“THE EXAMPLE WE SET”
Like Belle Gardner, Effie Stern made a great to-do over birthdays, her own especially, and at intervals of not more than five years she saw to it that an especially spectacular gala was given in her honor in some exotic place. For her sixtieth birthday she flew her entire family to Bermuda, where she insisted on taking scuba-diving lessons. For her seventieth, all the relatives were flown to Paris, and for her seventy-fifth it was to Venice. At this point the Rosenwald-Stern clan had grown to such proportions—what with grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and in-laws, ranging in age from eight or nine to almost ninety—that an entire floor of the Gritti Palace Hotel was required to house the week-long party.
As always, every detail of the adventure was organized by the hostess. During the day, the guests were permitted to come and go as they chose, though printed lists suggesting a visit to this or that church, monument, palace, or museum were distributed daily. And throughout the day the door to the suite belonging to the matriarch—who had seen all the sights of Venice long before—was kept open to receive members of her family while she held court. At six o’clock, everyone was expected to gather in the principal suite for cocktails. Reservations for the entire group would have been made well in advance at a number of the city’s top restaurants, and Edith would read off the list of choices, along with a few words about the atmosphere, setting, and menu specialties of each. Then a vote would be taken, the reservations at the rejected restaurants canceled, and the party would repair to a fleet of gondolas which would carry them all to the elected eating place.
For her eightieth birthday, in 1975, Edith Stern announced to her family—now grown even larger—that the locale would be Walt Disney World, which had recently opened in Florida. Her sister Marion Ascoli was apprehensive about this choice, and told her so when Edith first mentioned the notion on the phone. Marion was certain that, at the Disney World Hotel, her sister would not find food, service and accommodations at the level she was accustomed to in such places as the Gritti Palace and the Paris Ritz. “But it will be so much fun for the children,” Edith said, determined, as usual, to have her way. At first Marion declined the invitation. But as the date approached, and as Marion sensed her sister’s increasing tension and irritation over little details that kept going wrong—reservations were misplaced, the hotel did not have the number of suites Edith wanted, no limousines were available, only buses—Marion decided at the last minute to fly to Florida and help Edith through what was becoming a sizable ordeal.
Arriving at the hotel, Marion Ascoli asked for Mrs. Stern’s room, only to be told, “She hasn’t come through the computer yet.” Then, offered no further assistance, Marion set off through the hotel, starting on the top floor and working down, to find her sister’s room by trial and error, knowing that her clue would be the open door. At last she found it and stepped inside. Edith was standing outside on a balcony, furiously flipping through her file folders on the trip—the schedules, the itineraries, the suggestions, the lists of restaurants, all carefully typed, collated, organized. Sensing someone’s presence, Edith turned and, seeing her sister, ran into the room, fell in her arms, and burst into tears. It had taken the huge Disney World organization to defeat Edith Stern.
Of course, there were still many enormously successful parties—parties at Longue Vue, where luncheons for eighteen were the general rule, and where tables set up in the garden were always matched by identically set tables in the house as insurance in case of rain. There were huge house parties, with guests invited for weeks at a time, at White Pine Camp in the Adirondacks, which during the Coolidge years was lent to the President as a Summer White House. Later Edith acquired a second summer place, outside Lenox, Massachusetts, so her family could enjoy the Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow music and dance festivals. Edith christened this house Austerity Castle. It was hardly austere, but she liked to point out that she had furnished it entirely from the Sears catalogue. During all these house parties her loyal and underpaid servants could not even look forward to the bounty of tips. Tipping any of her staff, Edith explained, was against the rules. This, she said, was because she also entertained a goodly share of struggling young artists as well as ill-paid teachers and university people who could not afford to tip. In the same breath she usually mentioned her Sears stock bonus system, implying that the servants were becoming almost as rich as she.
Edith hated missing parties as much as she loved giving them. Her husband was proposed for membership in the elite Jewish Century Country Club in New York’s Westchester County, and, not long after joining, he managed to win the club’s golf tournament, along with a $1,500 purse. Edgar Stern was gently reminded that it was a club tradition for the purse winner to use his winnings to throw a party, which he proceeded to do. At the time, his wife was giving birth to their second son, Philip. She was furious because she couldn’t be there.
Edith and Edgar Stern’s full year of foreign travel was an extended party, and during the course of it Edgar Stern would invent a new pet name for his wife, “The hostess with the mostes’ on the bill.” Edith could never quite grasp the fact, for instance, that her favorite fresh oysters, which she ordered many dozens at a time, were much more expensive in the great restaurants of Rome, Paris, and Madrid than at the fishmongers’ in New Orleans, or understand why they were completely unavailable in Nepal. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she would cry, and the next day a shipment of oysters would be flown in to Katmandu. When she tired of the location of Longue Vue, which had been built on Metairie Lane, it was her iron whim to have the entire house moved to Garden Lane, a few blocks away. While the big Georgian house was being transplanted, which took several days, Edgar Stern would climb aboard the moving house each evening to collect clothes to wear to the office the next morning.
The Sterns returned to New Orleans from their year of travel in 1936, and it soon appeared that, from the experience, Edgar Stern had lost his taste for business. Though he had risen to the position of president of the Cotton Exchange, cotton trading no longer seemed to interest him. Perhaps a solid year as his wife’s factotum had convinced him that this was the career he was best cut out for. He had become, in a sense, her assistant, and in that role he seemed happy enough. She might be the hostess with the mostes’ on the bill, but she was the one who paid the bills, and there was no clear reason for him to work at all. He sold his business, disposed of his seat on the Exchange, and retired at the age of fifty-one.
Now he continued as her assistant full-time. The Rosenwald fortune had managed to weather the Depression virtually intact, and Edgar Stern helped Edith set aside some of her money to establish the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund—later renamed the Stern Fund—a foundation to support worthy philanthropic and civic causes. For the next twenty years the Sterns’ principal activities were philanthropic, and, in the process, they endeavored to instill a sense of philanthropic mission in their children.
Edgar Stern died, at seventy-four, in 1959, and with his death the first rift appeared in the Stern family. (Edith’s daughter Audrey died soon afterward, of that mysterious illness called anorexia nervosa, or prolonged loss of appetite.) The directors of the Stern Family Fund were now sons Edgar, Jr., and Philip, their respective wives, and, of course, Edith.
There had never been much question that Edith’s favorite son was her younger, Philip. Edgar, Jr., was very much a businessman, and he was good at it. He was on the Sears board of directors, had headed the New Orleans United Fund, was active in the promotion and development of Aspen, Colorado, and had invested in other profitable enterprises. But Philip had both literary and political talent. He had written many magazine articles and published several books, including the controversial The Rape of the Taxpayer. He had graduated with honors from Harvard, studied law, and served as campaign manager and chief speech writer for Adlai E. Stevenson. (Like his mother, in the southern tradition of her adopted state, he was an ardent Democrat.) He had written for The Washington Post, edited scholarly journals, and served on the boards of many charitable institutions. The only enthusiasm he didn’t share with his mother was her fondness for high society. “I keep trying to launch Phil socially,” she often said, “and he keeps sinking.” For every fraction of an inch that Edgar B. Stern, Jr., managed to add to this biographical sketch in Who’s Who in America, his younger brother managed to add just a bit more. That the boys were a mite competitive was a fact that Edith didn’t mind at all, but when she looked for advice she turned to Philip.
Not long after Edgar Stern, Sr.,’s death, the five-member board of the Stern Family Fund was asked to consider a proposal involving funding for research on corporate responsibility. In particular, the study proposed to investigate certain antisocial activities of the General Motors Corporation. Earlier, Edgar, Jr., had been acutely embarrassed by a Stern Fund grant that paid for a critical study of the broadcasting industry. Among young Edgar’s business interests was his ownership of WDSU Broadcasting in New Orleans. Now, from his position on the Sears, Roebuck board, Edgar felt certain that he would be severely criticized if his family’s fund offered to finance a study that would be anti–big corporation. Sears, after all, was very much in the big-corporation category; it would not look right. Also, Edgar argued, such a move could open him up to stockholder lawsuits. He announced to his mother and to his brother and sister-in-law, “If this grant passes, I will have no choice but to resign.” A family meeting was held to discuss this touchy matter.
Philip and his wife voted in favor of the grant. Edgar and his wife, as expected, voted against it. The pivotal vote was then Edith’s. She voted for it, and Edgar promptly did as he had threatened—and resigned from the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund.
To say that Edgar Stern, Jr., never forgave his mother for siding with his brother would be putting it a little strongly, but it was noticed that after this episode Edgar, who had always lived near her in New Orleans, more or less permanently removed himself to Aspen.
In the years following her eightieth-birthday party at Walt Disney World, Edith Stern—who had always seemed slight and frail despite her enormous energy—became increasingly ill. Like her daughter, she seemed to lose her appetite for food, even for her favorite oysters, and her weight dropped alarmingly. She had to be forced to eat, and, in the late 1970s, she entered a hospital. From far and wide the family gathered—children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grand-nephews and grandnieces, her devoted sister Marion and her brother Bill. The end, it seemed, was at hand. An intravenous device was placed directly in her heart. It failed. Sadly, the doctor informed her assembled family, “There’s nothing more we can do. She might as well go home and die there.” She was carried by ambulance back to Longue Vue, where it was assumed to be only a matter of hours.
Once home, the family resumed its vigil at her bedside to bid her goodbye, while Edith surveyed their concerned and anxious faces mutely from her pillow, her hair still dyed a vibrant red—a queen saying a last farewell to her loyal court and courtiers.
Then, as though satisfied that her deathbed scene had been a success, with all the desired effects and fuss, and with the proper attendance figures, Edith began to improve. She began to eat again. She gained weight. Soon she was up and about, rummaging through the trunks of costumes she kept upstairs for fancy dress, talking about another party. The family, suspecting that she had staged her departure from this life as effectively as she had orchestrated her famous entertainments, dispersed, feeling somehow a little cheated. When the end finally came, in the late summer of 1980 when she was eighty-five, it came quietly, in her sleep. There was no need for another scene.
In New Orleans, flags flew at half-staff. At her memorial service, held in her lovely Longue Vue, the weather was oppressively hot and humid. Just before the service, the air-conditioning system broke down, and the hundreds of perspiring guests fanned themselves with paper fans. Her son Philip remarked, “If she were still around, she would have had it fixed immediately.”
“She turned New Orleans around,” one of her old friends says. “From a sleepy, corrupt little Mississippi River town, she brought it into the twentieth century.” There were other legacies—a small but elegant collection of modern art, including a Kandinsky, a Victor Vasarely, a gallery of Barbara Hepworth works, and an exquisite collection of miniature Alexander Calder mobiles. There were her two schools, her Voter Registration Service, and innumerable lesser benefactions. Not long after her death, Philip and his wife were traveling in Israel and visited the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden. There they were surprised to find a Vasarely sculpture commissioned and donated by Edith Rosenwald Stern. Philip has no idea how many other such random gifts may turn up around the world.
One of her more important presents to New Orleans was Longue Vue itself—donated to the city, along with its magnificent gardens, and accompanied by a $5,000,000 endowment to maintain it for the public. At Longue Vue, every detail of the house and its furnishings is preserved as it was when Edith lived there. It is a museum, as it were, of a certain way of life.
She once told the writer Leon Harris, “I think that one thing we children each learned from our parents was the importance of the example we set. And I don’t mean a snobbish sort of fashion … just the opposite in fact. My mother never ceased telling us with pride about the calluses she wore on her hands as a child scrubbing floors and helping to raise her sisters and brother. And after my father made so much money and they went East, where they were entertained at the feudal estates of the Schiffs and the Strauses outside New York, my mother was more than ever resolved never to become like that, never if she had a country place to have statues or anything else she considered pompous or stiff. Mother was very naïve, but she was a very great lady—very sensitive, in the good sense of being sensitive to the feelings of others and not just her own. And when she built Ravinia, she insisted that it be kept natural, using the ravines and local flowers and only tanbark and gravel roads—nothing forbidding.”
In a rare moment of modesty, she added, “We tried to set a pattern here, Edgar and I. We hoped to change the local way of life, but I think we failed.” She was referring, of course, to Mardi Gras, whose force in New Orleans has become as inexorable and immutable as the tides. Each year the flashy face of Carnival appears, puts on a wig and paper mask, dances drunkenly in the streets and scatters cheap trinkets and fake doubloons to the “poor.”
Edith had lived to see the Sears Tower in Chicago rise to become the tallest building in the world, but of course she could take no personal credit for that. Her greatest pride was being honored in her adopted city. Each year the New Orleans Times-Picayune presents a loving cup to the citizen deemed to have done the most for the city during the previous year; it is considered the highest honor the city can bestow. Edgar B. Stern won his loving cup in 1931, and Edith herself was given the annual award thirty-four years later. The two of them were the only his-and-hers recipients of the awards in the city’s history. The twin cups reposed on a mantel, side by side, in the drawing room at Longue Vue, and their images are embossed on Edith’s and Edgar’s respective headstones.
It must have amused Edith, in a grim way, when her son Edgar was invited, in a gesture of gratitude for his various civic services and philanthropies in New Orleans, to join the Carnival Krewe of Comus, and accepted the invitation. It was not the elite Krewe of Rex, to be sure, to which such Old Guard Christian families as the Williamses and LeGendres belonged; Comus was the next step down the ladder. It was not just that Edith despised Carnival, and all the cavorting and silliness and snobbery that the yearly rite of Fat Tuesday entails. It was simply that she would never have accepted anything second-best.