kinship with them’, he said. Alex was deeply moved by his general’s words, which he took as proof of his ‘attachment to the noble and just cause of Israel’, and the two men stayed close until the general’s death three years later.

  Not everyone from Alex’s military past felt such an attachment. Alex had always been proud to have been in England alongside the Free French and de Gaulle, but that changed in 1967. In the months leading up to the war, relations between Israel and the neighbouring countries of Egypt, Jordan and Syria became increasingly strained. De Gaulle, then the president of France, warned Israel not to launch preemptive strikes against Egypt, advice Israel promptly and rightly ignored. These strikes helped Israel to win the war, as the early attacks nearly wiped out the Egyptian air force, and save themselves. De Gaulle’s advice had been bad, his motives questionable and he was so irritated that he had been ignored that he held a press conference at the Élysée Palace – five minutes away from Alex’s gallery – in which he described the Jews as ‘an elite people, domineering and sure of themselves … [with] ardent and conquering ambition’. Le Monde mocked de Gaulle’s speech with a cartoon that appeared on the paper’s front page, showing a skeleton behind barbed wire in a concentration camp, a Star of David on his striped pyjamas, which – only twenty-five years earlier – Jews had to wear on their clothes in Paris. ‘An elite people, domineering and sure of themselves’ was written underneath.[24] Others were even more cutting, such as Michel Debré, France’s former prime minister, the grandson of a rabbi and once a deeply loyal supporter of de Gaulle, who said the president’s comment showed ‘an infantile-psychological-senile’ attitude.[25] De Gaulle’s statement probably had a lot more to do with the hurt ego of a seventy-seven-year-old politician than any proof of long-dormant anti-Semitism within him. But Alex didn’t care. To him, de Gaulle’s remarks sounded like the kind of attitude he had fought against, alongside the general, the attitude that had led to his brother’s death and nearly his own. It was yet another betrayal by France, and he was hurt and, more than that, furious. So he picked up the phone and called his friend and neighbour Prime Minister Pompidou to inform him he was sending back his Croix de Guerre and Bronze Star, which he’d been awarded after the Narvik campaign. Pompidou begged him to calm down and reconsider, but Alex wasn’t having any of it. He boxed up his medals, addressed them to the prime minister and president of France, and had his assistant run them next door to the palace. No matter how good Alex’s life became, he never stopped thinking of himself as the Jewish outsider and he never stopped believing France saw him that way too.

  Picasso’s reaction to the Six-Day War was, for Alex, even more surprising than de Gaulle’s. The artist was so moved by Alex’s gift of his painting to Israel that he confided in him that the first thing he ever said to Alex – ‘T’es Juif, comme moi!’ – was meant not metaphorically but literally: ‘You should know that my mother was a Marrano,’ Picasso told him, according to Alex. (A Marrano was a Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity, often by force.)

  ‘So Picasso was one of us. And, I can add, he told me this with much pride and nobility,’ Alex writes in his memoir.

  As far as I know, there is no evidence that this was true of Picasso’s mother, or that Picasso made this claim to anyone else. Certainly no Picasso scholars I spoke to had heard it. B
ut Alex was adamant Picasso had told him this and, if Picasso did believe it, it would explain Picasso’s well-established and longstanding loyalty to Jewish people, exemplified on an individual level by his friendship with Alex.

  De Gaulle and Picasso were probably the two men Alex respected most in the world, and both stood up against fascism during the war. Their opposite reactions to the Six-Day War show how two people, even those ostensibly on the same side, could find themselves so divided when it came to the subject of Jews and, in particular, Israel. This split arguably developed in the way we still know it because of the Six-Day War, in itself a defining part of the Jewish story in the late twentieth century and still today. Israel’s victory aggravated Palestinian frustration and, in turn, nationalism. Palestinians now knew that other Arab countries couldn’t and wouldn’t help them regain territories now held by Israel, such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights, and this led to an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is still all too ongoing. Israel’s response to this conflict has shaped its own identity and has led the country down a militaristic, far-right path that is far from the dream Alex and many other Jews harboured for it. Alex was right to take a stand against de Gaulle’s cruel comments about Jews in regard to Israel’s actions in the Six-Day War; how Israel reacted after the war led many others to say similar things and worse.

  WHEN I FIRST FOUND the shoebox at the back of my grandmother’s closet, there was only one object that made immediate sense to me. I didn’t know who the bespectacled man in the photos was, or what that metal plate saying ‘GLASS, Prisonnier Cambrai’ referred to, or why the Red Cross was writing to Sala in 1944 – but I knew exactly how my quiet, self-effacing grandmother acquired a Picasso drawing. That’s because it came from the one member of the Glass family who was always happy to talk about his achievements and who achieved the kind of things that were written about in history books. What I couldn’t understand was why she had it or why she had hidden it in her closet.

  Alex introduced Sala to Picasso while she was on a trip to France in the late 1960s, and she was even more excited to meet the artist than Alex was the first time he went to Villa Californie. There is only one photo of her with Picasso and, although he is looking elsewhere while shaking her hand, perhaps for someone a little more interesting than a housewife, she is positively shining with happiness. If meeting Picasso was a kind of self-validating success for Alex, for Sala it was proof that there existed a life out there where dreams really did come true, and that life was in Paris. She never said anything, but her trips back to France, which she took every other year or so, must have been almost impossibly painful for her: yes, going to America had possibly saved her life, but she surely looked at Henri and Alex and wondered maybe if she’d stayed whether she, too, would be living glamorous lives like her brothers, instead of being a suburban American housewife. They had been able to take active control over their lives and climbed up the social ladder in ways she’d longed to do too. But her role in life, as a woman from a traditional Jewish background, was to stay in the background, behind her husband.

  Sala and Picasso.

  Chaya’s death in 1964 quietly devastated Sala: despite her and her mother’s differences, they loved one another very deeply, and being on a different continent when her mother finally passed away in a retirement home in France that Henri and Alex had found for her when she got too old to live on her own in Israel, must have made Sala feel even lonelier. She paid for a death notice in the New York Times, even though no one else in America knew who Chaya was.[26] But that didn’t matter to Sala, she wanted to make a public statement of her grief and for her mother’s death to not pass unnoticed. Shortly after this, Sala went through one of her periodic ‘blue’ phases, and when Alex heard about this, he asked Picasso for a little sketch that he could send her. Picasso obliged, and he even signed it, which he often omitted to do with sketches, much to the frustration of dealers and collectors.

  Until the end of her life, Alex sent Sala pictures, and she loved to brag to visitors about the priceless art her famous brother in Paris gave her. After she died we took down her pictures and out of their frames, and while some of them were worth something – some prints by Soutine, some by Vlaminck – others were worthless posters from art exhibitions. For years I assumed that my grandmother had been deceived by her brother with these posters, but after finding the Picasso in her closet, reading her letters to Alex and Henri and spending so long in Alex’s head by reading his memoir, I realised I was too harsh in my judgement, of both Alex and my grandmother. Sala was not self-deluding. She, alone among the Glass siblings, had been happy to go along with Alex’s exaggerations, fudges and self-mythologies, because she understood her brother. She knew that he loved his family, and that his ability to show it had its limits, so when Alex revealed something real, it had to be cherished and protected. That’s why when he sent her a sketch by Picasso, she didn’t hang it up for all to see: she kept it in her closet, where only she knew about it for the rest of her life. Here was real evidence of how extraordinary their lives were, that they had started in a shtetl in Poland, and now he was sending to her home in America a drawing by one of the greatest artists of all time, just for her. It was their secret and her secret, and like so many other things, she kept it that way until she died.

  Hadley, Sala and Bill, in about 1980.

  13

  THE END OF THE GLASS SIBLINGS

  Paris and Miami, 1980s and 1990s

  AS THEY ENTERED their fourth decade of marriage, Bill and Sala developed a kind of mutual dependence that could, from certain angles, be seen as love. Sala in particular felt a real marital loyalty to him that ultimately meant she was never at ease, wherever she was: when she was with him, she was dreaming of her family in Paris; when she was in Paris, she fretted about whether Bill had enough to eat at home. She was in a constant battle between her desires and her obligations.

  A mutual respect had grown between them: they understood each other and in many ways appreciated one another’s qualities as a spouse and parent. And yet, friends would say the two of them could argue over the oxygen in the air, and this was barely an exaggeration: one of their most frequent arguments was over the thermostat in their apartment. It was never too hot for Bill, whereas Sala liked it cool and fresh, and as fast as he would turn the radiator dial up she would turn it down, horrified at how cloyingly claustrophobic he made her home. But in 1973 it looked like he had definitively won the temperature argument when he announced they were moving to Miami, Florida. The family had often gone there on holidays and the reasons Bill loved Miami (the golf, the heat) were the same reasons Sala hated it (the lack of culture, the heat). But she went along with the move. She knew how much he wanted to go and when he was like this there was no arguing against him. It would, after all, be better for his health than the bitter East Coast winters, and maybe there was a part of her that thought, given Bill was now in his seventies, she might not be there for too long.

  Once she was there, Miami turned out to have its advantages. She loved their apartment, with the ready-made community inside the building of other older Jewish couples with whom she could play cards and go shopping, and she especially enjoyed the local Jewish delis where she could buy lox and challah. While Bill played golf all day, she made a life for herself, introducing herself to everyone in the building and teaching them backgammon on the beach. When Bill stayed at home in the evenings, she went to the ballet, the theatre and every exhibition of French art. They led busy if separate lives. (She also valiantly maintained her side of the battle of the air temperature, insistently turning the air conditioner up as high as it would go in every room of their apartment, while he would turn it off behind her, barking in frustration.) She made a young friend, named Stephanie, who was the same age as her sons, and the two of them liked to go on shopping trips together, during which Sala would try on miniskirts that Stephanie would never have dared to try on herself, and she alway
s looked wonderful. When Stephanie told her one day that she was leaving her husband, despite the disapproval of their friends, Sala looked at the ground and said quietly, ‘You have great courage.’

  Hadley and Bill, in about 1986.

  Best of all, their younger son Rich soon also moved to Miami to work as a lawyer. Just as each of the Glass siblings reacted so differently to what they went through during the war, so Sala’s sons reacted in their own individual ways to their parents. Sala and Bill poured the love they couldn’t give one another into their boys, but whereas Ronald found this at times overbearing and eventually moved overseas, Rich stayed close. Even as a popular bachelor about town, he saw his parents almost every day, and when he went to work during the day as a lawyer, Sala would often come to his apartment to restock his refrigerator. She loved doing this as much as he appreciated that she did it. (The Freeman boys, like the Glass siblings, are an eloquent argument in favour of nature over nurture when it comes to explaining a person’s character. Despite having an identical upbringing, Ronald and Rich are in many ways as different as Alex and Jacques.)

  What Sala really liked about Miami was the view from her living room. Their apartment was on the seventh floor, and faced the beach. Sala could stand at the window for hours, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean she had crossed so many years ago, gazing back towards her beloved France and home. But a few years after they moved in, a developer built an identical apartment building across the street, between her and the sea, and she watched the progress of the work creeping up closer and closer to her window. One day they were at level pegging, her and the builders. Then the new building was finished, blocking her view of the ocean, and she looked out of the window no more.