23. ELDORADO 5–0050
The three older children leave the city.
Elisabeth, poet, is the first to go. She receives a doctorate in law in 1924, the first given to a woman from the University of Vienna. And then a Rockefeller Scholarship to travel to America – she is off. She is redoubtable, my grandmother, clever and focused, and she writes about American architecture and idealism for a German journal, how the ardour and fervour of skyscrapers fit with contemporary philosophy. When she returns she moves to Paris to study political science. She is in love with a Dutchman she met in Vienna, recently divorced from a cousin of hers, with a little boy from the marriage.
The beautiful Gisela is next. She marries well, a lovely Spanish banker called Alfredo Bauer, from a rich Jewish family. The couple are married in the synagogue in Vienna, which causes confusion for the secular Ephrussi, who are unsure of what to do, where to sit or stand. There is a party for the young couple and the great floor of the Palais is opened up for a proper reception in the gilt ballroom under Ignace’s triumphant ceilings. Gisela is effortlessly stylish in a long cardigan and a silver belt low over a print skirt, a dark black-and-white dress with a string of dark beads for going away in. She has an open smile and Alfredo is handsome and bearded. The couple move to Madrid in 1925.
Then Elisabeth sends the young Dutchman, Hendrik de Waal, a note to say that she has heard he is coming through Paris on Friday week and might they meet? Her phone number is Gobelius 12–85, if he could ring. Henk was tall with slightly thinning hair and wore very good suits – grey with the slightest of charcoal stripes – and a monocle and he smoked Russian cigarettes. He had grown up in Amsterdam on the Prinzengracht, the only son of a merchant family that imported coffee and cocoa. He was well travelled and played the violin and was charming and very funny. And he also wrote poetry. I’m not sure if my grandmother, who at twenty-seven was wearing her hair drawn back in a severe bun and had round black spectacles worthy of a Baronin Doktor Ephrussi, had ever before been wooed by such a man. She adored him.
I find their wedding notice in the archives of the Adler Society in Vienna. It is rather elegantly printed. We are gemeinde (compelled to/led to/unable not to) announce, it reads, that Elisabeth von Ephrussi has already married Hendrik de Waal. And then Viktor and Emmy’s names in one corner and the de Waal parents in the other. My grandparents – one Dutch Reformed Church, the other Jewish – were married in the Anglican church in Paris.
The genealogists are amused by this notice and this use of this word gemeinde, with its undercurrents of familial complexity.
Elisabeth and Henk bought an apartment in Paris in the rue Spontini in the 16th arrondissement and furnished it in the newest art deco taste, with armchairs and carpets by Ruhlmann and rather excitingly moderne metal lamps and glassware of impossible lightness from the Wiener Werkstätte. They hung large reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh and, briefly, housed a Schiele landscape in the drawing-room that they bought in Vienna from Fanny’s gallery. I have a couple of photographs of this apartment, and you can sense the complete delight this couple took in creating it, the pleasures of buying new things, rather than inheriting stuff. No gilt, no Junge Frauen, no Dutch chests. And no family portraits at all.
When things were going well, they lived in this apartment with Henk’s son Robert and their two little boys, born soon after their marriage, my father Victor – known, like his grandfather Viktor, by his Russian nickname Tascha – and my uncle Constant Hendrik. They played every day in the Bois de Boulogne. When things were going well there was a governess and a cook and a maid, and even a chauffeur, and Elisabeth wrote poetry and articles for Le Figaro and improved her Dutch.
Sometimes, when it was wet, she would take the boys to the gallery of the Jeu de Paume on the edge of the Tuileries gardens. Here in the long, bright rooms they would look at the Manets and Degas and Monets coll. C. Ephrussi, left to the museum in memory of her uncle Charles by Fanny and her husband Théodore Reinach, the clever scholar who had married into the family. There are cousins in Paris, but Charles’s generation has gone, trailing benefactions to the country it adopted. The Reinachs have left the Villa Kerylos, a fabulous re-creation of a Greek temple, to France, and great-aunt Béatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild has bequeathed the rose-pink villa in Cap Ferrat to the Académie française. The Camondos have given their collections, and the Cahen d’Anvers have given their chateau outside Paris, too. It is seventy years since all these first Jewish families built their houses on the golden rue de Monceau and they are giving something back to this generous country.
In terms of religious faith it is an interesting marriage. Henk had grown up in a severe family – they look doomed in their black suits and dresses – but had converted to become Mennonite. Elisabeth, who felt completely confident of her Jewishness, was reading the Christian mystics and talking about conversion. Not expedient conversion for marriage, or to fit in with the neighbours, or to Catholicism – I’m not sure if any Jewish girl brought up in Vienna opposite the Votivkirche would choose to do that – but to the Church of England. They go to the Anglican church in Paris.
When things did not go well with the Anglo-Batavian Trading Company, Henk lost a lot of his own money, and other people’s too. He lost, inter alia, a fortune belonging to Piz, the wild cousin and childhood friend, who had become an up-and-coming Expression-ist painter and was living a bohemian life in Frankfurt. Losing this amount of money was a nightmare, and the maid and the chauffeur were let go and the furniture was put into storage in Paris and there were discussions of labyrinthine complexity.
Henk’s incompetence with money was different from his father-in-law Viktor’s. Henk could make numbers dance. My father talks of how he could scan three columns, take away another column and conjure a (correct) total with a smile. It was just that he believed he could do the same sleight of hand with money. He believed that it was all going to come right, that the markets would move, the ships would come into port and that fortunes would click back together like his slim shagreen cigarette case. He was, simply, deluded in his abilities.
And I understand that Viktor never believed he had any control over the columns of figures at all. I wonder, very belatedly, what it was like for Elisabeth to realise that she had married a man almost as poor with money as her father.
Iggie graduated from the Schottengymnasium and was the third to leave. I have his graduation photograph and can’t find him at first, until I suddenly recognise a rather portly young man in the back row in a double-breasted suit. He looks like a stockbroker. Bow-tie and handkerchief, a young man practising how to stand properly, how to look convincing. Do you, for instance, stand with one hand in your pocket? Or are two hands in pockets better? Or even, this is most endearing, one hand inside the waistcoat, a clubman pose.
To celebrate the end of his schooling, he went for a motoring tour with his childhood friends the Gutmanns, from Vienna to Paris the long way round through northern Italy and the Riviera in a Hispano-Suiza, an elephantine car of fabled luxury. In some cold, bright pass somewhere, three young things sit in the back with the hood down, swaddled in their motoring coats with goggles up over their motoring caps. Their luggage is piled in front of them. A chauffeur hovers. The bonnet of the car disappears to the left of the photograph and the boot of the car disappears to the right. It feels balanced on the faintest breath of a fulcrum, hovering between deep descents.
It would have been difficult to have Elisabeth as an older sister if you were academic: Iggie was not bookish. The family finances are not so rocky in these days – Emmy, an elegant forty-five, is buying clothes again – but Iggie does need to concentrate and not just spend his time watching endless looping afternoons of films in the cinemas. Viktor and Emmy are clear about his future. Iggie should join the bank, turn left and left again each morning with his father, sit at a desk under the shield with the little boat ploughing its way onwards, Quod honestum, through the generations from Joachim to Ignace and Léon, and then to Viktor and Jules, and now to Iggie. Iggie was, after all, the only young man in the whole of the extended Ephrussi family, Rudolf being a rather gorgeous child of seven.
The fact that Iggie was not particularly good with his figures was swept aside. Plans were made for him to continue his studies in finance at the university in Cologne. This had the advantage of allowing Pips – now on his second marriage, this time to a glamorous film actress – to keep an avuncular eye on him. Iggie was given a tiny car as a gesture towards independent living, and he looks good in it. He survived this ordeal – three whole years of German lectures – and started work in a Frankfurt bank, which ‘gave me the opportunity to acquaint myself with all phases of the banking business’ as he drily put it in a letter years later.
He would not talk of these years, except to say to me that being a Jewish banker in Germany in the Depression was unwise. These were the years of the Nazi ascendancy when the votes for Hitler spiralled higher, when the paramilitary SA doubled its membership to 400,000, and when street battles became part of the life of cities. Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30th January 1933 and a month later, after the Reichstag fire, thousands were taken into ‘preventive detention’. The largest of these new detention camps was on the edge of Bavaria in Dachau.
In July 1933 Iggie was expected back in Vienna to start at the bank.
It was not wise to stay in Germany, but it was not a propitious time to return to Austria. Vienna was turbulent. The Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had suspended the constitution in the face of increasing Nazi pressure. There were violent confrontations between police and demonstrators, and some days Viktor did not even go to the bank, but waited impatiently all day for the evening papers to be brought to him in the library.
Iggie did not turn up. He ran away. The list of reasons for running away started with the bank – the smirk that the doorman always gave him – but tangled into Vienna. And then tangled further into family: Papa, the old cook Clara and her welcoming veal pie with potato salad, Anna fussing over his shirts, his room with its Biedermeier bed waiting for him along the familiar long corridor, past the dressing-room, the counterpane turned down at six.
Iggie ran to Paris. He began work in a ‘third-rung fashion house’ learning how to sketch tea-gowns. He spent nights learning how to cut in an atelier, starting to sense how the scissors slip across a billowing field of green shot-silk. Four hours’ sleep on the floor of a friend’s apartment and then coffee and back to drawing. Fifteen minutes for lunch, coffee, and back again.
He is poor: he learns the tricks to keeping clothes clean and smart, how to take in and hem cuffs. He has a small allowance from Vienna that continues, without comment, from his parents. And though it must be mortifying for Viktor to explain to his friends that Iggie is not joining the firm – and perhaps he mumbles when asked what Iggie is actually doing in Paris – I wonder if he has sympathy for his son. Viktor must know about running away and not running away, just as Emmy must know about staying.
Iggie is twenty-eight. As with Emmy, clothes are a vocation. All those nightly hours in the dressing-room with the netsuke and Anna and his mother, smoothing down a dress, comparing lace details at cuff or neck. All those dressing-up games with Gisela, the trunk of old gowns kept in the box-room at the far corner. The old copies of Wiener Mode, pored over on the parquetry floor of the salon. Iggie could tell you how the trousers of one imperial regiment differed in cut from another and how you could wear crêpe de Chine on the bias. And now, finally, he finds that he is not as good as he had hoped, but he has started.
And then, after nine hard months, he runs away again, to New York, to boys and to fashion. This was a trinity so wonderful in its cadence that in very old age he couldn’t help smilingly describing the voyage to New York as a sort of baptismal crossing from one life to another, a voyage in some way into himself.
I know a little about this from his wry attempts to make me dress better when I first stayed with him in Tokyo. It was during that hot, humid June in Iggie’s apartment, earnest and gushing and rather grubby from my travels, that I first understood not that clothes mattered, but how they mattered. Iggie and Jiro, his friend in the interlocking apartment, took me to Mitsukoshi, the grand department store in the centre of the Ginza, to buy some proper clothes, some linen jackets for the summer and some shirts with collars. My jeans and collarless shirts were taken away by their housekeeper Mrs Nakano and returned rehemmed, folded with little pins across the cuffs and all my buttons restored to full array. Some things did not re-emerge.
On a much later visit to Tokyo, Jiro gave me a small card that he had found: ‘Baron I. Leo Ephrussi begs to announce his association with Dorothy Couteaur Inc. formerly of Molyneux, Paris’. The address is 695 Fifth Avenue and the phone number Eldorado 5-0050. It seems appropriate. Fashion was El Dorado for Iggie: he has dropped the Ignace bit for Leo, but kept the Baron in place.
Iggie’s invitation, 1936
For Dorothy Couteaur Inc. – a name straight out of Nabokov with its mocking, drawling version of couture – Iggie designed ‘The Free-Swinging Coat’, shown ‘posed smartly over a diagonally tucked sheer crêpe frock in beige, with beige also the background color of the novelty silk crêpe coat patterned in brown swallows’. It is very brown indeed. Iggie mostly designed ‘Sophisticated gowns for the smart American woman’, though I did find a reference to ‘Smart Accessories shown for the first time in California. Belts, Bags, Ceramic Jewelry and Compacts’, which shows either his financial straits or his astuteness. In Women’s Wear Daily for 11 March 1937 there was ‘an important type of evening ensemble that makes a point of an interesting fabric alliance, the gown reflecting Grecian influence in mother-of-pearl satin jersey, the coat in the gayest red chiffon, with pin-tucks for surface decoration. The scarf can be worn as a girdle on the coat, giving a redingote suggestion.’
‘An interesting fabric alliance’ is a wonderful phrase. I look at the illustration for a long time for the ‘redingote suggestion’.
It was only when I found his design of cruise-wear based on US Navy signal flags that I realised just how much fun Iggie was having. It shows girls dressed in shorts and skirts being run up the rigging by magnificent swarthy sailors, while the code helpfully informs us that the girls are wearing signals for ‘I need to have personal communication with you’, ‘You are clear of all danger’, ‘I am on fire’ and ‘I cannot hold out any longer’.
New York was full of newly impoverished Russians, Austrians and Germans escaping Europe, and Iggie was one of many. His minute allowance from Vienna had finally petered to nothing and his earnings from his designs were meagre, but he was a happy man. He found his first great love: Robin Curtis, a dealer in antiques, slightly younger, slim and fair. In a domestic picture in their apartment shared with Robin’s sister on the Upper East Side, with both men in pin-striped suits, Iggie perches on the arm of a chair. There are joint family photographs on their mantelpiece behind them. In other pictures they are larking around on a beach in their trunks, in Mexico, in LA: a couple.
Iggie really did get away.
Elisabeth wouldn’t sanction moving back to Vienna. But when the finances became intolerable – clients had let Henk down, promises had not been fulfilled, et cetera – she took the boys off to a farmhouse in Oberbozen, a beautiful village in the Italian Tyrol. The village had its own cacophonous band of drums on feast days, and meadows of gentians. It was beautiful, and the air was marvellous for the children’s complexion, but above all it was very, very cheap with none of the expenses of a Parisian lifestyle. The children went briefly to the local school, before she decided to teach them herself. Henk stayed in Paris and London trying to retrieve the losses of his Trading Company. ‘When he came to see us,’ my father recalled, ‘we were told to be very quiet as he was very, very tired.’
Sometimes Elisabeth took the children back to Vienna to see their grandparents and their uncle Rudolf, now a teenager. The chauffeur took Viktor and the grandchildren out in the back of the long black car.
Emmy was not terribly well – a heart condition – and had started to take pills. She looks much older in the few pictures of her from these years, and slightly surprised by middle age, but is still beautifully dressed in a black cloak with a white collar, a hat pinned at an angle to her grey curls, one hand on my father and another on my uncle’s shoulder. Anna must be looking after her well. And she still falls in love.
She says she is not ready to be a grandmother, but she sends my father a series of colourful postcards from the stories of Hans Christian Anderson, ‘The Swineherd’, ‘The Princess and the Pea’, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Dozens of cards each with a short message, one every week without fail, each one signed ‘with a thousand kisses from Your Grandmother’. Emmy still cannot resist telling stories.
Rudolf, growing up at home, without his sisters or his brother from one year to the next, is tall and handsome and in one picture he is dressed in riding breeches and an army greatcoat, framed by a doorway in the salon of the Palais. He plays the saxophone. Its echo must have sounded glorious in the increasingly empty rooms.
Elisabeth and the boys spent a fortnight in Vienna at the Palais in July 1934, the weeks in which there was an attempted coup led by the Austrian SS, in which Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated in his office, the signal for a Nazi uprising. It was put down with heavy casualties, and the new Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was sworn in against a real fear of civil war. My father remembers waking in the nursery in the Palais and running to the window to see a fire-truck rattling down the Ring with its bells ringing. I have tried to get him to remember more (Nazi demonstrations? armed police? crisis?), but he is not suggestible. A fire-truck is the alpha and omega of his 1934 Vienna.
Viktor hardly pretends to be a banker any more. Perhaps as a consequence of this, or the competence of his deputy, Herr Steinhausser, the bank is doing well. He still goes to the bank every day, where he studies long, closely printed catalogues from Leipzig and Heidelberg. He has taken up collecting incunabula, early printed books, and his particular passion – more intense since the crumbling of the Empire – is for Roman history. The books are kept in the library overlooking the Schottengasse in a tall bookcase with a mesh door, and the key is kept on his watch chain. Early printed Latin histories seem a characteristically abstruse thing – and an expensive thing – to collect, but he is interested in empires.
Viktor and Emmy holiday together at Kövecses, but since the death of her parents it is a strangely diminished place, with only a couple of horses in the stables and fewer gamekeepers and no great weekend shoots any more. Emmy walks down to the bend in the river, past the willows where you can get the breeze, and back before dinner as she used to with the children, but with her heart problem she is quite slow. The swimming lake has been let go. Its edges are susurrating reeds.
The Ephrussi children are dispersed. Elisabeth is still in the Alps, but has moved to Ascona in Switzerland and comes to Vienna with her boys when she can. Anna makes a great fuss of them. Iggie is now designing cruise-wear in Hollywood. And Gisela and her family have had to leave Madrid for Mexico because of the Spanish Civil War.
By 1938 Emmy is fifty-eight years old and is still very handsome, her rope of pearls looping around her neck and down to her waist. Vienna is a chaotic place to be living in, but life in the Palais is strangely immobile. There are eight servants to keep this stasis perfect. Nothing really happens, though the table is set in the dining-room for one o’clock, and again for dinner at eight, but this time it is Rudolf who does not appear. He is out, she says, at all hours.
Viktor is seventy-eight and looks exactly like his father – and like the portrait of his cousin Charles printed with his obituary. I think of Swann in his old age, when all his features have become larger: the Ephrussi nose is resplendent. I look at a picture of Viktor with his neatly trimmed beard and realise that he looks like my father does now, and wonder how long I’ve got before I too start to look like this.
Viktor is so anxious that he reads several of the papers each day. He is right to be anxious. There have been years of overt pressure and covert funding by Germany of the Austrian National Socialists. Hitler has now demanded that the Austrian Chancellor, Schuschnigg, release members of the Nazi Party from prison and let them participate in government. Schuschnigg has complied. The pressure has increased and now he has had enough. He has decided to hold a plebiscite on Austria’s independence from the Nazi Reich on 13th March.
When Viktor goes to the Wiener Club on the Kärtner Ring on Thursday 10th March for lunch with his Jewish friends (out the door, turn left, 500 yards on the left) the afternoon disappears in smoky debate about what is happening. History is not helping Viktor.