thirteen

A FLAG IS BORN

Rose raised one more issue with the Times, and that was Jewish immigration to Palestine. During his visits to DP camps he saw firsthand what Earl Harrison had noted some months before: that the desire of the Jewish DPs to immigrate to Palestine was widespread and profound and the only moral path forward. “The civilized world owes it to this handful of survivors to provide them with a home where they can again settle down and begin to live as human beings,” Harrison wrote. Just before Rose visited Germany and Austria, an UNRRA official reported that “a general strike which occurred simultaneously in all Jewish camps . . . [was] a demonstration against the British deal of preventing their immigration into Palestine. More trouble of this sort was expected.” During Rose’s visit to Zeilsheim he would have observed that the Jews embraced Zionism as a “Jewish national approach to their problems.” They resented UNRRA authorities who tried to “force their educational and cultural program into a pattern that is Polish or German, or English, and not Jewish.”1 As for the New Palestine camp, its name made its inhabitants’ hopes plain. So Rose raised the issue with the Times but, as usual, hedged (or fudged) his position. “I’m not a Zionist, I do not know enough about it,” he said, “but I would like to see Palestine made quickly available as a place of refuge and rescue.”²

This was not on the level. After more than two years working closely with Hecht and Bergson, Rose knew a good deal about Zionism, and his continuing connection with Bergson and his new organizations, the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation and the American League for a Free Palestine (ALFP), make it clear that Rose was a Zionist. In the fall of 1946 he told a friend that he helped unnamed groups working for the Zionist cause, and later he was more explicit when he told Lee Strasberg, “I helped buy a fairish amount of guns for the Irgun.”³

Because America’s closest ally, Great Britain, opposed Jewish immigration, in order to placate Arab objections, Zionism was controversial, but it was also very popular among Jews. The former New York governor Herbert Lehman urged the opening of Jewish immigration to Palestine, and in 1946 the famed liberal journalist I. F. Stone published Underground to Palestine, an account of his experience running the British blockade against Jewish immigration. He wrote it not “merely in search of a good story, but as a kinsman, fulfilling a moral obligation to my brothers.”4 The symphony conductor Leonard Bernstein “sympathized with both the Irgun and the Haganah,” and in 1947 he conducted the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra while the British and Jewish militias fought each other in violent battles.

The Jewish American public also supported the Zionist movement. In 1945, membership in America’s Zionist organizations reached one million, a dramatic rise from the sixty-five thousand in 1933. Such general agreement made the moment a historic one. “At the war’s end, American Jews confronted the enormity of the destruction of European Jewry and the . . . struggle for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine,” notes the historian Arthur Goren. “Linking the solution of the problem of the survivors with the attainment of statehood created a unity of purpose on a scale unprecedented in the modern history of the Jews.”⁵

THE BIG BOYS

Rose played a part in this extraordinary moment. In March 1946, two of the wealthiest and most important players in American Jewish life—Edward M. M. Warburg, heir to the great Warburg banking and investment fortune, and William Rosenwald, a former director at retail giant Sears, Roebuck—reached out to him for help with the United Jewish Appeal’s “Campaign for Survival” to raise $100 million. The campaign helped the Jewish causes Rose cared most about, as half the amount raised funded the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s work with DPs and another 40 percent funded Jewish settlement in Palestine.⁶

Rose was an almost inevitable choice. His fame and riches were now greater than ever. Carmen Jones remained a hit throughout 1944 and netted Rose $40,000 a week as it played until February 1945 for a run of thirteen months. Seven Lively Arts at his Ziegfeld Theatre ran for five months, until May 1945, and though it was not a critical success the revue’s parade of top talent, with sketches by Kaufman and Hart, songs by Cole Porter, music by Igor Stravinsky, dance by the ballerina Alicia Markova, and the return from England of the great comedienne Bea Lillie, won him terrific publicity, including another multipage spread in Life and yet another newspaper profile, this one in the Times, which stayed true to the established format by mentioning virtually his every endeavor except his Jewish-themed productions.7

His Diamond Horseshoe was still so popular that on April 12, 1945, the night of President Roosevelt’s death, every club “in town was waiting to see if the Diamond Horseshoe would stay open” or go dark in mourning, said Kitty Carlisle Hart, who then sang at the Club Versailles. “They were all waiting on Billy. And he decided to stay open, and we all went to work.”⁸ And when one Billy Rose production folded, another opened, to provide uninterrupted publicity. Just before Seven Lively Arts closed, 20th Century-Fox released Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, a musical film the Times called “probably the most expensive advertisement that a night club ever had.” Not only did Rose not pay for the ad; he got paid for it. “It didn’t cost me a moment’s effort and it brought in thousands. I had to do something for Eleanor,” Rose told an associate struck by “the topaz in Eleanor’s bracelet,” which, she said, “was the size and shape of an old-fashioned reading glass. The stone was easily as big as the palm of my hand.”⁹

In October, Rose was again in the news, this time for spending $75,000 on a Rembrandt, the highest price paid for a work of art that year. “I’d have paid a million for it,” Rose told his Jewish mentors Bernard Baruch and Samuel Untermeyer about A Pilgrim at Prayer. “I’m in love with it.” At that moment a Diamond Horseshoe manager interrupted the meeting to say, “I finally got that guy who has the bird act to stay in the show for seventy-five dollars.”

Rose shouted, “Seventy-five dollars! How do ya like that! Seventy-five dollars! Well all right. But we don’t feed the birds!”¹⁰ Such tales, this one in Winchell’s column, got a chuckle out of millions and surely helped persuade Paramount Pictures in February 1946 to buy the rights to a film about Rose’s life (the Diamond Horseshoe movie did not feature an actor playing the boss). The studio paid him $200,000.¹¹

Given this résumé and Rose’s work on behalf of We Will Never Die and Jewish DPs, Warburg and Rosenwald wanted Rose for the UJA campaign and asked him to chair the theatrical division and raise money from Jews and sympathetic non-Jews in that industry.¹² Rose joined up, and his first volley of telegrams to people in the business displayed the showman’s characteristic style. It also exposed the chip on his shoulder toward the sector of the population that had once tormented him. Referring to the money-raising job he had taken on he said, “The big boys of our business promised me every help and cooperation. Let’s see if it will be forthcoming.” This pitch was sent to a select group invited to a luncheon at the Hotel Astor, where fifty “big boys” such as Warburg and Barney Balaban, president of Paramount Pictures, would brainstorm “arranging a big dinner party in honor of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.” At the Astor luncheon, Rose set a goal of raising $1 million and established an organization to get it, naming Ed Sullivan, then a Daily News columnist, to head the “nitery division” and others assigned to squeeze songwriters, costume pros, designers, orchestra leaders, and ticket brokers. “A million dollars may seem a lot,” Rose said. “But it means the difference between life and death to people overseas. I think we should all do our share not only in giving but in going out and getting.”13

Rose did both. To get he wrote emotional pleas that pressed potential supporters to donate. “It will help us so much in our work of bringing life and hope to the Jews overseas if you will join Mrs. Roosevelt, Bob Sherwood, and leaders of Amusement Industry at our UJA dinner at Sherry’s on Tuesday, April 30,” read an April 22 telegram to Theresa Helburn of the Theatre Guild, and on April 25 he made an “impressive address” to the Independent Theatre Owners Association that raised $80,000.¹⁴ His passion for the cause was also decisive at the dinner for Eleanor Roosevelt. Rose “presided and spoke with deep feeling of his experience visiting displaced persons’ camps in Germany,” reported Mrs. Roosevelt in her newspaper column “My Day.”¹⁵ His words complemented the first lady’s, which were also about her visit to DP camps, and the evening raised $501,900 from the 150 guests, nailing down half of Rose’s fundraising goal at the one event.

The biggest donors included the three Warner brothers, who together gave $100,000, and the Balaban family, which donated $70,000. Rose donated $20,000, twice the minimum donation of $10,000 that qualified one as a major donor, and for months afterward he continued to pay close personal attention to the fundraising effort.¹⁶ Irving Berlin had promised to donate 10 percent of his royalties that quarter to the UJA, an amount that would have been about $3,200. However, “in view of the present emergency,” he said, “I have decided to increase my donation. I am enclosing my check for $5,000.” A personal thank you from Rose was in order. “Dear Irving,” he wrote. “On behalf of the United Jewish Appeal, accept my sincere thanks for your check. Spelled out in medicine and things to eat, it will buy a great deal.”¹⁷

Rose’s group eventually raised $850,000, short of the $1 million goal but still six times more than the amusement division had ever raised before. This reflected the general success of the fundraising effort. Though the UJA’s $100 million goal was three times the amount raised in 1945, the organization managed to exceed that amount. It raised $131 million, a figure four times the previous record.18 But New York’s Federation of Jewish Philanthropies was not interested in putting Rose’s fundraising success in context. Instead, the organization took accurate measure of his achievement, wealth, and fame and decided it could raise money for the 116 hospitals it helped support by holding a fundraising drive in his honor. On December 12, 1946, a dinner was held at the swanky Hotel Pierre, and Herbert Bayard Swope, from Rose’s WIB days, served as emcee. Bernard Baruch presented Rose with an award for his “distinguished achievements as a showman, journalist and humanitarian.”¹⁹ That last description undoubtedly elicited an ironic laugh from many, but his public and secret Jewish philanthropy justified it.

A FLAG IS BORN

This alignment with mainstream Jewish groups was a departure for Rose, who since 1941 had worked closely with the Jewish renegades Hecht and then Bergson to bring attention to and initiate action on behalf of Europe’s Jews, and despite his October 1944 repudiation of them, he continued to help the two men while he labored for the UJA. In May 1946, Bergson of the Hebrew Committee asked Rose to pressure UNRRA to aid the Jews of the Balkans. Rose brought the issue to Warburg.²⁰ Bergson of the ALFP funded the Irgun’s “repatriation effort” that smuggled Jews into Palestine on boats that tried to evade the British blockade. Ben-Gurion’s Haganah made the most progress here with a campaign that succeeded even when it failed. Ships filled with stateless Jews turned away by the British, especially in the case of the SS Exodus, “focused embarrassing attention on London’s harsh policy.”²¹ The ALFP had less success with its own repatriation program, but Rose contributed one hundred dollars to the cause.²² However, the heart of Rose’s work with Hecht and Bergson had been producing theatricals designed to energize the public on behalf of Jewish causes boldly stated, and in 1946 he partnered with them one last time as the prime financial backer of the ALFP’s production of Ben Hecht’s play A Flag Is Born.²³

“You, out front, are not in a theater tonight, you are on a battlefield.” That was the direct call for donations issued from the stage after every performance of the play that was both the first Holocaust drama and the first Zionist drama, appearing as it did two years before the Jewish state became a reality.24 Its two themes were intertwined to make three emotional pleas: to view the Jewish survivors as Jews with Jewish national needs; to foment American anger at the 1939 British restriction against Jewish immigration to Palestine that before the war trapped Jews in Nazi Europe and after the war prevented them from attaining a national homeland; and to raise money for ships that would defy the British blockade by bringing Jewish DPs to Palestine and fund the Jewish fight to establish the State of Israel.²⁵ Flag was the culmination of the theatrical efforts that saw the Jews claim their right, as Americans, to argue Jewish interests. “It was their Jewish identity that spurred them to civic action in the American public sphere,” writes Garrett Eisler.²⁶

However, this transformation into full-fledged Jewish Americans able “to embrace both sides of that equation equally,” as Eisler puts it,²⁷ did not happen overnight, and the habit of prudent care that enabled Rose to escape a childhood clouded by failure and poverty now reasserted itself. In contrast to his work on Fun to Be Free and We Will Never Die, and his statement to the Times that the DPs should be allowed to reach Palestine, Rose wanted no public connection to A Flag Is Born. Bergson and Hecht’s actions were going too far for the Jewish showman. On July 22, 1946, six weeks before Flag opened in New York, the Irgun bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, headquarters of the British government in Palestine. Every American Jewish group but Bergson’s ALFP condemned the attack that killed nearly one hundred. Hecht acted as the exceptional group’s spokesman when he told the Times two days after the bombing, “The hand which writes British policy in Palestine is directly responsible for detonating the bomb at the King David Hotel.”²⁸

Rose at that moment was fundraising for the hardly radical UJA, and such statements surely dissuaded him from any further public affiliation with Hecht or Bergson. But there is little doubt about his willingness to finance Hecht’s play. “Rose was my chief ally,” Hecht said. “His pocketbook was one of the chief arsenals for Jewish liberation, no less than his talent as a producer.”²⁹ And two years before Flag, Rose had made it clear he would even finance Hecht works he disliked. That was when Rose in July 1944 pleaded with Hecht to ditch a play he was working on because the anti-Nazi theme “already feels like a period piece.” Rose wrote, “I will produce it or if you want to produce it I will finance it but as a dear friend of yours who never wants to see you strike out I would like to see you sell it to the movies or scrap it. I don’t think it is fresh enough or distinguished enough and I have a fierce and possessive pride about anything that you write. Please don’t get mad at me because I love you.”30

A Flag Is Born was not a period piece but, as stated above, something new, and it seems likely that Rose’s 1944 letter helped Hecht turn away from a reiteration of Nazi horrors and toward a play about the Jewish future. Flag did this through the story of three Holocaust survivors trying to make their way across Europe to the Land of Israel. Two are an old married couple, Tevya and Zelda, who are remnants of the shtetl world of Sholem Aleichem, and the third is David, a despairing young Jew who “has lost faith in God and in his fellow man.” The theater stars Paul Muni and Celia Adler played the old couple, who die during the journey. David, played by Marlon Brando, takes up with “fighters of the Hebrew resistance in Palestine.” At the play’s close, David carries the future Israeli flag and with his new comrades sings “Hatikvah,” the Zionist anthem that became Israel’s national anthem.³¹

Flag was a popular and critical success and its four-month run raised $275,000 through ticket sales and additional donations. This paid for a ship renamed the SS Ben Hecht that in March 1948 attempted to bring six hundred DPs to Palestine. The British intercepted it, took the DPs to Cyprus, and arrested the American crew.³² No records regarding A Flag Is Born mention Billy Rose. Like his rescue of Kurt Schwarz, the production proved Rose’s ability to keep a secret.

FRUSTRATED FATHER

Rose undertook yet another secret operation while helping the UJA and the ALFP, and that was an American version of Hecht and Bergson’s effort to bring refugees to Palestine. In August 1946, while Flag was in rehearsals, Rose paid $70,000 for a thirty-room house on 131 acres.³³ He did not publicize this purchase or tell anyone what he intended to do with this second Mount Kisco estate, adjacent to his first, until March 1947, when he revealed that he wanted to house twenty-five war orphans there. They would be his and his wife’s children. The couple was going to adopt them from European DP camps. Rose and Eleanor’s adoption trip to Europe was in the works.

The adoption plan was Rose’s attempt to implement what the US government had announced as its policy but had largely failed to enact. In December 1945, President Truman ordered that DPs be given preference to immigrate to the United States as “an example to the other countries of the world [and] . . . it is hoped that the majority will be orphaned children.”34 But Truman’s order had little effect on overall refugee immigration numbers and minimal impact on Jewish arrivals. By December 1946, a year after the president announced his plan, only 6,213 refugees had entered the country, and of these a mere 177 were orphans. In addition, though American Jewish lobbying was part of what led Truman to issue the immigration order, American Jews did not dare request special treatment for Europe’s dispossessed Jews, so they were admitted per their share of the refugee population, which was about 20 percent. This meant that over the course of a year, the United States admitted about thirty-five Jewish orphans.³⁵ In this context, Rose’s plan was enormous.

The needs of the Jewish refugees, the vileness of the Nazis, and the quirks of Rose’s character joined together to yield his ambitious and bizarre adoption plan. In November 1946 he published an article in PM about the Germans he saw during his 1945 DP tour. He wrote that while in Munich he visited “the big Red Cross Club which played to something like 7000 GI’s a day” and was astounded to learn that the band was composed of former SS soldiers from Dachau. Rose asked a staffer, “Do you think it’s a good idea . . . to allow the Death Head Brigade to ingratiate themselves with these kids by playing dance music for them?” The answer infuriated him: “What’s the difference? . . . The war’s over.” After the band ended its set, Rose sized up the departing Germans:

They were laughing as the truck pulled away in the direction of Dachau. I wondered what they were laughing at, and what the joke was. And then I felt a little drop of ice water trickle down my spine. I knew what the joke was and who the joke was on. It was on the Red Cross, on the soldiers in the club, on you and me, and on the hundreds of thousands who had preceded the SS men at Dachau. . . . I wasn’t much surprised at anything I saw in Germany after that. I wasn’t surprised when we investigated Nazis in public office with a whitewash brush in our hand. And I wasn’t surprised when the Nurenberg [sic] Court looked at atrocity pictures for a year and then decided to hang only eleven of the twenty-one defendants.³⁶

This contempt for what he saw as the naiveté, stupidity, and indifference toward Nazi crimes was part of the general derision for accepted opinion that had always driven Rose to go his own way. His adoption program was in alignment with this aspect of his character and also another trait that had previously only been hinted at—his view of himself as the essential father. Having replaced his own father when he was a teenager, Rose assumed the role toward nearly everyone. His mother encouraged and his sisters accepted his assumption of that position within the family and he extended its reach to more distant relations, as his draft board revealed when it announced that he supported three uncles. He also “adopted” friends, as when he called himself Hecht’s “loving father,” despite Hecht’s being five years older. Another show business colleague received the same treatment. “Don’t get excited, boy,” he chided Will Morrissey, who reflected, “Him calling me boy, he was a kid and I was an old man then.” This conception of himself as a paterfamilias was surely strengthened by his financial success and the acclaim he received from the entertainment and Jewish communities. Another factor also may have played a role. It appears his affair with a Texas showgirl in 1937 resulted in an out-of-wedlock child he never acknowledged, and to avoid similar mishaps in the future, he underwent what turned out to be an irreversible vasectomy. His sister Polly said the procedure was the reason he never had children with any of his wives. His childless life apparently frustrated his paternal impulse, which expressed itself in this grandiose gesture.37

Word of his plan to adopt twenty-five orphans appeared in the Times on March 21, 1947, along with a protestation that he did not want publicity. Circumstances behind the scenes, however, suggest that he engineered the press attention to overcome objections to his adoption goal. Through an intermediary, he had communicated his proposal to the United Service for New Americans (USNA), “a strictly Jewish agency” that deliberately took a nondenominational title to evade antisemitic opposition.

On March 19, two days before the Times article appeared, the USNA rejected Rose’s plan. The idea was impossible for a host of reasons, from the legal structures that governed adoptions to the needs of the orphans, said the USNA’s Joseph Beck. The process required, first, that an umbrella organization, the US Committee for the Care of European Children, sign the required immigration affidavits guaranteeing economic support of all immigrant children. The committee then entrusted Jewish children to the USNA, which placed them in foster homes through a subsidiary, the European Jewish Children’s Aid. In addition, the children needed individual attention and not “group care, for this is merely a repetition of camp life that they had in Europe,” Beck said. “They want to get away from that, which calls for the type of care they can get only in a home.” There were additional issues that Beck was reluctant to discuss, “since it would be harmful to our whole immigration procedure if information of this kind got out.” Some of the children had tuberculosis. What’s more, “they are a suspicious, tense, difficult lot of adolescents. . . . The mark of the concentration camps is a mark on the spirit, soul and the personality of these people.” Privately, Beck worried that “moving these teen aged youngsters into [Rose’s] . . . ‘posh’ naborhood [sic] could be detrimental to the program. An attempted rape, or a drunken ‘ball’ with its potential publicity could be fatal to admission of refugees.”38

Rose was surely made aware of Beck’s concerns, but he did not accept Beck’s answer, and the Times article was clearly his counterattack. Reactions to the unveiled idea varied. To a colleague at the UJA, it was proof that Rose was “the amazing Billy.”³⁹ To officials at UNRRA, it was evidence of madness and a reason to marshal troops.

“Would it not be possible to cable appropriate agencies in the U.S.A., possibly State Department and U.S. Committee [for the Care of European Children] to stop this wild scheme,” wrote an UNRRA child search officer, Cornelia D. Heise, to UNRRA headquarters in Paris. “We shall be glad to alert our military authorities if in your opinion there is imminent danger of [Rose] arriving in the U.S. Zone for the alleged purpose of adopting children.” Heise then had a moment of doubt about her passionate reaction and asked a superior, “OK to send this out? Enough trouble with agencies—to say nothing of the Roses.” There was no problem. The organization was with her. “Heartily concur,” came the reply. “Approved for sending.”⁴⁰

Still, Rose had reason to think he could get his way. Others within the adoption bureaucracy “were inclined to accept [his] offer.” And Rose was in no mood to give up the fight. He “was furious: there is no person more insulted than the generous donor whose gift has been refused by a philanthropic agency,” Beck wrote. “He said that he would cut off all his charitable contributions and in particular his large gift each year to United Jewish Appeal (which was the source of our funds). Ed. Warburg became involved.” In May, UNRRA offices in Washington sent UNRRA’s Displaced Persons chief in Paris the latest message from the US Committee for the Care of European Children: “The only additional information I can give you about Billy Rose at the moment is that we are discussing our program with him with the hope that we might somehow work together toward helping displaced children in whom he is interested.”⁴¹

That discussion went nowhere, and over the course of the summer Rose came to accept the fact that he would not be able to carry out his outlandish scheme to adopt twenty-five children. In addition to official objections, it can be taken for granted that his wife would never have agreed to be a mother to Yiddish-speaking orphans. He and Holm did not journey to Europe to find children to adopt. Those whom he might have cared for remained under the jurisdiction of the authorities who sought conventional homes for them in America, and that is where Rose redirected his passion for the project.

On June 13, he wrote an open letter to Secretary of State Gen. George Marshall on behalf of all Americans who wanted to adopt European orphans. The letter appeared in his new syndicated newspaper column, “Pitching Horseshoes.” He started the column in April 1946 as a series of (relatively) subtle and diverting paid advertisements for his Diamond Horseshoe that featured Rose’s editorials on “Life, Art, Reforestation and Sex among the Aborigines” of New York. He ranged widely, sometimes endorsing quality cultural products, such as Roberto Rossellini’s film Open City. These musings caught the attention of John Wheeler, president of the Bell Syndicate, who told Rose, “You shouldn’t give that column away or pay to have it published. I can sell it.”42 By the summer of 1947, it appeared in more than seventy papers across the country, and Rose joked, “I’m now a real newspaperman. I carry a press card and talk tough to cops.”⁴³ With a showman’s gift for the appeal of sentiment, schmaltz, what he once called “the real corn,” he wrote to General Marshall about the children who needed homes,

I got a close-up of these small fry a year ago last November when I was in Europe. I particularly remember some I saw at Landsberg, Germany. A full-scale blizzard was doing its stuff as I trudged past the shacks in which 6,500 DP’s were waiting for a confused world to make up its mind what to do with them. Off in a corner of the camp, I heard laughter coming from one of the shanties. I walked in and found myself in a makeshift laundry. I ducked under some wet clothes hanging over a dirt floor. Near the washtub, there was a group of kids playing with a doll they had made out of knotted rags. And they were laughing. Laughing like kids anywhere laugh. I’m afraid I wept a little when I saw them, because I couldn’t think of any set of kids anywhere in the world who had less to laugh about.⁴⁴

This depiction had little to do with the harsher reality of the typical orphan. Beck had advised that the “children are largely a teen age group. There are very few young children alive in Europe,” and that the concentration camp experience had made them very unlike “kids anywhere.” In his private notes Beck elaborated that they “sought safety in the woods, in abandoned buildings, in the slums. In small gangs they begged, foraged for food, stole, to maintain life. These were a hardened group of youngsters by the time we got to know them. They would lie without provocation or reason. It had become habitual. Sometimes they would change their names from one interview to the next as if continuing to hide identity.” Rose surely got a taste of this at the DP camps he visited. At Zeilsheim, a report noted that the Jews “have developed a certain hardness and toughness of personality; it is that of course which was largely responsible for their survival.” At Landsberg, officials noted that black-market activities were rife: “They have had to trade and bargain to exist in the past. They don’t consider it wrong to continue.” This was not information anyone in favor of helping the survivors wished to publicize, and Rose’s fairy tale put the USNA in a bind. It helped the adoption cause but also made Rose a saintly figure the organization could not afford to criticize. As a result, Rose’s adoption wish was still being discussed as a possibility as late as August 1947, when a memo to Warburg revealed the scale of Rose’s desired impact: “Incidentally, part of Billy Rose’s idea is that if Mt. Kisco could be used for children, it would not only be of value for the children, but as a possible visual demonstration in connection with the whole emigration situation.”45 This was the last reference to Rose’s plan.

Proof that his desire to care for children was not a mere infatuation or publicity stunt is the quiet work he performed the following year on behalf of another group of Holocaust orphans. In 1948, Rabbi Michael Weissmandel, a survivor of the Nazi carnage, established in America a yeshiva to succeed the “Nitra Yeshiva, one of the jewels in the crown of prewar Hungarian orthodoxy.”⁴⁶ The rabbi found a site in Mount Kisco, where his Yeshiva Farm Settlement, with a student body of Jewish orphans, purchased a 250-acre estate for $100,000, which money, Weissmandel said, “we got from somewhere.”⁴⁷ Rose was likely one of the donors. In 1948, he was invited to a meeting of influential Jews who agreed to back the yeshiva against Mount Kisco opponents who wished to deny it a permit. That was not the end of the story. In 1950, Rose donated some of the $12,000 the yeshiva needed to pay for a new well and water system. The following year he made an additional gift.⁴⁸

A FABULOUS CHARACTER

The extraordinary Jewish events of late 1947 drew Rose’s attention toward a new project. In November the United Nations approved a plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. The prospect of a Jewish state immediately inspired Rose’s deal-making imagination. Two weeks after the UN vote, on December 15, Rose used his newspaper column to send an open letter to Chaim Weizmann, soon to be Israel’s first president, to suggest the Jewish state raise the money it needed to develop its economy and build an army by issuing bonds. The column’s syndication included Jerusalem’s Palestine Post, and the following month Israel undertook a study of the plan’s feasibility because “there was a growing recognition that there was a limit to funds available from charitable contributions.” Rose’s back-of-the-envelope figuring and assessment of the bond market’s attitude toward lending the new state half a billion dollars at 3 percent interest covered some of the ground a team of researchers delivered to Ben-Gurion. According to the historian Ilan Troen, “It is difficult to fix a date and an author to the idea of Israel Bonds,” but Rose’s column puts him in the running for the credit. “Who’ll buy these bonds?” wrote Rose. “Well, to begin with, the people who contributed over $200,000,000 in the past couple of years to United Jewish Appeal. It figures that if they dropped that kind of money into a tin cup, they’ll do even better when you offer them paper which is a first claim on the present and future assets of New Judea. . . . And I think a lot of investors will believe you when you tell them that folks who weren’t frightened by concentration camps, immigration quotas and Arab tribesmen aren’t going to be frightened by 3 per cent.”49

This last bit of romanticism echoed the thoughts of many Jews amazed and inspired by the prospect and then the advent of Israel in May 1948. I. F. Stone’s This Is Israel, with photographs by Robert Capa, the famed war photographer and ladies’ man whose assimilated Jewish identity was apparently quickened by the attractive female soldiers he depicted, presented Israel’s story as heroic, and Arthur Koestler’s 1949 Promise and Fulfilment, “one of the liveliest and freshest accounts of Israel’s war for independence ever written,” lionized the Bergson Boys—who were castigated by official American Jewry—with a “passionate defense of [their] role . . . in the creation of Israel.” In this spirited climate, when it seemed giants walked the earth and all was possible, it is not surprising that Israel’s government became interested in “a rather fabulous character . . . by the name of Billy Rose.”50

Rose’s Israel matchmaker was Alfred Strelsin, who introduced the showman to the Jewish state’s top people. Strelsin was a successful New York advertising man who had been a friend of Rose’s since at least 1943, when both worked with Bergson. But Strelsin’s affluence and interest in Jewish projects were not the only bases of their relationship. The two also shared the eccentricities and passions that, more than similar ideals, often make for the fondest bonds. Like Rose, Strelsin embellished his accomplishments “tenfold in the telling . . . [and] was always surrounded by a bevy of beauties.” In September 1948, he discussed with Rose the idea of helping Israel, and then during a visit to the country in October Strelsin proposed it to Israel’s government officials, including Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.⁵¹ When Strelsin returned home in December he arranged for Rose to lunch with Arthur Lourie, Israel’s new consul-general in New York; Eliahu Elath, Israel’s ambassador to the United States; and Isaiah Kenen, spokesman for Israel’s delegation to the United Nations. Lourie wrote to Israel’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs about the Rose meeting:

I must admit that a little to my surprise—and also to that of Eliahu, we were genuinely and favorably impressed with him. He is decidedly a person, and we were both convinced that he is sincere in his desire to be of service and that more than that, he is really capable of rendering an important contribution. He has exceptional contacts not only in the literary and artistic world, but also (as vide his close and continuing friendship with Baruch) in other spheres. He has imagination and organizing ability and it should be added that he is today a man of independent means. . . . I am not going into the details of our discussion at the luncheon. You will have the opportunity yourself when he comes to Tel Aviv of talking things over with him. But I do want to emphasize that we here . . . regard this as a matter of genuine importance which we think should be given favorable consideration and energetically followed through.⁵²

Rose’s upcoming visit to Tel Aviv was just one stop in a round-the-world tour he had once joked about taking in a letter to Winchell. Now he was about to set off on such a trip with Eleanor. Their journey began on January 7, 1949, and saw them travel through South America and Mexico, then Hawaii, Japan, China, and India, followed by Turkey, Greece, and Israel, with final stops in Rome, Paris, and London, before returning to New York in late April. But the only destination that required advance planning was Israel, because it was the only place where Rose intended to be more than a sightseer. In late December 1948, Lourie rushed Israeli officials to prepare for Rose letters of introduction to Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Rose had asked for them, and Lourie felt “it [was] appropriate that he should receive such letters.” They were delivered in one day. Both were signed by Eliahu Elath and were identically worded. The letter to Ben-Gurion read, “My dear Mr. Prime Minister: I wish to introduce you to Mr. Billy Rose of New York. I am sure that the name of Mr. Rose is familiar to you, for not only is he a well-known figure in many fields of activity in the United States and one of the most popular figures in journalism, but he is also a good Jew and a friend of ours.”53

What Israel hoped to derive from all this efficient preparation was the realization of Strelsin’s assurance that Rose wanted to help Israel win positive reception in the world press. Strelsin said that Rose was “excitedly interested in heading what he terms ‘The Israeli Information Bureau,’ with offices possibly in New York, Paris, London, and maybe Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires.” This was a singular opportunity because, Strelsin explained, “Rose, the columnist . . . has obtained more free [press] space than possibly any other man in America,” and his “publicity know-how . . . would make [him] the ideal man to head such a venture. Under his management, I am sure Israel would find itself in the top magazines and newspapers of the world, disseminating subtle propaganda on the highest level, and with the material so slanted that it would attune America particularly to a recognition and full acceptance of Israel as a sound investment field and a future industrial center linking the Near and Far East.”⁵⁴

WINE, WOMEN, AND WORDS

Strelsin’s buildup was backed up by Rose’s most recent triumphs. First, Bennett Cerf at Random House took over the Rose biography project from Harper’s after that firm failed to deliver, and Cerf got Rose to cooperate on the book with the writer Maurice Zolotow. On February 15, 1947, Collier’s magazine began running a series of excerpts from Zolotow’s forthcoming biography, which was entitled Billy Rose of Broadway. A month later the Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon opened on Broadway at Rose’s Ziegfeld and ran for 518 performances. Rose had wanted to produce the show, but under onerous conditions. “The contract Billy Rose wanted us to sign negated Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves,” Lerner said. Instead, it played at Rose's theater, and he boasted, “I made more money out of the show this way . . . and without taking any risks.”55

On June 2, 1947, Time magazine put Rose on its cover and the accompanying article sold the public on his already well-established image as a success who lived life as promoters of the American Dream promised it could be lived—in luxury and at ease, with money in the bank and a beauty by his side. The magazine avoided any hint of his interest in Jewish causes and ignored not only Rose’s work on We Will Never Die but also his 1945 visit to Jewish DP camps and his then-still-ongoing effort to adopt refugee orphans. Thirty years after the Gregg Writer congratulated Rose for his American virtues, it was still easier, safer, and more acceptable to describe Rose without reference to anything Jewish.

Meanwhile, Rose signaled he was having second thoughts about his forthcoming biography, because he struck a deal for Simon and Schuster to publish his autobiography. Max Schuster had been interested in a Rose book since December 1943, when he watched Rose follow Oscar Hammerstein’s remarks on Carmen Jones at New York’s Dutch Treat Club with a talk that “knocked the boys cold.” Rose’s “Pitching Horseshoes” column reawakened the publisher’s interest. “Pardon my ignorance,” began an internal S&S memo, “but has anyone ever published or thought of securing an autobiographical book by Billy Rose? His stuff in PM makes the best reading in the paper, and he must have a swell story to tell.” The answer was that Schuster was on it, and a deal was struck for Rose to produce a memoir in the form of a humorous collection of stories, including some new material and the rest reworked or simply reprinted from his column. The only question was which book should appear first: Random House’s Zolotow biography or the autobiography? Cerf argued that his firm’s biography should take precedence. It “can only help the book of columns later. . . . If the Horseshoe book [the autobiography] comes first, on the other hand, the biog will be just one big anticlimax,” he said.⁵⁶ Max Schuster agreed, but Rose had other ideas, and in 1947 he decided to issue his autobiography ahead of Zolotow’s biography. Cerf then withdrew his approval for the biography, which was never published. Lawyers forced Rose to compensate Zolotow for his trouble, and in October 1948 Simon and Schuster published and promoted Rose’s Wine, Women and Words, featuring original illustrations by Salvador Dali.⁵⁷

Zolotow’s biography included the tale of Rose nearly being buried alive, and the showman may have decided it was not a story he wanted known. Besides, Rose had managed his image successfully for thirty years and likely had no interest in delegating the job. The book also may not have been Jewish enough for Rose. Its opening line shared Time magazine’s outlook that his story was that of “a poor but honest American lad.”58 In contrast, Rose’s autobiography made room for a piece called “Somebody Hold My Coat,” which objected to all prejudice and racism and to antisemitism in particular. In high school, a fellow student “tried to pin a murder rap on me,” Rose wrote. “I told him I had an airtight alibi: I wasn’t anywhere in the neighborhood when He was killed, and I had witnesses to prove it.” And in “Me and My Pea-Shooter” he made a playful but not flippant case that he may have motivated Hitler to commit suicide. As Rose recounted the tale, in June 1941 the British arrested the high-ranking Nazi Rudolf Hess, and Rose wrote Lord Halifax, British ambassador to the United States, to suggest that he be allowed to put Hess on exhibit in a cage. “The coast-to-coast tour of Mr. Hess would take at least two years, and by that time, Mr. Hitler himself might be available as a follow-up attraction.”

Lord Halifax got into the spirit of the thing and in his reply assured Rose, “We are currently doing our utmost to secure Mr. Hitler for you.”⁵⁹ Rose released the correspondence to American newspapers in July, and the publicity brought it to the attention of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, which attacked Rose, as he proudly put it, for being a “loud-mouthed American showman, of a certain frowned-upon ancestry, who had the audacity to talk about putting Der Fuehrer on exhibition like an ordinary monkey.” When Hitler killed himself, part of his stated reason, quoted in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, was, “I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle, exhibited by the Jews, to divert his hysterical masses.”⁶⁰ Was Hitler thinking of Rose and his plan to put the Nazi leader on display? “I don’t know, but I certainly hope so,” Rose wrote.⁶¹

The publicity drumroll for Wine began on July 6, 1948, when Look magazine published the first in what was to be a series of eight installments of the book to herald its publication. “Move over, De Maupassant,” was the headline of a self-deprecating full-page ad in the Times book review section that sold the author as a lovable roughneck. “Guess who’s written a book!” was the attention grabber atop another ad, and anytime Rose liked he could attract publicity with a provocative open-letter “Horseshoes” column, such as the August 27, 1948, letter to George Sloan, chairman of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, suggesting that Rose take over its management. That set off fireworks. “Pitching Horseshoes” had also sprouted a new branch, with Rose sounding off Monday through Friday in five-minute radio broadcasts heard on 392 stations. The column appeared in about 245 newspapers. Rose’s thoughts blanketed the nation and brought him unsolicited applause from powerhouses such as Walter Annenberg, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I frankly admit to you a mistake in editorial judgment was made . . . in having failed to contract for your column Pitching Horseshoes,” he wrote Rose. “You are doing a magnificent job and I salute you cordially.”62

Several ghostwriters, such as Jerry Tallmer, later of the Village Voice, and the author Bernard Wolfe, helped Rose sustain the pace demanded by a daily column, but all agreed Rose made it his own. Wolfe Kaufman also wrote many columns, “though,” he said, “I repeat, I could not have made them half as effective if [Rose] did not re-write and edit them . . . [and] there is the fact that he loved ‘the magic of words.’ He really and truly did, and he was mighty good at toying with words.” Charles Samuels, author of a bestselling biography of the singer and actress Ethel Waters, remembered how Rose tested the columns: “He would sing them, hum them, whistle them . . . to see if they were rhythmic.” And the widow of the writer and Rose ghost Lee Rogow said, “Lee could have written that column and it could have been dead. It was Billy who made that column. When Lee said it was Billy’s column he was not only fulfilling his obligation. . . . Billy made that column. . . . Billy was a relentless editor.”⁶³

Rose struck a bold deal with Simon and Schuster. He put up all the money to publish Wine, Women and Words and in return split the profits with the publisher fifty-fifty. He dedicated the book to “B. M. B,” Bernard Mannes Baruch. Its first chapter is titled, “Look, Ma, I’m Writing.” The book was a bestseller.⁶⁴

DISCREET HOSTILITY

Despite this résumé and Strelsin’s puffery, the Israelis were wary. Arthur Lourie made additional inquiries about Rose and spoke with Meyer Weisgal, producer of the epic Jewish theatrical The Eternal Road. Weisgal agreed that “Billy Rose has excellent contacts and is capable of being extremely helpful,” but there was also the warning that, as Lourie delicately put it, “Billy Rose being what he is, we should be ready to avail ourselves of his help quietly.”⁶⁵ The irony was perfect. After years when Rose was careful to preserve his American credentials by segregating his Jewish work from his business career and even publicly rebuking Jewish allies such as Bergson, Israel now wished to keep its new Jewish image respectable by hushing its relationship with the loud Broadway operator. Rose’s dealings with Israel, Lourie said, should be carried out “more or less in an unofficial way, and [we must] make it clear to him that we are anxious to have his cooperation, but it would be very inappropriate for him to appear as a spokesman or a representative of the Government.” This was not what Rose wanted. He believed he was now ready to be a public Jew and official ally of Israel. “He is definitely opposed to being an arm of the Zionist Organization, Jewish Agency, or any organization that is not the government, per se,” Strelsin advised Ben-Gurion.

Rose requested, and Israel made, all the necessary arrangements to ease his arrival. Because his travel itinerary included a flight from New Delhi to Istanbul that made a refueling stop in Syria, his travel agents advised he delay getting his Israeli visa until after that leg of the trip. So at Rose’s request Lourie contacted the Israeli Consul in Athens with instructions to issue Rose a visa when he landed there on March 8. When the time came the visa was ready, and on March 9 Rose and Eleanor boarded a Czech Airways flight from Athens to Haifa, where, as Rose had requested, they were met by a government representative.66

“From the beginning of his trip, it was clear that the sight-seeing was of little importance to him compared with the contacts and discussions which he hoped to have in connection with the schemes he had in mind,” wrote Rose’s handler, Monica Dehn. Nevertheless, he managed to see almost the entire small country and visited “Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nazareth, Tiberias, Safed, Haifa, Acre, the immigrant childrens’ reception centre at Onim and the Misrachi children’s village at Ra’anana. He also had an evening at the Habimah and Mograbi theatres.” Like many future American visitors to Israel, Rose “was disappointed when he considered something done here less efficiently than, say, in the United States . . . [but] he considered [the War of Independence] ‘heroic’ and said it ‘made every Jew proud.’” Israel’s military elan was likely reinforced by Rose’s dinner with Lt. Col. Mordecai Maklef, who had been a senior officer during the war.⁶⁷ The spirit of the young country also touched him when he saw the celebrations for the raucous holiday of Purim that celebrates the Jews’ deliverance from genocide in ancient Persia. “The streets of Tel Aviv were alive with young and old Israelites singing and dancing. It was as though an entire nation was having a block party,” Rose told Polly. One of Rose’s Israeli contacts remembered that he observed the scene less with jubilation than with profound emotion. In an understated way that hinted at deep feeling, Rose said, “Let these people have a good time.”68

Dehn learned to disregard Rose’s practiced air of casual indifference and perceived that “despite an apparent apathy, the general impression gained was that he was strangely excited by what he saw.” Perhaps the most fascinating opportunity was the chance this small Jewish nation offered to increase his stature and historic role. His reception by the government’s top echelon surpassed anything he ever achieved in America. He never met Roosevelt or Truman and could not even get his White House contact, David Niles, to fix his Syrian transit visa problem. But on his first visit to Israel he met with and received orders from Ben-Gurion. In a diary entry of their March 16 meeting Ben-Gurion recalled,

Billy Rose came to me from New York. He thinks that the appeal this year will not be very successful. Jewish businesses in particular have suffered. . . . And we need money, money, and money. But there are many rich Jews that have vast amounts of wealth. We need to get them to invest in the country by means of appropriate advertising. He is prepared to open such an office in New York. . . . He gave me a list of rich people such as Harry Warner, Harold Lasker, Danny Orenstein, and others. I told him—he should act!⁶⁹

A plan was set in place. Rose and Israel would partner to fund an annual $250,000 public relations program in the United States to promote business investment in Israel. Israel would provide $75,000 of the budget, to be paid in three installments of $25,000, and Rose was expected to donate personally and find additional backers to come up with the remaining $175,000. To avoid the complications of getting Israel’s Treasury Department to approve the expenditure, the prime minister’s office requested the money and directed it to what became “popularly known as the B.R. Fund.”⁷⁰ The thrill of the Israel publicity plan was in the way it permitted the little showman to punch far above his traditional weight. Broadway was nothing compared to his new ability to sway and excite a government. Another thrill was Israel itself. When he returned to the United States, Rose got a call from Bernard Baruch, who wanted to know if Rose thought Israel would survive. “I had come away from Israel with the general impression that its people were (a) intelligent, (b) tough as nails, and (c) prepared to work like all get-out to make a go of their new lives,” Rose later recalled replying. Baruch responded, “A business or a nation with those qualities usually gives a good account of itself.”⁷¹

Israel was eager to implement Rose’s publicity plan. Less than a week after Rose returned to New York on April 17, 1949, the government wired $25,000 to the Israeli consulate, made payable to Billy Rose. Lourie thought this unwise and had the draft canceled and replaced with one made payable to the consulate.72 Lourie also made it clear that Rose would not have free rein to do publicity work as he wished. Instead, Rose would be “an associate member” of Israel’s Joint Public Relations Board. “Within the framework,” Lourie wrote Rose, “your own advice and cooperation would be of the greatest value and would be warmly welcome.” However, Lourie knew Rose would not like this. Rose was not an organization man, and Lourie telegrammed his government colleague Esther Herlitz, “DOUBT HIS READINESS ACCEPT CONDITIONS.”⁷³ Plus, Israel insisted that Rose remain a silent partner, a stance confirmed in a memo to the powerful Zeev Sherf, who served both as Israel’s first government cabinet secretary and as director of the prime minister’s office. Sherf’s press officer assured him that Rose “would of course function in an honorary capacity and without any official position. His connection with this operation would also be kept private.”⁷⁴ All of these conditions helped doom the enterprise, and Eliahu Elath wrote Lourie, “I doubt . . . that Billy Rose will return to [the United States] very much encouraged by Tel Aviv’s reception of his proposal.” Sure enough, by the summer, communication between Rose and Lourie came to a near halt. When they met on July 27 at Rose’s home, the two had not spoken in many weeks, and their discussion made it clear that Rose was drifting away. Dressed for the meeting in “silk pajamas” he gave Lourie “the impression that Mr. Rose’s enthusiasm for the project has diminished considerably and that it is unlikely that anything will come of it.”⁷⁵

Nothing did, and a contributing factor was the influence of Rose’s wife. Though Rose claimed Holm had joyously joined Tel Aviv’s Purim dancers, this appears to have been another example of his need to depict the women in his life as founts of love and support, such as when he falsely claimed Brice bore him no malice when he asked for a divorce. Eleanor did not embrace Israel. On the contrary, she communicated a “discreet hostility” toward the country, Monica Dehn wrote, and “was clearly anxious to prevent [Rose] from becoming personally involved in Israel’s affairs.”⁷⁶

UNRRA, Record Number S-0436–0042–06, folder “U.S. Zone—Team 311—Landsberg, 11/8/1945–15/10/1946,” Assistant District Medical Officer (Dr. A. Sainz de la Pena) to Files, November 24, 1945; AJJDC, NY AR45–54 00034 00925-Zeilsheim, Koppel S. Pinson, “Education Report for Zeilsheim,” 3.

“Billy Rose Reports Polish Jewish Abused; Suggests UNRRA Force a Housecleaning,” New York Times, December 17, 1945, 5.

LOC, Manuscript Division, Lee Strasberg Papers, Rose to Strasberg, September 25, 1959.

“Lehman Warns of Moral Decay Unless Palestine Opens to Jews,” New York Times, June 21, 1946, 6; I. F. Stone, Underground to Palestine (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1946), xiii.

Rafael Medoff, “When Leonard Bernstein ‘Dug’ the Irgun,” Forward, September 4, 2008, forward.com/opinion/14142/when-leonard-bernstein-dug-the-irgun-02473; Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2005), 195; Arthur A. Goren, “A ‘Golden Decade’ for American Jews: 1945–1955,” in American Jewish History, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock, vol. 4, American Jewish Life, 1920–1990 (New York: Routledge, 1998), 19.

AJJDC, NY AR45–54 00179 00022, “Meeting of the Emergency Administration Committee,” April 2, 1946, “Remarks by the Chairman,” no. 5, n.p., and NY AR45–54 00179 00016, “Meeting of the Emergency Administration Committee,” April 9, 1946, “Remarks by the Chairman,” no. 5, 1; Frank Emerson Andrews, Philanthropic Giving (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1950), 177.

NYPL, Schomburg Center, “An Interview with Dick Campbell,” disc 3; “Billy Rose Has a Big First Night,” Life, December 25, 1944, 24–26; William Du Bois, “Erstwhile Mahout Captures Sixth Avenue,” New York Times, December 10, 1944, section 2, 1; “Closing on Feb. 10 for ‘Carmen Jones,’” New York Times, February 2, 1945, 16.

CUL, oral history interview with Kitty Carlisle Hart, 1979, 5:692–93.

Bosley Crowther, “Between the Eyes,” New York Times, May 6, 1945, section 2, 1; Agnes de Mille, Portrait Gallery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 113.

“$75,000 for a Rembrandt,” New York Times, October 26, 1945, 21; “Auction News,” in The New International Year Book: A Compendium of the World’s Progress for the Year 1946, ed. Charles Earle Funk (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1947), 63; BRTD, Billy Rose Clipping File, Walter Winchell, “New York,” n.d.

Sidney Skolsky, “Movie Gossip from Hollywood,” New Castle News, February 21, 1946, 12; MHL, Paramount Pictures contract summaries, subject files, 15-f. 1422, Rose, Billy 1946.

AJJDC, “Meeting of the Emergency Administration Committee,” April 2, 1946, “Remarks by the Chairman,” n.p., and “Meeting of the Emergency Administration Committee,” April 9, 1946, “Remarks by the Chairman,” 1.

“Film Leaders Pledge a Million to the UJA,” Motion Picture Daily, April 16, 1946, 1, 6.

Theatre Guild Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, box 188, folder 4809, Rose to Lawrence Langner, April 9, 1946, and Rose to Helburn, April 22, 1946; “Mrs. Roosevelt to Address UJA Dinner April 30,” Film Daily, April 16, 1946, 1, 4; “Trade’s $1,000,000 N.Y.-UJA Quota,” Billboard, April 27, 2016, 52.

“ITOA Meet Yields $80,000 for UJA,” Motion Picture Daily, April 26, 1946, 7; “$80,000 for UJA Pledged at ITOA Meet,” Film Daily, April 26, 1946, 1; Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, May 3, 1946, www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday.

“UJA Raises Half of Industry Quota,” Film Daily, May 1, 1946, 1; “Raise $501,000 at N.Y. Dinner for Fund,” Showmen’s Trade Review, May 4, 1946, 18.

LOC, Irving Berlin Collection, Correspondence, box 354, Berlin to Rose, July 24, 1946, and Rose to Berlin, July 26, 1946.

Howard Morley Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 559; Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 63.

“200 Honor Rose,” Motion Picture Daily, December 13, 1946, 4; “Baruch to Present Rose Award at FJP Dinner,” Film Daily, December 10, 1946, 1, 4.

AJJDC, NY AR45–54 00189 0353, Bergson to Rose, May 10, 1946; NY AR45–54 00189 0352, Rose to Henry C. Bernstein, July 26, 1946; NY AR45–54 00189 0351, Myrtle Horowitz to Edward M. M. Warburg, August 9, 1946.

Atay Citron, “Ben Hecht’s Pageant-Drama: A Flag Is Born,” in Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, ed. Claude Schumacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 78; Rafael Medoff, “Ben Hecht’s ‘A Flag Is Born’: A Play That Changed History,” David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, April 2004, new.wymaninstitute.org.

Palestine Statehood Committee Records, HM 53, reel 8, group 690, series 3, box 10, folder 9, “Repatriation Fund,” 2.

Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 193; Stephen Nelson, “Only a Paper Moon”: The Theatre of Billy Rose (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), 126. Nelson says Rose “backed the show . . . but requested that his name not appear in the program credits.”

Garrett Eisler, “‘This Theatre Is a Battlefield’: Political Performance and Jewish-American Identity, 1933–1948” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2012), 10, 157.

Citron, “Ben Hecht’s Pageant-Drama,” 70–71.

Eisler, “‘This Theatre,’” 10.

Ibid., 9.

“Leading U.S. Jews Denounce Bombing,” New York Times, July 25, 1946, 9.

Quoted in Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936–1946,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (September 1996): 245.

Nelson, “Only a Paper Moon,” 126; BHP, box 61, folder 1586, Rose to Hecht, July 25, 1944.

Citron, “Ben Hecht’s Pageant-Drama,” 80–81.

Ibid., 92–93.

Westchester County Property Records, Liber 4425, 447, August 5, 1946.

“Harry S. Truman, Statement and Directive by the President on Immigration to the United States of Certain Displaced Persons and Refugees in Europe,” American Presidency Project, December 22, 1945, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12253.

“Refugee Arrivals Put at 6,213 in Year,” New York Times, December 24, 1946, 8; Michael Joseph Cohen, Truman and Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 112, 115; Shira Klein, “Displaced Persons Act,” in Anti-immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Kathleen R. Arnold (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2011), 1:162.

BBP, vol. 117, Rose, Billy, 1946, folder 96, Rose to Baruch, October 21, 1946, and Joseph Birstein to Edward Warburg, October 18, 1946; Billy Rose, “Sweet Music and Torture,” PM, November 12, 1946, reprinted Euclid Ave. Temple Bulletin (Cleveland, Ohio), November 22, 1946, 5–6, collections.americanjewisharchives.org.

Will Morrissey, On a Shoestring (Santa Barbara, CA: Willdon Paul, 1955), 208; Polly Rose Gottlieb, The Nine Lives of Billy Rose (New York: Crown, 1968), 44. According to affidavits filed by one Gordon D. Novel and his son, Sur, in New York’s Westchester County on October 24, 2011, and October 21, 2011, respectively, Gordon Novel claimed he spoke with Billy Rose in 1965 to discuss whether Rose was Novel’s biological father. Rose said that Novel’s mother, Sybil Nolan, “caused [him] to get a vasectomy.” (A Sybil Nolan did live in Dallas in July 1937, per “Obituary of Walter Earnest Nolan,” Valley Morning Star [Harlingen, TX], July 23, 1937, 4.) Novel also said he visited Rose’s sister Polly and that she confirmed that she had heard about his existence. The Novel family tried to get the courts to exhume Rose’s body for DNA testing to discover whether Gordon Novel was Rose’s son, but the request was denied. Novel family papers held by the author; information about Novel family provided in an e-mail to the author from Sur Novel, October 16, 2013.

“Billy Rose Plans to Bring 25 Orphans from Europe’s Camps and Rear Them Here,” New York Times, March 21, 1947, 8; Beth B. Cohen, “Face to Face: American Jews and Holocaust Survivors, 1946–54,” in “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 138; AJJDC, NY AR45–54 00114 00190, Beck to Louis Novins, March 19, 1947; JEB, #3083, box 2, folder 5, “Vignettes of famous people (ca. 1950–ca. 1970),” 3.

AJJDC, NY AR45–54 00114 00062, Carl Stern to Edward M. M. Warburg, August 12, 1947.

UNRRA, S-0125, box 64, file 1, Heise to UNRRA Displaced Persons Hq, March 24, 1947, and UNRRA US Zone Headquarters, Inter-Office Memo, Subject “Attached letter.”

UNRRA, S-0401, box 1, file 1, “Adoptions—Unaccompanied Children 7/8/1945–9/5/1947,” Molly Flynn to Myer Cohen, May 9, 1947.

MLS, box 123, “Wine Women and Song, Billy Rose, MLS Working Folder 2,” memo from HWS to JAG, July 31, 1946; John Wheeler, I’ve Got News for You (New York: Dutton, 1961), 172.

“A Rose Is a Columnist,” Time, June 24, 1946, 72; “Rose Cuffo Colyum [sic] Makes Grade; Goes Commercial Jan. 1,” Billboard, August 24, 1947, 38.

Billy Rose, Pitching Horseshoes, Nashua Telegraph, June 13, 1947, 11.

AJJDC, Pinson, “Education Report for Zeilsheim,” 3; UNRRA S-0436, box 42, file 6, “U.S. Zone—Team 311—Landsberg,” memorandum from O. A. Nelson to Brigadier General Walter J. Muller, December 10, 1945, 1; AJJDC, Stern to Warburg, August 12, 1947.

Julian Levinson, “Roth in the Archives: ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ and the Nitra Yeshiva Controversy of 1948,” provided by Levinson to the author in manuscript.

“70 Refugee Orphans to Farm and Study on Million-Dollar Estate in Westchester,” New York Times, March 16, 1948, 29.

In Memoriam, Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, 1892–1987 (New York, 1988), n.p. [Reminiscence of Mr. Moses Feuerstein]; Walter Bennett, “Yeshiva Case Is Unsettled,” New Castle Tribune, October 29, 1948, 1, 9; “Rabbinical Students Wed, Babies Toddle at Yeshiva,” New Castle Tribune, August 11, 1950; Mrs. Hanson W. Baldwin, “Kisco Yeshiva Lists Major Debts Paid Off,” New Castle Tribune, April 27, 1951, 4.

JEB, #3083, box 2, folder 5, 3; Billy Rose, “Billy Rose Writes Chaim Weizmann,” Euclid Ave. Temple Bulletin (Cleveland, OH), January 2, 1948, 3–4; S. Ilan Troen, “American Experts in the Design of Zionist Society: The Reports of Elwood Mead and Robert Nathan,” in Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, ed. Allon Gal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 207, 209, 211–12.

Michael Scammell, Koestler (New York: Random House, 2009), 335; TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Arthur Lourie to Walter Eytan, December 28, 1948.

Clifford Odets, The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets (New York: Grove, 1988), 121 (Odets misspelled the name as Stretsin); Judith Tydor Baumel, The “Bergson Boys” and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy, trans. Dena Ordan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 94; Meyer Weisgal, . . . So Far: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1971), 127. For Strelsin in Israel in October, see “Social & Personal,” Palestine Post, October 26, 1948, 2. Strelsin’s conversations with Rose took place before the trip, so likely in September.

Israel State Archives, Jerusalem, Lourie to Eytan, December 28, 1948.

WWP, box 1, folder 3, Rose to Winchell, November 12, 1947; BMB, vol. 117, “Mr. and Mrs. Billy Rose [Itinerary],” January 5, 1949; TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Lourie to [Arthur] Liverhant, December 30, 1948, and Eliahu Epstein to Ben-Gurion, December 31, 1948.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Strelsin to Ben-Gurion, February 28, 1949.

Maurcie Zolotow, “The Fabulous Billy Rose,” Collier’s, February 15, 1947, 11; Blair Howell, “Romanticism of Composers Lerner and Loewe First Seen in ‘Brigadoon,’” Deseret News, October 5, 2013, www.deseretnews.com; HB, box 26, folder 2, Rose, Billy & Stanley Walker, 1942–1945, CC [Cass Canfield] to BWH, July 31, 1945, and Billy Rose to Canfield, August 11, 1945.

HB, box 26, folder 2, George T. Bye to Cass Canfield, December 14, 1943; MLS, box 123, folder 2, memo from HWS to JAG, July 31, 1946, and Rose to Schuster, August 27, 1946, Cerf to Rose, August 24, 1946, and Schuster to Rose, August 28, 1946.

ECP, research folder 1, Maurice Zolotow, “Zolotow, Et Al., Also on Billy Rose Biogs,” Variety, n.d.

MZP, Billy Rose of Broadway, 1.

Billy Rose, Wine, Women and Words (New York: Pocketbook, 1950), 270–71.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 210.

Rose, Wine, 143, 270–72. Some of Rose’s story is verifiable. In July 1941, columnist John Truesdell ran news of Rose’s correspondence with Halifax and the idea for exhibiting Nazis, but searches of the Beobachter newspaper failed to unearth an article or cartoon about Rose. See “John Truesdell in Hollywood,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 17, 1941, 6.

MLS, box 123, folder 1, “Guess who’s written a book!,” advertisement, New York Times, October 25, 1948, “Move over, De Maupassant,” advertisement, New York Times Book Review, November 7, 1948, and “BILLY ROSE’S HILARIOUS NEW BOOK,” advertisement for Look magazine serial, New York Herald Tribune, June 22, 1948; MLS, box 123, folder 2, “List of Papers Taking BILLY ROSE,” October 14, 1948, and Annenberg to Rose, September 3, 1947; WHS, Mss 208, Sloan papers, box 15, folder 1, Billy Rose, Pitching Horseshoes, New York Herald Tribune, August 27, 1948, and accompanying articles about opera proposal. For radio program, see Billy Rose to Bob Stephan of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, November 25, 1947. Author has screenshot of this item featured on eBay on March 13, 2017.

ECP, research correspondence folder 2, Wolfe to Earl Conrad, September 20, 1966; ECP, interview folder 2, “Charles Samuels,” June 1, 1966, n.p. [1], and “Mrs. Lee Rogow,” June 15, 1966, 3, 5.

BHP, box 61, folder 1586, Rose to Ben Hecht, July 2, 1948, 2; MLS, folder 2, MLS memo, “LS session with Rose 11/11/47,” and memo from LS to MLS, RLS, JAG, November 12, 1947; Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900–1999 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2001), 96.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Lourie to Walter Eytan, January 3, 1949.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Rose to Lourie, January 6, 1949; Lourie to Rose, January 10, 1949; Ascher Moissis to Lourie, January 14, 1949; Strelsin to Ben-Gurion, February 28, 1949, 2.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, “Excerpt from Letter from Monica Dehn to I. L. Kenen, March 31, 1949”; “Social & Personal,” Palestine Post, March 16, 1949, 2.

Gottlieb, Nine Lives, 216; JDC, recording of Ralph Goldman dictating notes regarding Billy Rose, tape of reels 1, 2, and 3. Quote found at 27:15–27:25. This recording was obtained with the very generous help of Goldman’s daughter, Judy Baumgold. (Goldman says Rose was in Israel in 1949 for Independence Day, but the celebrations were for Purim.)

BGRI, David Ben-Gurion diary, entry dated March 16, 1949, 81–82.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Moshe Pearlman to Zeev Sherf, April 7, 1949, and Arthur Lourie to Reuven Dafni, December 20, 1949.

Billy Rose, foreword to Israel Revisited, by Ralph McGill (Atlanta: Tupper and Love, 1950), vii.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Lourie to Shoham HaMisrad, Tel Aviv, April 22, 1949.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Lourie to Rose, May 2, 1949, and Lourie to Herlitz, May 31, 1949.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Moshe Pearlman to Zeev Sherf, April 7, 1949.

TKP, Billy Rose correspondence, box 87/23, Eliahu Elath to Arthur [Lourie], March 14, 1949; Lourie, “Minute of Talk with Billy Rose (Wednesday afternoon, July 27, 1949).”

TKP, “Excerpt from Letter.”