The Wrong Kind of Money Read online

  In those days there were certain New York buildings that were known not to want Jewish tenants. But, it was thought, north of Seventy-sixth Street, attitudes were more forbearing.

  Mr. Truxton Van Degan III, of the building’s board, contacted Jules Liebling. “I’m sorry, Mr. Liebling,” he said, “but your application has been rejected by the board.”

  “May I ask why?” Jules Liebling asked him.

  “The board of a cooperative may reject any applicant without stating any reason,” Mr. Van Degan said.

  “Surely it’s not financial,” Jules said. He had submitted documents to the board indicating a net financial worth of at least $10,000,000, which he assumed would be quite sufficient. “If necessary, I can produce evidence of additional assets,” he said.

  “The building is not required to tell you why you were rejected,” Mr. Van Degan said again.

  “Mr. Solomon Brinckmann, the investment banker, owns an apartment in your building. He is a Jew. So I assume that the reason is not because I am Jewish,” Jules said.

  “I’m sorry, but I can tell you nothing more,” Mr. Van Degan said.

  “In fact, Mr. Brinckmann is on your board, is he not?”

  “That is correct, Mr. Liebling.”

  “May I ask how Mr. Brinckmann voted?”

  “I am not required to tell you how any board member voted,” Mr. Van Degan said. “But I can tell you that Mr. Brinckmann voted with the majority.”

  “I see,” said Jules.

  “I believe there was a general feeling that one family of your sort in the building was enough,” Mr. Van Degan said. “That another family might start a trend. Of the wrong sort, as Mr. Brinckmann put it.”

  “I see,” Jules said again.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Liebling.”

  “Let me ask you one question,” Jules said. “I understand the building badly needs a new roof. Your board wants to assess the tenants twenty-five dollars per square foot of floor space to pay for this. The tenants on the lower floors, who are not affected by the leaks, feel this is unfair. They feel the costs should be borne by the upper-floor tenants only. There have been many angry tenants’ meetings about this. Am I correct?”

  “That is correct, Mr. Liebling.”

  “And of course the longer the tenants fight about this, the worse the roof will get, and the more expensive it’s going to be to repair it. Correct?”

  “Sadly, sir. Yes.”

  “Suppose you were to tell your board that if they will reconsider my application, I will be personally willing to pay for the new roof?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then Mr. Van Degan said, “I’m sorry, but you cannot bribe your way into a building like ours. It’s been tried before, Mr. Liebling.”

  “Bribe? An act of generosity is a bribe? Let me ask you one more question. Mr. Stuyvesant Miller, of Miller Publications, is president of your board. Correct?”

  “Yes. Correct.”

  “That magazine he just bought—City Lights, I believe it’s called. It’s not doing as well as Mr. Miller hoped. That new editor he brought in from England. She hasn’t been able to turn the magazine around the way he hoped she would. Advertising revenues are down. The bottom line looks very bad. You might mention to Mr. Miller that I may be forced to cancel my advertising because of this situation.”

  “What situation, Mr. Liebling?”

  “The situation I have just outlined to you.”

  “You would cancel your advertising in City Lights?”

  “No. I would cancel in all Miller publications. There are seven of these, actually, in which my company advertises.”

  “I see,” Mr. Van Degan said carefully.

  “Mention that to Mr. Miller, won’t you?”

  There was another, longer pause. Then he said, “Very well.”

  “You do that,” Jules said.

  A few days later, there was another call from Truxton Van Degan. “The board has accepted your application,” he said in a pained voice.

  “I see,” Jules said.

  “And your generous offer to pay for the new roof.”

  “Sorry, but that offer has been withdrawn,” Jules said. “But I will be happy to purchase the McCurdy apartment for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Sir! The price of the McCurdy unit is two hundred thousand!”

  “It just went down,” Jules said. “I happen to know that Richard McCurdy is seven months delinquent in his maintenance payments. He’s scrambling for money to pay off his wife in what could become a very messy divorce suit. He’s also a vice president of Miller Publications, and Stuyvie Miller won’t be very pleased to see some of McCurdy’s wife’s accusations if they hit the newspapers. I also know that your fancy building isn’t very happy with the—shall I say, caliber?—of the young men Mr. McCurdy has been—shall I say, entertaining? shall I say shacking up with?—since his wife moved out on him. I happen to know that your building would do anything to be rid of McCurdy and his friends. Am I correct?”

  “What—?” Truxton Van Degan sputtered. “What—what do you call this, Mr. Liebling? What do you call what you’re trying to do to us?”

  “What do I call it?” Jules said. “It’s called doing business.”

  As it happened, the Lieblings’ new apartment and the Solomon Brinckmanns’ were on the same elevator stem at 1000 Park. Solomon Brinckmann died in 1976, and his wife sold the apartment and moved to Arizona a year later. Through the years when they shared the elevator, the Brinckmanns and the Lieblings did not encounter each other much. But whenever they did, they nodded and smiled at each other politely.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Brinckmann.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Liebling.”

  Only once had Hermina Brinckmann attempted something that might have been termed an intimacy in the elevator. “Someone told me that the great Mr. Al Capone himself offered to be your son’s godfather,” she said. “How exciting!”

  “We Jews don’t have godfathers,” Hannah Liebling said.

  “Oh, how I envy you your traditions,” said Hermina Brinckmann.

  “You have a few traditions of your own, if you cared to observe them,” Hannah said.

  After that exchange relations between the Brinckmanns and the Lieblings were somewhat frostier. The Brinckmanns often gave large parties. So did the Lieblings. In her ballroom Hannah could comfortably accommodate a seated dinner for sixty. But the two families never entertained each other. About a year after Jules and Hannah Liebling moved in, however, they received an invitation from Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Miller.

  “What shall we do about this?” Hannah asked her husband. “It’s for a Christmas tree-trimming party. But they’re not people we visit. We hardly know them.”

  “We do this with it,” Jules said. He took the invitation and tore it in half, then in quarters, then in eighths.

  “But it says R.S.V.P. on it,” she said.

  “They need us more than we need them,” he said.

  This is one of several episodes that are never talked about in the family. It is not a family secret, exactly. The Liebling family secrets are quite another matter. But the episode is a painful reminder that Jules Liebling’s money was not made in one of the more fashionable ways. In fact, there are some who hint that his money was made illegally. The connection with people like Al Capone is the circumstance most often cited.

  Ahead of the Lincoln now, the traffic on Park Avenue has come to a complete standstill. There seems to be an almost newsworthy case of urban gridlock at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. Nothing moves. Police whistles sound shrilly. Arms in orange slickers gesticulate furiously in the air, to no avail. Park Avenue has become a parking lot. “I suppose it’s the rain that’s causing this,” Hannah says to no one in particular.

  “Anyway,” Anne says, “I think it’s silly to talk about how important it is to get married, and to marry the right sort. It’s so old-fashioned, Nana. Nowadays a woman doesn’t have to g
et married at all to have a successful life. In fact, I don’t think I’ll get married at all. I’ll just have a lo-o-o-o-ng series of lovers. Like your sister Settie’s husband, I’ll just screw around.” She lies back against the seat and stretches her arms above her head, touching the car’s ceiling with her fingertips, and smiles.

  “Knees together, young lady,” her grandmother says. “Gracious, if I’d talked that way in front of my grandmother, I’d have had my mouth washed out with Fels Naphtha soap! If you’re saying things like that to try to shock me, you haven’t succeeded. I refuse to let you try to shock me, Anne.”

  “Were you ever in love, Nana Hannah? Deeply, madly, passionately in love?”

  “What a question! Of course I was.”

  “But I bet it wasn’t with Grandpa, was it?”

  “What a thing to say!”

  “Look! I can tell by the expression on your face that it wasn’t. I knew it! Who was he? Who was your one true, deep, passionate love, Nana?”

  “I do not wish to pursue this line of conversation,” her grandmother says.

  It is another characteristic of Hannah Liebling, geboren Sachs: whenever the conversation gets vaguely interesting, she changes the subject.

  “And look at your sister Settie. She didn’t marry for love, either, did she? You say she married the right sort of man. But you also say he made her miserable.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Settie. It makes me too sad.”

  “But it was you who brought the subject up, Maman,” Cyril says.

  “No. It was you. You, with your slouching. Sit up straight, Cyril!” She raises the sleeve of her mink jacket and consults her gold watch. “We’re going to be late,” she says. Outside, the traffic lights go from red to green, then to red again, and then to green, but nothing moves. Horns are blowing loudly from all directions. Anne says nothing. She knows just how far she can push her grandmother, and she has pushed her just far enough.

  Now, in front of the Lincoln, a small band—perhaps six or seven—of black youths jaywalks, or rather jay-runs, across the middle of the street. Some wear dreadlocks. Others have haircuts in extravagant topiary designs. They run zigzagging between the bumpers, leapfrogging the fenders of the unmoving automobiles, and one of the boys slaps the Lincoln’s hood sharply as he passes. Mr. Nelson presses the button that locks all four of the car doors and, simultaneously, taps the car’s horn twice.

  “Um-fuh-wuh,” one of the boys shouts.

  Another boy makes a leering face at the invisible passengers behind the tinted glass in the backseat of the limousine, while another makes a vulgar gesture with his fist. Then the first boy break-dances back across the street toward them and slaps the big Lincoln’s hood again, harder. Mr. Nelson sounds his horn again, louder.

  “Muh-fuh!”

  “Goodness, right here on Park Avenue,” Hannah Liebling whispers as the boys, shouting and jeering, skip and hop away and disappear into the traffic. “I didn’t know they came out when it rained.” She leans across the back of the front seat. “I have my can of Mace in my purse, Mr. Nelson,” she says. “Do you have yours?”

  “Definitely, Mrs. Liebling. Right here in the glove box.”

  “Do you really carry a can of Mace, Nana?” Anne asks her.

  “Absolutely. I wouldn’t step outside my house without it. This isn’t the same city I grew up in, when I could walk to school and go skating in the park without my nanny. I also carry a gun.” She pats her purse authoritatively.

  “Really, Nana? Can I see it?”

  Her grandmother hesitates. “I’ll let you look at it,” she says, “but you mustn’t touch it. It’s fully loaded.” She reaches into her reticule and withdraws a small Smith & Wesson .38-caliber automatic pistol with a bone handle, and places it across her lap. “I know how to use it, too,” she says. “I’ve had fourteen hours of target practice.”

  “Pistol-packin’ grandma,” Cyril says drily.

  Outside, the noise in the street is deafening, as all the motorists in the street, having nothing better to do, sit on their horns. Had Hannah Liebling fired off her pistol now, no one would have heard it. “I knew he should have gone down Third Avenue,” Hannah Liebling says. “It’s a wider street, and the lights are synchronized.”

  “He didn’t take Third Avenue because Third Avenue is a one-way street going uptown, you stupid old fool!” Cyril says.

  There is silence in the backseat of the Lincoln now, following this outburst. Anne, embarrassed, stares at her folded hands in her lap. Hannah gazes out the window. Finally she says, “Cyril, your nerves are bad tonight, I can tell. You need one of your pills. Take one of the little yellow ones. Besides, Third Avenue runs downtown. I am quite positive of that.”

  That is another thing to remember about Hannah Liebling: You can be right. But she cannot be wrong.

  “Now do sit up straight, Cyril,” she says.

  And so there you have Hannah Sachs Liebling at eighty-two, a despotic old harridan with a will of iron and a heart of stone, who has managed to break the spirit of all three of her children, one after the other, and who is now, all sails flying and loaded with money to the Plimsoll line, determined to perform the same feat on the next generation, charging ahead at full speed, leaving devastation in her wake, taking no prisoners, two hundred forty pounds of pure hell. Why do some love her so? Perhaps because she has managed to keep two terrible and linked secrets locked in her hard but still evergreen heart. Once you tell a secret to another person, it’s no secret anymore. Spill the beans to another, and you might as well tell the world.

  Her husband was not a nice man, from all reports, though it wasn’t easy to know him really well. Few did, in fact. Some women claimed to find him sexy. But then, money itself is sexy. He was certainly not handsome. He was a small man, but his head seemed too large for his body. By contrast, his hands were tiny, almost dainty. His manicurist always applied clear polish to his nails, and the sparkly fingernails only served to emphasize the daintiness of those hands.

  They say all rich men make enemies, but Jules Liebling seems to have made more than his share. There are other stories along the line of the one about how he bought the big apartment at 1000 Park. There is the story of how he built Grandmont, the huge, extravagant house in Westchester, in Tarrytown, on the Hudson River, overlooking the Tappan Zee. Again, this was in the early 1950s, and the contractor’s price was $500,000. Again, this was considered a huge price in those days, though today, to replace Grandmont—it is gone now—it would cost many times that figure. The grounds contained a pool with a wave-making machine, two tennis courts, industrial-sized playground equipment for the children, and a sandbox for Cyril’s baby brother, Noah, that was as big as a squash court. When the house was finished, Jules Liebling presented the builder with a check for $400,000.

  “But, Mr. Liebling, our contract price was five hundred thousand.”

  “I’m paying you four. Take it or leave it.”

  “Mr. Liebling, I have a contract. I can sue.”

  “Go right ahead. Your lawsuit will cost at least a hundred thousand in legal fees. And until you get a judgment, you won’t get a penny from me.”

  “Mr. Liebling, you are robbing me of my contractor’s profit.”

  “Your profit is the boost your reputation will get from having built a house for me,” Jules Liebling said.

  There are other stories like this, not all of them involving real estate.

  When he died, twenty years ago, it was decided that his funeral would be small and very private. “Only members of the immediate family, and certain Liebling employees, are invited to attend,” the obituary notice said.

  Jules Liebling had many influential acquaintances. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were frequent house guests at Grandmont. The duchess traveled with her own especially cushioned toilet seat. There is a photograph of Cyril, as a little boy, seated on the lap of Queen Marie of Romania. Bernard Baruch nearly choked to death at Grandmont on a piece of shell in
his Maryland crab cake. Ike and Mamie Eisenhower made a point of requesting separate bedrooms there because, as the first lady explained in her note, Ike snored. And speaking of bedrooms, the whole household was awakened one night when Frank Sinatra tried to get into Lana Turner’s bed. Lily Damita was already in that bed, for what reason no one was ever quite sure. Hedy Lamarr was suspected of pinching silverware during her visit. John Huston once got drunk and fell head-first into the fireplace in the Great Hall, and had to be treated for third-degree burns.

  But when Jules Liebling died, it was decided to keep the services small and private. Hannah Liebling was afraid that if she tried to stage a large public funeral at Temple Emanu-El, nobody would come.

  In the eyes of some people, Jules Liebling’s will treated all three of his children unfairly. Here is what Business Week had to say about it at the time:

  It is not uncommon, when a rich man dies, to discover that he has punished one or more “bad” children through disinheritance. But when a mogul’s Last Will and Testament seemingly rewards two errant offspring and overlooks a loyal son, that is news.

  And that, on the surface of it, is what Jules Liebling did in arranging for the distribution of his estate, estimated to be in excess of $800,000,000 upon his death.

  Jules Liebling’s widow, Hannah Sachs Liebling, was bequeathed 52% of her late husband’s Ingraham Corporation stock, effectively putting her in control of the family-owned companies, with the specific wish that Mrs. Liebling assume, at least temporarily, her late husband’s role as president and CEO of Ingraham. The older of the Lieblings’ two sons, Cyril Liebling, 40, is a Manhattan public relations man. Though he has never been considered much more than a playboy—and a sometime Peck’s Bad Boy—he was left 24% of Ingraham stock in a lifetime trust, from which he is to derive the income. In 1969, Cyril Liebling was briefly jailed on charges of child molestation. The charges were later dropped when the alleged victim admitted that the charges were a publicity-getting hoax, and the name of the plaintiff, a minor, was never revealed.