CHAPTER XIII — THE ROTHSCHILDS TODAY:
While the banking Rothschilds reasserted themselves in the financial world, the non-banking Rothschilds sprang into bloom in all sorts of unexpected places with the hardiness of wild flowers. During the past twenty-five years these unorthodox members of the family made names for themselves as scientists, poets, civil servants and entrepreneurs; and, as they are still very much alive, the past at last has caught up with the present.
In London one Rothschild is paid to advise the Cabinet, in Paris another is often consulted by the president. In the aggregate, Rothschilds translate Elizabethan poetry, grow superlative shrubs, direct great racing stables, produce memorable wine, create enchanting houses and probably give more to charity than any other family in the world. As all of them are competitive, they invariably collect the same things, and vie with each other in their knowledge of silver, porcelain, eighteenth-century furniture and rare books. Very agreeably for their friends, all Rothschilds remain true to the tradition of 150 years by serving superb food. ‘When I want to set my French cousins quarrelling among each other,’ Lord Rothschild told a friend, ‘all I have to do is to invite them to dinner and ask them who has the best chef.’
Needless to say, Lord Rothschild is the most provocative member of the family. He is also the cleverest, the most entertaining and, apparently, the most unfathomable, for no two people ever agree on an assessment of his character. Indeed, when Mr Heath’s Government announced in October 1970 that Lord Rothschild would head a new agency known as the Central Capability Unit, journalists could not decide which was the most puzzling, the job or the man. The job was to organize a ‘think-tank’ which would analyse problems that departmental civil servants viewed in a partisan light. The man was a brilliant academic who shunned fashionable society and who had spent his life as a Cambridge research workers and scientific director. The Sunday Times published a pen portrait of him that began like this: When asked about Victor Rothschild his friends variously describe him as a genius, an oaf, an academic recluse, a man of the world, a frustrated failure, a remnant of old Bloomsbury, a fierce perfectionist, a character out of one of Scott Fitzgerald’s poorer novels, and an administrator of immense skill. They all agree, however, that the quadruple burden of his name, his race, his money and his intelligence have made him one of the most complicated personalities in contemporary life.[156]
Victor’s career, on the other hand, at least in outline, was very uncomplicated. He had returned from the war with a Bronze Star, a George Medal, and a fiancée, Miss Teresa Mayor, a charming young Cambridge graduate who had joined the War Ministry in 1941 and been detailed to assist Lord Rothschild in some of his counter-sabotage activities. Miss Mayor was a great-niece of Beatrice Webb, and a Labour supporter; indeed, her first peace-time job was secretary to Mr Philip Noel-Baker, one of Mr Attlee’s ministers.
Victor and Tess were married in 1946 and although Lord Rothschild was not a political animal, he began to look on the socialist scourge, which had so upset his grandfather, with a friendly eye. Even before the war he had taken his seat in the Lords on the Labour benches, although this was more an act of defiance than a pledge of faith. It happened because of provocation on the part of Winston Churchill. Although Churchill at that time was not a member of the Government he was indignant to learn that a Rothschild — and a grandson of the grand old man of banking at that — had taken a neutral position on the cross benches and was not prepared to defend the capitalist citadel. ‘So you’re on the cross benches,’ he growled to Victor, ‘sitting on your dividends, I suppose.’ Churchill seemed to have forgotten that in the early part of the century he himself had abandoned Toryism for Radicalism, and now it was Victor’s turn to take umbrage. Without further ado the latter took his seat on the Labour benches and gave an interview to Reynold’s News on his reasons for supporting the Socialists. The reporter, however, seemed more interested in how a Rothschild lived than in what a Rothschild thought and soon Victor was denying that Rothschilds ate off gold plates or owned taps that produced pound notes. ‘I do not believe,’ he said, ‘that people should be allowed to have a lot of money unless they have earned it. Being the son of a rich man is not good enough.’
In order to justify himself, Victor became one of the hardest-working science dons in Cambridge. He specialized in the biophysics of reproduction, trying to discover what happened to the metabolism of an egg when it was joined by the sperm; how a sperm swam, where it got its energy. He used cinematography to record the behaviour of a sperm under microscope, and claims to be the only person in the world to be able to show you a moving picture of a bull’s spermatazoon joining a female egg. During the years of his research Lord Rothschild was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, awarded two Cambridge doctorates, and given honorary doctorates at Newcastle and Manchester Universities.
Apart from his scientific work, Victor became chairman of the Agricultural Research Council in 1949. In those days he championed the unfettered independence of all scientists. ‘One of the features of University life that we most cherish is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,’ he told the Council on 8 October 1951. ‘The great advances in science, whether of a fundamental or of an applied nature, come in peace-time from the labourers of good workers rather than from the minds of central coordinators assessing the needs of the nation. Research councils are the servants and not the masters of the scientists they subsidize, and it is a good thing to remind them of this from time to time.’
Some people were surprised in 1959 when Victor accepted a very lowly job with the Royal Dutch Shell Company as a part-time adviser on the company’s vast research organization. His salary was in keeping with his humble duties and, although the Shell managers were confident that they had bought a good horse, they were unaware that they had picked a Derby winner. Victor displayed such brilliant powers of analysis, not to mention skill as an organizer, that within six years he rose to the dizzy heights of research coordinator of the whole Royal Dutch Shell group which embraced more than five hundred companies. He was responsible for an annual budget of £34,000,000 and supervised a staff of seven thousand people in twenty-eight research laboratories spread over seven countries. His salary leapt to Rothschild dimensions and in 1968 he reached his final goal by becoming chairman of Shell Research; but in 1970 he also reached the company’s retiring age of sixty, and subsequently fell into Mr Heath’s net.
When the press learned that the Prime Minister had invited Lord Rothschild to head his Capability Unit, known as a think-tank, journalists were intrigued that a former Labour supporter had become an adviser to a Tory Government. However, almost all of them praised the appointment, and Richard Crossman congratulated Heath on ‘putting a tiger into the tank’.
But the subtle Lord Rothschild does not operate as a tiger. Witty and amusing, he can charm the birds off the trees when he chooses, but when he does not choose he can be a formidable opponent with a sharp cutting edge disconcertingly concealed in a sheath of flattery. ‘No one can mix extreme discourtesy with extreme courtesy so effortlessly as Lord Rothschild,’ commented a friend admiringly.
But Lord Rothschild pleases far more than he displeases. He is warm-hearted and generous, a man of deep sympathies who nevertheless tells you that the head is more important than the heart. Everything about him is paradoxical; at one and the same time he is devious and outspoken, arrogant and bashful, a millionaire with a conscience who works sixteen hours a day to justify himself as a Rothschild. Apart from a Rolls-Royce brain, his most outstanding characteristic is an acute sense of humour. When the Prime Minister invited him to Chequers in 1971 to address the Cabinet for the first time, Victor was well aware that there was considerable hostility towards both himself and his organization. Although it might be tactless to refer directly to the antagonism, there would be no harm in taking a mild poke at the head of the Treasury. ‘When I first arrived in Whitehall,’ he told the Cabinet blandly, ‘Sir Douglas Allen looked at me as though he were Lord Longford examining a piece of porn.’ There is nothing that British politicians like better than being made to laugh; and with one stroke Lord Rothschild had entrenched himself and his think-tank.
The ‘tank’ is composed of some thirty people, three-quarters of whom are first-class academics still in their twenties. The group have made reports on subjects ranging from aircraft to regional government; from Ireland to energy; from trade unions to the nationalized industries. But nothing raised such a storm as Lord Rothschild’s recommendation, in contradiction to what he had said publicly ten years earlier, that Scientific Research Councils should be controlled by the consumer, in this case mainly government departments. ‘A revolutionary in Whitehall,’ shrieked the New Statesman triumphantly, while the columns of The Times were inundated with correspondence from scientists all over Britain, not one of whom appeared to be in agreement with Rothschild. In the end, the usual British compromise was reached, which did not satisfy anyone.
In London Lord Rothschild has a flat in the spacious house of his cousin, Mrs James de Rothschild — ‘Dollie’ to her friends, — a sharp-witted, enchanting woman who looks sixty and is, in fact, well over seventy. Dollie’s residence is the only one of a row of houses which survived the blitz. Two of those demolished belonged to the late Lord Camrose and the late Lord Beaverbrook, ‘The Rothschilds had more energetic fire-watchers,’ explains one of the Camrose children. ‘They simply picked up the fire bombs that fell on their roof and tossed them on to their neighbours’.’
Victor’s home is in Cambridge, a large, low-sprawling white brick house, with a complex of cottages and garages. It has several acres of land, a garden, a tennis court, a croquet lawn, and the most spectacular swimming pool in England, complete with sauna bath. The pool is under glass like a greenhouse, with a dome that can be opened or shut according to the weather. Lord Rothschild also has a holiday home in Barbados, where he spends a few weeks of every year, and a large farm, Rushbrooke, near Cambridge, where he grows apples which he sells to Marks and Spencer. The children of his second marriage are the brilliant twenty-five-year-old Emma, who graduated from Oxford at the unheard-of age of seventeen and then won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Victoria, twenty, and Amschel, eighteen.
Almost as clever as Victor is his sister, Miriam, two years his senior. A handsome woman with a highly original mind, Miriam Lane is one of the most entertaining conversationalists in England. Everything about her is unusual; for instance, although her son, twenty-five-year-old Charles Lane, took first-class honours in science at Cambridge, and a prize doctorate at Oxford, she is fiercely opposed to examinations, arguing that they waste the pupil’s time by concentrating his mind on presentation rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Miriam’s own academic career is unique. As her parents did not believe in higher education for females she did not attend a university; yet because of her contribution to science today she is an Honorary Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, an Honorary D.Sc., and Professor of Biology at London University. Apparently the colleges broke all the rules in showering its distinctions on a lady so glaringly deficient in the most elementary of university degrees.
This does not mean, of course, that Miriam lacks scientific training. She acquired an impressive knowledge from her father, her uncle, and the curators of her uncle’s museum at Tring. She specialized in bird parasites and in 1951, when she was having a baby, wrote a book in collaboration with Theresa Clay entitled Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos which went into four editions. This was the prelude to a labour of love, the cataloguing of her father’s ten thousand species of flea, which she has done over the past twenty years. The result is five impressively large, illustrated volumes.
Miriam is a rich woman, having inherited a fortune from her disinherited uncle, the second Lord Rothschild, who was forced to make ends meet on a niggardly million. She also inherited two thousand acres of farm land in Northamptonshire from her mother, and a manor house built by her father known as Ashton Wold. Apparently Charles Rothschild fell in love with the Northampton countryside when he was searching for butterflies. He was particularly struck by an empty Elizabethan house, once upon a time occupied by a farmer. He enquired to whom the property belonged and was told: ‘An old crank who refuses to sell.’ More enquiries and he discovered that the old crank was none other than his father, Lord Rothschild. Apparently the farm had been given to the latter in lieu of a bad debt.
Charles persuaded his father to make it over to him, and his father, in turn, persuaded him to sell the Elizabethan house because it was in a hollow and all Rothschilds believed that ‘living low’ was bad for the health. So Charles built a new house on a suitably high piece of ground, a rambling manor with very large and very pretty Elizabethan windows as a reminder of the abandoned property. Today Miriam Lane is transforming the manor into four or five flats for herself and her various children. The village of Ashton consists of thirty-five or forty very large thatched cottages which, although built by Charles in the early 1900s were all equipped with bathrooms and electricity. Like his father he was one of the most progressive landlords in the country. Recently Miriam transferred the farm to the joint ownership of three of her four children, and hopes that they will be able to reconcile two incompatibles: keeping the cottages of Ashton tied to the farm, and making the farm pay.
Like most Rothschilds, Miriam is immensely generous. She has four children of her own, and two adopted children, the offspring of a close friend who died. For the past ten years she has been living in a large, rambling house on the outskirts of Oxford, where each Sunday she keeps open house. Here she provides delicious luncheons for friends, both young and old, who wander in and out as the spirit moves. Although a writer who attended one of these celebrated meals recently observed that the wine ‘was not Mouton Rothschild but a plain claret’, the wine was, in fact (and always is) Château Lafite.
Miriam’s houses have the usual Rothschild masterpieces hanging on the walls, but here the resemblance ends, for Miriam lives in the middle of a sea of books; books that reach from floor to ceiling, overflowing on to tables and floors where they remain in stacks. Her bedroom is partly a laboratory, complete with microscope, caged birds, sets of files, wired-in butterflies and hundreds more books. Miriam reveres the memory of her father and grandfather and, like Victor, has inherited from them a deep sense of obligation.
Like other Rothschilds she pays frequent visits to Israel, sometimes taking one or two of her children with her. At the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 her brother, Victor, organized a fund-raising dinner to which thirty of the most prominent Jewish families in Britain were invited. Although the Rothschilds insisted that individual contributions remain anonymous, the dinner guests stunned everyone, even the Israelis, by producing the staggering sum of 7,000,000 dollars.[157]
On many occasions Israel serves as a meeting ground for English and French Rothschilds. For instance, the late Baron Edmond’s Trust, administered by James de Rothschild, financed Israel’s first golf links, an eighteen-hole course in a hundred acres of land, laid out at a cost of £200,000. The course was near the Roman port of Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, which the current Baron Edmond is developing, and was opened jointly in 1961 by himself and his cousin, Victor. The latter managed to drive a golf ball 175 yards down the fairway with a No. 2 iron club, despite a 25 mph wind, while Edmond pursued the more cautious role of formerly presenting the key to the club-house to Mr Abba Eban, the Minister of Education.
Forty-seven-year-old Baron Edmond is the richest of all the Rothschilds. A grandson of the great Edmond, and a nephew of the late James de Rothschild, the last private owner of Waddesdon Edmond was the only son of the only Rothschild who might be described as a playboy. The reference is not wholly apt, however, as his father, Maurice, had an uncanny flair for money, a talent not usually associated with big spenders. Apparently Maurice fled from the Germans in 1940 with £250,000 of gems sewn into his satchel. He arrived in England and began to play the stock markets of London and New York, multiplying his fortune many times over.
Maurice’s wife, Naomi Halphen, also possessed business acumen. Descended from the famous Pereire family, which once upon a time challenged James de Rothschild’s financial supremacy, and suffered for it, Naomi parted from Maurice shortly after the birth of Edmond in 1926, ending a marriage of seventeen years. She loved Switzerland and travelled around the Alps with her baby son and his nanny, Mile Pfeiffer, who became her close friend and business associate. Naomi decided to develop a new resort, and commissioned two mountain guides to advise her. After a lengthy survey the men recommended two regions, Val d’Isère and Megève. She chose the latter, built a splendid hotel at the foot of the Mont d’Arbois, but was unable to continue developing the resort through lack of money. Later, however, her son Edmond proved that she had made a good choice.
Edmond was barely twenty when the Second World War ended. A handsome young man with immense drive and enthusiasm he was more of an entrepreneur than a banker and decided to use his fortune to support enterprises that interested him. With true Rothschild intuition he managed to hit upon the gold spinner of the century — mass tourism. He backed the Club Méditerranée and began to build anything and everything that would serve the rapidly growing tourist industry: Pan American’s Intercontinental hotels, bungalow villages in Majorca, a luxury resort in Israel, housing projects in Paris, developments in Guadeloupe and Martinique, and finally chalets and ski-lifts and another superb hotel in his mother’s resort, Megève. The Hôtel du Mont d’Arbois was perched five thousand feet above the village, with such innovations as a heated swimming pool under glass, and a terrace from which a helicopter could lift skiers to the mountain tops.
Baron Edmond had a showman’s flair, and celebrated the opening in 1963 by inviting 120 guests from Paris and New York and flying them to Megève in specially chartered aeroplanes for a four-day skiing party. He took out an £8,000,000 insurance policy to cover guests against loss or theft of their jewels, which provoked a good deal of newspaper comment and no doubt was the inspiration of his press agent.
Edmond’s Paris office is situated at 4$ Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré where he has a staff of thirty assistants. His business interests represent an empire that stretched from Europe to South America., from the Middle East to New York. The Compagnie Financière is the holding company for his French interests. Apart from tourism, he owns a private bank in Paris, more like an English merchant bank than his cousins’ Banque Rothschild. He also controls the largest top company and the largest frozen food company in France. In Switzerland he has another bank, known as the Banque Privée, and a company that promotes hotels in Geneva, Frankfurt and Hamburg, and is involved in the trailer business in Germany and Holland. In Belgium he is a director of the Banque Lambert, in South Africa of De Beers Consolidated Mines, in Holland a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Meetings, in Israel Chairman of Tri-Continental Pipelines, which was founded in 1958 to link the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, but now is merely a holding company, Chairman of the Israel Corporation, and Chairman of Isrop, an investment company which controls the Israel General Bank.
His philanthropic activities are on the same gigantic scale as his business interests, and range from sitting on the board of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to directing the Middle East Peace Institute, which he founded after the war in 1967. He has helped to create French schools in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and donates money regularly to the Biological-Physio-Chemical Institute, founded by his grandfather, the first Baron Edmond. In France and Switzerland he sits on a dozen boards of a dozen hospitals and scientific institutes.
In 1961 Edmond married a beautiful girl, Nadine Lhôpitalier, who was a singer in a night-club. In 1963 she gave birth to a boy, Benjamin, his only son. Edmond’s Paris house in the Rue de l’Élysée is as spectacular as his energy. Situated within a few yards of his office, across the street from the Élysée Palace, he has an incredible swimming pool ninety feet long built to look like a natural pond and bordered by a tropical garden, all of which is under glass. As the pool is basement level, he has continued his underground world to include a magnificent gymnasium and a cinema room that seats fifty people.
As a showman Baron Edmond only has one rival in the family: the romantic, highly intelligent Baron Philippe, owner of Mouton Rothschild, which he inherited from his father, Henri. Philippe fell in love with the vineyard during the First World when, as a boy of sixteen, he was sent to Bordeaux to escape the ravages of Big Bertha. In those days the Médoc was primitive; bad roads, no electricity or running water. In 1922 Baron Henri turned over the vineyards to Philippe who, despite the fact that he was attracted to every sport that combined speed and danger, such as sailing and motor-racing, did not neglect Mouton. He opened it to the public and poured money into improvements although in those days making wine was far from profitable. But Mouton was in Philippe’s blood. The serenity of this little enclave stretching along the Gironde, the beauty of sun and soil and season, combined with the skill and patience of man, gave Philippe a feeling for the grace and timelessness of existence which added a new dimension to his understanding.
In 1940, when the Germans overran France, they took possession of the two Rothschild vineyards — Mouton and neighbouring Lafite, which is now owned jointly by Barons Guy, Alain, Élie and Edmond, and Jimmy de Rothschild’s widow, Dollie. The French Government nationalized the property in an effort to prevent the invaders from scooping up the thousands of bottles of wine mellowing in the cellars, and exporting it to Germany as ‘Jewish contraband’. As things turned out, the conquering army behaved well, for the Nazis appointed a ‘wine führer’ who took up residence in Bordeaux. The job of the official was to make sure that the cellars remained unharmed so that Goering and his colleagues could celebrate the final victory in the world’s best claret. As a result, although Mouton became HQ of the German general commanding the aircraft batteries of the south-east of France, the vineyards and cellars were treated with respect. Unfortunately the same did not apply to the living rooms. One night soon after their arrival the officers got drunk and began shooting at three pastels of Philippe and his brother and sister, James and Nadine. They destroyed two of the pictures but in the middle of the hilarity the family cook walked into the room, grabbed Philippe’s portrait, put it under her arm and marched out. Next day the cook left, taking the picture with her, not to set foot in the château until Philippe’s return. The portrait hangs on the wall today.
During the ten years following the Second World War, Philippe had a difficult time retaining his inheritance. With half Europe behind the Iron Curtain, the other half suffering from shock and dislocation, and the U.S.A. only interested in hard liquor, it seemed impossible to make the vineyards pay. Philippe grasped at any new idea that would give the wine publicity, one of which was to invite famous artists each year to design the labels for the bottles. In 1947 Cocteau drew a romantic impression of the harvest; in 1955 Braque produced a very messy table recalling the end of a convivial evening; in 1958 Tchelitchew did an abstract painting of a gold and crimson splash against a black background; in 1967 Henry Moore showed hands holding glasses; in 1970 Marc Chagall painted lovers in a prairie.
However, long before Moore’s contribution, Mouton Rothschild had turned the comer and become a most profitable business. ‘If I had not been a Rothschild,’ Philippe confided to a friend, ‘I could never have survived the difficult times financially.’ But being a Rothschild meant that the banks extended credit. And suddenly in 1955 things began to change. Overnight, it seems, the Americans began to drink wine. From that year onwards the proprietors in the Médoc have never looked back.
Today Baron Philippe not only has two vineyards — Mouton Rothschild and Mouton Baron Philippe — but in 1970 he added a third cru, Château Clerc-Milon. He has built up a merchant company called La Bergerie which distributes Mouton-Cadet and others. His vineyards now total about three hundred acres and are worth at least £7,000,000. He is the only Rothschild to make the Médoc his home, and for years battled to alter the 1855 classification which placed Mouton in the second cru. His reward came in 1973 when the Ministry of Agriculture appointed a commission to re-examine the situation, and accepted the latter’s verdict. Alongside the other Rothschild vineyard, Lafite, Mouton is now listed as Premier Grand Cru.
Very different from the revolution in American drinking habits was another spectacular change that took place in Philippe’s life in the 1950s. The first Baroness Philippe had been arrested in Paris during the Occupation (their small daughter, Philippine, was incredibly lucky not to be picked up as well) and sent to a concentration camp, where she died. In 1954 Philippe married again. His bride was a fascinating American lady, Pauline Potter of Baltimore, who might have stepped out of the pages of a Henry James novel. Yet despite her distinguished colonial ancestry she was more French than American, having spent most of her childhood in Paris. When Philippe met her she was working for Hattie Carnegie as a designer. Soft-spoken, with wide-apart eyes and a seductive smile, Pauline not only was clever and humorous but had an outlook so unusual, a personality so different, that if the word ‘enchanting’ were not debased by indiscriminate usage it would be the right adjective to choose. She is an artist who does not paint, but who creates beauty, sometimes by shape and colour, sometimes by visual ideas. At night she dresses in silk shirts and knickerbockers, her hair plaited over one shoulder. In the summer she does not seek the sun but moves north to Scandinavia, Siberia, even Iceland. In 1965 she took a trip to Russia and wrote a book The Irrational Journey, more poetry than prose and memorable for its vivid imagery.
Pauline’s marriage to Philippe marked the beginning of a distinguished partnership. For many years Philippe had written poetry; indeed one of his poems Vendange had inspired a three-act ballet by Darius Milhaud with décor and costumes by Dali and choreography by Serge Lifar. However, story and script lay forgotten in the drawers of the Paris Opera House for nearly twenty years. Then, in 1972, it was decided to celebrate Milhaud’s eightieth birthday with a special offering. Vendange was rediscovered and performed in Nice in May, to the satisfaction of the author and the acclaim of the critics.
Soon after their marriage, Pauline encouraged Philippe to undertake the task of translating the Elizabethan poets, among them such metaphysical thinkers as Marvell, Donne, Crashaw and Henry Vaughan. The work was absorbing, yet so complex — at times almost impossible — that it took fifteen years; every word, every phrase, every intonation was puzzled and argued over before it was deemed ready for the public. In 1969, however, the glowing reviews justified the meticulous care. Philippe also translated two of Christopher Fry’s plays, The Lady’s not for Burning and The Dark is Light Enough, both of which were performed at the State Theatre in Paris. His latest achievement is a brilliant translation of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus> which was published in 1972.
Together Philippe and Pauline redecorated the small Victorian chateau at Mouton, and redesigned the seventeenth-century stables, turning them into a luxurious new house with an enormous drawing-room and a library containing books in four or five languages. But the greatest of their joint enterprises was the establishment of a wine museum which must rank as one of the most original and most perfect private museums in Europe.
The idea was inspired by a wonderful group of silver ceremonial vessels that Philippe inherited from his grandmother, a daughter of Baron Carl of Frankfurt. How amusing it would be, he thought, to collect works of art connected with the grape. For the next seven or eight years Philippe and Pauline searched the world for objects that might qualify.
The result is a unique and marvellously diverse collection ranging from a Gilgamesh Cup carved 2,500 years before Christ to a vessel with black pictorial scenes done by the Greek painter Theseus; from blue and white porcelain bowls of the Ming period mounted in Elizabethan English silver-gilt to a fragment of a fifth-dynasty bas-relief once part of a tomb at Sakkarah; from tapestries of the wine harvest made near Colmar at the end of the fifteenth century to jugs of the ninth century B.C. from Iran. Some of the most striking pieces are the high German covered cups, a French silver chalice dated 1570, a Burgundian wine vessel that van Eyck might have painted, a Chinese silver bowl of the twelfth century, an Amlash bowl of gold, embossed with the walking deer that are now extinct, a Sassanian silver and gold drinking bowl showing a king, long ribbons streaming from his crown, hunting. Modem sculpture is represented by an astonishing piece entitled The Spirit of the Vine, a spray of gold thread, platinum and copper covered with red enamel, executed in New York in 1957 by Richard Lippold.
When the editor of the English art magazine, Apollo, Mr Denys Sutton, visited Mouton, he was lyrical.
The study of art [he wrote] has many attractions but one of the most rewarding is when … one has the good fortune to come across a collection which has been assembled with enthusiasm, and a fastidious sense of quality. This Museum, in fact, reveals that a collection can still be formed which is out of the ordinary and a tribute to personal taste … It is perhaps significant that this Museum is situated in the Gironde and that the grape is the chosen theme. Inevitably much nonsense is talked about wine and its virtues, but, surely, it is undeniable that the ability to detect quality, so vital in the tasting of wine, holds a message applicable to the study of art … I like to think that spending part of one’s life in a district in which La qualité et la gloire are sought after at all levels of society would have a tonic effect on the eye. It was certainly produced in this case a museum which will perpetuate the memory of its founders and provide endless pleasure to the visitor.[158]
Mouton Rothschild is an exciting place to visit, as everything about it bears the strange, exotic stamp of its imaginative and warm-hearted owners. The one-time stables are now part of the main house, painted white, long, low and rambling. The immense drawing-room, eighty feet in length and twenty feet in width, has seven arched windows that look on to the vines that grow up to the edge of the house. At night they are flood-lit and resemble a foam-flecked sea.
Baroness Philippe is a perfectionist and the house runs faultlessly. Guests are looked after with nineteenth-century care, their clothes packed and unpacked, washed and pressed, laid out and hung up. But apart from this routine nothing at Mouton is the same from one day to another. For instance, no two meals are ever served in the same room, and the hours of eating vary according to the whim of the hostess.
The big drawing-room is dominated by a sixteenth-century Italian life-sized wooden horse which stands at one end; and the rooms of visitors are enlivened by exotic trees which reach the ceiling. The dining-room table is a work of art in itself, with floral decorations that no one would think of, except Pauline; one of the prettiest effects was massed cabbage leaves, the curly kind, that looked like bowls of feathers.
Philippe, who wanders about in the day time in tweed trousers and velvet jacket, makes an entry at night in coloured dinner jacket and embroidered slippers. The food is perfect but of course what fascinates the visitor is the wine. At every meal guests are given three clarets which sometimes span a hundred years. The meals always end with a thimble-full of iced Château Yquem. From some of the windows of Mouton it is possible to look on to the vines of the rival Rothschild establishment, Lafite, which is separated from Mouton by a narrow footpath.
The interior of the little eighteenth-century house where Philippe lived as a bachelor and which Pauline shared with him while the stables were being re-done is a gem of Victoriana. The walls are decorated with a riot of colourful petit-point samplers, and on the floor is a needlework carpet showing Queen Victoria exchanging a treaty of friendship and trade with Napoleon III. The guests are often asked to guess whether or not the figures are larger than life. To prove their point they sometimes lie down on the carpet. ‘But never, never on Queen Victoria,’ notes Pauline, ‘always on the Emperor.’
*
Today the Rothschild family consists of twenty-two males, twenty-seven females, fifteen Rothschild wives and five ex-wives, a grand total of seventy. The eldest Rothschild is Baron Eugene, formerly of Vienna, who lives in Monte-Carlo with his wife, the former actress Jeanne Stewart; the youngest is two-year-old Nathaniel, son of Jacob and Serena Rothschild, who one day will be the fifth Lord Rothschild.
If you were allowed only two adjectives to describe the Rothschilds you would stumble automatically on the paradox that distinguishes the family, for the words ‘rich and energetic’ do not spring to mind naturally as a pair. Generation after generation of Rothschilds have refused flatly to accept the leisured role usually welcomed by those with inherited wealth. Although the second generation of English Rothschilds built themselves enormous country houses, and at one time owned thirty thousand acres in Buckinghamshire alone, they were not interested in settling down as landed gentry. It is some measure of the family vitality that in the past forty years every one of the great Rothschild country houses in England has been sold or given to the National Trust, their former owners moving into smaller, more manageable houses in keeping with the times. Indeed, the only house built by a Rothschild and still in private hands is Mentmore Towers, the property of Hannah Rothschild’s son, the present Lord Rosebery.
First and foremost the Rothschilds are a family of doers and givers. Although they are not intellectuals, they have an intellectual streak that began with the children of the first Lord Rothschild, the famous Natty. Not only did Natty have two clever sons, Walter and Charles, both scientists, but Charles had a clever son and daughter, Victor and Miriam, again both scientists, and Victor had a clever son and daughter, Jacob and Emma, a banker and a journalist, and Miriam had a clever son, Charles, a boy of twenty-four who shows brilliant promise as a scientist. The other intellectual Rothschild is Philippe who, although his forebears have lived in France for 130 years, is claimed by the English Rothschilds as their own because his great-grandfather, Nathaniel, was Nathan’s son and an uncle of the first Lord Rothschild. However, the French Rothschilds are able to counter with Nathalie Josso, a grand-daughter of Baron Robert de Rothschild, who at twenty-one was the youngest doctor in Paris.
Along with Rothschild riches and Rothschild vitality marches another quality, an urge to create, which displays itself not only in vineyards and gardens, racing stables and collections, but in the art of living. All Rothschilds are superlative hosts. The French cousins still live in enormous Paris houses, waited on at table by footmen in white gloves. The English Rothschilds, on the other hand, spend a great deal of money to achieve simplicity. According to the press, the labour-saving house, cottages and swimming pool built by Victor Rothschild in Cambridge in 1960 cost £100,000; and a figure twice as large was mentioned in connection with alterations carried out about the same time at Eythrope, which stands a few miles from Waddesdon, and once upon a time was Miss Alice de Rothschild’s tea pavilion. James de Rothschild’s widow, Dollie, turned the folly into an exquisite eight-bedroomed house which looks on to a magnificent park of rolling green hills, lawns and leafy trees.
A few miles away lives Anthony de Rothschild’s widow, Yvonne. Her son, Evelyn, occupies part of Ascott, which was given to the National Trust, while his mother and grandmother — a wonderfully alert Russian lady of 95 — live in an enchanting cottage which looks like an illustration to a fairy tale. Painted white, and surrounded by roses, it is everyone’s dream of life in the country.
There are no poor Rothschilds, only Rothschilds who are richer than other Rothschilds. The owner of one of the greatest private collections in the world is Guy’s mother, eighty-nine-year-old Baroness Édouard, who lives on the Avenue Foch against a background of magnificent Renaissance jewellery and the superb eighteenth-century furniture and Sevres porcelain so dear to Rothschild hearts. On her wall is the only privately owned Vermeer in France, The Astronomer, bought by James in 1863 and now owned by Guy.
The French and English cousins are linked by strong ties of affection. Baroness Alix often takes trips with Victor’s sister, Miriam; Baron Guy and Evelyn, Baron Edmond and Jacob are close friends. Lord Rothschild’s favourite French relations are Cecile and Liliane. Cecile is in her fifties, the sister of £lie and Alain, a clever, well-read woman who has never married and lives in a flat in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré surrounded by Goyas, Renoirs, Manets and Picassos. She gives dinner parties celebrated for food, wine and conversation, and plays scratch golf, often accompanying Victor on golfing holidays.
Yet of all the Rothschild ladies on both sides of the Channel, Liliane probably plays the most indispensable role. A clever, talented person, who loves a joke, she is the family lynch-pin, assuager and healer. This is an interesting role for a woman who not only could have earned her living as a designer or decorator, but who has such a good eye for pictures, both old and new, that she might have become a leading art dealer. Instead, she has been content to play her part as a Rothschild wife. She knows more about the family history and the family possessions than any other person, and gives considerable time to biographers, art editors and photographers in quest of Rothschildiana. Her husband, Élie, runs Château Lafite, which, although it is ‘first of the first’, is nevertheless hotly challenged by Philippe’s Mouton. When the latter’s daughter was married in 1961, and hundreds of guests travelled to Bordeaux for the wedding, Liliane and Élie gave the wedding dinner in the giant cellar at Lafite, and the cousins toasted the bride in clarets from the two vineyards.
Today, Rothschilds on opposite sides of the Channel are still held together by finance and business but the State of Israel has forged a new bond. At the time of the Six-Day War the French and English cousins alone contributed over $1,000,000, a gift unequalled by any other family. When Baron Alain visited Israel shortly afterwards, and went to the Wailing Wall he was so moved that he burst into tears. Baroness Alix is the World President of Youth Aliyah, which is concerned with the emigration of Jewish children to Israel. Edmund de Rothschild is treasurer of the Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Evelyn de Rothschild is chairman of the Board of Governors of the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology. As the country’s very existence depends on its skills and inventiveness, both in peace and war, this last appointment is one of the most crucial that the Government can give. It not only calls for faultless management but the ability and determination to raise large sums of money.
However, as far as money is concerned nothing in the family rivals the donations made by the Trusts established so many years ago by the late Baron Edmond. These organizations represent an unbroken chain of support for the people of Israel over a time span of nearly a hundred years. Originally the principal Trust was known as Pica — Palestine-Jewish Colonization Association — but when it became clear, after the establishment of the State of Israel, that colonization would be handled by the Government, its functions were changed. Edmond’s son, James, renamed it ‘Hanadiv’ the Hebrew word for ‘benefactor’ by which his father was known throughout Palestine; and at the same time rechannelled the Trust’s funds to the promotion of education, science and culture. When James died in 1957 his widow, Dollie, assumed the presidency which she still holds. For many years she has been powerfully assisted by Lord Rothschild, and recently she has enlisted the help of the latter’s son, Jacob. The Trust knows no boundaries. In the 1960s it carried out James’s wishes by providing money for the Knesset, the new Parliament building in Jerusalem. Today its beneficiaries range from universities, hospitals and public libraries to archaeological digs; from the board of the Weizmann Scientific Institute to the organizers of Instructional Television.
The Rothschilds have always given freely, yet of all the qualities that distinguish them — generosity, creativeness, or sheer vitality — none is more conspicuous, even today, than the cardinal principle which the founder implanted in his five sons: solidarity. If old Mayer Amschel Rothschild never tired of demonstrating the frailty of a single stick and the strength of a bundle of sticks, the lesson was well learned. All Rothschilds still accept the belief: ‘A family that works together is invincible.’
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[1] J. W. von Goethe, Poetry and Truth, Vol. I, London 1908, p. 129
[2] M. E. Ravage, Five Men of Frankfurt, London 1919, p. 25.
[3] Mayer Amschel gave all five sons the name of Mayer. Although they were always known as Amschel Mayer, Salomon Mayer, Carl Mayer etc., in order to avoid confusion for the reader Father Mayer will be the only Mayer of this period, while the sons will be referred to by their distinctive names alone.
[4] A. Dietz, Stammbuch, quoted by Eugene Meyer in Jews of Frankfurt, Jewish National University Library, p. 408.
[5] Memoirs of Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton, edited by Charles Buxton, London 1848, p. 352.
[6] Correspondence of Napoleon I, Vol. XIII, Paris 1865, p. 585.
[7] Ibid., p. 588.
[8] C. W. Berghoeffer, Meyer Amschell Rothschild, Frankfurt-on-Main 1928, p. 79.
[9] Ibid., p. 78.
[10] Count Corti, The Rise of the House of Rothschild, London 1928, pp. 64-5.
[11] Ravage, op. cit., p. 85.
[12] Corti, op. cit., p. 95.
[13] Ibid., p. 106.
[14] Ibid., p. 112.
[15] Ibid., p. 114.
[16] Memoirs of Sir Thomas Foxwell Buston, p. 333.
[17] John Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder, Cambridge, Mass. 1944, p. 232.
[18] John Fortescue, History of the British Army, Vol. VII, London 1912, p. 235.
[19] M. Marion, Histoire Financière de la France depuis 1715, Vol. IV, Paris 1914, p. 358.
[20] Thomas Raikes, Portion of a Journal, Vol. I, London 1912, p. 457.
[21] Sherwig, op. cit., p. 329.
[22] Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Gentz und Adam Heinrich Müller, Stuttgart 1857, p. 267.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ravage, op. cit., p. 202.
[25] John Reeves, The Rothschilds, London 1887, p. 195.
[26] Ibid., pp. 192-3.
[27] Ronald Palin, Rothschild Relish, London 1970, p. 13.
[28] Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Vol. II, edited by L. Loewe, London 1890, p. 3.
[29] Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt in Ihren Briefen, Vol. IX, Berlin 1912, p. 320.
[30] Memoirs of Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton, pp. 345-6.
[31] Reeves, op. cit., pp. 182-5.
[32] Corti, op. cit., pp. 214-5.
[33] Ibid.
[34] A. Ayer, A Century of Finance, compiled for N. M. Rothschild & Sons and privately printed, London 1905.
[35] Corti, op. cit., p. 237.
[36] Ibid., p. 253.
[37] Ibid., pp. 265-6.
[38] Ibid., p. 274.
[39] Ibid., p. 291.
[40] M. Schwenner, Geschichte der Freien Stadt, Vol. II, Frankfurt-on-main 1840, p. 138.
[41] Ignatius Balla, The Romance of the Rothschilds, London 1913, pp. 246-7.
[42] Count Corti, op. cit., p. 346.
[43] Hormayr zu Hartenburgh, Kaiser Franz und Metternich, Leipzig 1848, p. 80.
[44] Ravage, op. cit., p. 305.
[45] Memoires du Prince Talleyrand, Publiées par le Duc de Broglie, Vol. III, Paris 1892, p. 456.
[46] Corti, op. cit., p. 433.
[47] M. J. Quinn, Trade of Banking in England, London 1833, pp. 45-6.
[48] An American in England, quoted in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, Vol. XIII.
[49] The Observer, 1 December 1833.
[50] Prince Puckler-Muskau, Tour of a German Prince, Vol. III, London 1832, pp. 62-4.
[51] Memoirs of Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton, pp. 343-5.
[52] Simon Moritz von Bethmann und seine Vorfahren, Frankfurt-on-Main 1898, p. 128.
[53] W. Moneypenny and G. Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Vol. II, London 1910-20, p. 20.
[54] Ibid., p. 183.
[55] Quoted by John Reeves from a pamphlet: ‘Rothschild et les états européens’, op. cit., p. 101.
[56] Count Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, pp. 245-6.
[57] Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Emfallen, Vol. VII, Berlin 1909, p. 430.
[58] Moneypenny and Buckle, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 51.
[59] Frederick Morton, The Rothschilds, London 1962, pp. 73-4.
[60] Balla, op. cit., pp. 180-1.
[61] Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, p. 89.
[62] The Greville Diary, Vol. I, edited by Philip Whitwell Wilson, New York 1927, p. 321.
[63] Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, p. 97.
[64] Ludvig Borne, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. III, Stuttgart 1840, p. 97. (99)
[65] The Greville Diary, Vol. I, p. 321.
[66] Constitutional: October 14, 1840.
[67] Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, p. 197.
[68] The Greville Diary, Vol. I, pp. 205-6.
[69] Corti, The Reign of the House of Rothschild, p. 258.
[70] Mémoires de Caussidièrre, Paris 1849, p. 92.
[71] Tocsin des Travailleurs, 28 June 1848.
[72] Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, p. 274.
[73] Reeves, op. cit., pp. 377-81.
[74] A. Ayer, A Century of Finance.
[75] Cecil Roth, The Magnificent Rothschilds, London 1939, p. 45.
[76] Annual Register, London 1848, pp. 90-1.
[77] Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, p. 283.
[78] Ibid., p. 286.
[79] Ibid., p. 355.
[80] Ravage, op. cit., p. 316.
[81] Fürst Bismarck Breife an Seine Brandt und Cutten, May 1851.
[82] Morton, op. cit., p. 92.
[83] Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, pp. 342-3.
[84] Dei Rheinpolitik Kaiser Napoleon III und der Ursprung des Kreiges, Vol. II, Berlin 1926, p. 113.
[85] Victor Fournel, Paris Nouveau et Paris Futur, Paris 1865, pp. 47-8.
[86] Roth, op. cit., p. 60.
[87] Alphonse’s two brothers, Gustave and Edmond, were partners in the bank, as were the brothers of Lionel in England.
[88] C de B. to Salomon Rothschild, Feb. 21, 1865; quoted by Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, p. 324.
[89] Roth, op. cit., pp. 122-3.
[90] A Hyamson, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, Vol. XVII, p. 98.
[91] Frances, Countess of Warwick, Life’s Ebb and Flow, London 1942, pp. 74-5.
[92] Letter from Paris, edited by Robert Henrey, London 1942, p. 14.
[93] Lucy Cohen, Lady Louisa de Rothschild and Her Daughters, London 1935, p. 145.
[94] Corti, Reign of the House of Rothschild, pp. 417-8.
[95] Cohen, op. cit., p. 147.
[96] Mrs James de Rothschild, Waddesdon and the Rothschild Family.
[97] Ibid.
[98] An unpublished letter, copyright owned by Lord Rosebery.
[100] Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. I, London 1966, p. 285.
[101] Roth, op. cit., pp. 98-9.
[102] J. Clapham, The Bank of England, Vol. I, Cambridge University Press 1944, pp. 328-9.
[103] Roth, op. cit., p. 106.
[104] Palin, op. cit., p. 22.
[105] Ibid., p. 72.
[106] Roth, op. cit., pp. 149-50.
[107] Lord Asquith and Oxford, Memoires & Reflections, Vol. II, London 1928, p. 200.
[108] Frances, Countess of Warwick, Afterthoughts, London 1931, p. 87.
[109] Lily Langry, Days I Knew, London 1925, p. 235.
[110] Palin, op. cit., p. 43.
[111] Langry, op. cit., p. 159.
[112] Warwick, Afterthoughts, p. 39.
[113] Ibid., p. 89.
[114] Cohen, op. cit., p. 232.
[115] Ibid., p. 235.
[116] G. Kressel, Father of the Yishuv, translated from the Hebrew by I. M. Lask, unpublished manuscript, p. 23.
[117] The mezzuzah is a little box holding a parchment on which is written the most famous Jewish prayer (Deuteronomy VI, verses 4-9) – the prayer of deliverance when the Jewish first-born were spared in Egypt.
[118] David Druck, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, published privately, New York 1928, pp. 123-6.
[119] The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Marvin Lowenthal, London 1958, p. 19.
[120] Ibid., p. 187.
[121] Isaac Naiditch, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, unpublished manuscript, British Museum 1945, pp. 25-6.
[122] The Duke of Windsor took refuge here at the time of his abdication.
[123] The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, pp. 47-8.
[124] Ibid., p. 364.
[125] Andre Maurios, The Edwardian Era, New York 1933, p. 309.
[126] Martin Harper, Mr Lionel, London 1970, pp. 63-4.
[127] Baron von Eckardstein, Ten Years at the Court of St. James, London 1921, pp. 170-1.
[128] Roth, op. cit., p. 165.
[129] Kressel, op. cit., p. 1.
[130] Ibid., p. 68 and p. 4.
[131] Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, London 1949, p. 177.
[132] Ibid., p. 178.
[133] Ibid., p. 165.
[134] Roth, op. cit., pp. 276-7.
[135] This was a small hospital compared to the Hôpital Rothschild founded by the Baron James in 1852 and still one of the great institutions of Paris.
[136] An extract from a paper on Walter Rothschild written by his niece, Miriam Rothschild.
[137] Miriam Rothschild, Foreword to Illustrated Catalogue of the Rothschild Collection of Fleas, Vol. I, British Museum, London 1953.
[138] Extract from Lord Rothschild’s address to the Empire Club of Canada, 4 March 1965.
[139] Foreword to Illustrated Catalogue of the Rothschild Collection of Fleas, Vol. I.
[140] Extract from Lord Rothschild’s address to the Empire Club of Canada, 4 March 1965.
[141] Palin, op. cit., p. 187.
[142] Ibid., p. 63.
[143] The Times, 12 November 1938.
[144] L’Expansion, December 1967: Guy de Rothschild in an interview with Roger Priouret.
[145] E. de Rothschild, Window on the World, pp. 172-3.
[146] Speech for the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith, Toronto, 11 December 1971.
[147] Ibid.
[148] Letter to the author.
[149] Ibid.
[150] Daily Telegraph, 13 April 1946.
[151] James Rorimer, Survival, New York 1950, p. 260.
[152] Ibid., p. 262.
[153] Ibid., pp. 185-6.
[154] Frederick Morton, op. cit., pp. 237-8.
[155] Daily Sketch, 3 August 1955.
[156] 1 November 1970.
[157] Daily Express, 10 June 1967.
[158] Apollo, September 1963.