one

ILLUSTRIOUS ANCESTORS

“All my grandiose strains stem right from my mother. She was a completely fantastic person,” said Billy Rose. “Her name was Fannie. The word Fannie in Jewish means a bird, a little bird. That’s how she was, small, fluttering around; you couldn’t keep her still or tied down. She was one of the great desperadoes I have known in my life, and I have known plenty of desperadoes.”1

UNSTOPPABLE

Fannie Wernick was twenty years old in 1895 when she became the first of her eight siblings to emigrate from Odessa to America. Her older and unmarried brother Abraham would have been the more conventional choice as the family’s New World pioneer, but Fannie’s personality resembled that of a famed Hasidic rabbi her parents followed, and that likely made all the difference.² In November 1860, Rabbi Duvid Twersky left his village of Talne in Ukraine to visit the Jews of Odessa, and according to an observer “was triumphantly conducted through the streets” to speak at the Russian port city’s central synagogue. Twersky was “witty, appreciative of music, and elegantly dressed.” He sat on a throne made of silver that signified his assumption of a royal station, a king in the house of Israel.³ These were not his only dramatic effects. He also addressed audiences using at first a very low voice. After listeners strained to hear, he turned up the volume. Fannie employed the same technique. “She was a terrific super-salesman,” Rose said. “She would start off talking in a quiet voice, very low, and staring at you with intense sharp blue eyes. She had brown hair, a high forehead, a large nose, and an imperious stare in her eyes.”⁴ Her energy and ambition drove her to industry, invention, and gatecrashing. Washquick was her idea for a laundry detergent. “The house was filled with barrels of borax and potash and mama stirred up her mixtures and packed them in a liquid form in quart bottles,” Rose said. “She placed cards in East Side grocery stores and even in snow and rain would take out a satchel full of Washquick bottles and lug them around.” Incorporation and tax records show that Fannie founded the business in June 1908.5 It survived until 1915, and its eventual failure did not blunt her drive. “She always told the children, ‘You want to do something—go ahead and do it. Don’t be afraid for nothing nor nobody,’” said Rose’s sister Polly Rose Gottlieb.⁶ Fannie made fearlessness look easy. In the only portrait photograph of her, a scarf around her neck is her only adornment, and it softens but does not obscure her determined demeanor. Without makeup or jewelry, what stands out is her healthy glossy dark hair, cut short to frame her uplifted, attractive, somewhat mannish face, which expresses both boldness and impatience.

Business was just one arena for the exercise of these traits. The other was the welfare of her fellow Jews. Like many followers of Twersky, Fannie was dedicated to Jewish brotherhood.⁷ “Her constant project was with bringing greenhorns to America out of the pogrom areas of Russia,” Rose said, using a slang term for new immigrants. “It cost $300 to bring a greenhorn over and she was always whipping around trying to raise money. She was a one-woman collection agency. Nobody and nothing could stop her. She once walked into Kuhn, Loeb & Company and hit Jacob Schiff for $1,500” to help her bring over Russian Jews.⁸ There was, however, a downside for the people this overwhelming powerhouse rescued, said Rose’s first wife, the comedienne Fanny Brice. She “wanted to run the lives of the people she brought over and they wished they were back in Europe.”⁹

THE GREAT VICTORY

Rose’s mother was not the only larger-than-life old-world influence that made predictable Rose’s success as a producer and showman. Another was Fannie’s uncle, Solomon Rosenthal, who preceded her arrival in New York and sponsored her immigration. For both, self-promotion and exaggerated claims bordering on the comic were as central to their lives as their Jewish identity. The two passions often overlapped, and tales of their adventures surrounded Rose in childhood. Rosenthal was Fannie’s partner in the Washquick business, and Rose grew up also hearing about Rosenthal’s victory over Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The event took place two years before Rose was born, but he recounted it with pride fifty years later.¹⁰

Comstock’s typical enemies were purveyors of racy postcards and contraceptive devices. Armed with police powers, between 1872 and 1915 he arrested more than three thousand New Yorkers on vice charges.11 In 1897, however, Comstock strayed from prosecuting sexual liberties to go after two Jewish books that treated Jesus and his origins as anything but immaculate. Yeshu ha-notsri (Jesus the Nazarene) and Ma’aseh talui (The story of the crucified) originated in the first centuries of the Common Era and were written down in the ninth. Both attack core beliefs of Christianity, such as the virginity of Jesus’s mother, in language direct and indelicate. “Mamzer ben ha-nidoh, the bastard son of an unclean woman,” was the bottom line on Jesus.¹² Converted Jews at New York’s Hebrew Missionary Union informed Comstock that these books were for sale on the Lower East Side, and he arrested Meyer Chinsky for selling the works from his shop at 19 Ludlow Street. Chinsky hired prominent defense attorney Elias Rosenthal, who tapped Fannie’s uncle Solomon as the expert witness for the defense. A Talmudic scholar of no relation to the attorney but probably known to Chinsky, Solomon Rosenthal took the stand on September 29, 1897, at the New York Court of Special Sessions and rebutted the testimony of Comstock’s informants with a combination of erudition and mendacity. Uncle Solomon lied like a rug. “The ‘Yishu’ mentioned in the book sold by Bookseller Chinsky did not refer to the Jesus of the Christians, and was not intended to be derogatory to Christ,” he said. Instead, Yishu referred to an early Jewish reformer “hanged by his countrymen for having abandoned their faith.”¹³

Comstock lost his case, and Chinsky returned to his book business. But Solomon Rosenthal was not ready to put the event behind him. Instead, he published a Yiddish pamphlet that in its title purged the bookseller and attorney from the trial and transformed it into a historic showdown between himself and Comstock. The Victory: The Great Victory of Judaism over Christianity at the Astonishing Religious Trial between the Leading Jewish Expert, S. Rozenthal against the Christian, A Kamfstok is carnival barker brio. The come-on is a foretaste of classic Billy Rose. Its fanfare defies the customer’s disbelief with a sales pitch that overwhelms. The apparent redundancy in the title is due to its claim on a Jewish literary tradition. Its opening words are the Hebrew ha-Nitsahon (the victory), which since the Middle Ages have begun Jewish accounts of the debates Christian authorities forced upon the Jews to defend the validity of their faith. “Victory” is then repeated in the Yiddish subtitle that explains the event at hand. The sixty-six-page booklet sold for twelve cents.¹⁴

Rose did not know all these details of the case, but he knew that Solomon Rosenthal, a relation, had fought as a Jew against a Christian enemy and “outbested” his foe.15 It was a story he liked.

PASSAMENTERIES

These influences were formative, but Rose’s father, David Rosenberg, contributed the humiliations of poverty and the example of failure that outfitted Rose with what the American billionaire Larry Ellison called “all the disadvantages required for success.”¹⁶ Rose came to detest his father and throughout his life sought to amass riches to prove he was not his father’s son.

Rosenberg landed in Philadelphia on September 22, 1895, and traveled to New York to meet his brother Jacob, who was already living on the Lower East Side at 145 Forsyth Street with their cousin, Ben Halperin. His hometown was the tiny Russian shtetl of Dzhurin, home to fewer than 1,500 Jews and the opposite in size and importance of the vital Black Sea port of Odessa. Still, Rosenberg identified himself on his ship passenger manifest as a clerk, a position that suggests some education, and according to Rose, in Russia his father studied Morse code, a system for fast communication that hints at Rose’s future mastery of shorthand.¹⁷ Rosenberg also played the piano and possessed the elegant handwriting necessary to succeed as a “public letter-writer and transcriber of documents.” This manual dexterity and musical ability also played a role in Rose’s early successes. And like Rose’s mother, Rosenberg possessed a sense of Jewish distinction. He “boasted that he traced himself from a long line of rabbis, scholars and wise men,” Rose said.¹⁸ In this way Fannie and David resembled each other and also the sociologist Max Weber’s characterization of the Jews as “aristocratic pariahs,” outcasts with an attitude.¹⁹ Unfortunately for his wife and children, Rosenberg decided that his heritage was incompatible with the demands of the American marketplace. “He complained of having to work for a living,” and preferred ludicrous business schemes such as raising silkworms, Rose said. David became a bitter failure. Fannie always charged forward but was equally incapable of successfully managing worldly matters, Rose recalled. “She lived in a crazy never-never land. She had her two feet planted firmly in the clouds.”²⁰

Fannie’s Uncle Solomon brought these two dreamers together with the promise of a practical plan. He told David he would help the young man study pharmacy at City College if he married Fannie.²¹ The pair would have been unlikely to meet if not for Uncle Solomon. According to their November 13, 1896, marriage certificate, David lived on the Lower East Side at 713 East 6th Street, while Fannie was uptown in East Harlem at 216 East 102nd Street.22 But pressures were building on both parties. David had been in America more than a year and was twenty-five years old. He clearly needed help finding a bride. And Fannie apparently had to move out of her lodgings, which either belonged to or were coveted by Joseph L. Sossnitz, the rabbi who performed the marriage ceremony. After Fannie moved out, Sossnitz moved in.²³

Uncle Solomon reneged on the bargain he had made with his niece’s new husband. David Rosenberg never received the money he needed to attend pharmacy school. Instead, like twenty-five thousand others in New York, he worked as a peddler, and surely like many others, he failed at it.²⁴ But the camaraderie of failure was no consolation to his wife. “Mama was continually annoyed and irritated by Papa’s butterfingered attitude to life,” Rose said. “Mama used to berate him: ‘When they’re buying passamenteries, you’re selling trimmings and when they’re buying trimmings you got a satchel full of passamenteries.’” Rose took his mother’s side with a more damning assessment of his father’s abilities. It was not a matter of lacking the right product. His father “would have difficulty selling a famished dog a bone.”²⁵ The issue was salesmanship, which for Rose was akin to showmanship. This was something his mother Fannie with her imperious stare, her Uncle Solomon with his self-congratulatory pamphlet, and certainly Rabbi Twerksy with his silver throne understood instinctively and that his father never learned. The contempt of son for father may have bred the same in the father for the son, but in Rose’s unlikely version it was his father who started the feud. At Rose’s birth his mother exclaimed, “Ain’t he pretty,” while his father supposedly replied, “Yeah, but what we really needed was an icebox.”²⁶

ROSE IN LOVE

Samuel Wolf Rosenberg was born on September 6, 1899, which that year was the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.²⁷ It was an auspicious beginning for any Jew and especially for one with a mother loyal to Twersky, whose rabbinical court in Russia during Rosh Hashanah had attracted Hasidim “rejoicing in song and all of them clapped their hands without pause and hundreds of them danced on the table.”²⁸ Rose’s mother claimed her son for this festive legacy and the energetic engagement with the Jewish world that accompanied it and that she personified. Though her husband named the boy Samuel for his deceased male ancestor and only his middle name, Wolf, referred to Fanny’s deceased grandfather, Velvel (Wolf), Fannie immediately waged a campaign against this traditional order.29 She called her son Velvel, and by the time Rose was five, she had prevailed. The New York State census of 1905 lists her son as William Rosenberg. By 1908, Rose’s school records reveal that the name Samuel was not merely deposed from its first position; it did not even survive as a middle initial. Still, in high school Rose was William S.³⁰ By then Fannie had apparently acquiesced to the vestigial remnant of Samuel that, after all, helped distinguish her son from the many William Rosenbergs of early twentieth-century New York. And distinguished he would be, because, his mother insisted, “Billy is a genius.”³¹ His preciousness to Fannie was surely enhanced by her disappointment with her husband, and perhaps also by the failure of earlier pregnancies or the death of an earlier child. Fannie and David had been married nearly three years when their son was born, and in 1910 Fannie told the census taker she had given birth to four children but was the mother of only three still living.

Rose was born on the Lower East Side in a tenement at 129 Clinton Street, near the corner of Delancey Street and on the border of Manhattan’s Tenth Ward, the most densely populated in the city and one of the most crowded in the world, with more than 700 people per acre.³² In June 1900, the census taker found the family six blocks south at 227 Clinton Street. In the less-congested Seventh Ward there were 290 people per acre, but the Rosenberg tenement was still an excellent example of how, for the visiting Englishman Arnold Bennett, the Jewish ghetto “seemed to sweat humanity at every window and door.”³³ The family’s building preexisted the 1901 Tenement House Law that improved the city’s housing stock, so a three-room apartment was only 340 square feet and lacked its own bathroom. Bennett rightly guessed that the tenements’ “hidden interiors would not bear thinking about.” On each floor four apartments, or about twenty people, shared two bathrooms in the hall. To pay the rent of about fifteen dollars a month, Fannie Rosenberg rented out a sleeping space—it was Jewish women who handled these domestic transactions—to a boarder named Jacob Kigulsky, a forty-year-old widower who worked in a laundry.³⁴

Despite Rose’s later vilification of his father’s business ineptitude, the family’s initial poverty was typical of the Jewish immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century and not a sign of extraordinary incompetence. To make ends meet, Russian Jews survived thanks to the income earned by working-age children.35 David Rosenberg had no working-age children. Worse, his wife spent money to bring over her family. On July 18, 1900, the first one arrived. Fannie’s brother Abraham, twenty-seven, landed in New York that day and headed to the Rosenberg apartment. It is not clear whether the boarder moved out or if the tiny apartment now held four adults and an infant, but less than a year later, on April 22, 1901, room had to be made for Rose’s sister Miriam.³⁶ Six months later Fannie’s brother Schmuel, twenty-one, and sister Lierel, nineteen, arrived in New York. They stayed with Abraham, who lived nearby at 222 Clinton Street.³⁷ Then in September 1903 a fresh example of Jewish family unity occurred when Fannie’s father, Israel Wernick, and his three youngest children—Schloime, seventeen, Chane, sixteen, and Moishe, thirteen—arrived from Odessa.³⁸ The Wernick clan was reunited, a milestone apparently spurred by the April 1903 Russian pogrom at Kishinev, less than a hundred miles inland from Odessa. In New York, Fannie Rosenberg joined the thousands of Jews who flooded the streets in mass demonstrations against the Kishinev violence that killed fifty, injured five hundred, and left thousands of Jews homeless.³⁹ Billy Rose fell in love. “One of my earliest memories is of my mother standing on a soapbox on Henry Street and giving an oration about the Kishinev massacres,” he said. “A carbon lamp on a nearby pushcart lit up her face, the hair falling over it. She passed the hat after the appeal.”⁴⁰

At the time of the Kishinev pogrom Rose was three and a half years old. That might be old enough for a first memory, though there was no shortage of pogroms in the early 1900s and the scene he described might have been tied to a later demonstration, perhaps in response to the October 1905 violence against the Jews of Odessa. And it is clear that Rose’s description of the scene benefits anachronistically from his adult experience staging theatrical productions, arranging lighting or an actress’s hair, and placing key props on the set. Yet even so, the evidence of Rose’s lifelong obsessions with his mother, the theater, and the Jews is persuasive. The historical moment preceded and informed the later theatrical work. Rose was inspired and even transported by his mother’s theatricality and disheveled beauty, which could not be separated from the Jewish people.

His father’s family also contributed to the Jewish network of mutual aid. In 1900, David’s married sister, Ida Ginsberg, lived nearby on Rivington Street with her husband Charles and their eight children.⁴¹ “Ida nursed Billy Rose as a child. She partly raised him,” said Ida’s granddaughter Shirley Gatsik.⁴² Even at age sixty Rose remembered Ida’s loving help and wrote Gatsik, “I was very much moved when I saw your dad’s mother again.”43 Rose certainly needed some conventional mothering, and Fannie needed someone to provide it to. She was not a natural homemaker and “kept house in a helter-skelter fashion, leaving the dirty dishes piled around,” Rose said. She was too busy helping Jews come to America. “We were always going to Ellis Island. She was always travelling down to Washington to get visas.”⁴⁴

His mother’s example of good works, of acts of mitzvah and the Talmudic teaching that all Jews are responsible for each other, was something Rose never forgot, but it was at odds with the values of business success that, as the only son of a poor family, he was desperate to master. Life in the slums was brutal, his family’s poverty was dire, and the ecstatic possibilities of American life beckoned.

MZP, interview notes, “Childhood and Youth,” 1.

Fannie’s brother Abraham Wernick arrived in New York in 1900 at age twenty-seven. See “Supplement to Manifest of Alien Passengers” for the SS Southwark, arrived in New York on July 18, 1900, line 19, Abraham Wirniak. In 1900, Fannie said she was twenty-three, though even if she was twenty-five she was younger than Abraham. See “Twelfth Census of the United States,” Schedule no. 1—Population, New York City, Borough of Manhattan, Enumeration District 77, Sheet no. 14, line 9. Fannie’s father, Israel Wernick, was buried in New York by the Twersky burial society. See Mount Lebanon Cemetery at www.mountlebanoncemetery.com.

Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 104–5; Paul Ira Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform: A Biography of Rabbi Duvid ben Mordkhe Twersky” (PhD diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 2001), 82–83, 113.

MZP, “Childhood,” 1; Radensky, “Hasidism,” 69.

New York County Clerk Archives, Certificate of Incorporation of S.R. & F.R. Washquick Co., filed and recorded on June 13, 1908; Proceedings of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of the City of New York, Vol. 10 (1915), entry for S.R. & F.R. Washquick Co.

MZP, “Childhood,” 1, and “On Billy Rose,” 4.

Radensky, “Hasidism,” 214.

MZP, “Childhood,” 1; Radensky, “Hasidism,” 69.

MZP, “On Billy Rose,” 1.

MZP, “Childhood,” 1.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Anthony Comstock,” in The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 271.

Michael Meerson and Peter Schäfe, eds., Toledot Yeshu: The Life Story of Jesus, vol. 1, Introduction and Translation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 3, 5; Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), 18.

“For Selling ‘Massa Tolo,’” New York Sun, September 30, 1897, 5.

The author is grateful to Prof. John Efron for his translation of the Yiddish title, which can be found in the catalogue of the New York Public Library under author S. Rosenthal.

MZP, “Childhood,” 1.

Rebecca Leung, “The World’s Most Competitive Man,” CBS News, February 23, 2004, www.cbsnews.com/news/the-worlds-most-competitive-man/.

“List or Manifest of Alien Immigrants,” SS Rhynland, arrived in Philadelphia on September 22, 1895, line 6. Regarding Rosenberg’s hometown, Zolotow says he was from the “city of Podolsk,” which was not a city but a province. On the ship manifest documenting the arrival of Rosenberg’s sister, Udel Ginsberg, the town of origin is Zurin, often spelled Dzhurin. It was in Podolsk. See “List or Manifest of Alien Immigrants,” SS Rhynland, arrived in Philadelphia on June 6, 1898, line 8.

MZP, Billy Rose of Broadway, 31.

Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (New York: Penguin, 1995), 296.

MZP, “Childhood,” 2.

MZP, Billy Rose, 32.

New York City Department of Records, marriage certificate of David Rosenberg and Fannie Wernick, November 13, 1896.

“Sossnitz, Jos. L.,” in Trow’s New York City Directory for the Year Ending July 1, 1898 (New York: Trow Directory, 1898), 1229.

Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigrations, 1840–1920 (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 120.

MZP, “Childhood,” 3; “Rose, Billy,” in Current Biography 1940 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1940), 695.

BRTD, “Interview with Billy Rose on the Long John Nebel radio show, Aug. 5, 1965,” audio disc 1.

New York City Department of Records, Manhattan births, cert. no. 33537, Samuel Wolf Rosenberg.

Radensky, “Hasidism,” 14, 181–82.

For Velvel Wernick see New York City Department of Records, certificate of death, Israel Vernick, May 9, 1930.

New York State census, 1905, Borough of Manhattan, Election District 13, Block E, Assembly District 4, page 22, line 11; student records of Community School 44, Bronx, NY, for “William Rosenberg (09-06-99).” For Rose’s name in high school, see “Commerce Student Shorthand Champion of Manhattan,” Commerce High School Caravel, April 1916, 449.

Polly Rose Gottlieb, The Nine Lives of Billy Rose (New York: Crown, 1968), 57.

Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 79.

Arnold Bennett, “The Book of the Month—Your United States,” Hearst’s Magazine, March 1913, 498.

John H. Lienhard, “Tenement Houses,” accessed December 8, 2017, www.uh.edu/engines/epi2137.htm; Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis, 123.

Polland and Soyer, Emerging Metropolis, 122.

Supplement to Manifest of Alien Passengers, SS Southwark, arrived on July 18, 1900, line 19, “Abraham Wirniak”; New York certificate of birth, no. 16844, Marjam Rosenberg.

List or Manifest of Alien Immigrants, SS Rotterdam, arrived on November 4, 1901, lines 9 and 10. See “Record of Aliens Held for Special Inquiry” for arrival date and entry number 46 for the name Schmuel.

List or Manifest of Alien Immigrants, SS Rijndam, arrived on September 15, 1903, lines 16–19.

Naomi Pasachoff and Robert J. Littman, A Concise History of the Jewish People (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 236.

MZP, “Childhood,” 1.

US census, 1900, Charles and Ida Ginsburg [sic], 232 Rivington Street.

Shirley Gatsik, interview with the author, May 9, 2014.

BRP, box 2, “Correspondence 1953–1964,” folder 1, Gatsik to Rose, July 19, 1960, and Rose to Gatsik, July 20, 1960.

MZP, “Childhood,” 2.