Not Bad for Delancey Street

ISRAEL MUSEUM

“I’ve got time on my hands and would like to start a new project. Maybe something will come floating in.”1

It was October 22, 1959. Rose had recently turned sixty and was being coy with the press, just as in 1936, when he feigned indifference toward the World’s Fair. Something was up. It was true he had time on his hands. He was single again. Joyce Mathews had divorced him in July after three years of marriage, on the standard grounds of incompatibility.² Other business was also completed. The New York decorator Melanie Kahane had finished furnishing his palatial new home, and in August 1960 eight photographs of the great rooms done in Louis XVI and Jacobean styles—and graced with sculptures by Hugo Robus, Elie Nadelman, and Jacob Epstein; tables, chairs, and a mirror (the last a gift from Baruch) by Chippendale; antique Aubusson rugs; fabric-covered walls and tapestries by Fortuny of Venice; and more—would appear in Interiors magazine.³ Also behind him was the purchase and renovation of another New York theater. Rose had bought the National in June 1958 for $1 million and immediately hired London’s Oliver Messel, “a major presence in the history of British theatre design,” to redecorate it. After a further expenditure of $500,000 it reopened on October 18, 1959, as the Billy Rose Theatre.⁴

Its owner was richer than ever. Rose started purchasing AT&T stock in 1954, and in 1958 bought more in anticipation of the three-for-one stock split of April 1959, which left him with eighty thousand shares. This holding alone gave him the then-mighty income of $264,000 a year in dividends, the equivalent of $2.2 million today, and his Ziegfeld had also become a reliable producer.⁵ In 1956, NBC signed a seven-year lease for the theater and produced television shows there. “It’s like having a seven-year hit in a house,” Rose said of the regular cash flow. He flaunted his new prominence and defied bad news. Word of his 1959 divorce hit the papers on Thursday, July 23, and Rose made sure his columnist friend Leonard Lyons had a story to run that day about the fabulous time he had the previous Monday kidding around and shooting pool at his mansion with the screen stars Eva Marie Saint and Sidney Poitier, the playwrights Paddy Chayefsky and William Inge, and the famed African American diplomat Ralph Bunche, who in 1950 had won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a 1949 ceasefire between Israel and Arab states.6 Reporters still loved him. “We just happen to like cocky guys with ability, who can transform dreams into reality,” wrote a columnist. “Rose, beyond most men we have known, can do just that.” And as Rose hinted, a new project had floated in, one that became the greatest of his life and that “in size and emotion makes my Jumbos and Aquacades look like peep shows.”⁷

FREE THE HERZLS

Israel had a job for him. In 1958, after a three-year wait, the Jewish state won United States approval to use $822,000 in American funds to kick-start the creation of a new museum in Jerusalem, and by 1959 the planning was in its infancy but under way.⁸

Rose’s connection with it began with a March 19, 1959, letter from Nahum Goldmann, whose titles included president of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the World Zionist Congress, and the World Jewish Congress, and who some years before had been an enemy of Rose’s friend Peter Bergson. Goldmann wanted to enlist Rose on a special mission. “It concerns members of the family of Dr. Theodor Herzl, the great founder of the Zionist movement,” Goldmann wrote. The Herzl relations were two sisters, Magda and Elisabeth Herzl, imprisoned in Romania. “Maybe you could approach the Rumanian [sic] Ambassador whom you know and ask him to intervene so that they should be allowed to leave Rumania and join their families in Israel.”⁹ Rose first met Ambassador Silviu Brucan in 1956 when they planned a tour of Iron Curtain countries Rose took that fall, and Rose’s friendly dealings with him may have owed something to the Romanian’s Jewish origins; in 1916, he was born Saul Bruckner. It is not known whether Rose was willing or able to help the sisters, who were soon allowed to immigrate to Israel, but as a result of his letter Goldmann learned about the sculpture collection Rose had built since the Mount Kisco fire had destroyed many of his paintings, and he asked the childless bachelor about its ultimate destiny. This question quickly made the rounds among those interested in the new museum. Goldmann contacted Gershon Agron, who had been the publisher of the Palestine Post when Rose’s “Pitching Horseshoes” column appeared in it, and who in 1959 was mayor of Jerusalem, and Agron spoke to Walter Eytan, chairman of Israel’s Bezalel Art Museum, the institution the new museum would replace.10 In the summer of 1959 Eytan wrote Rose to expect a visit from a young American art historian, Karl Katz, the Bezalel’s director, and Rose perked up at the prospect of this new Jewish action.¹¹ “Israel—and I know it like the palm of my hand—has excited me,” he wrote Lee Strasberg on September 25.¹²

Israel intrigued him in a new way that year when he spotted Miriam Hadar, Miss Israel of 1958, at the “21” restaurant and walked up to her table to say hello. The twenty-four-year-old beauty had a boyfriend and was not attracted to the sixty-year-old showman, but she did find him fascinating company. “I’m five-eight and six feet with heels. He felt so little next to me,” said today’s Miriam H. Weingarten. “But when you speak with him and get to know him better he’s eight feet tall.” Rose attended the talks the Jerusalem native gave in New York for the American Friends of Hebrew University, and they knew people in common, including Agron.¹³ Then on October 21 Katz wrote Rose, “I plan to be in the States this winter and would be grateful if you could spare some time for me to see you.”¹⁴ A meeting was arranged for early December.¹⁵ “We were grasping at every straw to try to find money,” Katz said.¹⁶ The museum got more than money. It got Billy Rose.

“CUT THE BULL____”

“He was living in that incredible house . . . it was unbelievably palatial . . . over the top plush,” Katz recalled.¹⁷ The showman’s instincts still hit bull’s-eyes. Rose knew the power of staging, and the house, with a “living room that may have been slightly smaller than Madison Square Garden,” was one of the ways he defended himself and conquered others.¹⁸ When he and Moss Hart argued over an unattractive character in Hart’s 1949 Light Up the Sky that resembled Rose, the house eventually made the peace between them. “Moss wanted so badly to see his house,” Kitty Carlisle Hart said, that he patched things up in order to visit.¹⁹ When the butler admitted him, Katz also was awed. Then “this little guy walks in, I’ll never forget,” Katz said, “in bedroom slippers, with a red shirt on with a rose in blue on the pocket of the shirt, and said, ‘OK, kid, what’s that?’ He pointed to a piece of sculpture. And I said, ‘I think that’s a Daumier.’ He said, ‘Right. What’s that?’ ‘I don’t know—I think it’s a little study by Rodin?’ ‘Right. What’s that?’ ‘Oh, I think that’s a Zadkin [sic].’ ‘Right. OK, come on in.’ I said, ‘What if I didn’t pass the test, Mr. Rose?’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t have let you in.’” (To make sure his interviewer understood the nature of this meeting with Rose, Katz yelled out Rose’s lines.)20

The two men then went to an office, where Rose sat in a barber’s chair and looked over the plans for a museum on a hill in Jerusalem. Rose already knew what he wanted. “I think you should have a sculpture garden,” he said.²¹ Katz thought it was a terrific idea, since “there weren’t many sculpture gardens in the world at the time: there were three or four.”²² Things now moved quickly. The next day Katz “was so excited” that he ran to talk with Ralph Goldman, an American who had left his position in Israel at Ben-Gurion’s office to head museum fundraising at New York’s America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF). “I remember we had lunch together at the La Terrain Hotel on 45th Street,” Goldman said. “We spent two good hours getting all excited” about Rose. But Goldman, as “the practical person, was trying to think how can we get Billy Rose to commit himself to give this particular gift.”²³

There was an opportunity to accomplish this on an upcoming Friday, either December 11 or 18. That evening a kind of museum-awareness event was scheduled at the Manhattan home of Siegfried and Lola Kramarsky, important art collectors. Goldman thought it an ideal place for Rose to make a public announcement of his sculpture gift to the museum and “clinch the deal,” he said. The only hitch was that the Kramarskys were “very ‘proper’ people and they were not people to whose home you invite a Billy Rose.”²⁴ His “reputation—with the tall roses and tall girls, the saloons and all the rest of it—he really did not belong in that society,” Goldman said.²⁵ In 1949, Israel’s government had had the same problem with Rose, and before the sculpture garden was completed, both orthodox Jews and Israel’s writers and intellectuals also objected to him. This snobbery was a Jewish problem Philip Roth put his finger on when his Alexander Portnoy complained, “I am soiled, oh, I am impure—and also pretty fucking tired, my dear, of never being quite good enough for The Chosen People!”²⁶ Rose would also rage at his fellow Jews.

Still, Goldman was desperate to get Rose on the record and invited him to the gathering anyway, and Rose shared his sculpture garden plan, charmed everyone, and thrilled Goldman, who later said, “I was so exhilarated by the evening—meeting Billy Rose, and Billy Rose saying he was giving his sculpture—it was the biggest gift we could get for the Museum.” The next day Rose had the Kramarskys visit his mansion to see his art, and that evening Rose told Goldman he needed Isamu Noguchi to design his sculpture garden and wanted to meet him the next day, a Sunday. Rose had purchased a Noguchi sculpture no later than 1955, and in 1958 Noguchi’s fame grew because of the gardens he had created at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters. Goldman did not know Noguchi so he contacted Baroness Bethsabée de Rothschild, who did, and on Sunday, Rose and Noguchi had lunch. “I wanted to show Billy Rose that if he does business with us, we deliver,” Goldman said.27

Goldman next arranged to have Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Avraham Harman, and Sam Rubin, president of the AICF, accept Rose’s gift. They all met at Rose’s home, where, according to Goldman, “one potentially dangerous moment” occurred. Rubin got carried away and rhapsodized that “such a gift may bring peace between Israel and Egypt and . . . how the nations would meet and governments would forget war.” Goldman recalled that Rose responded with, “‘Cut the bull____,’ with all the dirty words associated. And that was of course very embarrassing to me.”²⁸ But the meeting brought the deal closer to fruition, and on December 20 the Bezalel’s Eytan wrote Rose, “We need not tell you how immensely grateful and enthusiastic we are about the prospect of receiving this extraordinary donation, which will no doubt be one of the most important individual contributions made to the development of our Museum.”²⁹ Still, the dimensions of the gift were unknown, including to Rose, who had not thought through the details. He was just running on his obscure but powerful source of drive. “He was overflowing with vitality, [it] streamed out of him,” said Stephen E. Weil, an art gallery executive. “Boundless energy.”³⁰ Meanwhile, naysayers told Goldman, “Billy Rose is just a mirage—he’ll never deliver.”³¹

So Goldman decided to seize an upcoming event for an even more public announcement of Rose’s gift. The annual AICF gala dinner and concert, featuring the New York Philharmonic, violinist Isaac Stern, and an audience of one thousand was set for January 6, 1960, at the Waldorf Astoria. The guest of honor was Spyros P. Skouras, president of 20th Century-Fox. The program was already printed, and Skouras’s name was on the cover. Rose was not part of the organization, and his name was nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, Goldman decided this was the perfect venue for Rose to commit to his gift. “Then Billy Rose gets into the act,” Goldman recalled. “He feels that if he’s going to make a presentation of the gift at the Waldorf Astoria it has to be staged by him, because only Billy Rose knows [how] to stage!” Rose decided to transport Jacob Epstein’s sculpture The Annunciation from his home to the Waldorf as a photo-op prop. At five feet, five inches, it was taller than Rose, and for the occasion he, Katz, and Goldman agreed to call the piece Hannah, since its true name denoted the moment the Virgin Mary learned from the angel Gabriel that she would give birth to the Son of God. The papers would have had a field day. “Anyway, at the dinner Billy Rose stole the show,” Goldman said. The Rose magic that had averted an insurrection by the cast of Jumbo twenty-five years before was still operational. “His enthusiasm was such that whether [the AICF dinner guests] believed he would do what he was saying about donating the sculpture or not didn’t matter. Everybody was ultimately taken in by him. And the meeting ran about three-and-a-half hours instead of the one-and-a-half that had been scheduled. . . . His enthusiasm was inspirational. It was everything.”32 Katz’s assessment was the same: “Rose, true to form, stole the show with his surprise announcement. When it was his turn at the podium, he revealed that he would send his entire sculpture collection to Israel and fund the design and realization of a . . . sculpture garden designed by Isamu Noguchi.”³³ The reaction of the audience at the Waldorf might have been bewilderment, rather than gasps. They had no reason to expect him there, and the Israel Museum project was little known. But over the previous quarter century the press had learned that Rose was good copy, and newspaper reports on the AICF dinner were all about Billy Rose.

TWO-TON KNICKKNACKS

The next day the news ran in all the New York dailies. The Mirror, Herald-Tribune, Post, Times, and more reported on his gift to Israel of fifty sculptures and a garden to display them, which together amounted to a grand $1 million gesture. It was Rose who made the story worth reporting, and the headlines made sure not to bury the lead, giving greatest prominence to his name in examples such as, “Billy Rose Gives His Art to Israel,” “Rose Gives $1 Million Art Collection to Israel,” and “Billy Rose Is Giving Israel Million in Art.” The Post revisited the news three days later on Sunday, January 10, with a feature that included nine photographs of the works destined for Israel, but the topper was Time magazine’s “Bonanza from Billy.” The February 8 issue devoted four pages to Rose’s gift, including three pages of photographs that introduced readers to the showman’s art collection, including Antoine Bourdelle’s massive The Warrior, Rodin’s Adam, and Aristide Maillol’s Chained Liberty. Most striking about the news coverage was Rose’s open embrace of Israel. “I’m very close to these pieces, naturally, but I’m closer emotionally to the State of Israel,” he told the Herald-Tribune, and to the Times he said, “If 2,000,000 people [of Israel] can gamble their flesh and blood, I can gamble a few tons of bronze and marble.” Though he obscured his Jewish motivation in his interview with Time—“What was I going to do with these two-ton knickknacks—leave them to my sister Polly?”—his general openness regarding his feelings of loyalty and love toward the Jewish people signaled a change in the times that permitted him to express and enjoy such sentiments for the first time.34

In the years since Rose in 1944 told the Washington Post that he produced We Will Never Die only because it was a good show, the conditions of American Jewish life had shifted profoundly. The antisemitism of the war years had faded, and by 1962 an opinion poll found that just 1 percent of respondents felt Jews were a threat to America, a dramatic reduction from the 25 percent of 1944. The moment that the productions Fun to Be Free, We Will Never Die, and A Flag Is Born paved the way for had by 1960 largely arrived, and American Jews had not just the freedom to express Jewish identity alongside their American one but, with Israel, something new to express. Israel’s birth, survival, and energy lifted American Jewish spirits well before its spectacular victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, and during the 1950s, whether by reading books about the country, participating in or watching Israeli folk dance performances, shopping in what by 1957 was a surge of Jewish gift shops stocked with Israeli products, or attending Israel Philharmonic Orchestra concerts when the musicians toured the United States in 1950–51 and again in 1960, Israel offered Jews a way to take “pride in the Jewish state and, by extension, the Jewish people as a whole,” writes the historian Emily Alice Katz.³⁵ Popular culture took advantage of the buoyant mood with a hyperbolic expression of Jewish pride. “More tourists fly in to Tel Aviv with copies of Leon Uris’ best-selling novel [Exodus] than with copies of the Bible,” the Associated Press reported in November 1959.³⁶

Rose had been waiting for this moment his whole life. He was now able to indulge his American and Jewish passions, his native patriotism and his love of Israel that were both equally part of him. In a January 1960 interview with a journalist for North American Jewish weeklies, he spoke of how his mother helped bring Jewish refugees to America. “[Rose] had learned early the universal and specific meaning of ‘mitzvah’ and he carried that heritage with him through the years. Over and again, Billy reverted to the treasure that was his legacy from his mother,” reported Nathan Ziprin, who asked Rose two important questions. “‘How does it feel to give away a collection to which one is so attached?’ His reply was: ‘Fine,’” wrote Ziprin. “‘And how does it feel to give it to Israel?’ I thought Billy would pour out a stream of sentimentality. Instead, he stunned me with a terse but highly tragic and meaningful answer: ‘It provides the reason for my whole idiot existence.’”37

The clamor of publicity that greeted Rose’s sculpture donation—all of it diligently seeded by Rose—was a boon to the obscure museum project. “For the first time the building of the Israel Museum became known not only to the Jewish world in the United States but also the American public,” Goldman said. Katz agreed. “That was a shot in the arm that we really, really needed,” he said. “No one knew about the Israel Museum, about the whole effort. All of a sudden there was this big article . . . in Time. . . . And so it was a huge shot in the arm for the project.”³⁸

On February 18 Noguchi signed a contract with the AICF to design the five-acre Billy Rose Sculpture Garden, as it was then called. Noguchi was at first reluctant to accept the assignment, apparently because he was not Jewish. “This [Rose] would not accept, contending that one who voluntarily incarcerated himself in a war relocation camp could not refuse such a challenge,” Noguchi said. Rose’s argument was direct and profound. He understood that the Japanese American artist’s experience of exclusion and dislocation made him an ideal choice for the Israeli project, and Noguchi later decided Rose was right. “My going to Israel was in a way like going home and seeing people like myself,” he said. “The Jew has always appealed to me as being the endless, continually expatriated person who really did not belong anywhere.”³⁹ Few gave Rose credit for such insight, and he deliberately abjured anything resembling a sensitive artistic temperament, but he had a grasp of what artists were about. The paintings he collected were “very exciting because these painters almost invariably were wild hearts, desperate fellows,” Rose said.⁴⁰

The contract made it clear that Rose would donate his sculpture and funds to the AICF, a tax-exempt American organization, which would pay Noguchi the fee the two men agreed upon: $25,000 plus $30 per diem for expenses when Noguchi was in Israel, and first-class jet travel to and from that country. “In those days, that was already a considerable amount of money,” Noguchi said.⁴¹ In addition, Rose committed to spend an additional $100,000 to construct the garden. It was these amounts, when added to the value of the donated sculptures, that yielded the newsworthy $1 million gift.42

JERUSALEM OR BUST

Rose’s enthusiasm and determination that his garden and the museum both be successful made him a determined foe of enemies and an indefatigable champion of the cause. Almost immediately after the contract was signed, he and Noguchi made their first trip together to Israel, where the pair were honored on March 1 at the Bezalel. When Rose returned home he organized for the middle of May a museum benefit at his mansion, where one hundred people viewed photographs of Jerusalem and the museum site and heard Max Abramovitz, the New York architect then at work on Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, speak “with great enthusiasm about the entire plan of the museum project.”⁴³

At the same time, Rose became incensed that Israel’s orthodox Jews objected to his sculpture garden. During his Israel visit he met with Binyamin Mintz, who served in the nation’s parliament as a member of the United Religious Front, and while the religious politician gave “the impression, after long conversations, that he would raise no great fuss about this matter,” others did. The religious community viewed it as a direct contravention of the Jewish law against graven images and a project grossly ill suited to Jerusalem. Rose had no sympathy for this position. “As I see it, from where I sit, this is all so much poppycock,” he wrote Teddy Kollek, a key originator and backer of the Israel Museum idea, who was then at work in the office of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. “No one will bow to these works, no one will worship them. . . . This seems like an easy way for a man to get his name in the papers.”⁴⁴

Secular Israelis also had qualms about the sculpture garden, as the eminent Hasidic rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Brooklyn stressed in May to the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, whom Schneerson addressed as Chaim Yaakov Lipchitz. “I will cite the opinions of some prominent Jews on this project . . . and I bring only these as no one can accuse them of ‘religious bias,’” Schneerson said. Several of the objections were principled. The poet Nathan Zach called on Jews to “display a little respect for our past.” But others just did not like Rose. “The would-be benefactor should be told that not all gifts can be accepted unconditionally!” wrote the author David Zakkai, and Prof. Dov Sadan characterized the gift as “a collection of statues which had been assembled by the caprice of a pampered individual.” Uri Avnery, editor of the sometimes racy HaOlam Hazeh (This World), which Schneerson called “a radically ‘modernistic’ publication,” also found the idea in poor taste and castigated Rose as an “alien ‘benefactor.’” Schneerson had no love for Rose either, and wrote Lipchitz, “You surely know that the whole project was started by one whose profession is associated with burlesque and night-show business, New York style.”45 Rose, however, would not budge, and he told Kollek that if the sculpture garden was “not set up in Jerusalem, my collection would not be set up anywhere in Israel.”⁴⁶

Initially there were reports of a compromise that would keep representative as opposed to abstract works out of the main display area, but it seems the real breakthrough was in the choice of the proper Hebrew word to describe the sculpture garden.⁴⁷ “I visited a number of rabbis, trying to understand the injunction and devise a solution,” wrote Karl Katz. “If we directly translated Sculpture Garden, it would be Gan Ha’pesalim—literally ‘garden of idols.’ That clearly wouldn’t work.”⁴⁸ Instead, it was decided that the garden would be called an art garden and use the Hebrew word for art, which was not objectionable.

With this obstacle overcome, Rose assumed more responsibility for the museum. On November 30, 1960, Abba Eban congratulated and thanked him for becoming head of the finance committee, making him one of the most important players in the development not just of his sculpture garden, but of the museum as a whole.⁴⁹ Ralph Goldman later said, “And if you know anything about Billy Rose, you know that meant he also had to be the whole committee.”⁵⁰ Rose soon undertook a world tour to collect money and art. In February 1961, he visited Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, to buy Mario Cravo sculptures, and upon his return planned additional major offensives: a June trip to London and an August visit to Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival to view the sculptures of the late Sir Jacob Epstein, meet Lady Epstein, and land Epstein’s works; a fundraising dinner for major donors at his New York home; a similar event in London at the home of Arthur Lourie, now Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, who had worked with Rose on the Israel public relations plan in 1949; and a meeting in Geneva with Baron Edmond de Rothschild.⁵¹

Rose succeeded everywhere. “There is a small amateur bandit at large in the art world today who is making the recent and spectacular hauls,” wrote the syndicated columnist Inez Robb in an article that appeared in 140 newspapers on August 21, 1961. Rose had just announced two victories. Lipchitz donated to the museum 300 of his original plaster casts and Lady Epstein gave 250 of her husband’s original casts. Israel sent Rose ecstatic congratulations. “The magnificent gifts of the two sculpture collections have received even more publicity here [in Israel] than in the States,” wrote the future museum director, Yohanan Beham, “and if you continue in this manner some people might consider you a serious candidate for Prime Minister.”52 (Lipchitz later reneged on his deal with Rose and never donated the sculptures to the Israel Museum, probably because of Schneerson’s disapproval.⁵³)

By November 19, Rose’s plans were set for the December 7, 1961, fundraising dinner at his home, and he telegrammed invitations to the publishers Max Schuster and Bennett Cerf, his cartoonist friend Al Hirschfeld, the art collector Joe Hirschhorn, the film executive Jack Warner, and apparently Marlene Dietrich, who was among the fifty guests expected to donate at least $25,000 per person or couple “for the Jerusalem Museum now under construction on a hill in the Holy City,” as Rose’s invitation worded it.⁵⁴ The guest of honor was to have been Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, but Stevenson had to bow out. Rose replaced him with Nahum Goldmann.⁵⁵ The event was luxurious. Each diner had a dedicated waiter, and the chef Dione Lucas prepared the food. Dinner “began with 50 individual cheese souffles. They all had to come out at the right time and in the right shape, and we had to take them upstairs quickly before they fell,” Lucas said. Then came “baby trout with almonds, served with cucumber ice sherbert and then stuffed roast veal with chantrelles [sic], and covered with a mousseline sauce.” A “tossed green salad with hot brioche and a pineapple filled with pineapple sherbert and fresh fruit” completed the feast.⁵⁶ The royal treatment apparently set a munificent tone—and perhaps induced a sense of indebtedness—that opened wallets. Ralph Goldman and Karl Katz were there, and on December 9 Goldman wired Israel with the good news. “A few minutes ago we received Ralph’s cable informing us of the overwhelming success of your dinner,” Beham wrote Rose. “Please accept my warmest congratulations and sincerest thanks. While I hope to see you in the not too distant future, I wanted to let you know that the fruits of your efforts are making my life considerably easier, because now we shall be able to continue the Bezalel [art] wing along the lines [of] the Archaeological wing [which] has expanded.” As Beham indicated, the money was significant enough for the museum to realize grander ambitions. The dinner raised $600,000, Goldman said.⁵⁷

By the time word of the New York dinner reached Israel, Rose was in London to work on last-minute details for the fundraiser there. “It’s taken me the best part of a year to put this one together and if everyone shows up who has accepted, my chances of getting a good piece of money are excellent,” he wrote Kollek.58 He did not exaggerate his long devotion to the London fundraiser. Rose was already heavily invested in it by late June, when he wrote Lady Epstein’s attorney that “Arthur Lurie [sic], Israel Ambassador to Great Britain, is holding dinner party for me at his home in London,” then set for late September, and expected guests included Isaac Wolfson, owner of a retailing conglomerate, the financier Jack Lyons, and the wide-ranging businessman Charles Clore, as well as “a dozen other wealthy men and women who are interested in Art and, we hope, in a major art Museum in Israel.”⁵⁹ The London dinner also was a success. Rose told Kollek about it on December 27, and the news that Rose had again triumphed and pulled off a New York–London fundraising double-header that together yielded more than $1 million elated museum officials and brought Rose more congratulations, but apparently not with the enthusiasm he desired.⁶⁰ On January 17, 1962, Jerusalem mayor Mordechai Ish-Shalom tried to appease an apparently sulking Rose: “I have already expressed in previous letters and cables our deep appreciation for your latest successes in New York and London and our admiration for everything you are doing . . . (but I never received any reply).” Rose may have felt he deserved more extravagant effusions of gratitude. His fundraising was crucially important, as Beham made clear on May 28 when he informed Rose that the museum decided to add yet more pavilions, after learning “of the success of your two dinners.”⁶¹

As for Baron Edmond de Rothschild, in December 1961 Rose took time away from planning the London dinner to travel to Geneva to meet him and declare him—with a New Yorker’s democratic informality—“a very nice fellow.” The baron assured Rose he would keep the promise he made to Kollek to “act as Chairman of an International Art Committee for the Jerusalem Museum of Art.” Rose further commended Rothschild to Kollek as “a warm first rate human being.”⁶²

MAKE BULLETS

The years 1960 and 1961, characterized by Rose’s tenacious fundraising and his need for praise and control, continued through the museum’s 1965 opening and established him, according to Kollek, as one of the Israel Museum’s “greatest and most troublesome benefactors.”⁶³ That formulation summed up Rose’s way of life. “Tough guys go further than sweet phonies,” he reminded Kollek, whose characterization of Rose may have been spurred by a 1965 Rose letter that accused him of a double-cross.64 “To welsh on this contract with my sculpture on your doorstep is too much. You all have a lesson to learn from the goyim,” Rose wrote, venting some of the Jewish venom he had often been served.⁶⁵ Or Kollek may have had in mind a letter of August 3, 1964, in which Rose angrily complained about the planned arrangement of museum buildings, which he feared might obscure his garden. “What in the name of Christ does this mean,” Rose demanded, with a particularly unsuitable choice of words for a project in Israel. “I sincerely hope that I misunderstood your paragraph. It’s like telling me that you’re going to build a building directly in front of the new Knesseth [sic].” Rose did misunderstand, Kollek told him. And the future Jerusalem mayor, who would himself emerge as one of the world’s great showmen and personalities, composed just the sort of letter necessary to reassure Billy Rose. “We shall still have the nicest Museum Hill in the world,” he said, “the most suitable and the most unspoiled site that anybody anywhere can imagine in the centre of any capital city in modern times.”⁶⁶

Ralph Goldman was exposed to the same volatile yet careful man and wrote Beham, “Billy will probably seek assurances until the day that the garden is completed and all the sculpture is there. Despite his show-business-like behavior, he is a calculating and extremely cautious individual.” But the fact remained “that the museum in Jerusalem means a great, great deal to him. The garden will be great if the museum is great. He will be difficult, make demands and create problems—but if you and I did not have any problems, what would we do.”⁶⁷ Jerusalem was Rose’s chance at immortality—Jewish immortality. “Being the kind of practical man that he was, Rose knew that nowhere else in the world would his name be celebrated and perpetuated as much as it would be in a city like Jerusalem,” Goldman said later.⁶⁸ However, this did not mean he trusted Jerusalem’s tailors. When his luggage was lost by an airline, he did not buy new clothes in Israel but instead had the King David Hotel clean and press his suit every night. “He refused to shop in Israel,” Katz said. “The goods would be inferior.”⁶⁹

Still, Rose was hardly insensible to Jerusalem’s enticements and the excitement of being part of the ancient Jewish story and land. In a letter to Hillel Fefferman, the garden’s prime contractor, Rose wrote, “Your executions of Noguchi’s creations are dazzling and wonderful. The retaining walls you have built, judging by the photographs, look as if they were carved out of the Bible with Moses himself collecting and setting the stones. . . . Most sincerely, I am happy that you are doing this job, both for me and for Israel. Judging from the photographs, we are working on something which may be one of the genuine wonders of the Holy Land. If it tops the entire museum and the Shrine of the book well, that will be just too bad.”70 That chance of achieving a masterpiece persuaded Rose to spend five times his initial budget of $100,000. By March 1964, his expenditures exceeded half a million dollars. “That’s as far as I want to go,” Rose wrote Beham.⁷¹

But he went further. In April he visited Joe Hirschhorn in Connecticut. Rose was itching for him to make a big sculpture donation, and he longed to get the “zillionaire art collector up on the [Jerusalem] hill.” The same month Rose traveled to Chicago, threw a big party at the Standard Club, and bagged sculptures by Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti. On May 29, he held another “fancy black-tie” fundraiser at his New York mansion and in June was back in Chicago, where he landed “seven paintings worth half million or better including outstanding Cubist portrait Picasso large Kline magnificant [sic] Klees.”⁷² At the end of June he flew to Israel. Rose had finally persuaded Hirschhorn to visit Jerusalem, and during their stay together Rose won Hirschhorn’s agreement to lend the museum thirty-seven sculptures, a victory Rose celebrated with a handwritten contract promising that on his eightieth birthday he would treat the Hirschhorns “to a beautiful party, anywhere in the world they want it (plus 1 share of att).” On November 9, 1964, Rose held yet another fundraising dinner at East Ninety-Third Street. It was a triumphant year, spoiled only when Hirschhorn’s curator nixed the sculpture loan on November 11. He could not risk damage to the artworks during shipment.⁷³ But Rose never quit. In 1965 he was still campaigning for the museum, and on February 23 he invited Samuel Goldwyn to a fundraiser scheduled for March 2 at the Beverly Hills home of Edward G. Robinson. Rose flew to California for the event, and so did Teddy Kollek. Goldwyn refused to attend.⁷⁴

As the May 11, 1965, opening day neared, Rose concentrated on publicity with the professionalism he first exhibited at his Jumbo pitch to Jock Whitney. On February 4 he appeared on the Today Show. For a half hour “Rose was poised, positive and superbly effective, and did not let two sentences pass without referring to Israel in some favourable light,” the Israel Information Services office informed Kollek and Beham. “We had known in advance of this projected appearance, but I did not anticipate such a solid handling, with models, background, anecdotes and dignified salesmanship.” Israeli ambassador Katriel Katz was also moved by Rose’s performance, writing to him, “Believe me, Mr. Rose, it is not only the Israel National Museum, it is all of Israel, which owes you a debt we cannot repay.”75 It was the season for gratitude. The job was done. “It must be months since I even uttered the words ‘Thank You’ for all that you have done and are doing,” Kollek wrote Rose. “Billy, you have been wonderful, utterly selfless and dedicated. . . . You have done a great thing for Israel and a great thing for our people. We are proud of your friendship and we shall prize it as long as we live.”⁷⁶

The feeling was mutual. “I love those two million loonies in Israel,” Rose told a reporter. But a little bit of sentiment went a long way. So Rose continued: “They asked me, ‘If the Arabs attack, what’ll we do with your sculpture?’ I told them, ‘Melt it down and make bullets.’”⁷⁷