Personal History (4 page)

My mother fell in love with Paris. She lived it up in the Latin Quarter, attended high mass at Notre Dame and Chartres, studied voice and singing, took French lessons, attended endless lectures, and generally delighted in her youth, her encounters, her gay life. A diary she kept in Paris displays her high values, a good deal of learning, and a great passion for all that was going on in the world of art and ideas.

When my father appears in the diary, he is described by her, with some condescension and little apparent interest, as her rich Jewish beau. Judging also from the many letters she wrote from Europe, he was regarded as the giver of loans to her friend Nancy and other friends and the provider of lavish meals that the Left Bank student group all enjoyed enormously. On his few visits to her in Paris, my father was principally greeted with joy for taking everyone out to dine at the Tour d’Argent.

Far from taking him seriously as a suitor, my mother—for the entire time she’d been in Europe—had been writing to Otto Merkel, a German-American
friend of the family, living in New York, to whom she seemed to consider herself engaged. The whole correspondence with Merkel was saved—he must have returned her letters. He is obviously withdrawing—disappointing her by not coming to visit after saying that he’s coming—but she seems not to notice and keeps on writing passionately and in detail about her life and their future together. At one point she says she bought a beautiful first edition for “our library” instead of a fur coat she had saved up for. Anyone reading these letters can tell that he’s lost interest, but, not untypically, she doesn’t understand that his continuing nonappearance and his increasingly infrequent and colder responses are sending a message.

Nancy left for home in February 1909, and my mother moved into a room in a sixth-floor flat with neither bathroom nor heat. She earned enough to stay in Europe by sending stories to the
Sun
and a few magazines, including
St. Nicholas
, for which she also took some photographs. That spring she went to London for Easter vacation and, quite by accident, stumbled upon a small room of Chinese paintings. There she suddenly and inexplicably “fell in love at first sight completely, hopelessly, and forever with Chinese art.” She vowed to explore this “attitude toward life” to “its uttermost depths,” which she did over the next several years.

After a stimulating swing through Germany, Austria, and Italy, she finally returned home to discouraging problems. She was torn between devotion to her artist and bohemian friends and my father’s renewed attentions. And she must have discovered the awful truth that the beloved Merkel was no longer interested in her. In any case, she grew more interested in my father. At a lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria she told him that she felt the need to go back to Europe to think things over. Having decided that problems in the Taft administration would lead to a recession, he had converted his assets to cash to wait out the inevitable effect on Wall Street, so he responded, “I have decided to get away for a bit myself,” and told her of his plans to take time off for a trip around the world.

“Why, how long are you going to be away?” she asked in hurt surprise.

“Oh, at least six months,” he replied.

When she suddenly realized that he might not be there waiting for her forever, she quickly responded, “I’m going with you.”

“I know,” he replied. “I have your tickets.”

Three weeks later, they were married at her home in a very simple Lutheran ceremony with only the two families present. Even the accounts in the New York papers mentioned that their friends were surprised. He was thirty-four, she only twenty-three. What were her motives? And, indeed, what were his? Did she marry him to escape the problems of her family, for security, for money? Certainly she conceded that his money was not irrelevant to her decision. In her autobiography, she admitted:

Hers was secured, to be sure: my father not only paid off her father’s debts even before they left on their honeymoon, but also generously supported Frederick Ernst until his death, in 1913. And her mother was secure.

And yet Mother certainly loved my father in her own peculiar way all her life. She looked up to him, admired his brains, strength, and qualities of leadership. Perhaps one passage in her European diary provides some insight into why she married him, as well as some insight into her own consuming sense of self:

For his part, he was ready to be married and have a family. Her pictures show her as marvelously good-looking, and she was obviously a highly sought-after, intelligent young woman. From the first sighting in the museum, he must have been dazzled, determined, and patient.

Did the fact that he was Jewish trouble her? I think it must have. She refers to it in her early letters home from Paris. Despite her strong Lutheran background, my mother was not particularly religious either, but clearly she shared the latent anti-Semitism of the period, at least to some extent. My guess is that from her point of view his being Jewish was outweighed by his other strengths and appeal. I think she also was so young and unrealistic, and had had so much go her way despite her family problems, that she thought his being Jewish wouldn’t affect
her
. I can only surmise that her ego and self-assurance were such that when she married my father she thought he might come to be considered as not Jewish rather than she as Jewish. She was deeply hurt, however, after her marriage by suddenly being touched by social discrimination in New York.

Her decision to marry Eugene Meyer sprang, no doubt, from a mix of reasons. In any case, she certainly startled everyone by this marriage, and there were those who thought it wouldn’t last. But of one thing I am sure:
despite moments of great stress and difficulty in my parents’ marriage, they never looked back.

A
FTER TWO WEEKS
at my father’s farm in Mount Kisco, New York, which he had bought some years earlier, the newlyweds set out in a private railroad car, the
Constitution
, for their honeymoon trip around the world, he with a valet and she with a maid. They made their way across America, stopping at one point in Montana to see my father’s copper-mining friend, “Big Bill” Thompson. My mother was wearing her wedding present, a string of perfectly matched pearls. Though they were not especially big, this was in the days before cultured pearls, and these were quite rare; she wore them all her life. As they were leaving, according to family lore, Mrs. Thompson turned to her husband and said, “Bill, do you see those pearls?” When he said yes, she queried, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

By the time the newlyweds reached San Francisco, where they were to visit with the California members of the Meyer family for a week before going on, my mother’s maid hadn’t worked out. Rosalie found a trained nurse who wanted to travel and was willing to do what was necessary, although she knew nothing about what was expected or needed. So the unsatisfactory maid was replaced by a lady named Margaret Ellen Powell, a practical nurse and a Christian Scientist and the salt of the earth. It was the luckiest thing that ever happened for all of us Meyer children, since Powelly, as we all came to call her, stayed to bring us up.

When my parents returned from their honeymoon and settled back into New York, my mother was pregnant. My father went back to Wall Street, and she had to begin making the necessary adjustments to being a married woman. Overnight she found herself living a wealthy life and running households. She once told me of thinking, as she rode in a chauffeur-driven car, “Can this really be me?” As she herself acknowledged, she had a difficult time, especially in the first years, long before I was born, the fourth child of five. She had rarely thought about what marriage entailed in the way of relationships to spouse and children. I’m not sure she was ever really able to.

She seemed to regard her marriage as a contract she would always keep, and in her way she did. Her duty, as she saw it, lay in having and rearing children, running the houses, and being there when needed to fulfill her obligations as a hostess. After that, like so many of today’s women but way ahead of her time, she was determined to maintain her own identity and intellectual life. In her own world, she went her own way. Later, in a memoir, she explained how she felt at the time:

I believe she was often desperately unhappy in her marriage, especially at first. She went to a psychiatrist, on whom she leaned heavily. She tried to escape any problems with her marriage and motherhood by studying Chinese art and language and by maintaining her connections to “291” and developing an interest in collecting modern art. She had already met a man who was to be one of the great influences in her life, the industrialist and pioneer collector Charles Lang Freer. They met at an exhibit of Chinese art, and he, having heard of her interest, invited her to Detroit to see his collection. She responded, “Next week I am going to have a baby, but I’ll come as soon after that as I can.” My father went along as chaperone and he, too, became a friend of Freer’s.

From January 1913 until his death, my mother studied under and collected with Freer. Often they would divide up the shipments from his personal representatives in China. She had already studied the Chinese language at Columbia from 1911 to 1913, and for the next five years, with the aid of a Chinese scholar whom she often had in residence at Mount Kisco, she amassed research materials for an analysis of the contributions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism to the development of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. This resulted in the publication, in 1923, of her book
Chinese Painting as Reflected in the Thought and Art of Li Lung-Mien
. Unfortunately, Freer, to whom it was dedicated, had died in 1919. She visited him constantly throughout his long, agonizing illness. At his death, Freer designated five trustees for his gallery in Washington, of whom my parents were two.

As another outlet for her mind, she enrolled in postgraduate study in biology, economics, and history at Columbia University, where she met and became involved with the historians Charles and Mary Beard. When the Beards, John Dewey, and others founded the free and liberal New School for Social Research, she helped modestly to fund it and also helped in psychology classes when it opened in 1919.

At the same time, she grew even more involved with “291” and with Steichen in promoting modern art, especially that of John Marin, who
sent over his watercolors from Paris. She was instrumental in founding the periodical named for the gallery,
“291,”
and became an editor of this first avant-garde journal in America. My mother was already caught up in these activities by the time the first baby, my oldest sister, Florence, was born. She later told stories of deciding to nurse the baby but forgetting to come home from her “extramural activities” and racing home to find a screaming baby being pacified by poor Powelly.

During these first years of my mother’s struggles with marriage, my father had some business setbacks. He had entered the budding automobile business in a big way, investing heavily in a company called the United States Motor Company, which produced the Maxwell. This company had run into trouble, and my father had helped reorganize it into the Maxwell Motor Company, which was still in trouble. His heavy investments in copper had not begun to pay off, and, for the first time, he felt financially squeezed. My parents had moved into a large, elegant house at 70th Street and Park Avenue. In an effort to retrench, they sold the house and moved into an entire floor at the St. Regis Hotel—not exactly poverty row, but enough to set off rumors that Wall Street’s boy wonder had gotten into trouble.

He eventually emerged from the tumultuous experience with Maxwell with a substantial profit and went on believing in the automobile business. A little later he made a brilliantly successful investment in the Fisher Body Company, run by seven able brothers. When Fisher sold to General Motors, however, he chose cash rather than stock, passing up the chance to become one of G.M.’s largest stockholders.

Around the same time, my father made another—less important—mistake. With his friend Bernard Baruch he invested in a gold mine, Alaska Juneau. The value of the mine went up and down, but at some point water, not gold, was found in it. For some reason, my father had invested in the mine for all of us children and told us about it. The price of Alaska Juneau was the subject of dinner-table merriment for many years, along with discussion of whether each child had profited or not. Eventually, it dropped farther and farther and finally disappeared altogether. Phil and I later named our golden retriever Juneau in honor of the mine—a much better investment.

My father’s investments in copper, cars, and, later, chemicals were all indicative of his desire not only to make money but to participate in creating new frontiers. He very much admired E. H. Harriman for creating a railroad when railroads were new. That was the kind of thing he aspired to do, being in on the birth of an industry. He once asked James Russell Wiggins, when Russ was editor of the
Post
, what he would do if he could do exactly what he wanted. Russ replied that he supposed he’d write history, to which my father responded, “I wouldn’t. I’d sooner make it.”