Hazel Liberman
Arnett; 100, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 27, 2023.
Hazel Stewart Liberman was born in New
York City on December 14, 1922, the third of four daughters of Bertha Bayer
Liberman and Isaac Liberman.
Throughout her long life, she was open
and vocal about her role as the black sheep of the Liberman family. “I was
unwanted,” she said to Brooks Clark, biographer of her younger sister Sally L.
Smith. “When I had the nerve to come out female, that was a disappointment. I
don’t know if I was supposed to be a sort of surrogate heir when my father
strangely chose Stewart for my middle name. Well, I say this because it seems
I’d been named after his store at the time, Stewart & Company.” I chuckled
a little. “You laugh,” she said to Clark. “But it wasn’t funny. In fact, I felt
so ashamed of having a boy’s name that whenever I was asked what the S stood
for, I invariably lied, answering, ‘Susan.’
“Not only was I not forgiven for not
being the wished-for male heir, but also for not having my siblings’ light
skin. My father, for some odd reason, overlooked the fact that my dark skin had
come from him! As a result of being made to feel different, my image of myself
was that of an ugly duckling Yet there were those who saw me through another
lens, like Sally’s Bennington College buddy Ruth Lyford, who said, ‘Hazel was
absolutely gorgeous and so different from the older sisters. She did things her
way.’
“Yes, I was the maverick in the family. I
was the rebellious one. Although Sally was less so, I knew there were times
when she looked up to me. Contrary to her memory, however, she was strongly
supported emotionally by our parents. She was what you might call their golden
girl. Whatever—putting perceptions aside, I am enormously proud of my sister,
who left a giant footprint in the field of teaching children with learning
differences.”
Other
aspects made Hazel different from her sisters. As she admitted to Clark, “I was
a loner and a culture vulture, which I still am. I would often spend Saturday
afternoons at a museum by myself. Or sit in the last row of the balcony to see
a Broadway show, would you believe, for just fifty cents!”
With high hopes of becoming an opera
singer, Hazel started her training at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music
while enrolled as a liberal arts student at the University of Cincinnati.
“Unfortunately,” says Hazel, “the conservatory was not at all good.” So, she
returned to New York, where she entered the BS degree program at the Juilliard
School of Music as a voice major. Although the basic music program was superb,
the voice department was not, forcing her to change her major. “I soon
discovered the vocal faculty had always been notoriously weak, and when the
outside teacher I eventually chose heard me sing he exclaimed, ‘Oh, another
Juilliard wreck!’ That he took me on was incredible considering he had produced
such stars as Todd Duncan, the first Porgy, and one of the Metropolitan’s
greatest baritones, Leonard Warren.”
With tuition having been paid by her
parents, it fell to Hazel to pay for the lessons. This meant getting a job. At
first she found part-time work at Columbia University “punching an IBM machine”
and tabulating true-false exam scores. After a year she was hired to do
research for a music-loving advertising executive who had contracts for a
monthly music page in Good Housekeeping
and articles for the programs handed out at the Met. “To my shock and
amazement,” she told me, “this man also expected me to become his ghostwriter!
Who? Inexperienced me? In all honesty, I had never considered writing my strong
suit, but somehow I rose to the challenge and managed to muddle through. Since
part of my job was to conduct interviews behind the curtain, I got my first
taste of backstage life. Although thrilling at first, it soon became quite the
tutorial on the less glamorous side of stardom.
“As time passed, plus the unpredictable
vicissitudes of life, I was to switch gears and, with the help of many kind
folks, was able to gain a footing in my new trade. Early on I racked up credits
as a radio music continuity writer in New York and for a show produced by the
Marshall Plan in Paris starring film actor Jean-Pierre Aumont.” Following that,
Hazel scripted another show for the Marshall Plan called The International Women’s Program, which was in essence an exchange
of inspirational ideas beamed to four other European countries.
Back in the States, Hazel worked as a TV
writer and producer for two years at CBS crafting scripts for Mike Wallace and
three years at NBC working for Hugh Downs and Arlene Francis. Later she wrote
and produced industrial films for AT&T and Dow Chemical.
Hazel also enjoyed a magazine career.
While in Paris she worked as a reporter for Line,
an American start-up publication created
for Seventh Avenue fashion houses that couldn’t afford to view haute couture
shows in person. There, Hazel’s beat was to cover runway shows, as well as culling boutiques for newsworthy items to
copy. Years later she was to edit Sew
Fashionable, a sewing magazine. After that she spent two years as Fashion
Editor of Woman’s Day, landing next
at Family Weekly as its manuscript editor.
Her final stop for five years was as executive editor of Science Digest.
Hazel published two books: I Hear America Singing (1975), about two
centuries of folk songs, and Converso
(2005), a three-generational novel tracing the legacy of the Portuguese Inquisition
and the “crypto” Jews it created.
As mentioned earlier, Hazel did things
her way and, as was her wont, she set her course in another way. Whereas all
her sisters had had huge Jewish weddings, Hazel said, “I eloped with Russell
Arnett, a non-Jew, and we promptly moved to France for him to learn filmmaking
at the prestigious Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographique.”
Toward the
end of his studies at IDHEC, Russell served an apprenticeship with motion
picture producer Alexander Salkind on two features, one made in Spain, the
other in France. On returning to the United States, he was employed as an
assistant director on the Army’s Signal Corps training films. From there he
became assistant director of the Guy Lombardo TV series for two years before
moving on to feature films. Among several well-known directors he assisted were
Bud Yorkin and Peter Bogdanovich. As a director, his specialties were TV
commercials and industrial films. His major clients for industrials were
Lederle Laboratories and Singer Sewing Machines; for commercials, the
production company Screen Gems.
After fourteen years of marriage, Hazel
and Russell had her parents’ only granddaughter, Hayley. Approximately six
years later the couple divorced.
In 1984 Hazel moved to Saint Louis to
head the media arm of a famous institute. Within a year she met her second
husband, Wayner Swenson, a successful contractor and realtor. After seventeen
years, the very happy union of two culture vultures suddenly came to an end
when Swenson died in 2001.
Hazel remained very active through her
nineties. At one point she submitted a different ten-minute play to two
playwriting festivals and was working on an original feature film treatment.
Living as long as she did, Hazel Arnett’s childhood memories date back to the
Roaring Twenties and the remarkable coming-to-America story of her parents and
their families.
A Gray Homburg and Spats on West End
Avenue
On Sunday
afternoons in the late 1920s, Isaac Liberman would don his gray spats and
matching homburg hat, pick up his wooden cane with a gold band around it, and
usher his wife, Bertha, and three daughters into their elevator at 272 West
Ninetieth Street in Manhattan. From the front of their building, they walked a
few steps to the corner, where Liberman turned and took the lead as they
promenaded on West End Avenue, showing off the family to the neighborhood. Ike,
as he was called, a trim five-foot-four and dapper, walked with a stride that was measured and determined. Bertha,
barely five feet and fuller of figure, struggled to keep up at the best of
times. “My father and mother never walked arm in arm,” remembered Hazel
Liberman Arnett, who trailed behind with her older sisters, Ruth and Irene.
Unlike the schoolgirls in the Madeline
books, they did not walk in a straight line. “It was more of a rotating
formation,” said Arnett.
This was the West Side of Manhattan in
the last days of the Roaring Twenties. Just a block to the west, fashionable
figures like Babe Ruth, George Gershwin, and Damon Runyon steered their
roadsters along the tree-lined curves and rises of Riverside Drive, which had
been finished just nineteen years earlier but still felt like the modern world
come to life.
Sundays were the Libermans’ family
time. The rest of the week, including Saturdays, Ike served on the board of New
York’s oldest specialty store, Arnold Constable, at Fifth Avenue and Fortieth
Street, for the middle class and ran Stewart & Company, the specialty store
he had founded, serving upscale customers. “My father was a workaholic,” said
Arnett. “We didn’t see him, except on Sunday. He went to work before we got up
and came home after we went to bed. On Sunday, we’d put on our coats and walk the
neighborhood.”
By any measure Ike Liberman had plenty to
show off. Since 1901, when he had arrived as a seventeen-year-old at the Castle
Garden pier from Lithuania, he had founded and built Stewart & Company into
one of Manhattan’s largest specialty stores, and in 1925 he had been asked to join
the board of Arnold Constable.
As the decade Lindy hopped toward its
crescendo, Liberman was still on the rise, determined to build his fortune,
burnish his name, and take his place in fashionable society. As with J. P.
Morgan on Wall Street, the initials I. L. were identifier enough for Isaac
Liberman in the retail world.
In 1928 he had supervised the creation
of the inaugural gown for the wife of the newly elected governor of New York,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The process of creating the gown included the input
of Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt. “I had picked a
group of dresses that made her look younger,” said Liberman. “I had to show
them to Mrs. Roosevelt’s mother-in-law. She said, ‘This is terrible.’”
Liberman, being diplomatic, helped Eleanor and Sara settle on another style,
although he knew it was not as flattering as the first group he had shown.
Eleanor said to Liberman, “You know, you’ve been wonderful with my
mother-in-law.” Later, he said, “Eleanor realized she’d made a mistake.”
It turned out to be the first of two
inaugural gowns Liberman made for Roosevelt, who became a longtime friend and
ally in philanthropic causes. At her behest, Liberman became an early and loyal
supporter of the Wiltwyck School for Boys, which was located across the Hudson
from the Roosevelts’ home in Hyde Park and served the needs of emotionally
disturbed “juvenile delinquent” African American teenagers.
In the spring of 1929, while Bertha was pregnant with their fourth
child, Liberman was busy with another venture—joining his friend Sam Golding in
starting the Sterling National Bank and Trust Company. As it happened, the bank
opened on May 7, 1929, the same day Bertha gave birth to Sarah Bayer Liberman,
named after Bertha’s mother. Eddie Cantor, then
starring in Whoopee! on Broadway,
attended the bank’s opening celebration. “We compared births,” said Liberman.
“Sally was my fourth daughter. Cantor said, ‘I can top that—I have five.’” Sally’s birth was
long and painful: “The only one that had caused her such pain,” Sally
remembered her mother saying, “the only one to make it necessary for her to go
to the hospital.” [Hazel strongly disputes that her mother had to go to the
hospital for Sally’s birth. Nonetheless, these are the words that Sally heard
from her mother.]
As he had before the birth of Hazel, Isaac
Liberman had strongly hoped for a boy to carry on his business, and he
expressed his disappointment in Bertha for not producing the right gender.
“I do remember the day Sally was born,”
said Arnett. “I was in kindergarten downstairs in the building where we lived.
There was this beautiful bassinette and inside there was this beautiful,
fair-skinned baby. Later, in the summer, when we rented a hundred-acre estate
in Dobbs Ferry, New York, I remember that beautiful bassinette next to my
favorite tree, which I liked to climb.”
“I was amazed about this fun little cherub,” said cousin Abba Bayer,
always called Abby, who was about the same age as Arnett.
Thereafter, when the Libermans took
their Sunday strolls on West End Avenue, the baby Sarah stayed back in the
apartment with Anna MacDonald, the Scottish nurse who had been with the family
for eleven years.
“She just took charge,” said Arnett. “Our time was all with the nurse. It
wasn’t with our parents—just on Sunday.”
MacDonald’s influence on the household
can be gauged by a switch she made soon after the baby’s arrival. “Anna the
nurse had the gall to change her name to Sally,” said Hazel, “which turned out
to be her sister’s name. It was scandalous!”
That summer, Liberman’s perspective as board member of a bank may have
led him to take a close look at the surging stock market. Or perhaps he had a
moment like that of Joseph P. Kennedy, who said he realized it was time to exit
the market when taxi drivers offered him stock tips, the man shining his shoes
gave him the latest financial news, and his cook had a brokerage account.
Liberman may also have noticed the large numbers of his customers who were
buying on credit. In fact, charge operations were making up 45 to 70 percent of
his business, as they were in stores like Lord & Taylor, Best & Co.,
and Abraham & Strauss. Whatever Liberman’s reasoning, he, like Joe Kennedy,
sold short before Black Friday, October 29, 1929. In the aftermath of the
crash, as Arnett put it, “He made a killing.”
Although Liberman had been savvy enough to sell his own stocks, he
couldn’t save Stewart & Company. In unfortunate timing, Liberman had built
a new location at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street and opened it on October
16, 1929. The building featured an entranceway that was described in The New York Times as “a stupendously
luxurious mix of limestone, bronze, platinum, and hammered aluminum . . . At
the very top of the façade were limestone relief panels of two nearly naked
women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing. The interior was just as
opulent as the entrance: murals, decorative painting, and a forest of woods:
satinwood, butternut, walnut, cherry, rosewood, bubinga, maple, ebony, red
mahogany, and Persian oak.” An invitation to a luncheon preceding the
inauguration ceremonies, which Eleanor Roosevelt attended, read, “signalizing
through architecture and decoration a new era of art in fashion.”
After
the crash, with Stewart customers unable to buy anything, Liberman closed the
new store and sold it to Paul Bonwit, who had for some time been urging him to
make a deal for the location. “They were on Thirty-Eighth Street,” Liberman
remembered. “He said Bonwit Teller belongs uptown.” Uptown it went, and there
it remained for fifty years or so until a young developer from Queens tore the
building down and erected a luxurious glass skyscraper that he named Trump
Tower after himself.
In the next phase of Liberman’s business
life, he took over as president of Arnold Constable
as it navigated the wreckage of the Great Depression. Part of his
strategy anticipated the rise of the suburbs. Under
Liberman’s leadership, Constable expanded into New Rochelle in 1937, followed
thereafter by the Long Island towns of Hempstead and Manhasset; the New Jersey
outposts Hackensack, Trenton, New Brunswick, and West Orange; and Upper Darby
in Pennsylvania.
In
1933, the Liberman family—Ike; Bertha; daughters Ruth, Irene, Hazel, and Sally;
and Anna MacDonald, the nurse—moved to the East Side and a twelve-room
apartment at 1000 Park Avenue, at Eighty-Fourth Street. Ike, as driven as ever,
spent little time with the women at home. As his and Bertha’s social profile
grew, she was consumed with raising money for Jewish charities and carrying out
her role as a lady of New York society. She ran her household with the help of a
cadre of live-in employees that over the years, along with MacDonald, included
chambermaid and waitress Marie Sebek from Czechoslovakia; cook Lou Michael from
Germany; and chauffeur and butler Al Crain from the horse country of Kentucky,
where he had been an aspiring jockey (before he grew too tall) and a stable
hand thereafter. A Runyonesque character, Crain loved to bet on the ponies,
smoked cheap cigars, taught Hazel to drive, and served the family for many
years. The live-in help was complemented by seamstresses and laundresses who
came in for the day.
The three older daughters went to Fieldston, the high school of the
progressive Ethical Culture Society, in a leafy section of the Bronx. “It was
peer pressure,” explained Hazel Arnett. “All of my parents’ friends’ kids had
been sent to Fieldston, so we were, too.”
Sally, meanwhile, attended Public School No. 6, the Lillie D. Blake
School at East Eighty-Fifth Street, named after suffragist Lillie Devereaux
Blake. Each morning MacDonald walked Sally from their door on Park Avenue one
block up to Eighty-Fifth Street then one block over to Madison Avenue, then
walked her back when school let out. Sally loved her dearly.
Each winter Isaac and Bertha spent a month in Florida, leaving the
children in MacDonald’s care. “None of us traveled,” said Hazel. “Here we are,
rich kids. But we didn’t feel rich. We didn’t go to Bermuda like some of the
other kids in our schools. Other than camp in Maine in the summer, none of us
went anyplace.”
In this protected environment, “the baby” Sally spent most of her time
at home alone with her dolls, her books, the games she made up, and Anna MacDonald.
Sally’s was a privileged Park Avenue childhood that contrasted dramatically
with the remarkable coming-to-America stories of her father and mother, just a
generation before.
The
Rise of Isaac Liberman
In 1900, a fire roared through the inventory of the
yard-goods store owned by Isaac Liberman’s parents in the tiny rural shtetl of
Ramygala, in northwest Lithuania, then still a part of the Russian Empire. In
the aftermath, the government-run insurance paid just 10 percent of what the
fabrics had been worth. Liberman, then sixteen, looked around at Ramygala
(literally, “Quiet End”). Nestled in the highlands, it was remote from
everything— except, from time to time, the bootheels of the Czar’s dragoons.
Almost half of Ramygala’s 1,326 people were Jews, but that didn’t help when the
pogroms came—or maybe it made things worse.
To one extent or another, waves of
violence against Jews were a recurring part of life in Czarist Russia in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. It was said that things had been better
in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilna, ninety miles to the southeast, where
Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Germans, and Russians
had lived together in a cultural stew. But the Czar’s soldiers had seen to it
that each pogrom was bloodier and more brutal than the last. Throughout the
1890s, Isaac’s four older brothers and sister, like thousands of Lithuanian
Jews, had emigrated. His oldest two brothers, Udol and Zalman, had gone to
Israel. Philip, Meyer, and Rose had left for New York City. Their letters home
from Manhattan described a city where they could make a living. As the old joke
went, “America is paradise. We work only a half day: twelve hours.”
Isaac had been born in 1885. In later
life, not knowing the exact date of his birth, he picked December 25, because
it was a day of the year he wouldn’t have to have his store open. In later life
he also made it clear that he had no fond memories of the poverty and the
injustice of having everything swept away in an instant. His grandson Randy
Smith once asked him, “Don’t you ever want to go back?” Liberman paused and
answered, “Why?”
Isaac’s path of immigration likely took
him through Poland and East Prussia to Hamburg, where steamers departed for
America. Rose and Philip met him at the Castle Garden pier on the tip of
Manhattan. It was 1901, and Isaac started working for Philip straight away. “My
brother ran retail stores,” said Liberman, “convenience stores.” They sold dry goods, clothing, and notions. “His main store
was on Eighth Avenue and Fortieth Street.”
The family lived above the first floor,
and Liberman lived with them. “I was of considerable help to him,” said Ike. “I
didn’t know what ‘hours’ meant. I’d work six in the morning until ten at night,
Sunday night until twelve. We used to stay open on Sunday morning until twelve,
twelve-thirty. In spring and summer the streetcars were five cents a ride,
which was itself interesting. On Sunday afternoons I’d take a ride on the
streetcar up to 110th Street, where they had a regular Coney Island up there.”
Throughout his life, Liberman generally
pronounced v as w and vice versa, as in “ewentually” and “vuz.” The following
sentence is rendered as spoken to provide a feeling for the way Liberman spoke.
“My job ewentually vas to open up some of these stores and see that they were vell
stocked vith merchandise, at Canal Street and Broadvay and places like that.
Eventually ve opened up a big one on Broadvay opposite City Hall. One of the
big stores had occupied that corner. They moved further uptown and my brother
took over that store.”
Liberman remembered that Frank W. Woolworth had his offices on that
corner. “Mr. Woolworth used to come in to the store, and he asked me some
questions. He was very pleasant, very nice. Eventually, he put up the Woolworth
building, one of the first skyscrapers.”
One day in 1903 or thereabouts, Philip made
Isaac an offer. “My brother said to me, ‘I’ve just taken another store, and I’m
going to make you a partner of mine in that store.’ I was naturally delighted.
I thought that was wonderful of my brother to have done. So we went down and
saw where the store was, and he had laid out exactly what was happen to open
the store, and he said to me, ‘We’re going to call it either Liberman Brothers
or Philip & Isaac Liberman.’ I couldn’t sleep that night thinking that I
would be in business with my brother.
“We opened up and it was very successful,
we were doing business, but my name did not appear over the store, so I spoke
to my brother. I said, ‘I thought I was to be a partner of yours and we were
going to call it Liberman Brothers or Philip and Isaac Liberman.’ He said,
‘I’ve thought it over, and I thought you were too young.’ He thought that I
ought to wait. ‘Eventually,’ he says, ‘we’ll do it. But you’re too young yet.’
So I was very disturbed about it. He was probably right, but youth doesn’t understand
that. [It] can’t wait. I said, ‘I hate to do it, but I can’t put my efforts to
the best if I’m thinking that my name wouldn’t be up,’ and I said I would like
to step out of the business. He said, ‘Well, that’s all right, but I can’t pay
you out.’ I said, ‘I’ll take one half of the merchandise, if you will permit me
to keep it in the basement until I get myself located,” and so it was. I must
have been about twenty.”
This was Liberman’s sanitized version
of this episode, rendered with seven and a half decades of perspective. In
fact, this parting of the ways was considerably more bitter. Philip later moved
to Florida, where he started the first commercial bank in Miami Beach and his
son Marcie served as mayor from 1947 to 1949. Liberman did not approve of
Marcie because he was unpolished, was often quoted for his malapropisms, and
reportedly socialized with mobsters.
In later years, Liberman also broke off
social relations with his older brother Meyer, even when Meyer was working for
him at Arnold Constable. Liberman was self-disciplined and assiduous in his
personal habits. He held everyone around him to his own lofty standards of
behavior, appearance, and achievement. As apparent as these traits were in
later years to Liberman’s wife and children, they were also fully present when
he was in his early twenties, beginning to build his business.
“My first store was on 1418 Broadway
right opposite the Metropolitan Opera House,” Liberman recalled. “It was an
empty store and I took it. I went to the resources and they all welcomed me
very nicely and they gave me credit, and I bought nice merchandise to add to
what I had. Since that store was located next to the opera, in the middle of
the block, and there was plenty of activity until about twelve o’clock, and so
I stayed open until twelve o’clock. I was very envious of the papers,
particularly the Sunday papers, and all the advertising there. I thought, “If I
could only afford to spend some money on the advertising.” I checked it out,
and I thought it was too expensive. I went around to the newsstands and I asked
them, if I was to print a circular, would they put it in the Sunday section of
the papers. They wanted to know what I would pay, and I said, ‘Whatever you say
as a tryout, but you’ve got to be reasonable to start with,’ and they said yes.
The Sunday paper came out, it was the same size as the newspaper pages, and it
was successful. That was my first experience in advertising, but it didn’t last
long. The newspapers put in a restriction because the loose flyers fell out of
the papers and into the street.
“We were going along, the store was too small, and there was a store a
block and a half away, near Forty-Second Street, opposite the Imperial Hotel
and Broadway. The store was successful, doing good business. I was in that
store for quite a few years. I operated under the
name Stewart and Company because Liberman Brothers was taken.”
His first Fifth Avenue store was between was between Thirty-Eighth and
Thirty-Ninth. His next store, offering “Correct Apparel for Women &
Misses,” was at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street.
Around this time, Liberman helped organize the Fifth Avenue Association,
which shaped the future of that storied commercial district. “Between 1913 and
1920,” writes William Leach in Land of
Desire, “streets were widened, trees planted, public space freed—to the
‘extent that it was possible’—of ‘riff-raff,’ as the association’s notes
reported. ‘Isles of safety’ for pedestrians were created on the streets and
garish billboards were demolished. At the urging of the association, the city
adopted new subway stations and rerouted bus service to serve the retail
district better.”
At that point, Liberman decided to take a buying trip to Europe,
“particularly to France.” He and his two closest friends, a lawyer and an
engineer, started out in Paris. “We made an arrangement with the commissionaire
there, had everything lined up so we can place orders. So it was.” Next they
took the train to Venice, because Isaac wanted to see what Venice looked like.
“I didn’t know if there was anything I was interested in purchasing in Venice,
and I just couldn’t take the smell of the canals.” His friends said he was too
fussy. “I may be too fussy,” he told them. “But I can’t breathe. I can’t fall
asleep.”
So they adjourned to the Adriatic oceanfront at Lido Beach. “It was
beautiful,” Liberman recalled. “It was a great place for schoolteachers, and”—a
memory that plainly endured— “they used to bathe nude.” Then, said Liberman, “a
Sunday morning came along and there was an extra: Austria had declared war
against Serbia. ‘Oh my God,’ I says. ‘What’s that going to mean?’ We were
supposed to leave on Monday morning to Trieste.” They asked Cook’s travel
bureau what they should do. “They said, ‘Oh, don’t pay attention to that Austria Declares War. They’re going to
walk in and that will be the end of it. Go ahead.’ And that’s exactly what we
did.”
The three Americans found that their original itinerary would take them
into the war zone. They were told that a big inland city, Vienna, would be
safer. They ended up stuck in Vienna for three or four months. Fortunately, the
manager of their hotel had managed the Imperial Hotel across the street from
Liberman’s store in New York. Liberman and his friends had to obtain passports
from the American embassy because up until that time, as he said, “you didn’t
need ’em.”
Eventually they made their way back to Paris, hoping to pick up some
merchandise, but with nothing available they went on to England and home. “I
was a different person when I stepped off the boat,” said Liberman. True to
that statement, for the rest of his life, he never again left the United
States.
A Match Is Made
By 1916, Liberman had established
himself as a successful entrepreneur and a respected civic leader. “So it was
time for him to find a wife,” said Hazel Arnett. In line with the culture of
the day, his introduction to twenty-two-year-old Bertha Bayer was the work of a
matchmaker. If the matchmaker was not named Dolly Levi, no matter. We can still
picture Barbra Streisand at Luchow’s arranging to bring Isaac Liberman and
Bertha Bayer together.
To Bertha, the matchmaker might have
said, “So what if he’s nine years older? He owns his own
store. He’s full of
energy. Everybody who tries to keep up with him at Stewart & Company knows
that. He doesn’t drink or smoke. He’s fit and
trim—never touches dessert. He even has good teeth—never had a cavity in his
life. Let’s face it, Miss Bayer, a person could do worse!”
To Ike, Mrs. Levi might have cooed,
“Miss Bayer is pretty and young—plenty of time for lots of children. She comes
from a good Lithuanian family. Good businessmen. They’re devout, very orthodox.
She was born in this country, even. [She wasn’t, but coming over at eighteen
months is close enough.] Remember, Mr. Liberman, you’re no spring
chicken.”
To properly express his intentions, I.L. would have been introduced to
Bertha’s father, Samuel Bayer, at 54 an owner of Bayer Brothers, a thriving
textile business with offices at 53 Fifth Avenue and a mill across
the Hudson in Paterson, New Jersey. Bayer was a dignified gentleman, with a
white moustache and goatee, his white hair swept back, with the piercing eyes
of a man who, like Liberman, had made his way in New York business and thrived
on his hard work and savvy. In fact, when Liberman called upon Bayer in his
apartment at 2 West Ninety-Fourth Street, he met a man whose journey from
Lithuania to America had much in common with his own.
Meet the Bayers; Ike and Bertha’s Life
Together
In the year 1900,
Eldridge Street between Canal and Division was crowded with pushcarts, fruit
and vegetable vendors, and horse-drawn wagons. It was a hub of life for
thousands of Eastern European Jews on the Lower East Side, much of it focused
around the massive, ornate façade of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, at No. 12.
Two doors down toward Division Street, at No. 8, stood a typical tenement
house. Among its twenty-four tenants were Samuel and Sarah Bayer, their six
children—Annie, fourteen; Henry, eleven; Alexander, ten; Mortimer, nine; and
twins Bertha and Isidor, four—and Samuel’s younger brother Jack, who had come
over from Vilna the year before. Samuel himself had emigrated in 1894. Sarah
and the children, including the twins who were then only eighteen months old,
had followed in 1897.
On a Saturday morning, the family might
have walked the two doors up to the synagogue. Samuel and Jack would have
settled in with the men downstairs. Sarah and the children would have climbed
the wooden staircase to sit in the balconies. In the records of the
congregation, the Bayers are not listed among its members. There were hundreds
of synagogues in the neighborhood where they might have felt more comfortable
or where Samuel’s older brother, Phil, and his family might have chosen to
worship.
The Bayers had
been textile merchants back in Vilna, selling undyed cotton, or what was known
as gray goods. When Phil had come over in the early 1880s, he had transplanted
the business and encouraged Samuel to join him. As Samuel prospered, he joined many Jewish
and Italian immigrants in moving his family to Harlem, first to 251 West 112th
Street, two blocks north of Central Park. By 1910, they lived at 187 West 118th
Street, where they were doing well enough to employ a Polish maid. As Samuel prospered more, he moved the family
to 2 West 94th Street, on the corner of Central Park West. In time, he was a
founder and first president of the uptown Talmud Torah. He was also a founder
and president of the West Side Jewish Center at 131 West Eighty-Sixth
Street.
When Ike Liberman started looking for
a bride, the Bayers’ oldest daughter, Annie, was still living at home. She
eventually married her uncle Phil—not exactly ideal, but sometimes things
happen that way. Henry, Al, Moe, and Iz were working for Bayer Brothers. When
the United States joined the Great War, Moe registered for the draft, became a
doughboy, and showed off the portrait in his uniform for the rest of his life.
The Covenant of Marriage at the Astor Hotel
In later life Ike
Liberman said, “I met my lady at one of the functions. I don’t remember which
one it was. She appealed to me. I was around 31 years old, and she was about
22. So it was I asked her, and she was foolish enough to say yes.” At other times he told a story, almost
certainly apocryphal and having the ring of a line from a vaudeville routine,
about meeting Bertha when she fell off a bicycle. “I helped her,” he said from
time to time, “and her father made me marry her.”
If
the marriage was the work of a matchmaker, she earned her fee. Isaac and Bertha
were married on February 25, 1917, in the Grand Ballroom of the Astor Hotel.
The service was performed by M. Hyamson and Rabbi Oraih Chaim Congoly.
The witnesses were Gus Nathansoly and Wolf
Kufeld.
From the certificate of the day:
This Certificate
Witnesseth
That on the First day of the week, the Third day of the month Adul in
the year 5677, A.M., corresponding to the 25th of February 1917 the
holy Covenant of Marriage was entered into at New York between the Bridegroom
Isaac Liberman and his Bride Bertha Bayer.
The said bridegroom made the following declaration to his bride:
“Be thou my wife according to the law of Moses and of Israel. I
faithfully promise that I will be a true husband unto thee. I will honor and
cherish thee, and will provide all that is necessary for thy due sustenance,
even as it beseemeth a Jewish husband to do. I also take upon myself all such
further obligations for thy maintenance, during thy life-time, as are
prescribed by our religious statute.”
And the said bride has plighted her troth unto him, in affection and in
sincerity, and has thus taken upon herself the fulfillment of all the duties
incumbent upon a Jewish wife.
This Covenant of Marriage was duly executed and witnessed this day,
according to the usage of Israel.
The commemorative photo, by Drucker & Co. NY, shows guests in formal
attire, mostly white tie, seated around some twenty-one round tables in the
grand ballroom, with six chandeliers and twelve Beaux Arts statues on each of
the decorative supports leading to the domed ceiling. The bride and groom, with
the latter in a top hat, are standing to the left and back in the photo, at a
table with Sarah and Samuel Bayer (also in a top hat), a rabbi, and the rest of
the Bayer children.
Isaac and Bertha
set up housekeeping in an apartment at 135 West Eighty-Ninth Street, between
Amsterdam and Columbus, with a French maid and a Bohemian cook who knew how to
keep kosher. Bert, as Isaac called her, pious and observant, went to an
Orthodox synagogue on West Eighty-Sixth Street. When daughter Ruth arrived on
January 7, 1918, the Libermans hired Anna MacDonald, then fresh off the boat
from Scotland, to take care of her.
The next year Liberman was part of a group of merchants,
led by Percy Straus of Macy’s, who founded the School of Retailing, which later
became the Institute of Retail Management, at New York University. “Retailing
in New York had a problem,” said Liberman. “No one was doing anything to
develop any people in the retail field. None of the colleges had a retail
course. We had to bring in some young people and train them, which takes years,
before they could be of importance. We thought some of the colleges would be
interested in developing a retail course so that people can go and be taught
retailing in a year, year and a half, and have some talent.”
As described by William Leach, “the first start-up meetings were held at
the Strauses’ private offices at Macy’s and in the Mandarin Room at Lord &
Taylor’s on Thirty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. More than twenty merchants
from stores in Newark, Manhattan, and Brooklyn attended these meetings, along
with people from the New York City Board of Education and New York University.”
Liberman found himself lecturing at NYU along with colleagues like Straus and
Samuel Reyburn, head of Lord & Taylor.
After Irene was born March 1, 1920, and
Hazel on December 14, 1922, the family moved
to the larger apartment at West End Avenue and Ninetieth Street. “We lived in a
fourth-floor duplex,” Hazel Arnett remembered. “The address has since changed
to 610 West End Avenue, even though the front door is still on Ninetieth
Street. The apartment had a room-sized foyer, living room, kitchen, maids’
rooms, dining room, and parlor on the first floor. We had a huge icebox in the
pantry, so the iceman cometh. On the second floor was our parents’ room and
dressing room, a room where our two older sisters slept, and a room for the
nurse, the baby, and me.”
In the middle of the Roaring Twenties, Arnold Constable & Co.,
established in 1825 and the oldest specialty store in New York, was having
management problems. “Arnold Constable was being run by an advertising man,”
said Liberman. “He knew nothing about retail. Our attorney, as it happened,
represented the Chase Bank, which held 50 percent interest in Arnold Constable.
My lawyer, George Haight, asked, ‘Are you having lunch in the same spot, at the
Waldorf?’ He said, ‘Give me some figures. What kind of a deal would you like?’
I said, ‘It seems to me that it’s kind of a deal where we ought to make a
merger—Stewart & Co. merges with Arnold Constable.’ He said, ‘You are in
that business. It seems to me that you ought to be able to work up a deal whereby
we could merge and make a success.’
Within twenty-four hours they had it all written up and I accepted, just
as they had written it.”
That was 1925. “It took a few months to reorganize,” said Liberman, who
led from his position on the new board. As the stock market soared and the
economy boomed, Stewart & Company—serving the upper crust of New York
society—and Arnold Constable—catering to the middle-class market—prospered
together.
In 1928 Liberman helped found the Hundred-Year Association, an
organization of New York companies in continuous existence for at least a
century. It was a promotional effort that ended up with more than 400 members.
It took considerable effort for Liberman to get Cornelius Vanderbilt and the
New York Central Railroad to take part. “I’m only the president,” Vanderbilt told
Liberman. “The vice president, he’ll work with you.”
On May 9, 1929, came the birth of Sally and the Sterling National Bank,
followed by the Crash and the demise of Stewart & Company.
Although Liberman had exited the stock market, his in-laws had not.
“They lost everything,” said Hazel Arnett. “The tables were turned.” The
Bayers, who had previously been considered the more established family, now
needed Liberman’s help to get back on their feet. His annoyance at this burden
was evident to Sally. She saw it as a source of tension between her mother and
father, whose relationship was chilly and distant at best. In 1932, Liberman
got his nephew Merwin Bayer, just seventeen, a job at Arnold Constable. He was
successful enough that in 1938 a New York
Times story announced that he was part of an “executive committee” of
younger employees who would “take over merchandising during the store’s 113th
anniversary celebration.” The team reported to Liberman’s brother Meyer, who
was then the vice president and treasurer.
In 1945, a young Eileen Ford was hired in Constable’s advertising
department, reporting directly to Liberman as a stylist and working on some of
America’s first story catalogues. “‘They were pages—whole sections in the
catalogue—that had a running theme with an editorial feel,’” she recalled in
Robert Lacey’s biography Model Woman:
Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty. “‘And it was at Arnold Constable
that I learned about accessorizing: what goes with what when you’re styling
photographs and presenting clothes.’”
Most of all, Ford recounted, she dived deeper into the modeling
business. “‘It was my job to hire all the models for Constable’s advertising
campaigns and catalogues. So I was on the telephone a lot. I got to know how
all the different agencies worked, and I made good friends with a lot of the
models. I learned a big lesson when Mr. Isaac Liberman saw what I was paying
for some models per hour. He was not happy, and he let me know it. So we had to
work much quicker in the photo studio.’”
Lacey writes, “Negotiating with photographers and modeling agencies,
arranging photo shoots, and devising the marketing campaigns for one of the
city’s most eminent department stores, Eileen rapidly made a name for herself
as she bustled around the high-pressure world of New York City’s fashion
business. Lively, self-confident, and efficient, the young Mrs. Ford was
clearly a rising talent, and it was not long before the headhunters came
calling.”
“‘I made a terrible mistake,’” recalled Ford. “‘I let a recruitment
agency, a lady called Betty Corwin, talk me into leaving Arnold Constable. It
was partly the money, but also the idea that, in fashion terms, Arnold
Constable was getting a bit homely and had become out of date.’” Nonetheless,
the lessons she learned from Liberman at Constable came in handy when she
started her own modeling agency.
In the early fifties, Liberman, as president, replaced Meyer as chairman
and took over the job himself, one of many instances over the years when he
grew impatient with his less polished older brothers for not living up to his
high standards. Amid the Roaring Twenties, Liberman’s older brother Philip and
his son Marcie had started a chain of clothing stores in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania. In 1929, they moved to Miami Beach, where Marcie, a rotund,
lovable bachelor, became a liquor wholesaler. In 1931 Philip, as his brother
had two years before, started a bank. It was the Mercantile National, Miami
Beach’s first commercial bank. When Philip died in 1937, the bank went to
Marcie and his sister, Bertha Miller, back in New York.
As mayor of Miami Beach from 1947 to 1949, Marcie was known for his
malapropisms. When he was named mayor, he said he had reached “the pinochle of
success.” Sometimes he fell asleep during long city council deliberations, then
woke up and said, “I move that we abdicate for today. I got work to do.” His
obituary in The Miami News notes, “He
admitted that he sometimes dreamed up other assaults on the language to break
the tension at council sessions. ‘If I can get those guys laughing, they may
forget what they were arguing about.’”
“Marcie was quite a character,” said his second cousin Jon Low. “Ike
apparently despised him because he was so wild and ostentatious. He always took
Mom and Dad [Irene and Jerome Low] to showy restaurants, then to clubs. He
consorted with Mafiosi, show girls, etc. He was a high liver and a great guy.
Never let anyone pick up a bill.”
Marcie lived for twenty years at the Albion Hotel, where friends could
always find him in the lobby or in the barbershop across the street. “He was a
shrewd businessman, a millionaire, and one of the area’s most generous
philanthropists,” reads his obituary. He and his father helped build the Beth
Jacob Orthodox Congregation at the beach, and he “without publicity,
contributed fortunes to Miami Sinai Hospital, the University of Miami, and many
other institutions.”
Perhaps a less driven, less perfectionist Liberman could have been more
forgiving of his relatives. In the years to come, he amplified the prestige of
his role as president of Arnold Constable by continuing his charitable and
civic activities. He was a founder of the Businessmen’s Council of the
Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and a longtime executive board member of
the New York chapter of the Boy Scouts.
In
1947 he and Bertha established the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation, which
supports worthy causes, many of them in the arts, to the present day. Liberman
ended up supporting Eleanor Roosevelt not only in the Wiltwyck School for Boys,
but also in the American Association for the United Nations when she assumed her role
with the American delegation to the UN.
