|
THE GRANDEES: AMERICA'S SEPHARDIC ELITE |
|
20. "FOUL DEEDS"
IN 1928, one of the last attempts was made -- publicly, at least -- to have ancient Sephardic lineage stand for something: probity, dignity, authority. It involved, appropriately enough, the ancient family of de Fonseca-Brandon, and the American public was reminded -- fleetingly -- of the grandeur that this family could look back upon.
James de Fonseca-Brandon (1764-1843) of London was a shipping magnate of considerable proportions who owned several fleets of India merchantmen. His mansion in town contained so many "taxable lights" (a man's house was taxed according to how many windows it had) that it became something of an eighteenth-century landmark, and an advertisement of its owner's great wealth. On the de Fonseca side of his hyphenated family, James de Fonseca-Brandon traced his descent directly back to the illustrious de Fonsecas of Madrid, one of whom, Cardinal de Fonseca (a Converso, obviously) was Grand Almoner to Ferdinand and Isabella at the time of Columbus' voyage.
The Brandon side of his genealogy was equally, if not more, illustrious. The Brandons were English, and included Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had been consort to Mary, Queen of France, and related to various English monarchs, including Henry VIII, "Bloody" Mary, Elizabeth I, Edward VI, and Mary, Queen of Scots. James de Fonseca-Brandon married Sarah Mendes-da Costa, an heiress whose family fortune came from West Indian plantations; she traced herself back to the first Jewish settlers in the New World, who established a colony on the island of Curacao. When Sarah Mendes-da Costa de Fonseca-Brandon died, the family pointed out proudly, if somewhat sorrowfully, she left her huge fortune -- all of it -- to "the poor of London of all denominations."
One of her ancestors had, at one point, been considered the richest woman in England: Caterina Mendes-da Costa Villa-Real Mellish, called "the Belle of Bath" and celebrated in court circles as "Kitty" Mellish. Kitty Mellish was the mother of Elizabeth, Lady Galway, and a sister of Lady Suasso d'Auvergne Le Grand, and her father had been Antonio Mendes-da Costa, seventeenth-century governor of the Bank of England. Her mother, a cousin of her father's, Dona Caterina Mendes, had been the godchild of Queen Caterina of England, the childless consort of Charles the Second. This lady, Dona Caterina, had actually been born in Britain's royal palace, where her family lived with the prince and his consort; Dona Caterina's father, Don Fernando Mendes, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, had been the most famous surgeon of the seventeenth century, physician to three monarchs -- King John IV of Portugal, Queen Caterina of England, and King Charles II of England. His portrait in court robes hangs -- somewhat inappropriately, since he was a Marrano -- in Westminster Abbey.
But by 1928 the de Fonseca-Brandon family -- a number of whom had dropped the cumbersome Spanish part of the double name -- despite the fact that it had become connected, in various ways, to the Hendricks family (a Brandon brother and sister married Hendricks counterparts), as well as to a number of Da Costa and de Fonseca cousins, had diminished to the point where the family consisted largely of a handful of spinster aunts and a young man named Lyman Brandon, who married and then divorced his wife, a New York lady lawyer who practiced under the name Frances Marion Brandon. It was she who put the Brandon name back under public scrutiny of a certain sort. In a lawsuit, Mrs. Brandon was claiming that she had been made the victim of a huge and nefarious swindle, one that involved not only herself but a number of her legal clients. This was what she claimed happened:
Mrs. Brandon, like some of her Nathan and Hendricks connections, had been an ardent feminist and, early in the twenties, she had been introduced to a Miss Annie Mathews, a Harlem dressmaker, who was running on a feminist platform for the office of New York county registrar. Mrs. Brandon gave liberal amounts of time and money to the Mathews campaign, which was successful, and in the process she became acquainted with one George J. Gillespie, a religious zealot who claimed to be a saint. Mrs. Brandon soon fell under Gillespie's charismatic spell, and before long Gillespie was a regular visitor at her house. The poor woman had just lost her mother, to whom she had been devoted. Thus she claimed that "While stricken in mourning, and completely under the influence of his astounding 'saintliness,' something I had never expected to find on earth, this rare bird-of-paradise by enslaving my mind, through his religious grip on me, and by his evil council, gradually got into entire control of my every thought and act, of my gilt-edged law practice, and, what is more to the point, of my amplitudious fees!"
For months on end, Mr. Gillespie and Mrs. Brandon had met at her house, where they chanted quotations from the Bible, sang hymns -- he sang "Nearer My God to Thee" in a high soprano -- and prayed. He brought along others of his flock, called "angels," and she invited her friends -- "Society folk," as she described them -- and mass conversions to the Gillespie sect took place. In the process, Mrs. Brandon and her friends were frequently called upon to contribute cash and gifts to Gillespie and his angels, as well as to Gillespie's wife, a "wretched paralytic," who never presented herself. The Gillespians were so devoted to holiness and purity that they would not drink, smoke, swear, or even eat an egg "unless assured the hen that laid it was married." Mr. Gillespie also claimed himself to be "one of Cardinal Hayes's personal attorneys," representing himself to be "a religious man of deep piety, an exemplary Catholic living the life of a holy man of high principle, virtually a saint, withdrawn from the world and worldly interests and affairs." Mrs. Brandon began to believe that Gillespie was her "second but superior self."
Gillespie was particularly interested in one of Mrs. Brandon's clients, Miss Alice A. De Lamar, a maiden lady who had inherited a multimillion-dollar fortune from her father, Captain Raphael De Lamar, a mining magnate, whose estate Mrs. Brandon's law office managed. Presently, in his role as Frances Brandon's alter ego, Gillespie had a new "life plan" to offer her. He asked her, "What is your object in life?" And she answered, "To devote myself ultimately to the poor and helpless." Solemnly he intoned, "God sent me to you." What she needed, he said, was a seat on the children's court bench, where "Your great heart, great mind, irreproachable character, all are needed right there. There you must work as I do for the honor and glory of God. But first you must serve a brief apprenticeship doing court work for the city, to learn the ropes." When Frances Brandon demurred, saying that she had a law practice to tend to, Gillespie said that was simply taken care of; he would take over her law practice and run it for her. Delighted, Frances Brandon agreed, and applied for the office of assistant corporation counsel for New York City, a post she was promptly given.
Not surprisingly, it wasn't too long before certain "irregularities" began to turn up in the accounts of some of the Brandon clients, particularly that of the biggest Brandon clien, Alice De Lamar. Presently the irregularities seemed to amount to more than half a million dollars. When the new assistant corporation counsel attempted to get information from Gillespie, he put her off soothingly, assuring her that all was well. He, meanwhile, seemed to have made off with all her clients' files, records, and accounts, but Mrs. Brandon, still under his spell, could not believe that her "angel from Heaven" could be guilty of any wrongdoing. When her clients expressed anxiety, Mrs. Brandon attempted to put more pressure on her friend. She found him suddenly strangely hostile. In fact, when she suggested that she might have to go to higher authorities about the situation, the holy man threatened her life, saying -- as she remembered it -- "You're a squealer, are you? Well, one squeal and I'll have you bumped. I'll have you jobbed!"
The situation continued to worsen. After more than one meeting, over tea and sandwiches, at Gillespie's office, Frances Brandon got the distinct impression that Gillespie was trying to poison her. Some discreet research revealed that George Gillespie had been known elsewhere, and at other times, by such names as Ginger-Ale George, Brother Gillespie, and Slippery George. He nonetheless continued to exercise "complete control and mastery" over her. And so, when he offered her a final and grotesque "deal," she immediately accepted it. He said he would return her law practice to her if she would marry him. His "paralytic" wife, he explained, had conveniently died in the meantime.
On March 15, 1925, Frances Marion Brandon formally announced her impending marriage to George Gillespie. She was, to be sure, somewhat apprehensive about the future of the union. She approached it in "fear and trembling, amid nameless premonitions." Mrs. Brandon did not lack for a sense of the dramatic, and she actually went so far as to purchase a black wedding gown. It was, as she saw it, "A marriage 1 had agreed to as the only way of recovering quiet possession of my records from this Gillespie, and unraveling those financial irregularities, without painful notoriety."
But her public announcement had the inadvertent effect not only of creating notoriety but also of catching Gillespie off his guard and trapping him. Obviously he had had no intention of marrying Frances Brandon, and was simply offering marriage as a way of putting her off and keeping her out of his account books. When the announcement appeared, it created a certain stir. For one thing, he was more than twenty years her senior; he was a self-proclaimed celibate, for another. When Gillespie was approached by a newspaper reporter for a statement about the upcoming nuptials, he protested, "I am a holy manl" And then, "I do not even know the woman. What is she? Some sort of city employee? Then how would 1 know her? The thought of marrying her never entered my mind I If a million other women had made that announcement, 1 could not have been more surprised."
Needless to say, to Frances Brandon this statement "came like a thunderclap, or rather, a roar of thunder that tore at the very core of my life." There followed a period where she "remained as one dead for two years or more." Then she instigated the swindle suit against Gillespie, asking $575,000 in damages.
It was, of course, a classic and pathetic case of a susceptible and perhaps foolish woman who had been successfully duped by a confidence man. And Frances Brandon might easily have won wide popular sympathy for her predicament, if she had not chosen to inject the issue of social "class" -- and alleged Sephardic superiority -- into the case. While it was still pending trial, she wrote and published a pamphlet intended to place her name above reproach, and thus disassociate herself from the shady doings of the nefarious Gillespie. Titled "The Truth at Last!!" it consisted of sixteen tightly packed pages filled with shrill vituperations and fulminations, besprinkled with quotations from the Old and New Testaments, Shakespeare, and Saint Thomas a Kempis, hectic with italics and spiky with picket fences of exclamation points. But at the heart of her exercise, alas, was the assertion that, in terms of background and breeding, George Gillespie was Frances Brandon's social inferior.
"Gillespie is Scotch," she wrote, "judging by his name, and of sordid, squalid origin, a street gamin, a ruffian; salesman of children's dresses, etc.; then a dockhand at the New York Customs House; married a creature, her father a stablehand, her aunt a cook; menials; illiterates. In line therewith, his daughter married the son of a Bronx veterinary." For all that, she wrote, "He palmed himself off as a 'Society man and philanthropist,' and then was always concealing his family connections and their record as habitual petty jobholders, this ingrate. . . identified me . . . as a despicable 'some sort of city employee.' ... Why should I, a recognized executive, with a phenomenal record of achievement, and a priceless law practice, exchange cake for crumbs, retrogress into the political rank and me, into a nominal public office, regardless of remuneration? For bread and butter? Hardly. My financial circumstances preclude that possibility. Then how? Through Gillespie!"
As for herself, she pointed out in her manifesto:
[quote]My sister, years ago, married the cousin of a beloved First Lady of the Land, our American equivalent for the bluest blood of Royalty. No fuss; no feathers; just unpretentiously. We are like that ... though my own blood and kin traces back through America's proudest aristocracy, those PIONEERS, who tamed the wilderness with their bare and bleeding hands; sturdy stock; backbone of America. . . . First Settlers back beyond the Revolution, tracing ancestry not to the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, but even back of that, to AMERICA'S FIRST SETTLER, The Founder, Sir Walter Raleigh.[/quote]
As if that were not enough, she crowed: "I wear the crimson of nobility by right of that proud name [Brandon], and wear that peerless name as a diadem of stars upon my brow: When we were very young, I married Lyman da Fonseca Brandon!" She then proceeded to recite all her ex-husband's genealogical credentials -- the Duke of Suffolk, Mary, Queen of Scots, Kitty Mellish, and all the rest.
Her pamphlet went on to quote a lengthy testimonial in her behalf from Lyman Brandon. "I know Frances Marion Brandon," her former husband wrote somewhat elliptically. "She is an Ace ... A phenomenon, a paragon among women; one in a thousand thousand, to know her is to love, respect, honor, and cherish all womanhood as epitomized in her. Cast in heroic mold, modest, self-sacrificing . . . of invincible courage . . . gladly go to the scaffold for principle, for THE TRUTH ... inspiration to women . . . her great soul ... glorious womanhood... ." Lyman Brandon's prose sounded suspiciously like his former wife's, and he was every bit as prolix.
Finally, after a detailed recitation of Mr. Gillespie's "foul deeds," Mrs. Brandon's paper terminated with these words:
Duped? Humbugged? Hoaxed? I was. We all were! But CREDIT ME ALWAYS WITH THIS, THE HIGHEST FEATHER OF MY CAP: It was I, who called Gillespie's bluff; smoked him out; treed him! I who rendered that supreme service to my fellow citizens. The Artful Dodger caught at last! Another prize captured by me; or rather, a prize capture. But those of you who do not yet know me may ask, have I any proofs? Have I? Have I? My turn to thunder now!
What was it Crockett said? "Come on down, Gillespie; you're a gone coon!"
And as the date for the trial approached, these words turned out to be prophetic. Mr. Gillespie was indeed gone. He had vanished without a trace.
And as for Frances Brandon, poor woman, her pompous and windy pamphlet had made her a laughingstock. While she attitudinized, New York giggled. While she fumed and ranted and exhumed fifteenth-century ancestors, readers of New York newspapers hugged their sides. She had made being related to the Grand Almoner of Ferdinand and Isabella seem -- simply -- funny.
To the Sephardic community of New York, Mrs. Brandon's behavior was a deep affront. She was, after all, using a Sephardic connection by marriage in order to establish her integrity; a pedigree she had merely married was being tossed around and advertised for all to see. Furthermore, Brandon was now no longer her husband but only her ex-husband. It was all just another reminder of how thin the fabric of Sephardic life had grown to be. As one of the Nathans wrote to a Philadelphia cousin: "In case it isn't obvious by her behavior, this Brandon woman is not one of us."
But of course the feeling that there is some sort of mystical advantage in being a Sephardic Jew, or even in bearing the traces of Sephardic "blood," has persisted, persists. In the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, the late Bernard Baruch, whose father had been a German immigrant, wrote: "My grandfather, Bernhard Baruch, whose name I bear, had an old family relic, a skull, on which was recorded the family genealogy. It appeared that the Baruchs were of a rabbinical family and of Portuguese-Spanish origin. . . . Grandfather also claimed descent from Baruch the Scribe, who edited the prophecies of Jeremiah and whose name is given to one of the books of the Apocrypha."
At the same time, the great financier admitted in a sheepish tone that was quite unlike him: "Somewhere along the line there must have been an admixture of Polish or Russian stock."
And John L. Loeb, the present head of the banking firm Loeb, Rhoades & Company, is more ancestrally proud of his mother, the former Adeline Moses, than of his father, who founded the giant banking house. The Moseses were an old Sephardic family from the South who, though somewhat depleted from the days when they had maintained a vast plantation with slaves and cotton fields, were nonetheless disapproving when their daughter married Mr. Loeb, "an ordinary German immigrant."
Both Messrs. Baruch and Loeb are dutifully listed in Dr. Stern's registry of the Old Guard.
|