CHAPTER FOUR

Walt’s anxiety was fastened to tracks that ran from his first consciousness to the ever-retreating terminal, the present. His anxiety was a swiftly scanning eye that transmitted all minutiae, never ending in its search for clues that might lead to the discovery of why he had been painted with such wet and sticky guilt. The frantically roving eye had never been able to find any explanation in all the almost thirty years of its shuttling desperation. It had raced over switches and across endless tracks of experience reporting back its bafflement—but it could not be stopped.

When Walter West had been five days old, in 1929, his father had assigned his rearing to the Wall Street law firm of Pick, Heller & O’Connell. When he was ten years old he had asked Mr. Pick whether many of the firm’s clients had consigned their children to Mr. Pick. The lawyer had stated, “In effect, yes. Death occurs to clients (and others) at all ages. We have had young, deceased clients who left children and substantial estates, and although we had not been instructed specifically to administer the child as well as the estate, we did have the executors’ responsibility in that the children had become the primary clients.”

On the morning of the first meeting with Edward Courance West regarding his son Walter, five days following the death of Irene Wagstaff West, Mr. Pick appeared at the Harkness Pavilion discreetly dressed as befitted a serious samurai. West laid out the retainer slowly but clearly and charged Pick, Heller & O’Connell with final responsibility for the rearing of his son, whom, he explained, he did not intend to see ever again. He suggested that Switzerland would be a good place to settle the infant. He wished Mr. Pick to draw a trust agreement into which Mr. West would pay seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars on January 2, 1930. Until that date, just less than a year away, he told Mr. Pick that he would invest the amount for the infant Walter and assign any profits to the infant’s trust. He gave Mr. Pick a power of attorney to act for Walter until it was decided whether Mr. Pick should be appointed by the court as Walter’s legal guardian.

When Irene West’s estate was probated, the Walter Wagstaff West trust fund was enormously appreciated in that Walter and his older brother Daniel were the equal and sole legatees of her estate. Irene West had been the sole heiress to the estate of her father, Walter Wagstaff, leading American railroad manipulator and operator. The morning after Mr. Pick had advised Edward West of this accrual of funds they held a meeting in Mr. West’s Pierce-Arrow, on the Harlem River Drive, motoring up and back twice past the Polo Grounds under High bridge to Dyckman Street. Mr. West told Mr. Pick that, in his wife’s memory, he wished to take over Walter’s inheritance, as he had already done with Dan’s, that he would combine Walter’s legacy with the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars already in hand, and that he would, of course, sign all necessary papers and place in escrow all necessary collateral to guarantee the amount of Walter’s inheritance against loss. Mr. Pick reminded him of the approximate amount in millions of dollars that would be involved in the escrow agreement and Mr. West nodded absent-mindedly.

Walter West’s fortune began to multiply five days after his birth on January 14, 1929, a date forty-one days after President Coolidge in his final State of the Union message to the Congress had said, “No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time.” The statement was a certainty on December 4, 1928, the day of the President’s message, the day the Goldman-Sachs Trading Corporation was formed. By the time Walter West was eight months old and settled in Switzerland it was less true.

Carrying the capital of his two sons as casual baggage, Edward West had provided the bulk of the financing in England, through the unidentifying and unidentifiable resources of his own bank, for the illegal Clarence Hatry operations, a vast industrial and financial empire that was built around vending machines and that had expanded into investment trusts, then to higher finance, then to the issuance of unauthorized stock, and even to the forging of stock certificates. When Edward West suddenly withdrew his entire investment, without warning and without risk to his own reputation, he left Hatry behind in England in a maze of peculiarly financed investment trusts, to collapse in September 1929, shaking world confidence in the highly speculative American stock market. Then, operating from his New York base at the West National Bank and buying from seven other offices in the United States and Europe, Edward West helped to drive up the value of the shares in Boston Edison to prices so far beyond their true values that the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities refused to allow the stock to be split four for one and consternated the stock market on October 11, 1929, with the words, “Due to the action of speculators no one … on the basis of earnings … should buy it.”

Mr. West took the short position in the market on September 5, 1929, and played it like world championship billiards through the next six weeks, taking his son’s legacies along with him. He worked well hidden behind the screen of the West National Bank, as always before he had worked behind the scenes in all of the extraordinary enterprises that had originally provided his extraordinary capital. He liquidated everything, from two high-leverage investment trusts to several companies he had built from two-thousand-dollar investments into stock issues worth thirty-seven million dollars, dumping shares onto the New York Stock Exchange, the Curb Exchange and onto markets in Boston and Cincinnati. On the afternoon of October 27 he gave Mr. Pick twenty-three checks made out to Walter’s trust fund, and he sailed for England that evening, telling ship news reporters that he was “seriously concerned with the immediate financial future of the country.” Hundreds of thousands of investors in all parts of the world were selling wildly behind him, hoping desperately to save something, but there was nothing left to save.

In following the demands of his acquisitive, not to say rapacious, nature and in acknowledging his respect for his dead wife’s last will and testament, he met his responsibility as Walter’s father for the first and last time. Walter at eight months of age had become the sole owner of one of the toweringly great American fortunes at a time when all investments at every single level of the American financial structure had become “bargains.” However, Mr. West instructed Pick, Heller & O’Connell not to reinvest Walter’s funds until he issued instructions. Twenty-three months after the collapse of the stock market he told them to begin to reinvest. They did, and the trust held outstanding interests in stocks, real estate and bonds, as indicated by Edward West, all through the thirties, all through the war economy.

When Walter reached his majority in February 1950 (while he was in Korea as an infantryman) his estate had multiplied to proportions nearly immeasurable, because it insisted on growing even while battalions of accountants and bankers tried to count it. In a desperate caricature of the allegedly traditional system of opportunity offered in his native country, Walter West not only had enough to feed, clothe and house entire cities of crippling slums but he had not earned a penny of his fortune nor was he able to comprehend either what he owned or how he had acquired it. He personified the motto of the United States, E pluribus unum—one out of many.

In March 1929, through Natural le Coultre of Geneva, Switzerland, Pick, Heller & O’Connell purchased a comfortable seven-acre property for Walter—Les Haubans—on Lake Genève, between Hermance and Anières. It was a large, sturdy house with a sizable barn that was renovated and extended into a gymnasium, and a tennis court, squash court and indoor swimming pool. The law firm then caused the infant Walter Wag-staff West to emigrate from New York in the charge of Dr. Abraham Weiler, a young pediatrician, and a baby nurse, Evelyn Gonkums.

At the age of three Walter’s training was taken over by an English nanny of formidable reputation, Miss Rosie Currie, firm but fair, who trained his straight hair into a natural wave. She returned to England after a four-year tour with Walter, the last two years of which had been conducted in German and Italian; English was spoken only at meals and on Sundays. Walter learned French and Spanish from the housekeeping stewards of Les Haubans, Henri and Louise Emmet, who, after he had reached ten, taught him the grave distinctions among cheeses and wines; after he was fourteen Mr. Emmet taught him the embellishing distinctions of dress. Because of Mr. Emmet, Walter was never to travel in later years without packing two dinner jackets, in the event that sauce mousseline or any other staining agent was spilled on one of them.

Mr. Pick brought Gordon Elphinstone and Mr. Takamura to Walter on the boy’s sixth birthday. Gordon Elphinstone was an associate professor of education at Columbia University and held a doctorate in American history. During the two years he spent at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton he wrote his brilliant analysis of the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy that won the Keifetz Prize. Professor Elphinstone (calculating Mr. Pick’s options) signed a ten-year contract to educate Walter that provided grants and research assistance, as well as salary deposited in New York, which would enable him to publish every two years. He was to teach Walter all formal subjects except languages and physical culture. For his own enlightenment he began his tenure with the preparation of a history of the flaws in the American credit and currency structure that had brought about the panic of 1907 and had been directly responsible for the passage of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act—which is to say, to specialists of American history if not entirely to all others, he was a stimulating man. He was short, thirty-six years old, a bachelor and intensely aggressive. He was white and Presbyterian—perhaps superfluous information.

Y. Takamura took charge of Walter’s physical training and renewed his Italian and German. For twelve years, until Walter was eighteen, Mr. Takamura taught him calisthenics, baseball strategy, tennis, skiing, bowling, pétanque and curling, mountain climbing, figure skating, billiards, ballet, swimming, boxing, trampoline, small-boat handling, karate, ballroom dancing, automobile operation and maintenance, flower arranging, photography, gliding, fencing, controlled concentration, and how to watch bull fights and court tennis.

Pick, Heller & O’Connell had assembled a small surrogate family for their client. Elphinstone interpreted the passage of time, past into future; the uses of pen, speech and mind; mysteries and humanities. Takamura brought control and uses of the body. The Emmets introduced the essentials of sensuality, perpetual and life-lasting. Pick, Heller & O’Connell leased to him a conscience and judgment. Together all of them built a steady and reliable, if dull, young man.

Walter Wagstaff West cannoned out of adolescence to become an architect and was determined to show his father that he, too, was an achiever. He was a gifted architect who applied himself through late hours. When he had decided how he wanted to practice his profession he asked Pick, Heller & O’Connell to locate Derek Adler, a friend from the United States Army in Korea who had studied architecture with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

It took the law firm’s London detective agency two days to locate Derek Adler. When found he was trying to decide whether to accept a job in U. S. Army Ordnance as an architectural consultant/maintenance engineer or to become a playwright, which his British wife favored. As Adler had become more and more British his wife had become more and more American, until by the second year of marriage his only concession to American mores was to use peppermint-flavored toothpicks at $3.50 per thousand to dislodge his wife’s cooking, which consisted almost entirely of things like Two-Alarm Texas Chili and frozen hush-puppies. The Adlers had met through the Marriage Herald, a monthly magazine published in Chalcot Road, N.W. 1, that stated its sixty-two-year-old institutional purpose was “to arrange marriages between ladies and gentlemen of suitable character, tastes, attainments and intellectual standards,” maintaining at all times an awareness of “undesirable characters and adventurers who would bring the agency into disrepute.”

Derek Adler confirmed his disciplines for architectural design by believing in the logic of brokered marriages. His parents and grandparents had met and married by such means. One could be far more certain of making a successful marriage, because both partners would have demonstrated the degree of their interest in marriage by advertising for it; therefore both were more likely to be ready for marriage than partners acquired at random. Adler did not believe in the single life. Single, he felt like a magnificent recipe that had been torn in half before it had been savored, and he sought to find, the completion of the recipe when he advertised in the Marriage Herald in 1955:

American architect, bachelor, age 27, height 6 ft. 1 in., dark-to-olive coloring, athletic build when dieting, Jewish parents, comfortable income, wishes to correspond with/meet attractive, healthy, non-kinky, Jewish, Gentile, Mohammedan, Zoroastrian, or agnostic girl who does not smoke, is well-groomed writer, painter, architect, musician or even sculptor, income unimportant, must be willing travel anywhere; object, matrimony.

He got four responses. One criticized him for wanting to mix religions; one was looking for a mate who would be willing to become one-half of a ballroom dancing team; one got lost or stolen en route to a meeting that they had scheduled; and the fourth was the woman he would have designed for himself if architects had been given the power to breathe life into quarter-inch specifications.

Jane was a writer perpetually at work on an exhaustive biography of Cardinal Newman, author of Lead, Kindly Light and more than any other individual credited with the expansion of Roman Catholicism in Britain and the United States—which, in her view, was an invidious record indeed. She was a fine cook, he a splendid eater. She was a writer, he was a reader. Jack Sprat and his wife never had it so good in so many ways as did the Adlers. In fact, the only way their union could have been more perfect would have been if she were a transvestite and could have worn his hats, of which he had an extraordinarily representative collection.

Between her immersions in the biography of Cardinal Newman, Jane Adler was a free-lance journalist who happened to be entranced with trompe-l’oeil painting. She met Mayra Ashant at Battersby’s studio in Brighton. Mayra was about to try to break out as a professional painter in London and Jane invited her delightedly to stay with them while she looked for a permanent place to live. It was Jane’s theory that the more art surrounded her husband the more he would be likely to turn down the job in Army Ordnance and become a playwright. Six week later, at tea time, while she and Mayra were hammering at him to make him agree to write a play on the experiences of the lewd rector of Stiffkey who had passed on in 1936 as a result of having been partly eaten by a vaudeville lion, Walter West rang the Adler doorbell. When the door opened Mayra was standing there. At lunch the next day he and Adler worked out the details of their partnership. To be licensed in a foreign country would be next to impossible, but they could operate as consultants to a licensed firm.