Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  Six years after the birth of Artigas, Wolf and Annita’s only daughter was born in Porto Alegre, on December 20, 1934. An opera buff, Wolf insisted upon naming the baby girl Lily in honor of the petite French soprano Lily Pons, who was at the height of her fame just as her Brazilian namesake was born.

  By the time Lily was born, residents of Porto Alegre were keenly following events in the country’s capital, Rio de Janeiro, where one of their own native sons, President Getúlio Vargas, a lawyer and former populist governor of Rio Grande do Sul, was turning Brazil into a fascist state. Vargas, a gaucho who had seized power in a coup d’état in 1930, began to consolidate his powers in the 1934 constitution, which cracked down on left-wing opposition, centralized the economy, and set up economic incentives to spur industrial development.

  Wolf watched events in the capital with keen interest and wondered how this new Vargas “revolution,” as it was hailed throughout Brazil, could make him rich. Watkins knew that in order to prosper even further he needed to leave Rio Grande do Sul, where promises of cheap land had drawn thousands of migrants from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Most of the Jews who were settling in Bom Fim brought their professional experience from the Old Country and were happy to be able to open up a small shoe store or tailor’s shop. But Wolf wasn’t interested in owning land or running a small business. His specialty was the railway, and he followed its development in Brazil, hoping to get rich.

  Just before his forty-fifth birthday, in 1940, Wolf decided to uproot his family yet again, still in pursuit of the fabulous wealth he had dreamed about as a young man in England. This time, the Watkins clan headed to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital. At first they settled on the city’s outskirts in the down-at-heels municipality of Mesquita, moving three times in their first year until Watkins established the Society of National Reconstruction, a company that specialized in building and fixing railway carriages, known by its Portuguese acronym SONAREC. Mesquita, the site of a large sugar plantation that had fallen on hard times after Brazil’s Princess Isabel abolished slavery in 1888, was named for the plantation’s owner Baron Jeronimo José de Mesquita. Although the rolling hills and lush landscape must have reminded the Watkins clan of Uruguay, Mesquita was no pastoral retreat populated by well-mannered European immigrants. The town was located in the mosquito-infested Baixada Fluminense, the lowlands north of the city of Rio. It was hot and sticky in the summers and endured punishing torrential rains in the winters. Most of the town’s nine thousand residents were impoverished farmers, factory workers, and aging former slaves who had never left the ruins of the former plantation. There were few diversions in Mesquita, and the good schools were nearly an hour away by rail in Rio de Janeiro. It was hardly the place for an upwardly mobile businessman like Wolf and his young family.

  By the time the Watkinses arrived in Mesquita in the 1940s, local businessmen had largely failed in their efforts to turn part of the baron’s old plantation into orange groves for the production of orange juice. Still, Wolf saw opportunity. With its proximity to Brazil’s capital, Wolf felt that it was only a matter of time before Mesquita would turn into a booming industrial center, especially as it was strategically located on Brazil’s great Estrada de Ferro—literally “the highway of iron,” or the railroad. Yet, in the early days of their life in Mesquita, the Watkins family must have faced some difficult times.

  But it was there that Watkins began to make his important connections among Brazilian politicians and railway barons that would ensure his success for years to come.

  Although Watkins did end up making a lot of money, the bulk of his earnings weren’t exactly from the repair of railway carriages. From his base in Mesquita during the war years, when gas was severely rationed in Brazil, Watkins entered into a lucrative if not quite legal partnership with a powerful politician and military man named Napoleão Alencastro Guimarães. A former minister of transportation, the tall, dapper politician was also the director of the Central do Brasil train station in Rio de Janeiro, one of the country’s largest transport facilities at the time. Alencastro Guimarães, an anglophile who was fond of bespoke suits and an habitué of the most elegant supper clubs in Rio, took an instant liking to the plucky Englishman. And so when he sent railway carriages to SONAREC for repair, they would arrive loaded with cans of petrol. Watkins, who had developed a healthy network of black-market contacts from his years spent in the towns strung along the border of Brazil and Uruguay, easily sold the petrol on the black market. He then returned the railway carriages empty to the Central do Brasil and divided the spoils with his friend Alencastro Guimarães.

  “He made a tidy fortune,” said Marcelo Steinfeld, who first heard the stories of Wolf White Watkins from Lily when she was living in Rio in the late 1960s. “But even though he was rich, Watkins was too much of a spendthrift to ever be successful.”

  Wolf’s partnership with Alencastro Guimarães proved so profitable that he was able to move his family to a stately apartment in Rio at the end of the Second World War. Wolf managed to install his family in a large, ground-floor apartment on Joaquim Nabuco, a leafy residential street of some prestige in Copacabana, a block and a half from the beach. It was a good address, but far from the opulence of Flamengo and Laranjeiras, home to diplomats, high-ranking government officials, and the country’s president—the seat of old money in Rio de Janeiro. Still, one of his neighbors on Rua Joaquim Nabuco recalled that Watkins’s home was “nicely furnished and very comfortable.”

  In Rio, Wolf loved nothing more than showing off his wealth by tipping extravagantly and dressing in the custom-made linen suits he ordered from his tailor on the fashionable Rua do Ouvidor in downtown Rio, where the city’s wealthiest businessmen and politicians all ordered their made-to-measure suits. Wolf thought nothing of tipping extravagantly, and friends recalled that he once gave an attendant the equivalent of $100 to park his car. When he invited business associates to lunch, it was always a lavish affair, and he wasn’t content unless he invited six or seven people at a time.

  Wolf also loved spoiling his daughter. At first, he bought her toys and Belgian and Swiss chocolates that he ordered from the Portuguese import houses in downtown Rio. But when she became a teenager, Wolf was determined to give his little girl—the apple of his eye—the most exquisite clothes that money could buy.

  But Wolf’s extravagances often landed him in debt. According to some of his business associates he moved from place to place in order to escape paying those debts—a rather dangerous proposition in twentieth-century Brazil, when many disputes over money and women were settled with a bullet.

  Wolf was, however, nothing if not street-smart and wily, and he had become an expert at extricating himself from particularly difficult situations. For instance, when he wanted to hang onto the lucrative contract to repair railway carriages for Rio de Janeiro’s Central do Brasil Station, he knew his debts to a wealthy coronel, or local strongman, threatened to sink his prospects. But Wolf was undaunted. He ignored the repeated requests for repayment and stalled, knowing that top-level officials at the Central do Brasil desperately needed his company’s services after the Second World War. His strategy eventually proved successful. Eurico de Souza Gomes, who was in charge of the administration of the Central do Brasil between 1951 and 1953, and was a leading coronel in Rio, finally reached out to Watkins, through an intermediary, to collect part of the debt. Souza Gomes asked his friend Gastão Veiga to collect the money that Watkins owed him. If Watkins paid even part of the debt, the managers of the Central do Brasil would continue to do business with SONAREC.

  Veiga had never met Wolf before, but soon realized that the distinguished businessman who mixed the King’s English with guttural Uruguayan Spanish was his neighbor in Copacabana. Following Veiga’s intervention, Wolf appears to have at least partially settled the debt he had with Souza Gomes. After his difficulties with the Central do Brasil, Wolf’s company continued to repair an average of 360 wagons a year for the railwa
y.

  Wolf was so grateful to Veiga for his intervention that he grandly presented him with a gold Audemars Piguet watch, which was then an extremely expensive Swiss timepiece that was difficult to obtain in Brazil, especially as the fascist Vargas government had set up even more tariff walls on foreign products to protect local industry. But for Wolf the watch was a good investment: the way he saw it, Veiga had just helped break the impasse with his most important client, so he was worth more than his weight in gold.

  The intervention also helped in other ways, for when Wolf required a letter of reference from the principals of the Central do Brasil in order to apply for Brazilian citizenship in 1950, they did not hesitate to write the nicest things about the transplanted Englishman. “For ten years we have worked with Mr. Watkins, who has always faithfully fulfilled the requirements of the railroad,” wrote Hilmar Tavares da Silva in a letter to Brazilian authorities attesting to Wolf’s good conduct in business. “He is a person of absolute moral and material integrity.”

  It is not clear why Wolf saw the need to become a Brazilian citizen after living quite successfully in the country for nearly thirty-one years as a foreigner. Perhaps he wanted to consolidate his business and make sure that it survived after his death. In October 1950, Wolf and Annita began to collect the letters of reference and undergo the medical examinations that would enable them to apply for Brazilian citizenship. In the black-and-white photo pasted to his Brazilian identity card, Wolf wears wire-rimmed spectacles and has a receding hairline. Annita, fifty at the time, is a heavyset woman with a double chin and a short, tightly curled coiffure. Her severely plucked eyebrows lend her a hard, defiant air.

  Part of the citizenship application involved describing their children’s activities in Brazil. To this end, both Wolf and Annita focused on Lily, who was their only minor child at the time.

  While the Watkinses sought their Brazilian citizenship, Lily was well on her way to making a splash in Rio society—at least as it was defined within the city’s upper-middle-class Jewish and English-speaking communities. Lily was enrolled at the Colegio Anglo-Americano, a traditional British-American private school, housed in a handsome colonial building that had once belonged to a Portuguese duke. The school was next door to the Sears department store in the Botafogo neighborhood, where the country’s best schools were clustered. Known as the British American School when it was founded in 1919, the school was re-christened with a Portuguese name after President Vargas declared—in a fit of nationalistic fervor during World War II—that all educational and religious institutions in the country had to have Portuguese names.

  Margareth Coney, the no-nonsense British matron who founded the school, duly changed the school’s name but continued to direct its strict programming until just before her death in 1968. Coney had arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the last century to work as a governess for one of Brazil’s wealthiest families. By the time her contract with the family was over, Coney had begun to look for other opportunities. She bemoaned the lack of proper educational facilities for the growing colony of English-speaking immigrants in Rio de Janeiro and decided that the city needed a proper British school. The British American School soon became a tough training ground for the sons and daughters of British and American expatriates in the city, and offered Brazilian students the opportunity to become fluent in English, which was the working language of the school. Lily herself speaks a refined international English as well as Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Her multilingual skills would later prove excellent assets in elite society.

  By the beginning of the Second World War, Coney had developed an impressive educational institution in Brazil that drew upper-middle-class students, although it never attained the social prestige of the elite Catholic schools, such as Notre Dame de Sion, Santo Inacio, and Dom Pedro, where the old money coffee and sugar barons sent their children.

  The Colegio Anglo-Americano was particularly popular among well-to-do Jewish families in Rio who didn’t want to send their children to schools with Christian affiliations, although Jewish children were welcome in the Jesuit-run institutions throughout the city. In many cases, Jewish parents who worried about their social standing in the city sent their children to the Catholic institutions, but insisted that they not participate in any of the religious classes. The Colegio Anglo-Americano was one of the few elite schools in Rio de Janeiro that had no discernible religious affiliation.

  According to her parents’ application for Brazilian citizenship, Lily attended the school from 1945, when she was eleven years old, until she graduated in 1951 at sixteen. In school, she was known as Lilly de Castro Watkins, using, as per Brazilian tradition, part of her mother’s maiden name and signing her first name with a double l. Her older brother Daniel signed her report cards and the tuition receipts on behalf of Wolf, who still worked in Mesquita, an hour outside Rio, and was probably too busy to attend to the bureaucratic requirements at his daughter’s school. Sometimes Annita Watkins’s shaky signature appears on her report cards.

  According to her school records, Lily’s best subjects were English and the Portuguese language; she scored nine out of ten on both during a final exam in 1951. But she received failing grades in physics, mathematics, and chemistry, even though she appears to have been a diligent student. In one exam she copied a descriptive paragraph three times in her neatest handwriting before including a polished final version in her examination booklet. In “Description of the Engraving,” Lily wrote about an etching that showed three people—two children and a woman. Interestingly, Lily, who was eleven years old at the time, didn’t focus on the personalities of the people in her paragraph, but homed in on the interior design of the room and their clothing: “The little girl wears a little blue dress and white socks. Her shoes are brown. On the other hand, the boy’s clothing is quite different. He wears brown trousers and a white shirt and vest. The woman wears a red dress with a white apron.” The floors of the storeroom where they are posing were made of ceramic tile; there was a table and two stools, she wrote.

  “She was a beautiful girl, with green eyes and light hair,” said Ana Bentes Bloch, who hailed from a prominent Jewish family in the city and also attended the Colegio Anglo-Americano in the 1940s and 1950s.

  But the black-and-white school photograph attached to Lily’s registration shows a plump little girl with a shoulder-length bob and a very large nose.

  “Children used to tease her at school because of her nose,” recalled one of her acquaintances who did not want to be identified. “Everyone used to call her ‘Lily nariz.’” The direct translation from the Portuguese is “Lily nose.”

  But despite her nose, others remember her as an extremely poised and elegant teenager. Perhaps Lily was so beguiling in her speech, gestures, and carriage that she managed to convey the impression of beauty. Although Bentes Bloch was a few grades behind Lily, she remembers her as a striking presence in high school. “She had beautiful clothes, and was easily the most elegant girl at the school,” said Bentes Bloch. “Lily was really a pleasure to be around.”

  As a result, she was also the most sought-after girl at school socials and Saturday night dances at the Clube Israelita Brasileiro, known by its acronym CIB. The Jewish community center is located in Copacabana, down the street from the elegant Galeria Menescal shopping arcade and several blocks away from the grand Copacabana Palace hotel, where many of the girls at the Colegio Anglo-Americano attended the sumptuous balls during Carnaval in February. Inspired by the Hotel Negresco in Nice and the Carlton in Cannes, the Copacabana Palace was designed by the French architect Joseph Gire to be the grandest hotel in Rio de Janeiro, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on Copacabana Beach. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Lily was growing up in Rio, the hotel was the focal point of upper-middle-class society in the city.

  On the weekends, wealthy families gathered at the Copacabana Palace hotel for dinner at the Bife de Ouro, or Golden Beef, the city’s most fashionable restaurant.

  W
hen a government edict shut Rio’s casinos in April 1946, the hotel’s Golden Room drew some of the world’s biggest entertainers. The hotel became an important destination for fashionable society, even though its most popular feature was a nightly floor show featuring young women, known as the emancipadas, or “emancipated ones,” because most of the showgirls were under eighteen, which meant that hotel officials had to seek special permission from the local government to allow them to perform in public. The resulting permissions, when they were granted, allowed the girls to be “emancipated” from the strict laws forbidding minors from performing in a bar. “At that time in Rio, there were very few places where you could gather to see a show,” recalled Hélio Fernandes, a former owner of the Tribuna de Imprensa, one of the city’s leading newspapers at the time. “The beauty of the dancing girls at the Golden Room became the stuff of local legend, and anyone with any means was flocking to the shows in the evenings.”

  Like many upwardly mobile Jews in Rio, Lily’s family frequented the Copacabana Palace’s Golden Room, although they likely never took in the rather risqué floor shows. The center of their social life was the CIB on Raul Pompeia Street. The club organized balls and other cultural events that were attended by most Jewish families of means in Rio de Janeiro. It was not uncommon for young Jewish women to meet their future husbands at the CIB socials.