by Susan Jacoby
Oswald’s defense of his client boiled down to the contention that Cleveland wrote the article and Brandenburg simply added the signature. And if Brandenburg had tinkered with the original manuscript to make it more readable, Oswald suggested, well, that was exactly what editors were paid to do. Reading between the lines, it seems clear that neither the Times nor Cleveland’s executor had been eager to inquire too closely into whether the president had actually finished the article before he died or whether Brandenburg finished it for him. Brandenburg, his hyperbolic comparison to Dreyfus aside, was probably right in his contention that there was a “conspiracy among the Democrats” to discredit Cleveland’s endorsement of Taft and that Mrs. Cleveland may well have been pressured into disavowing the article after its usefulness to the Republican campaign became evident. The clear intent of my grandfather’s defense was to imply that everyone had been in on the scam, if scam it was, but his client was the only one charged with a crime.
As the Times fairly reported, “Mr. Jacoby argued that a verdict for the defendant would mean the vindication of the article. He declared that it was unimportant to consider if the signature was genuine or not. The real question [was whether] the article itself was Mr. Cleveland’s. That was proved by the style which had convinced an editor of the Times.” Oswald concluded with a tongue-in-cheek comment about the vagueness of the editors’ recollections of their handling of the manuscript, suggesting (even though he had already conceded the forging of Cleveland’s signature) that the original might just as easily have been spirited away from the newspaper offices by autograph hunters or Bryan supporters. In a closing argument reminiscent of a well-known scene from the movie Miracle on 34th Street—in which a young attorney convinces a judge to keep an open mind about the existence of Santa Claus—Oswald informed the jury that “we cannot tell what happened in the Times office….We do not say the Times did it. We do not say the Times did not do it….” The World succinctly summed up my grandfather’s argument as the “caveat emptor defense.”
Acquittal was far from a foregone conclusion, for Brandenburg—in addition to his less than illustrious record as an agent and blackmailer—also managed to get himself charged with kidnapping his stepson during the course of the trial. The prosecutor, over my grandfather’s strenuous objections, persuaded the judge to allow testimony on the pending kidnapping charge. In a defense attorney’s courtroom nightmare, Brandenburg then confessed on the stand to the kidnapping (motivated by a tangled custody-divorce suit straight out of today’s headlines).
“Mr. Jacoby was aghast,” the Times recounted—not least because the judge refused to allow him to cross-examine the witness at that point. But Brandenburg wasn’t through opening his mouth. “Was the lady you were living with…your wife?” asked the prosecutor. “I think so,” Brandenburg replied. The jury, however, proved capable of evaluating the forgery charge without being swayed by Brandenburg’s behavior as a husband and stepfather. Concluding that Brandenburg had technically violated the law but had not violated contemporary journalistic norms, the jurors returned a not guilty verdict the same day.
Years later, my grandfather told a legal writer that the caveat emptor defense had been entirely ethical and appropriate for a case involving an institution with the resources of the Times. “If Brandenburg had sold the article to some schoolgirl, it would have been an entirely different matter,” Oswald said, “but the Times, as we know, is not a schoolgirl. The DA’s case was, in essence, that this two-bit con man was brilliant enough to deceive the attorney for the late President, the President’s widow, and the editors of the country’s most respected newspaper. Brandenburg just wasn’t that smart.”
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BY THE time I read the accounts of this trial, which portray my grandfather in the ebullient prime of his career, I already knew that Oswald Jacoby was an extremely complex man. His resistance to authority and disdain for conventional respectability—two traits shared by both of his sons—were displayed during the trial and in his later comments on the case. Yet there was another equally important side to my grandfather’s character—a craving for social status. His desire to move up in the world played a major role in his marriage to Edith Sondheim in 1900.
When I began to form a picture of my grandfather as a young man, I assumed that his marriage must have been a purely calculated move, designed to attain some sort of social advantage. On one level, this was surely the case. Like Max Jacoby, the Sondheims were Forty-eighters. Unlike Max, they could trace their lineage in Germany for several generations. This was something my grandmother Jacoby never forgot and presumably never let her husband forget. Perhaps Oswald was as impressed with the name Sondheim as my grandmother was. (After her mother’s death, Aunt Edith became convinced that we were related to the composer Stephen Sondheim. I would like to claim him as a relative, but it seems unlikely in spite of our common last name.)
Granny Jacoby’s father, Simon Sondheim, was a classics scholar who had studied at the University of Heidelberg before he left Germany. His family of china merchants had lived near Frankfurt since the middle of the eighteenth century. His wife, Sarah, whom he married in 1872, also came from Frankfurt. The Sondheims had settled in Brooklyn, where Simon and Sarah ran a school for young ladies. Simon believed that girls, like boys, should be rigorously schooled in the classics, and he put this conviction into practice in the education of his children. My grandmother, the only one of the Sondheim daughters to marry, did not attend college, but she had been taught by her father to read both Greek and Latin. Her sisters, Mabel, Carrie, and Adele, who had to earn a living, all went to Hunter College and became teachers (two of them principals) in the New York City public school system. Her brother, Simon (like my uncle Ozzie, he had been named after his living father in defiance of Jewish naming traditions), spent several years in China as a trader in the Oriental bric-a-brac so popular before World War I. A peculiar sideline was his dealing in human hair (because of its thickness, Asian hair was often used to augment the coiffures of European and American women with thinning hair) and hair ornaments. Like his sisters, Si eventually became a public school teacher.
I knew Granny Jacoby’s other siblings, because they all lived into their eighties. “The aunts,” as they were known collectively, kept house for Si and a younger brother, Walter, who was said to be “simple” (a Victorian euphemism for mentally retarded). They were a jolly bunch, given to old-fashioned amusements, from singing around the piano to amateur theatricals, and visiting them was one of the few experiences I genuinely enjoyed during our family trips to New York. They were so very different from my severe grandmother that I found it hard to believe she was their sister. But, then, they hadn’t been married to my grandfather.
It is easy to see what she saw in him in 1900, regardless of how much she eventually came to regret her choice. He was a handsome, charming, sexually charismatic, successful young man on the way up. And he had money—something the Sondheims lacked. It is harder to figure out what he saw in her. As a young woman, my grandmother was plain and awkward; the family snapshots reveal a sharp contrast between her stiff demeanor and the born-to-have-his-picture-taken ease of her new husband. If Oswald was looking for someone pretty and socially adept enough to help him get where he wanted to go, he picked the wrong woman. I am also somewhat surprised that, of Max’s three children, my grandfather was the only one who married a Jew (especially one who would twit him about the “Polish” origins of his family). I have two theories about my grandfather’s motivation—one cynical, the other more charitable. I suspect that by 1900, though everything looked good on the surface and though his law practice was flourishing, Oswald’s private life wasn’t going quite as well as he wanted everyone to believe. Gentile families of substance would not have regarded a cocky young Jewish lawyer, with no apparent connections to the better-known Our Crowd families, as a desirable suitor for a daughter. And the successful Our Crowd families would have scrutinized Oswald’s qualifications as a suitor just
as skeptically and just as thoroughly. I am not at all certain that my grandfather would have emerged unblemished from a discreet and exhaustive inquiry into his finances and personal habits at age thirty. The Sondheim family, scholarly and proud but relatively poor, was in no position to be choosy about a son-in-law. My grandmother’s social origins, in the world of German-descended New York Jews, were a cut above my grandfather’s, but she would not have been considered a desirable match for a Guggenheim or a Straus even if she did share a piano teacher with them.
But I may be doing my grandfather an injustice, since I know him mainly as the bad father he became to my own father. For there was more to Oswald Jacoby than narrow professional ambition. He was a genuinely cultured man, fluent in German and Spanish, with a passion for the arts and a wide-ranging love of literature. In this, my grandmother was a match for him. “They both loved opera—all forms of classical music—and painting,” Aunt Edith recalled during one of our conversations after my father’s death. “The times I think of them as happy were when they were talking, usually arguing, about painting. Mother, who was quite a good amateur painter herself, was very interested in the new art we were beginning to see from Europe—Picasso, the work of Monet in his later years. Father was strictly a seventeenth-century Dutch and Italian Renaissance man. He was convinced that the Impressionists would be completely forgotten in his children’s lifetime. Of course, he had been exposed to fine works of art his whole life, and his taste was formed by his father. He and Mother could argue about art for hours; they’d get very animated and interrupt each other, and you could see they were happy. Really liking each other. For a few moments, maybe they could see in each other what they saw when they were courting.”
Before Aunt Edith entered the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease, I prodded her for more happy memories of her parents’ life together. At first she said there were none, but then, as she cast her mind deeper into her childhood, she came up with some poignant images. “Mother was a very accomplished pianist—so good that Father used to say she could have played professionally. I can see them together in the parlor, I was seven or eight maybe, I know it was before the war [World War I] because after that he was hardly ever home. Father would take out his violin—I think it was a very expensive, very fine old instrument that Max had bought for him when he was selected for the Columbia orchestra—and she would sit down at the piano. I can hear them playing Beethoven sonatas for violin and piano—the Kreutzer Sonata was their favorite, and you know how difficult that piece is. Mother’s face glowed—you probably don’t remember her ever smiling. I can see her, perspiring, her hair falling out of its topknot because playing was hard work. She was not a pretty woman, but she came close to being beautiful at those moments. At the end, when the last note died away, Father would bow to Mother. He took her hand as she got up from the piano bench and they would both bow to the rest of us, as if we were in a concert hall. Once he had roses delivered from the florist at the end of their ‘performance’—this was when we were still living in Manhattan. Mother cried and kissed him. Your dad didn’t have any memories like this….Mother and Father had grown to hate each other by the time he was born.”
My grandfather’s attitude toward Judaism, and his own Jewishness, seems to have been one source of friction between him and my grandmother. When I asked Uncle Ozzie whether his father had ever taught him anything about what it meant to be a Jew, his answer was immediate. “Oh, God, no. Father was an atheist. He said everything that had to do with religion, all religions, was pure superstition. This was a problem for Mother, because while she didn’t believe in the religion, her family—especially her brother—still considered themselves Jews. Your uncle Simon went to temple on the Sabbath for many, many years. You didn’t know that? Of course you didn’t. No one would have mentioned this around your aunt Edith. I’m sure her brother’s attitude influenced Mother in her reluctance to convert when Edith started pressuring her. Once in a while, around what I suppose were Jewish holidays, Mother would bring out special dishes that we never used the rest of the year. It was around Easter. Father would make fun of her, asking her which holiday she was celebrating. It was Passover. But you know, I don’t think I ever heard the word Passover until I was thirty. I was in a bridge tournament, and my partner had to back out because he said his mother would drop dead if she knew he was playing cards on the first night of Passover.”
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THOSE DISHES are now among my most cherished possessions. My Sondheim great-grandparents brought them to America from Frankfurt in 1848. My grandmother, having already bestowed Eve Jackson Jacoby’s silver tea service on Ozzie and his wife, gave the Sondheim china to my mother at some point during the 1950s. My mom handed down part of the set to me a few years ago, and she has left the rest of the dishes to me in her will. I intend to pass on the Sondheim china to my nieces when I die. They are the finest English stone chinaware, in a pattern manufactured between 1825 and 1835, with flowers and butterflies delicately traced over a pale blue background. These may indeed have been Passover dishes, carefully stored away for the rest of the year, because they are still in flawless condition. I use them on holidays too, washing them by hand. Their vibrant reds, blues, and golds have scarcely faded over nearly two centuries, leaving a visible heritage of care from generations of women. I wonder if my grandfather was really a man who would make fun of his wife for using special dishes on a holiday that had lost its religious significance for the family? I feel, for the first time, a smidgeon of sympathy for my grandmother. I wish I had known the young woman who loved to play Beethoven and Brahms. I wish she had known I would take good care of her family’s china. In recent years, I have begun bringing out the dishes whenever I have friends over for dinner—as I usually do—during Passover and Hanukkah. According to Ozzie (who heard it from his mother’s brother, Simon), my Sondheim great-great-grandfather was a rabbi in Germany. Maybe, maybe not. Every Jewish family, even one as far removed from Judaism as mine, hopes to find a learned rabbi in the family tree. Before the Sondheims went into the china business, they sold chess sets and playing cards at village fairs. That I do believe. Uncle Si had fantastic collections of carved chessmen and old playing cards in his chock-ablock house. When he died, Aunt Edith got rid of nearly all of his possessions. Including what I now realize was a menorah.
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NEAR THE end of 1907, Max Jacoby died at the age of seventy-six. His wife had died several years before, and he left an estate valued at approximately $200,000 (between $800,000 and $1.2 million today, depending on the value of the works), to be divided equally between his two sons. Included in the estate was a cottage near Saratoga, various paintings and “works of fine art” (though no Rubens), and more than $100,000 worth of government and railroad securities. Both Oswald and Harold should have been set for life—or at least until the stock market crash of 1929.
Harold was set. He lived in Manhattan throughout his years at Columbia, his children were educated in private schools, and the newspaper clippings chronicling his career showed that my great-uncle, like his father, was able to afford European travel throughout his lifetime. Even if he did lose money in the crash—professors being no more immune than other Americans to the lure of the ever-expanding stock market bubble—there was enough left for him to retire to affluent Westport upon his retirement.
Oswald was not set. Indeed, the legacy from his father—“found money”—may have fueled the destructive tendencies that ruined a once-promising life. “You know how it is,” explained Uncle Ozzie. “If you get some money you didn’t expect, it’s not gambling if you bet it. You didn’t have the money the day before, so what does it matter if you don’t have it the day after? Of course, you may bet money you did have the day before once you’ve lost the found money.”
In a 1936 magazine essay describing his introduction to contract bridge, Ozzie evoked the psychology of compulsive gambling, handed down from Jacoby fathers to sons, in revealing language. The words addict
and addiction appear over and over, in an era when such terms were not customarily applied to behavior like drinking and gambling. “My father before me was a bridge addict,” Ozzie explained. “His suffering was often indescribable—particularly when he had to play with my aunts, my mother being immune to the game. So, although I do not believe that bridge is actually a hereditary ailment, I am sure that I must have come into the world with a constitutional weakness, or predilection, for it. Although a great deal is known to science about the nature and progress of bridge, its devastating effect and the misery it inflicts upon the human race, no reliable cure or adequate preventive measures have ever been devised, and the germ itself has never been isolated.”
Ozzie began to master bridge at age six, when he contracted measles, mumps, whooping cough, and chicken pox, one after another, during a six-month period. He played with his father and his Sondheim aunts, since his mother adamantly refused to learn any card game. Under his father’s tutelage, young Ozzie soon moved on from bridge to blackjack and poker, thereby expanding the scope of his “addiction” to cards. Bridge was largely a game of skill (even though, of course, one could be dealt a bad hand), but Ozzie was quick to “reinvest” (his term) earnings in pure gambling, from the roulette wheel to sports gambling. High-stakes poker fell somewhere in between games of skill and games of chance. From my uncle’s description of his father’s habits, it could not be clearer that the gambling “virus,” “addiction,” or “germ” was passed on from father to son in the Jacoby family.