SAVING KURT SCHWARZ
Rose’s Aquacade and Diamond Horseshoe triumphs overlapped with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which marked the start of World War II in Europe and the growing desperation of Europe’s Jews. The latter was a crisis that had been on Rose’s mind for some time. As early as January 20, 1938, he made it clear that he wanted to add to his nightclub and producer credentials the role of Jewish hero. “Disraeli,” he replied, when asked to name his favorite historical character. “Disraeli was a gentleman, who got many chuckles out of life, and a great deal of satisfaction out of being a Hebrew who commanded the respect of the whole world.”1 Money was not the only gold medal that denoted victory. The chance to become a Jewish leader was also compelling and offered something money could not promise: the allure of historic immortality and, equally important to Rose, the chance to exceed his mother’s achievements in the realm of Jewish service.
Rose’s regard for Disraeli as an inspiring example almost certainly stemmed from a January 17, 1938, radio drama presentation of the well-known play Disraeli, first produced on Broadway in 1911 and made into a silent film in 1921 and a financially and critically successful talking picture in 1929. The radio play allowed Rose to see himself as a Disraeli, a Jew born at the bottom but “climbing, climbing on hands and knees with his eyes fixed on the summit,” and one who seeks help from a wealthy Jewish banker, a parallel with Rose’s cultivation of Bernard Baruch.2 Rose and Baruch’s reacquaintance in Europe in 1934 had by late 1936 begun to bear fruit. On October 23 of that year, Rose wrote Baruch about his success in Texas at the Frontier Centennial and greeted him as “Dear Bernie.” Baruch’s reply began, “My dear Billy.”3
Rose’s new conception of himself as someone ready to take on the role of Jewish historical figure represented an emulation of his mother’s early twentieth-century adventures helping Jewish refugees flee Europe, and her recent death made it easier for him to advance into the Jewish territory she had formerly held. He had boasted that she had achieved a Jewish fame that was recognized at the time of her death by the crowds at her funeral and, crucially, newspaper coverage—the invented editorial about her in the Forverts. Now the Jews faced an even more terrible persecution than the Russian pogroms that had energized his mother, and so the fame and gratitude to be reaped from Jewish activism might be exponentially greater. His mother would certainly have been pleased by his ambition. Rose’s ability to rack up gaudy show business successes while he volunteered to fund a World’s Fair depiction of Nazi horrors and vanquished Nazis in his It Can’t Happen Here productions satisfied her twin desires, which she shared with her immigrant generation. “It was the unspoken hope of the immigrants,” wrote Irving Howe, “that their visions and ambitions, the collective dream of Jewish fulfillment and the personal wish to improve the lot of sons and daughters, could be satisfied at the same time.”4 Rose became the embodiment of that hope.
SOMETHING QUIET
His mother’s example, however, was necessary but not sufficient. Rose’s ten years of silence on Jewish issues after his satires of Henry Ford’s antisemitism speak to a weakening of his attachment to the Jewish community. New York, because its more than two million Jews formed more than one-quarter of the population of America’s largest city, was unique among American Jewish communities in its ability to offer Jews both cosmopolitanism and Jewish culture.5 The city and the Jewish community were large enough to afford both. Rose, however, was more interested in cosmopolitanism. In 1937 when he left Fanny Brice for Eleanor Holm, a move impossible to imagine during his mother’s lifetime, Rose was heading toward intermarriage at a time when the rate of such unions was vanishingly small. Even at the start of the 1960s, Jewish intermarriage rates in America were under 10 percent.6 But Rose was in show business, and as with other Jewish songwriters and playwrights and producers, his job was to tap into Jewish energy and verve to create American, not Jewish, entertainment.7
It seems clear that only world events revived Rose’s Jewish identity, as it did that of his peers, whose example also seems to have been a powerful goad to his growing involvement in Jewish causes. In February 1933, the columnist Walter Winchell used his “On Broadway” column to rail against Hitler.8 Winchell continued to use his column to defend the Jews, and this seems to have made a deep impression on Rose. In 1944, he confessed to Winchell his admiration for the columnist’s work, which he intimated contained something meaningful. “I think I have done pretty well with my own career,” he said, “but by comparison with what you have done with yours, it seems pretty empty.”9 Another influence was Rose’s hero, Bernard Baruch. In Europe during the summer of 1934, Rose listened to Baruch discuss Hitler’s sports and flying clubs. “Baruch knew Hitler was arming,” Rose said.10 And in 1935, while Hecht and Rose worked on Jumbo, the screenwriter appeared as a guest columnist for Winchell and used the powerful bullhorn to decry Nazi antisemitism and explore the meaning of the shock it held for America’s assimilated Jews. Hecht understood their pain as part of a necessary awakening from their slumbering Jewish identities. “It is not without a certain thrill—this spectacle of financiers, society leaders, literary talents emerging as Jews under attack,” he wrote. “Painful though it is, I have a feeling that this Jew consciousness is rather good for the seemingly assimilated Jew.”11
Part of Rose’s attraction to these men was undoubtedly their alert Jewish consciousness. If he had wanted to avoid reminders of Jewish solidarity, he could have aligned himself with show business Jews who were hardly so engaged. In April 1934, columnist Louis Sobol recognized that “something unusual happened” when New York’s Jewish Theatrical Guild honored the non-Jewish George M. Cohan and “Harry Hershfield told half a dozen stories which were quite funny, too, but not a single one in which a Jewish gentleman was mentioned.”12 That crowd exhibited the assimilationist traits Hecht condemned. It was not Rose’s crowd.
His identification with Disraeli as a Jewish hero came five months after he staged It Can’t Happen Here and just three months after an October 3 rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden drew twenty thousand people to a German Day celebration that included more than one thousand uniformed Nazis.13 The cause-and-effect relationship between anti-Jewish acts and Rose’s Jewish activism became most plain after Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” The organized violence against Germany’s Jews on November 9 and 10, 1938, destroyed one thousand synagogues, left ninety-one dead, and saw thirty thousand Jewish men arrested. News of the outrages appeared on the front page of the New York Times.14 “Nazis Smash, Loot and Burn Jewish Shops and Temples until Goebbels Calls Halt” was the headline on November 11. The next day the front page alerted readers, “Arrests Run to Thousands.” Less than a week later, in a news story of November 17, 1938, Rose hinted he was interested in doing something out of character, something “that will be quiet, altruistic. More than that he would not say.”15
In fact, he would never say, but he did act. On December 6, 1938, Rose offered to help an Austrian Jewish refugee trapped in fascist Italy. “If you come to New York will definitely give you employment in one of my enterprises,” he wrote.16 Over the next three months this modest offer grew in scope until Rose took full responsibility for rescuing the young man from Europe, a project that included paying his travel and living and visa expenses for immigration to Cuba.
Rose’s rescue of Kurt Schwarz from Italy in the winter of 1938–39 reveals unpublicized aspects of his character. One was his determination to do something about the threat facing Europe’s Jews that went beyond expressions of concern and protest. Another was his ability to remain anonymous. The latter is the more shocking of the two. After twenty years seeking attention, Rose seemed the last person likely to avoid publicity, but when it came to good deeds he preferred anonymity. In 1942, owing to a mistake made by New York’s draft board, the public discovered that Rose supported his father, three of his uncles, and his sister Polly.17 As Polly later explained, her brother “has a person[al] WPA, and keeps dozens of relatives on his payroll.”18 This he kept to himself, and he likewise never told anyone he saved Kurt Schwarz—not Brice, not Holm, not his sister Polly, nobody.
LIFE AND DEATH
Schwarz was born in Vienna on May 19, 1917, the only child of Helene and Ludwig Schwarz, Jews secular enough that in one letter from his mother she noted the date as Easter Sunday.19 He pursued a business education at a commercial academy in 1935–36, and in 1937, at age twenty, started his career in the hotel industry as a clerk at Vienna’s grand Hotel Bristol, an 1892 monument to sophistication and culture that attracted guests such as Enrico Caruso, Gustav Mahler, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.20 But on February 8, 1938, Schwarz quit his job, said goodbye to his divorced mother, and left for Rome.21 It was a smart move. One month later the Nazis invaded and absorbed Austria, and soon afterward, in response to the arrival of many refugees, Italy made it illegal for Austrian Jews to enter the country. Schwarz found work in Rome at two of the city’s most luxurious hotels, the Flora and the Majestic, where he was assistant manager, but his Italian refuge was brief. In May 1938, Adolf Hitler made a state visit to Italy and many German and Austrian Jewish refugees, apparently including Schwarz, were arrested in advance of the visit. Then on September 7, under German pressure, Italy ordered all recently arrived foreign Jews to leave the country by March 12, 1939. To ensure compliance, the Ministry of the Interior compiled a secret list of the country’s approximately ten thousand foreign Jews. Schwarz was on it.22
The Italian government faced a problem carrying out the Jewish expulsion: there was no place for the Jews to go. No country would accept them. For the Italian authorities this was a bureaucratic headache, as they could not expel the Jews according to the official timetable. For Jewish refugees such as Schwarz it was a crisis, and he investigated many means of escape to avoid being repatriated to Austria, a prospect that also terrified the German Jews in Italy, and these two groups, “in particular, made desperate efforts to find alternative places of refuge,” notes the historian Susan Zuccotti.23 A stamp in his passport from the Chinese consulate confirms that Schwarz considered going there. He also sought and received help from an unidentified Marquis Nikolas and also Carlo Alberto Viterbo, an important leader of the Italian Jewish community who “worked tirelessly to help Jewish refugees.”24 Viterbo served as the Italian government’s official in charge of the Jewish community of Ethiopia and in the fall of 1938 there were reports and rumors, official and apocryphal, that Italy might consider its newly acquired colony as a place for Jewish settlement. Schwarz seems to have investigated that, too.25
Rose’s December 6, 1938, telegram dangled the tantalizing prospect of immigrating to America, the most desirable choice, and Rose’s offer of employment is obviously a response to an earlier and lost Schwarz inquiry. How and why Schwarz reached out to Rose is unfortunately an unsolved mystery. According to a Schwarz friend named Herb Hillman—the man who shared Schwarz’s story with Saul Bellow, who transformed it into the novella The Bellarosa Connection—Schwarz had a girlfriend in Rome who learned that Rose was running an underground rescue operation on behalf of Italy’s stranded Jewish refugees.26 This is unlikely, though Rose could hardly have avoided learning of Italy’s Jewish expulsion order and its implications. On September 2, 1938, the New York Times ran the story of the upcoming order on its front page.27 But if Rose had masterminded a secret operation of any great extent, it would have almost certainly come to light by now.
A more plausible explanation is that Schwarz probably wrote letters seeking help to several prominent Jewish Americans, and Rose was the one who responded. In late 1938 it was not unusual for American Jews of some renown to receive letters from European Jews pleading for the help that might save their lives. In November of that year, the playwright S. N. Behrman received a letter from a correspondent whom he had merely chatted with during an earlier visit to Vienna. “I regret to trouble you with my sorrows, but I beg you to understand that these sorrows have become literally questions of life and death for me,” the man wrote. Behrman brought him and his wife to America.28 In 1939 the famed New York Times cartoonist Al Hirschfeld received a letter from a Jewish widow in Budapest born with the Hirschfeld name. She used this slim connection to “beg you have the kindness in informing me, whether would you have the goodness to facilitate the immigration one of my sons into the United States of America.”29 Hirschfeld’s response is unknown.
Rose sent Schwarz a second telegram on January 29, 1939. Much had happened to both men during the intervening seven weeks. For Rose, the refugee crisis had grown into a serious concern, which did not mean he was committed to earnestness or self-abnegation. On January 13, he was master of ceremonies on the radio station WHN’s “refugee program,” a good place to promote his upcoming January 24 Casa Mañana show starring European refugees.30 The “Refugee Revue” featured “actors and musicians driven from Germany and Austria by the Nazis,” and Rose’s touch was evident in a comic send-up of Nazi intolerance. Whenever the performance included music composed by Jews, such as Oscar Straus’s “Chocolate Soldier” or Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” the Austrian actor Max Willenz “held up his hand and said: ‘Verboten!’”31 The Times commended the show and Rose for “putting these people to work where their talents may be seen,” and in February, Rose donated his Casa Mañana to a benefit for refugee children.32 Refugees were on his mind.
For Schwarz, life had become grimmer, as he surely informed Rose. The September 1938 legislation that called for the expulsion of Italy’s foreign Jews also instituted “anti-Jewish laws [that] affected Italy as a whole, not just its political, social, economic, or cultural life. . . . Mussolini had decided that Fascism and Italy as a whole were to be Aryan and anti-Semitic.”33 A normal existence was essentially outlawed, and the foreign Jews who needed to leave the country faced doing so without their assets, as Italy restricted the amount of Italian lira they could take out of the country to the equivalent of little more than one hundred dollars.34 This created a demand for the illegal acquisition of hard currency before emigration, and in January 1939 Schwarz was arrested for helping Jews buy British pounds. His position at the Majestic gave him access to foreign visitors willing to trade currency on the black market. He did this in concert with a Jewish refugee named Karl Marx (not a descendant of the author of Das Kapital), who became one of postwar Germany’s more important Jewish journalists, and on January 26 the Italian police arrested Marx and Schwarz for illegal currency trading.35 They were still in jail on February 9 when the Italian political police suggested to the Foreign Ministry that both men be expelled from Italy. The report added that Schwarz was “unemployed and without means.”36
Schwarz’s January 26 arrest surely accounts for the urgent tone of Rose’s January 29 telegram and his comprehensive plan for Schwarz’s exodus: “Will pay transportation third class Rome Havre thence French Line Havanna [sic] through American Express. Contact American Express immediately. Arrange passage visa. Will deposit money Cuban government soon visa issued. Rose.”37 Three weeks later on February 22 Rose sent Schwarz a third telegram: “Arranged everything. Contact American Express.” Using the money Rose sent, Schwarz visited the Cuban consulate in Milan on March 6 and paid $200 for a visa to enter that country. The next day he went to the American consulate in Rome and secured a transit visa to permit him to stop in New York on his way to Cuba. This means Schwarz had his ship ticket by March 7. Rose paid for that too. Schwarz’s passenger log for the journey from Naples to Havana—a simpler scenario than Rose’s original travel plan—notes an “Am Express passage order” number.38
Schwarz wrote his mother in Vienna about his forthcoming escape from Europe before he finalized all these arrangements. Rose’s February 22 telegram was assurance enough. Helene Schwarz received her son’s letter on March 4, 1939, one week before Italy’s expulsion deadline. By this time most of her family had fled Austria for India, Australia, and the United States, but she still had the company of her sister Gisela and niece Gerta, and she opened the letter from her son in their company. It was not something to face alone. There was no telling what news the envelope contained. Schwarz’s mother scanned the letter in silence, leaving her relatives in an agony of anticipation. “Read,” insisted Gerta, who grabbed the letter and read it aloud. “He’s going to Cuba,” she announced. “He’s leaving, thank God.”39
On March 16, 1939, Schwarz sailed from Naples to Havana via New York. On the day her son left the dangers of Europe, Helene Schwarz sent a letter to Billy Rose.
“Dearest Mr. Rose,” she wrote. “If ever in your life you have a special inner wish that calls for fulfillment, think of the mother who prayed for her beloved son every day and included in this prayer the one who saved her child.”40
THE ENIGMA
Schwarz arrived at New York’s Ellis Island on March 23 and soon played an unwitting part in an absurd juxtaposition. The young Jewish refugee hoped to enter the United States. He planned to use his transit visa’s permission to stop in New York on the way to Cuba as an opportunity to make his case for immediate immigration. To accomplish this, Schwarz highlighted his relationship with Billy Rose. Despite his visa to Cuba, Schwarz told the United States immigration inspector that his destination was “7th Ave. 50str. New York Casa Mañana,” Rose’s nightclub, and for evidence he carried with him the three telegrams he had received from Rose, so he was held in detention until a hearing could decide his case. Rose telegrammed Schwarz on Ellis Island to say, “Pardon my not coming to see you but it was impossible because of several shows in rehearsal.”41 That excuse was flimsy enough. The truth was ridiculous. On March 27, Schwarz had his hearing, testified before an Inspector Smith, and lost his immigration appeal.42 That same day Billy Rose sat in the display window of the Ansonia Bootery on Broadway at Forty-Seventh Street and judged a beautiful legs contest.
It is an unflattering contrast, to say the least. What’s more, this was not a last-minute plan. Rose clearly prepared the stunt to coincide with Schwarz’s hearing date, which Schwarz likely provided him. To ensure a crowd, Rose was joined in the window by Eleanor Holm, George Jessel, and a radio announcer from WMCA who offered a live broadcast of the proceedings. Rose produced it like a pro, and it all worked. The police had to be called because the leg contest generated disruptive crowds in the street outside, and Rose got what he apparently wanted. No reporter learned that a European refugee in New York Harbor had a terrific story about one of the most famous men in New York.43
Schwarz was deported to Cuba on March 29, but that did not end his contact with Rose. In a letter dated May 7, Schwarz’s mother tried to cheer her son with the reminder, “Rose invested a lot of money in you” and so was unlikely to abandon him, though on May 14 she wondered why Rose had not answered her letter, and on May 17 she confessed, “Rose is a puzzle to me.”44 Then on June 21 the enigma sent Schwarz in Cuba one last telegram: “Have American Express cable their office here immediately procedure necessary bring you America.” Nothing came of this. In December 1939 Schwarz married an American Jewish tourist during her visit to Cuba and joined her in New York in August 1940.45
LOVE AND MONEY
Rose’s lifelong silence about his rescue of Schwarz can be chalked up to a becoming modesty about matters that were truly profound. He dismissed the idea that he was lonely when he penned “Me and My Shadow,” one of the great popular evocations of loneliness, because it showed no class to seek applause for sensitivity or moral attributes. The journalist H. L. Mencken, Rose’s contemporary, approved of this approach. “There is always something embarrassing about unqualified praise,” he wrote. “A man knows, down in his own heart, that he doesn’t deserve it.”46 This was almost certainly the same reason that Rose kept mum about Schwarz.
But his failure to visit Schwarz on Ellis Island, and the leg contest publicity stunt, require a less flattering explanation. His actions suggest that Rose considered any association with the refugee too risky. The association threatened him on all sides: psychological, political, commercial, and sexual. He could have had someone translate the German letter from Schwarz’s mother and compose a response, but given Rose’s history with his mother-wife Fannie Rosenberg and his wife-mother Fanny Brice, he likely wanted to avoid entanglement with another Jewish mother. In addition, he needed to ward off controversial political questions that might sink his Diamond Horseshoe and Aquacade. Everything he did was newsworthy. If he went to Ellis Island, the visit would have wound up in the papers, and then the inflammatory political issue of Jewish persecution, refugees, and antisemitism would have been his issue. That would have damaged his prospects at the upcoming World’s Fair on two scores: it would tarnish the hopeful “World of Tomorrow” theme and make him the fair’s highest-profile Jew during a period of rising antisemitism.
As Rose realized, much of his Aquacade’s success was due to the green light given by the Catholic authorities that it was decent entertainment. That support might not have been issued if Rose had appeared to favor American involvement in the European war. In 1936–37, Catholic newspapers in Brooklyn, Boston, Connecticut, and Ohio railed against Jews for their anti-Franco stand in the Spanish Civil War, a position seen as anti-Catholic and pro-Communist, and also because the Jews were “too prosperous, too successfully grasping.”47 This American Catholic anger increased even after the horrors of Kristallnacht, when, ten days after the violence, the notorious demagogue Father Charles Coughlin used his radio address heard by 3.5 million people to blame the Jews for their victimization.48
Finally, Rose had to consider how the Schwarz project would affect his antisemitic-when-drunk future wife, Eleanor Holm. The beautiful young woman apparently broke a pathetic pattern in Rose’s life: despite his charisma, intelligence, and wealth, many women did not want to sleep with him. His tiny stature and not-very-attractive visage apparently repelled them. Brice was not interested in a physical relationship with him, and other women he squired, including Gypsy Rose Lee, the singer Jane Morgan, and a former Miss Israel named Miriam Hadar, felt the same.49 “Sooner or later he’d expect it to become physical and I couldn’t bear that,” Lee said about why she would not consider marrying him.50 Rose appeared to try and make light of such rejections by saying, “Sex has never been the most important thing in my life.”51 But this did not mean it was unimportant. Like his role model Baruch, Rose still had a powerful sexual appetite in his sixties, when he crudely and forcefully tried to seduce the actress Lee Grant, twenty-eight years his junior.52 When he rescued Schwarz, Rose was not yet forty and had just been released from a sexless marriage with an older woman. He could not afford to alienate his young lover. Holm provided an invaluable service. Schwarz had to go to Cuba.
Rose almost certainly saved Schwarz’s life by bringing him out of Europe, but he kept the project quiet. He was vulnerable in a myriad of ways. Rose’s big public Jewish move had to wait.