The rothschilds, p.17
The Rothschilds, page 17
Another Leo household was many-splendored Gunnersbury Park, inherited from his father. In addition, he bought Palace House near the racing course at Newmarket, where the King of England and similar types were glad to be his guests. Finally, he owned an estate at Ascott Wing, a lovely country manor with miles of gardens and views. This, by far the most tasteful and probably the most pleasant of all Rothschild realms in Buckinghamshire, is the only one inhabited by The Family to this day.
Ascott abutted on South Court, his stud farm and dearest passion. Racing was handed down to him as a legacy from his Uncle Mayer. Leo bred horses ingeniously, without regard to expense, and cheered them on without regard to English reserve. Sometimes it was hard to choose between spectacles: Mr. Leo’s blurring thoroughbreds on the track, or his Oriental exuberance in his box. Uncle Mayer had won the Derby once; Leo won it twice, in 1879 and in 1904. In between, he led into the paddock literally hundreds of champions.
That he did not win the Derby three times may be laid to rachmones of a very rarefied kind. The Prince of Wales, Leo’s good friend, entered the Derby of 1896 with a virtually unknown animal named Persimmon. The blue-and-yellow Rothschild silks were represented by St. Frusquin, possibly the greatest four-legged celebrity of the fin de siècle. Leo had once been offered sixty thousand pounds for this horse, which had walked away with almost every important turf event in England. But in 1896 His Royal Highness happened to have rather more mistress trouble than usual. He stood in need of cheer. Somehow it happened that Persimmon came in first.
Leo’s compassion, if it was a factor here, extended to the humblest citizens as well. It was said of him that the more races he won, the more money he lost. To celebrate, he gave away not only the winner’s purse but its multiples. Often he would gain a cup—and some hospital an entire wing.
Off the track his benevolence was no less active. Petitioners who did not dare come near Natty, or were fazed by Alfred’s peculiarities, sidled up readily to Mr. Leo. He became the welfare minister of New Court. A cold day would, for some reason, give his openhandedness a special impetus, and he was especially touched by children. One winter Sunday, when he took a somewhat absent-minded stroll on Natty’s lawns at Tring, he noticed a little shape before him. Instantly, automatically, he reached into his pocket. Only the frantic intervention of a butler saved him from a transcendental faux pas: he had been about to press a half crown on one of the royal dukes of England.
Mr. Leo became a byword of spontaneity and goodnature. In a clan that, for all its remarkable qualities, has never been notorious for sweetness, he stands out as a kind of darling mutation.
Of men like you
Earth holds but few:
An angel—with
A revenue.*
(c) The Incomparable Alfred
In the manor of Edmund de Rothschild’s great estate at Exbury today there are hundreds of family heirlooms. Visiting Family members, though generally quite inured to that sort of thing, never tire of asking for one specific item—“Alfred’s baton.” This is a staff of pure white ivory banded with a circlet of diamonds. The instrument had a very solid, practical use. Alfred needed it to conduct the symphony orchestra he kept as a private hobby.
The baton is symbolic of a way of life unique even among Rothschilds. Alfred, in age the second of the triumvirate, never married, and by his bachelorhood alone he departed from clan tradition. (Natty had wedded Emma Louisa, a Frankfurt Rothschild; Leo, an Italian-Jewish beauty named Marie Perugia.) Alfred’s physical appearance was even more radically different. In the English mishpoche, Jewish genes carefully interbred, and an ancestral sense solicitously nourished, produced generation after generation of the same portly, generously nosed, Frankfurt Semitic type. Alfred, however, was a slim, blond Ariel, of a dainty countenance delicately shrubbed with sideburns.
His brothers’ indulgences were properly luxurious. His were dizzily sybaritic. Often he had a personal train standing by for him in full steam. He maintained the private Philharmonic mentioned above, whose concert master submitted each morning the selections to be rehearsed for dinner music that night. He also had a private circus to which—beautifully accoutered in blue frock coat, whip and lavender kid gloves—he would play ringmaster, to his friends’ amusement. And he simply adored driving his zebra four-in-hand.
Small wonder that he rusticated not like a squire but like an emperor. His Halton House was a vast pile of the most expensive ornamentation hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling could buy. It clashed luridly with the simple glory of the Buckinghamshire beeches around it, exciting outrage and, just possibly, envy, among various sensibilities. One spoke of “an exaggerated nightmare of gorgeousness and senseless and ill-applied magnificence.” “A combination of French château and gambling house!” cried another.
Notwithstanding such towering excess, Alfred had flair. In the country, where an exquisite would feel out of his depth anyway, he didn’t bother with esthetic harmonies and let the zebras caper. In the city his connoisseurship came into its own. At 1 Seamore Place, a renowned (now razed) London address, he built a suitable roof over his head. It, too, constituted an immense grotto matted and jungled with treasures. A single mantel would hold 300,000 dollars’ worth of objects. And yet there was rhyme, reason and rhythm to it all, if a number of stunned witnesses are to be trusted. Seamore Place confirmed Lady Dorothy Neville’s edict that Alfred was “the finest amateur judge in England of eighteenth-century French art.”
Lord Beaconsfield thought so, too. A widowed ex-premier, he moved out of 10 Downing Street into Seamore Place in 1880. “The most charming house in London,” Dizzy said, “the magnificence of its decorations and furniture equalled by their good taste.”
Alfred’s taste was most dextrously exercised in his favors and hospitalities. To his very good friend, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, he presented two items, both masterpieces of resourceful giving. The first was a replica of Reynolds’ “Lady Bampfylde” (one of Alfred’s most cherished possessions) executed so well that it could hardly be told from the original; the second, a parade set of ornate saddle steels made for Philip III of Spain.
He was not only the most lavish giver, but the most cunning impresario of parties. Friends often wondered why he bothered to subscribe to his great box at Covent Garden, when all the stars appearing there also performed for his private soirees. Rubinstein, Liszt, Melba (whose financial affairs he managed), and Mischa Elman (whom he discovered) enchanted his music rooms. The moment they entered his house they were talented friends, not professional artists—a convivial impression he could create with the utmost deftness. He never seemed to realize that the jeweled trifle with which he thanked them for their courtesy was worth far more than the highest concert fee.
This was his forte and made him the greatest host of the era: unparalelled attention to the visitor’s well-being. Cecil Roth recounts the breakfast ritual, which began with an infinitely capacious dumbwaiter standing at the ready in the guest’s bedroom, and the footman announcing the menu: “Tea, coffee, or a peach off the wall, sir?”
Let us assume that the guest, unprepared for such unprecedented matitutinal variety, chooses tea.
“China tea, Indian tea or Ceylon tea, sir?”
“China, if you please,” decides the stranger.
It is poured out. The litany continues. “Lemon, milk or cream, sir?”
The guest indicates that he will take milk.
But the inquisition is not yet over. “Jersey, Hereford or Shorthorn, sir?”
The day passed in this fashion. When the company repaired to their dressing rooms toward evening, they found baskets filled with a rainbow of sprays from which to select boutonnieres or corsages for dinner. If the burden of choice engendered a headache, a delightful remedy was at hand; throughout the night broughams and drivers waited to soothe insomniacs with a moonlit ride. If the chill of dawn gave them a cold, they could resort to a medicine chest as magnificently stocked as the wine cellar. And when they had to go home at last, their luggage would be larded with little mementoes of their stay. The men would find boxes of the host’s famous guinea cigars (that is, fifteen-dollar cheroots, which became so renowned among gourmet smokers that at least one manufacturer tried to exploit the cachet with a brand called Alfred de Rothschild cigars). The ladies came away with such perishable treasures as chocolates, exotic fruits and hothouse blooms.
A specialty of Alfred’s was the “adoration dinner.” This was a miniature banquet, attended by only one woman—the lady in whose honor the affair was given—and three or four men “she might like to meet.” A beautiful actress of turn-of-the-century London—Lily Langtry, for example—would be “adored” in the lushest possible circumstances by, say, the current Prime Minister, the world’s foremost tenor, and a legendary general like Lord Kitchener. This function, too, culminated in a “little” present which the gentlemen joined in laying at her feet (the choreography here must have been interesting). The male guests were consulted on the gift beforehand, but its purchase was the host’s monopolistic privilege.
Alfred, the most urbane and delightful of men among inhabitants of his own stratosphere, always acted a little awkward before the lower classes. He seldom mixed with his beneficiaries (as Leo liked to) or with the common ruck of tycoons (as Natty did). Aloofness only added to his aureole. Inevitably he became one of the favorite targets of Max Beerbohm’s pencil. And yet, dandy, fop, dilettante though he was, he remained a Rothschild. He was not an idler. With all his many silken divertissements, he still found time for the three Family vocations: business, Jewry and charity.
Of course, he interpreted all three his own way. Even Natty, the despot of the City, could not get him to show up at New Court on time. He came late and stayed late, and instituted a whole “Bohemian shift” of clerks to be his staff. At twenty-six he was elected the first Jewish Director of the Bank of England. The job is not a sinecure. Even a Rothschild needed both ability and application to keep on being re-elected for twenty-one years. When he resigned in 1889, a bit precipitously, it wasn’t lack of financial gifts that had tripped him up, but excessive curiosity as a collector. He had paid a great deal of money for a picture he had long wanted. The dealer in question banked at Thread-needle Street, and the profit he had made could be gleaned from his account. Alfred gleaned. Alfred cried out, a bit too loudly. The dealer lost a client, and Alfred his directorship, but London gained another first-rate Rothschild story.
No such mishap occurred when he performed his Jewish duties. He attended synagogue as punctiliously as his brothers, though Natty often had to make sure his boutonniere was properly subdued. And despite his strong inclination toward the decorative splendors of Renaissance paintings, he disciplined himself not to buy them, because of their religious content (another proof of how hard it is to be a Jew).
Also in a Judaic context, Alfred is associated with a deathbed mystery about Disraeli. The great statesman had been baptized at the age of twelve but never hid his racial pride. He claimed descent from the Marranos, or secret Israelites of Spain, whom fifteenth-century terror had forced into an artificial Christianity but who redeclared their faith at the final hour. Now, Disraeli’s dying words, according to some biographers, resembled the phrase “shema Yisroel,” the Jewish deathbed confession of faith. And Alfred de Rothschild was among those in charge of the last rites over the body. It all added up to a rumor which has been neither proved nor stopped.
To the public, Alfred’s name blazed most brightly in connection with philanthropic fetes. Here he was an endlessly industrious and accomplished impresario. No other man could have masterminded the unique gala night in Covent Garden on behalf of the Boer War charities. For his sake alone, the great Patti abandoned her iron prejudice against performing at benefits, and with Alvarez—imported especially from New York—she sang the great duet from Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. Only Alfred could have managed to book the massed bands of the Queen’s Household Cavalry and the Brigade of the Guards. Only at his bidding would the haut monde of London pay such exorbitant prices: 250 pounds (or four thousand dollars) per box, fifteen pounds (or 230 dollars) per seat. And this particular affair aside, it is probable that mainly he, the most magnificent of the three magnificos, animated the august friendship on which the triumvirate based much of its eminence and to which we will turn now.
5. At Marlborough House
The greatest social triumph of The Family came to pass—by now a traditional irony—through their stubborn Jewishness. During a good part of the nineteenth century the two major British universities did not care for foreign faiths. They required that every academic candidate declare allegiance to the Church of England. At Oxford one had to do so before matriculation, at Cambridge not until the awarding of a degree. Therefore Natty, Leo and Alfred attended Trinity College, Cambridge, to study though not to graduate. Even today, long after the removal of religious restrictions, the Rothschilds read at Trinity as a result. In the 1850’s this circumstance brought them together with a chubby, merry Cambridge boy named Bertie. He was also known as the Prince of Wales.
The friendship between the future King of England and the grandsons of a ghetto apprentice was instant and intimate. It remained permanent and astounding. Bertie’s chumminess with Natty, Leo and Alf—and, before long, with Ferdy (the Austrian Rothschild, Ferdinand)—was unheard but not untalked of. It produced newspaper headlines, upset court chamberlains, and roiled protocol. Some of her Majesty’s ministers worried lest the heir apparent pass on state secrets to a commercial firm. As it turned out, his Highness, primed by the Rothschild information service, often knew more than the fretting ministers. But generally the friendship intrigued every walk of life and thrilled Jews all over the world.
Day after day the court circular announced that the Prince of Wales had stayed with Lord Rothschild at Tring Manor, joined Mr. Leopold at the Rothschild shoot in Leighton Buzzard or yachted with Mr. Ferdinand at Ramsgate. It was the Rothschilds, more often than the oldest ducal clans, who could send out cards with the magic phrase, “…to have the honor of meeting Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess of Wales.” On a darker occasion, after Bertie’s appearance in the witness box of a divorce court, it was Alfs piano that beguiled the Prince through a sleepless night at the Amphytrion Club.
More usually the friends sojourned at Marlborough House, where Bertie held his un-Victorian court; where one toasted, waltzed, placed bets together, occasionally lent one another money, and made the silkiest whoopee in the Empire. The “Marlborough Boys,” of whom the Rothschilds were a vital part, became the set in Europe. A motley galaxy, the set was not without a certain historical impact. It did something about Lytton Strachey’s complaint that royalty had been unfashionable in England since Charles II. The Hanover line had put a beery vein into Majesty. Victoria—respected, revered though she was—could not be admired as the quintessence of chic. But long before he became Edward VII, her son managed even his naughtiness with an Edwardian flair. At Marlborough House Bertie reigned more smartly and practiced a much more democratic snobbery than Mrs. Astor did on Fifth Avenue. Society went through a healthier house cleaning than anywhere else on either continent.
Let the courtiers raise their eyebrows sky-high—joviality began to outrank genealogy in London; wit took precedence over etiquette, the colorful over the emptily decorous. The Rothschilds scored on every count. In addition, they were always ready to help a chap out with a few thousand pounds, even if his Mater’s name was Victoria. Natty, Leo and Alfred played their part in running the wax figures out of Mayfair, in revitalizing the élite and thus adding to the viability of the country, in glamorizing the Crown.
The Queen herself came to recognize this, despite her rather ingrained earlier thoughts about the place of Jews. However, it took more than the combined luster of the three brothers to sway her Majesty at last. It was a fourth Family personage who induced her to make the initial public move.
Ferdy, the Austrian, turned the trick. We must go into his history a little to understand how. He had married Evelina, a sister of the three brothers, in the 1865 wedding described earlier. Eighteen months later she died in childbed. Ferdy decided to remain in England. He became an English Rothschild in residence, maintaining at Rothschild Row that town house with the famous white ballroom; English in political allegiance, becoming a subject of the Queen and, when Natty left the Commons for the Lords, taking over The Family’s parliamentary fief by becoming the new M.P. for Aylesbury; English in his charities—he founded the Evelina de Rothschild Hospital for Sick Children in London and the Evelina de Rothschild School in Jerusalem. At Christmas he sent a brace of pheasants to every busman in London; as acknowledgment, the drivers ribboned their whips in yellow and blue, the Rothschild racing colors. And Ferdy was English in his eccentric willfulness. He would give a ball at such short notice that his female guests would not have time to prepare their dresses, whereupon the hasty host made amends by ordering them new couturier creations at his own cost for the next function.
