Gilded Lily

by Isabel Vincent

  While war was raging a continent away, Alfred and his sister practiced their Portuguese by volunteering at the Radio Nacional, the country’s most important radio station. They helped translate the news from Europe, and later Alfred worked as a producer on other shows. They also became habitués at the Vogue nightclub—a popular spot in Copacabana founded by an Austrian refugee named Max von Stuckart. Known in Rio as the Baron, Stuckart had founded the Tour Paris nightclub in Paris, which became a regular haunt of artists, such as Pablo Picasso, and French politicians and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Like the Grunbergs, the Baron fled to Rio during the war. With the help of one of the city’s wealthiest families, who were habitués of his Paris club, he founded the legendary Copacabana nightclub, whose slogan was “open from seven to seven.” The Vogue rapidly became a de rigueur watering hole for the city’s politicians, business leaders, and intellectuals. Many émigrés used its address—an art deco apartment block on Avenida Princesa Isabel in Copacabana—as a makeshift post office box for their correspondence from Europe. The nightclub featured some of the best black jazz artists (considered risqué in the 1940s) from the United States as well as Sacha Rubin, a Turkish pianist who played the piano with a glass of whisky next to the keyboard and a lit cigarette permanently dangling from one side of his mouth.

  In the early 1950s, the club’s most popular entertainer was a French singer whose stage name was Patachou. While crooning French songs, the sultry chanteuse would flirt with the male patrons, sitting on their laps and coquettishly cutting off their neckties with a pair of scissors. One night, a grandson of one of Brazil’s former presidents exposed his penis in a drunken stupor and offered it up to Patachou’s scissors. She politely declined, going for his tie instead.

  After the club burned down on August 14, 1955, in a fire that left five people dead, Rubin opened his own bar in Copacabana, known simply as Sacha’s. But although popular, the club never had quite the same mystique as the Vogue, especially as many of the politicians and intellectuals who frequented the famous nightclub began to head to Brasília, the country’s new capital, in 1960.

  But in the 1940s and 1950s, Rio de Janeiro must have seemed like a magical place, especially for young Romanian refugees transplanted from wartime England. Errol Flynn and Carmen Miranda regularly descended to the pool of the Copacabana Palace hotel, and Orson Welles held court at the Vogue when he arrived during the war years to work on a series of wartime propaganda films for the U.S. government.

  After living in Rio for a few years, the Grunbergs could count themselves among the city’s elite, many of whom lived like European royalty, attended by white-gloved butlers in their spectacular apartments overlooking Guanabara Bay. The Grunbergs were close to the Seabra family, one of Rio’s prominent families at the time. The Seabras were so enamored of the Dakota apartment building on Manhattan’s Central Park West that they ordered an architect to make an exact replica of it, complete with a private elevator to their ballroom, in Rio’s elegant Flamengo neighborhood. The socialite Nelson Seabra, whose penthouse, with its stunning views of Sugarloaf Mountain, took up an entire floor of the family building and was filled with his collections of antique furniture and objets d’art from around the world, was also a keen collector of thoroughbred horses. He installed air-conditioned stables—a rarity in the 1940s—at the family’s sprawling country home. On weekends, the Seabras flew their friends, including Rosy Grunberg, in their private airplane to their country estate for riding and elaborate parties. Later, Nelson Seabra divided his time between homes in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. A Hollywood producer, he counted Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo, and Grace Kelly among his closest friends. In 1980, his Red Ball birthday party in Paris attracted everyone from the Rothschilds to Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger.

  Rosy and Alfred found themselves in this rarefied world of extravagance and rather loose morals. Rio’s leading socialites, for example, never did their shopping in the city, but headed to Paris once a year to buy couture at Dior or Chanel. The clothes typically took three weeks to a month to be completed, and while they waited, they attended the wild soirees chez Prince Aly Khan, the Pakistani race horse owner and playboy, who married Hollywood star Rita Hayworth in 1949. During the day, these extremely well-brought-up daughters of the rich and powerful spent their time at the Café de la Paix, “doing the trottoir,” or moonlighting as prostitutes, to amuse themselves in between fittings. “If the men were really good looking, they charged only a little bit,” said one woman who was familiar with the pastime. “If they were ugly, they charged a lot.”

  Although he had a reputation as a bon vivant, Alfred was also determined to become a business success in his adopted country. In May 1944, four years after arriving in Rio, Alfred graduated from the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia da Universidade do Brasil with a degree in chemical engineering. He worked as a producer at the Radio Nacional before taking a job as a technician at the Shell Mexican Oil Co. in 1945. He quickly recognized other opportunities in Brazil, a huge country with a largely untapped market for imported consumer goods. Using the Romanian gold that the Grunbergs managed to ship from England after the war, Alfred incorporated Globex Import and Export in 1946, with his mother and sister as partners. In the early days of Globex, the twenty-two-year-old entrepreneur headed out along the highway from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte hawking Firestone tires to truck drivers. Later, working from a dingy, one-room office on Winston Churchill Street in downtown Rio, he imported sewing machines and kitchen appliances.

  But it was the Coldspot refrigerators imported from the United States that became his best-selling items and eventually gave rise to a chain of stores that bore their name. He began selling Coldspot, which translates as ponto frio in Portuguese, outside a popular movie theater before he opened his first store on Rua Uruguaiana, in the heart of the Saara, or the old Arab market, in downtown Rio. His mascot was an Antarctic penguin that had accidentally washed up on a Rio beach. Although the penguin died of heat exhaustion after a few days, Alfred had it stuffed and mounted so that he could display it in his office. Later, an artist’s rendition of that unfortunate penguin would grace the company’s newspaper ads and become part of the corporate logo for Ponto Frio—a symbol of the extreme cold generated by one of the company’s refrigerators.

  At the same time that he was laying the groundwork for what would become one of Brazil’s most successful companies, Alfred decided that he needed to transform himself from a wartime Romanian refugee into a successful Latin American businessman. In 1946, Alfred and his mother embarked on the long, bureaucratic process of acquiring Brazilian citizenship, which they finally achieved in April 1948. Rosy would take a different route, applying for citizenship after marrying a Hungarian-born cameraman who had landed in Rio in 1941 to work on Orson Welles’s project, It’s All True.

  A year after the Grunbergs obtained their Brazilian citizenship, mother and son applied to change their name to Monteverde, a literal Portuguese translation of Grunberg, which means “green mountain.” By November 1950, the Romanian refugee Alfred Iancu Grunberg had successfully transformed himself into the Brazilian entrepreneur Alfredo João Monteverde.

  “Fred was an incredible businessman with an incredible vision,” said Victor Sztern, whose father was one of Alfredo’s early business partners. Victor, who was in his teens when he met Alfredo, was co-opted into helping him set up a set of traffic lights in his office. A red light meant that Alfredo was thinking and his staff was prohibited from entering.

  “Fred was brilliant,” said Gastão Veiga. “He was the only person I knew who made money selling to the poor at discounted prices. He was also the only person I knew who could do percentages in his head.”

  Friends recalled that even at his summer home at Aguas Lindas, a stretch of pristine, white sand beach on Itacuruça Island, he was fond of mathematical brainteasers and absently worked on problems even while entertaining his guests.

  “We’d be on his boat, and he’d be st
eering, and doing these incredible figures in his head, like that game Sudoku,” said his friend Vera Contrucci Pinto Dias, who met Fred at Aguas Lindas when he was still in his early twenties. “There was no one like him.”

  A Rio newspaper referred to Alfredo as “one of the most important figures in commerce and industry.” The editorial also noted that he was “an exceptional human being, a dynamic spirit,” possessed of “a keen sense of accomplishment.” Even decades after his death, his business associates and friends still marveled at his abilities, remembering his “violent intelligence,” his constantly “buzzing” mind, and his legendary whimsy.

  Alfredo’s whimsy and irreverence—his “dynamic spirit”—were also legendary in Rio de Janeiro. For instance, to avoid rush-hour traffic, he bought himself an ambulance. With sirens blaring, one of Alfredo’s chauffeurs would speed through stalled traffic as he reclined in the back, reading a newspaper or dictating notes to one of his secretaries. One day when the speeding ambulance was stopped by traffic police, Alfredo suggested they call his friend the governor. They did, and Alfredo was promptly released.

  Once he asked a friend if he could borrow his Volkswagen camper van to transport a painting that he had bought in London. The painting, which would be arriving at the international airport in Rio, wouldn’t fit in his own car. It was only when they arrived at the customs counter of the Rio airport that the friend realized that he would be driving back to the city with a priceless Van Gogh in the back of his clunky Volkswagen.

  Despite his whimsy, Alfredo was a self-confessed workaholic who typically began his workday at seven in the morning and ended at eight in the evening. “I do not get tired, as I work with great pleasure—the pleasure of creation and because I love Globex as I would love my son,” he wrote in a letter to his sister a few years after he founded Globex.

  “Do not think if I work twelve hours a day it is to make more money,” he continued in the letter. “I do this because I get so much satisfaction out of my work.”

  Alfredo had no qualms about rolling up his shirtsleeves and changing places with one of his sales staff on the Ponto Frio sales floor at the Rua Uruguaiana store. This way he could anticipate any problems experienced on the sales floor and deal directly with his customers. “Let’s change for the day,” he was fond of telling his bemused staff. “You pretend you’re me in the corporate offices, and I’ll pretend to be you and deal with customers.”

  Most of his friends and business associates described Alfredo as a visionary. “He was talking about computers when no one talked about computers,” said Sztern, who looked upon Alfredo as a substitute father after his own parents died while he was still in his teens. “He wanted to do things like recycle paper, and he wanted to create a popular bank for the poor because he sensed that Brazil was missing a popular instrument of credit.”

  While many of Alfredo’s early clients were prosperous consumers like himself, it was among the ranks of the impoverished masses that his company was to have its greatest success. Alfredo made huge sums of money creating a system of credit for Brazil’s working classes, who could not afford to buy appliances or other big-money items outright. The scheme led to a consumer revolution across the country in the days before credit cards were commonplace. It was a risk, to be sure. How could he be sure that the country’s poor would ever pay off a refrigerator, which for many was as monumental as the purchase of a house or a car? It was a risk he was willing to take, for he fervently believed that the poor, so grateful to obtain credit on favorable terms, would rarely default on a payment. The poor, he was fond of saying, are better at managing credit than most people with money. Credit at Ponto Frio was easier to arrange than at banks, which charged enormous interest rates. When buyers fell behind on a payment at Ponto Frio, Alfredo simply lowered their monthly payments to an amount they could afford.

  “Sometimes we had people who would come into the office and say they couldn’t pay the monthly installment,” said Maria Consuelo Ayres, Alfredo’s first and most trusted employee, who began working for him in 1946. “He would lower the rate, and before you knew it the buyer would bring in a friend who also wanted to buy something on credit.”

  The installment system Alfredo pioneered in the 1950s is now commonplace in a country where the minimum wage hovers at just under $200 per month. In Brazil, prices are displayed in shop windows in multiples of the actual price, and the consumer can buy everything from clothing to appliances and cars in installments, the payment terms of which can range from five months to two years.

  Laurinda Soares Navarro, Alfredo’s housekeeper, was an early beneficiary of this new system of credit. Laurinda lived with her two young sons in the Parque da Cidade favela—a jumble of half-finished brick and stucco houses connected by a warren of steep stairs and concrete alleyways in the hills above Rio where hundreds of slaves had worked the coffee plantations of the Marquis de São Vicente in the nineteenth century. Like most of her impoverished neighbors—all of them squatters who had built ramshackle houses on the marquis’s former estate—Laurinda had no refrigerator. Alfredo arranged for Ponto Frio to deliver a gleaming new Coldspot refrigerator to her home, and discounted the monthly payments from her salary until it was completely paid off.

  Alfredo’s success in business came with a well-honed sense of social responsibility. If the poor were his best customers, then Alfredo was determined to be their best friend, and give back to the community in a country with one of the world’s biggest disparities between rich and poor, and an abysmal lack of government-financed social services. Shortly after founding Ponto Frio, Alfredo teamed up in Rio with a local priest who did charitable work among the city’s poor, and paid to restore the Rosario Church next to his offices in downtown Rio. In one of his more memorable moments, Alfredo managed to block one of the city’s main thoroughfares after he bought all the produce and livestock from a local farmers’ market, and started to give it all away to the poor.

  “People came from the favelas, blocking traffic and turning the day into a festive occasion,” said one observer, who also recalled that law enforcement officials were not amused by the gesture. “Fred decided that the government wasn’t giving the people enough holiday time, so he created his own national holiday. That was Fred.”

  He was also a hero to many. He was the first to step forward in August 1954 when the assassination attempt against journalist and opposition politician Carlos Lacerda resulted in the death of his bodyguard, the air force major Rubens Florentino Vaz. Although he was generally apolitical, Alfredo had a great deal of admiration for Lacerda, who was the most outspoken critic of the government of Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas. Alfredo insisted upon paying for the education of the young daughter Vaz had left behind.

  The assassination attempt against Lacerda, on a residential street in Copacabana, had deep political ramifications for the Vargas government. A few weeks later, an independent commission of inquiry implicated Vargas’s chief bodyguard in the death of Vaz, which eventually signaled the end of the dictator’s twenty-four-year reign and drove Vargas himself to commit suicide. In his blue and white striped pajamas, the country’s president shot himself in the chest in his bedroom at the presidential palace on August 24, 1954. Alfredo promptly stepped in again, this time to buy the dictator’s Rolls-Royce.

  There were other grand gestures. In 1961, Alfredo set up a fund to help the families whose loved ones had been killed when an arsonist set fire to a circus, resulting in more than four hundred deaths. Three years later, he bailed out Garrincha (Manuel Francisco dos Santos), one of Brazil’s greatest soccer heroes, who helped lead Brazil to two World Cup victories in 1958 and 1962. Garrincha, who was in serious debt, was in danger of losing his home on Governador Island, on the outskirts of Rio. Alfredo paid off his debts, in recognition, he said, of Garrincha’s contribution to Brazilian soccer.

  He also created a private foundation to assist his workers, who grew from a handful of employees in the late 1940s to several hundre
d twenty years later.

  At the Millfield School, his posh alma mater, in Somerset, England, Alfredo’s generosity even made the local papers when, on a visit to the school, he bought £2,500 worth of tickets for a student production of the Sammy Davis Jr. musical Golden Boy. Funds from the sale of tickets were earmarked for the school’s building fund. “Up rushed…Alfredo Monteverde, the Brazilian millionaire, who said he proposed to distribute the tickets among ‘French students, Kenyan emigrants, nurses and the doorman at the Dorchester,’” said one report. “But really you didn’t know whether to take the man seriously or not. Asked where he lived, he said ‘The Moon.’”

  Alfredo could be excused for his lunar preoccupations, especially after he was diagnosed with manic depression as a young adult. From the time he was in his twenties, his periods of whimsy and sheer euphoria alternated with periods of deep, dark depression. During one euphoric state, Alfredo tried to convince his accountant to allow Globex to buy forty homes for Ponto Frio workers. Maria Consuelo, his savvy secretary who was by then used to her boss’s sudden acts of extravagance with company money, did not allow the deal to go through. However, other more costly ones did.

  “I spent a lot of time undoing Fred’s whims,” said Ademar Trotte, the Ponto Frio accountant Alfredo hired in 1946 when he started the company. “When he went on a shopping spree, we had to convince people to give us his money back, or we had to re-sell the things Fred bought.”

  Alfredo went on mad shopping sprees for things like mills, warehouses, and large plots of land when he was in his euphoric states, and then would sink into a soul-crushing depression when he realized what he had done. On many occasions, when the deals became too complicated for his secretary or accountant to fix, Geraldo Mattos, the director of Ponto Frio, would be called in to try to clean up the mess. At one point, in an act of extreme folly, Alfredo handed over all of his own shares in his company to Geraldo.