by Susan Jacoby
Dad was able to enroll at Poly (he had started his freshman year at Erasmus Hall, an outstanding public boys’ high school in Brooklyn) only because Uncle Ozzie, who by 1927 was on his way to making (and losing) his first fortune, paid the tuition. Between 1925 and 1929, Ozzie made more than a quarter of a million dollars in the stock market. Having quit his job at Met Life in 1928, he became a full-time professional at cards only after he lost virtually everything in the 1929 crash.
For my father, Poly provided a welcome change from his unhappy experiences with anti-Semites in public school (though a selective public academic high school like Erasmus would probably have served the same purpose). His good memories of Poly were underscored by annual donations to the school alumni fund (he gave almost nothing to Dartmouth) until the end of his life.
Dad had a moon face as a teenager, and that earned him the nickname “Fat”—which he did not resent at all—under his senior class picture. It was clear that Fat was one of the smartest young men in the Class of ’31. The class scribe reported that “Fat makes a practice of winning one or two General Information and Intelligence Tests every year. Therefore we don’t see why he should wear that sheepish expression all the time….He blushes frequently, which is something to see in this day and age.” A cartoon mockingly naming my dad as “Class Social Lion” shows an embarrassed, slightly chubby boy sitting at the far end of a couch from a girl who is unsuccessfully trying to get him to move closer. Dad was a member of the lacrosse and swim teams and assistant manager of the school football team (a customary job for a boy who can’t make it as a jock) in his junior year. He was also a member of Cum Laude, a junior Phi Beta Kappa for prep school students, with chapters at other high-ranking private academies like Phillips, Lawrenceville, Choate, the Germantown Friends School, and the William Penn Charter School. (Although only about 10 percent of the students in my father’s graduating class were Jews, they made up 40 percent of the Cum Laude membership.) What emerges from the yearbook is a portrait of a bright, studious, socially unpolished young man. But he was also a young man who knew how to have a good time and who made friends easily (as he did not in grade school).
“Bob was very, very funny,” said Charles Wardell, a surviving classmate and friend, when I tracked him down in 1995. “But he was very popular because he didn’t have any meanness in him. You know how some kids with a comic talent will do impressions of other kids that are downright cruel. Bob never made fun of people in a hurtful way. The fun was more at his own expense, or the expense of the universe.” My dad and Charlie Wardell would take the subway into Manhattan to study together in the reading room of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. They went to Dodger games together at Ebbets Field, and they sneaked off to the movies as the new “talkies” began to banish silent films. What they did not do, however, was double-date or visit each other’s homes. And that, Charlie Wardell told me, was because he was a Christian and Dad was a Jew—and there was an unacknowledged but real barrier that permitted a private, one-on-one friendship but did not extend to social and family activities.
“Of course,” said Wardell, “I didn’t think this through at the time. I never really thought about it until you asked me. But I know it was so. There were fraternities, and I was a member of one, but the Jewish boys were never asked to join. Looking back, I can see this was a terrible thing, but no one ever thought about it then. There was a social line. For instance, I went to ballroom dancing—Miss Hepburn’s, it was—where I first met my wife, and the Jewish boys didn’t. I suppose I assumed they had their own. Although we spent a lot of time together, I never met either of Bob’s parents—and he never met mine. Now that I look back, I see what was unusual is that I did have one Jewish friend. I think we first got to like each other because we both loved Latin, but we couldn’t admit it because all of the other fellows would have made fun of us. But I didn’t know any of the other Jewish boys in the class. I remember that years later, I was on a fund-raising committee for the school with one of our most successful classmates, a fellow named Dan Fradd who was a college football all-American and later on a very prominent businessman—and I hadn’t known him at all in school. It had to be because he was Jewish. There weren’t that many boys in the class, I knew almost everyone else. You see, it was all so unconscious back then. Christians and Jewish people, different worlds. People like me didn’t think much about anti-Semitism until after the war. That is, until we’d seen where it could lead.”
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WHILE MY father was enjoying his high school years at Poly Prep, his older brother was beginning the professional bridge, canasta, backgammon, and writing career that would make him famous and rich (or, to be more precise, the career that would have made him rich had he not gambled away such a large proportion of his professional earnings at games where pure chance played a much larger role). From 1930 to 1960, the heyday of bridge and canasta (on which Ozzie was also an expert) as middle-class pastimes, the top tournament players were national and international celebrities. In America, Puritan objections to cards had lost their force, and families across the nation turned to cards, especially bridge, for diversion. Until television subsumed all other forms of entertainment, bridge was a staple in college dormitories, at luncheons like the ones my mother and her friends gave or attended every week, and at Saturday-night after-dinner gatherings of couples. Newspaper bridge columns were as well read as the sports pages, and grandmasters like my uncle and Charles Goren were frequently written about (and wrote about each other) in mass-circulation magazines. Some of the liveliest articles about my uncle appeared in women’s magazines, for bridge and canasta, unlike poker, did not conjure up images of cigar-chomping, hard-drinking, tough-talking men in the sleazy back room of a bar. Whenever he was interviewed by a women’s magazine, Ozzie always made a point of talking about the bridge and backgammon tournaments in which he and his wife were partners. (He always had a male partner, of course, in the most serious high-stakes tournaments.) Few of my contemporaries recognize Ozzie Jacoby’s name when I mention that he was my uncle, but nearly everyone over sixty-five (except for those who had no interest in bridge) remembers him as a celebrity.
Uncle Ozzie won his first bridge match, the Eastern Pairs, after being “discovered” in 1929 by one of the leading members of the Knickerbocker Whist Club. In 1931, he was selected by Sidney Lenz, then the éminence grise of the bridge world, as his partner in a rubber match against Ely Culbertson (a young man who would also go on to cardplaying fame). The match, held in Philadelphia, was chronicled in front-page newspaper stories and followed by ardent fans across the country. Lenz and Ozzie had a falling-out over Ozzie’s unorthodox bids, and my uncle withdrew from the match. While Lenz went on to lose the match (with another partner) by a huge margin, the upstart Ozzie earned an instant national reputation for brilliant, unconventional play. He became a key member of the Four Aces team, which dominated bridge throughout the thirties. Ozzie had certainly picked a curious profession for a man who wished to distance himself from his Jewish origins, for Jews had long played as conspicuous a role in world-class competitive bridge as they did in chess. Short of becoming a psychoanalyst, my uncle could hardly have made his living in a way more calculated to bring him into social and professional contact with Jews.
Given the nature of his talents, it is not surprising that Ozzie proved to be among the minority of Americans who did extremely well during the Depression. Sports, games, and gambling of all kinds (including betting on sports and games) flourish in tough economic times; bridge and backgammon, in which skill is generally more important than chance, were perfect for my uncle. A great professional cardplayer must possess the talent and coolheadedness to cope with bad luck in the form of a bad hand, and Ozzie definitely knew when to hold and when to fold. But he was incapable of taking his own advice about the need to respect the line between games in which the ability to think several bids ahead, or make a crucial bluff, can overcome a bad hand and thos
e in which no degree of skill can affect the outcome (unless your skill happens to be loading dice or fixing a roulette wheel).
While Ozzie was launching his career, and putting his sister through college and his brother through prep school, my grandfather was representing fewer and fewer clients. One curious episode suggests how desperate for money Oswald Sr. must have been during the twenties. He filed a $90,000 libel suit against another lawyer on behalf of a female client he was representing in a divorce case. My grandfather contended that his client had been defamed because the lawyer had dictated letters regarding the divorce suit—in which the woman’s behavior and character were attacked—to his stenographer. By dictating his letters to a third party, my grandfather argued, the opposing lawyer had “published” defamatory material—though letters between opposing counsel had long been covered by attorney-client privilege. Even in 1924, when attorneys and businessmen relied somewhat less on clerical staff than they would only a decade later, it amounted to a frivolous lawsuit to suggest that dictating a sharp letter to a secretary was the equivalent of defamation in an open forum. My grandfather would naturally have known this but must have been hoping for a percentage of an out-of-court settlement. The other attorney, however, was not intimidated, and the suit was eventually thrown out. This lawsuit was the machination of a sleazy lawyer on the skids, not the work of one of the brightest young members of the city bar, a man who had once been spoken of in the same breath as Benjamin Cardozo. It must have been extraordinarily painful for my grandfather to measure his own tarnished reputation against the distinguished legal career of his old friend, by that time the enormously respected chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals. Cardozo’s achievements merited a biography even before he was elevated to the Supreme Court; my grandfather, contemplating the warm inscription from the friend of his youth, can hardly have been unmoved by the obvious contrast in their status.
Oswald Jacoby’s last noteworthy appearance as a defense lawyer took place in 1928, when he represented a swindler who was convicted in large measure because he had been dumb enough to advertise for investors in The New York Times. Hell hath no fury like a good gray lady used for black ends. In 1909, my grandfather had won an acquittal of the man who sold the newspaper an article with the fraudulent signature of Grover Cleveland. Nineteen years later, he fared less well in his defense of Edward Arden Noblett, a sixty-three-year-old con man who was convicted of swindling one Amos J. C. Baldwin out of $2,000. Noblett, who had been arrested at least twenty times in thirty years but served only two terms in jail, had billed himself as the representative of a British perfume company. Judging from the account in the Times, the arrest resulted from a sting operation organized by the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office, the Times itself, and the pigeon. My grandfather pleaded for leniency for his client on grounds of his advanced age, but the judge sentenced him to ten years at hard labor in Sing Sing. “Old age is one thing,” declared County Court Judge Lewis J. Smith, “but this man never did anything in his life useful or worthy. He has been a swindler ever since he was a young man. He seems to be obsessed with a great case of ego.” (Noblett, to be sure, had not helped his own cause by trying to bribe the arresting officers.)
A great case of ego. That phrase would certainly have made an appropriate inscription on my grandfather’s tombstone—if anyone had paid for a proper burial. But Oswald Nathaniel Jacoby was cremated after his sudden, unexplained death, at the age of sixty-one, in 1931. Nothing attests more powerfully to the low regard in which my grandfather was held by his surviving family members than their failure to give him a proper funeral. All three children claimed they did not know what happened to their father’s ashes and did not remember anything about a funeral. Cremation itself was much less common in the United States seventy years ago than it has become in recent decades, but it may have been my grandfather’s preference. He was not only irreligious but known to be antireligious, and even though he sent his children to schools with Protestant church connections, he was not himself a member of any church. But there is something unspeakably (in the most literal sense) sad about a family so angry at its husband and father that he was deemed unworthy of a formal burial ceremony.
There were no obituaries for Oswald Jacoby, save one small notice of his death, cause unstated, in a Columbia alumni publication. The absence of an obituary in the Times, which had such an extensive file on my grandfather’s early career, is significant. If there is one truism about newspapers, it is that they generally note the deaths of people they have chronicled in life. The Times would surely not have failed to publish an obituary for Oswald Jacoby merely because he had occasionally crossed swords with the newspaper in court; it is far more likely that no one in the family called to report the death. The Jacoby family, apparently unable to follow the policy of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, settled on de mortuis nil.
What was the cause of my grandfather’s death? My dad thought his father had died of a stroke, while Ozzie told me the cause was syphilis and a heart attack. Aunt Edith, however (at least in the last years of her life), was convinced that her father had committed suicide. Suicide would certainly explain the mysteries—the silence, the absence of a funeral, the nonexistence of obituaries—surrounding my grandfather’s death. His cocaine addiction could, of course, have hastened his death from any cause.
—
WHEN I look at the last fifteen years of my grandfather’s life, I see a man who had ample reason for despair. He was a lawyer of diminished stature, unable to meet his basic financial obligations to his family. He was a man who had squandered immense gifts of intellect, charm, education, and culture—a husband with a cold, unloving wife and a father whose children were so angry at him by the time he died that they would avoid looking at pictures of him for the rest of their lives.
Above all, I see the empty space the following June in the chapel at Poly Prep—the space where my grandfather should have been sitting when his seventeen-year-old son marched up to receive his cum laude high school diploma. For my father, that space would never be filled.
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OZZIE WAS twenty-nine when his father died, and he and Edith, who had just graduated from Smith and gone to work as a salesclerk, took over the responsibility of supporting their mother. My grandfather, not surprisingly, left no estate. Both my aunt and my grandmother seem to have held the traditional view (bolstered, one may assume, by Ozzie’s widely publicized and lucrative triumphs in bridge tournaments) of an eldest son’s eternal financial responsibility to the rest of the family. My uncle accepted that responsibility as long as he was single, but that would change when he met Mary Zita McHale on a tennis court in Dallas.
Ozzie was in Dallas for a bridge tournament when he spotted the beautiful Texas women’s tennis champion across the court. It was love at first sight: Ozzie and Mary were married just a week later in the rectory (the church itself being off-limits because Ozzie wasn’t a Catholic) of the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Dallas. In the wedding announcement in the Dallas newspapers, Ozzie was described as a Congregationalist. He had agreed, as the Church demanded, that his and Mary’s children be raised as Roman Catholics. “I was so crazy about her, I would have agreed to have the children raised as Druids,” Ozzie told me when I asked him how he felt about signing the papers. The McHale family must have had enormous clout to get the local bishop to marry their daughter so quickly to a non-Catholic; normally, a mixed couple would have been required to undergo weeks of pastoral counseling before a priest would consent to marry them. The counseling was designed not only to acquaint the non-Catholic partner with the requirements of marriage to a Catholic (including the all-important prohibition of artificial birth control) but, if possible, to dissuade the Catholic from entering the union at all. Although Mary McHale was (and would remain) a devout Catholic, she was not about to be dissuaded from marrying Ozzie. At the time she met my uncle, she was teaching in a parochial school. When she told the Mother Superior she was leaving to marry a
bridge expert, the nun smiled and said, “Ah, how nice, an engineer!”
Mary’s father did not inquire further into his future son-in-law’s background when Ozzie announced that he was a Congregationalist. In the late 1970s, when I first enlisted Ozzie’s help in reconstructing the Jacoby family’s Jewish past, he told me he had presented himself as a Congregationalist “because it sounded quite vague.” Ozzie said he was sure his future father-in-law knew the Jacobys were Jews but didn’t particularly care as long as there was an acceptable cover story for the local papers. “I really think Mary’s father didn’t give a damn who I was as long as he thought I could support her and I agreed to be married by a priest,” Ozzie speculated. “My mother, on the other hand, was absolutely furious that Mary was a Catholic. In 1928, when Al Smith was running for the presidency, she believed all that rubbish about how a Catholic president would be taking his secret orders from the Pope. I think having all three of her children marry Catholics was probably her worst nightmare. Of course, she probably wouldn’t have liked any woman I married.”
Mary Zita McHale Jacoby proved to be a formidable rival. Ozzie brought his bride home to an apartment on East Sixty-third Street in Manhattan—as fashionable a location then as it is today. Aunt Edith and my grandmother, who lived together, expected that the married son would soon bring his mother to live with him. But Mary quickly assessed Granny Jacoby’s overbearing, possessive nature, and told her new husband, “It’s her or me.” After his first son, Jim, was born in early 1933, Ozzie sharply reduced the amount of money he had been sending his mother every month. The depth of the conflict involving Ozzie, Mary, Granny Jacoby, and Aunt Edith is revealed in a rancorous 1934 exchange of letters. Ozzie had, uncharacteristically, hung on to the letters, and I found them in an envelope in Dallas after his death. I could hear my grandmother’s demanding voice as I read the yellowing pages: