Gilded Lily Page 4

  In the late 1940s, CIB officials began the club’s tradition of debutante balls for the daughters of their members. The balls were organized by Lygia Hazan Gomlevsky, the elegant wife of the club’s then president José Gomlevsky. With her shoulder-length chestnut hair, porcelain skin, and smoky eyes, Lygia looked like a glamorous Hollywood movie star. And she was determined to inject a little bit of that glamor into the debutante balls, which were modeled after the sumptuous coming-out parties for high-society girls at the Copacabana Palace hotel. The annual debutante balls in the Golden Room of the Copacabana Palace, which began soon after construction was completed on the hotel in the mid-1920s, were considered the highlight of the Rio social season.

  Lygia, herself a local socialite who attended all the best parties in the city, often showed up as a boldface name in the social columns, alongside her friends the Klabins, one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Rio de Janeiro. In black-and-white photographs of the balls, Lygia is shown ushering a group of young girls into the CIB ballroom. The girls are all beautifully dressed in puffy white taffeta or organza dresses. Every year, Lygia hired an orchestra for the annual debut and she personally chose twenty of the most beautiful girls from among the member families. One of those girls was a perfectly poised and elegant teenager named Lily Watkins.

  “I can easily say that Lily was the most beautiful and the most elegant debutante we ever had at the club,” recalled Gomlevsky. “She wore a magnificent white organdy dress embroidered with tiny white flowers on the sleeves. She was the chicest girl at the debut.”

  Although cosmetic surgery wasn’t as commonplace in Brazil as it is today, perhaps Lily did manage to get a little “help” when it came to her features. Gomlevsky, for one, doesn’t remember that Lily had a prominent nose by the time she was ready for her debut.

  Although her family otherwise kept a low profile at club events, where they would sit together en famille at dinners, the Watkins girl turned heads wherever she went.

  “Lily used to wear the most exquisite dresses at the CIB dances,” said Bentes Bloch. “She had an absolutely wonderful lilac organza dress that was the envy of all of the girls. It was absolutely stunning.”

  José Behar seemed to agree. Lily met José, or Zeca as he was known to his friends and family, at a CIB dance. Zeca, a handsome Sephardic Jew, was slightly older than the teenaged Lily, and was already out of high school, working for his uncle’s currency trading business on Avenida Rio Branco in the city center.

  But any union with Zeca was severely frowned upon by Lily’s upwardly mobile parents. Zeca might have been a nice young man with a good job, but he would never attain the fabulous wealth that the Watkinses dreamed of for their daughter.

  “Lily and Zeca had a real romance,” said a family friend who frequented CIB events in the 1940s and 1950s. “He loved her, but it was hopeless. Lily had been trained to marry money. She was educated to marry a rich man.”

  In fact, when Lily found herself falling desperately in love with another middle-class boy, her parents were quick to put a stop to the budding relationship.

  Her new obsession was Izidor, a classmate at the Colegio Anglo-Americano. Izidor was tall, slim, and green-eyed. He also had a way with the girls.

  “He would tease them relentlessly,” said Bentes Bloch. “He knew he was popular and so he would string along all these girls who all had a mad crush on him. Then he would dump them.”

  Lily ended up being one of his many victims, but she still dreamed about Izidor as her own Prince Charming, and she pursued him relentlessly, recalled Bentes Bloch.

  For his part, Gastão Veiga recalled that whenever Lily wanted to see Izidor, she would tell her parents that she was going to Veiga’s home around the corner from the Watkins family’s residence in Copacabana. During those fleeting meetings, hidden from outside view in Veiga’s courtyard, Izidor might hold Lily’s hand or touch her on the shoulder. If they felt particularly daring, she would allow him to kiss her on the cheek. In Rio’s middle-class Jewish society, the most risqué events for teenagers involved boys from the lower classes invading one of the orderly school or CIB dances and drinking beer.

  “We were all quite chaste back then,” said Bentes Bloch, whose father, one of the country’s first Jewish generals, had arrived in the Amazon as a thirteen-year-old immigrant from North Africa at the turn of the last century. “Dating didn’t have the same connotations that it has now.”

  Lily was so much in love with Izidor that she fell ill. She desperately wanted to marry him, but her parents seemed to have other plans for her. Like Zeca, Izidor did not come from great wealth—not the kind of family that was suitable for their daughter. And so her parents decided that they had had enough of Rio de Janeiro and its loose morals for a while, and became determined to find a more suitable young man for their daughter among the members of their old Jewish community in Uruguay.

  “Her parents were very strict, and it was important to them that Lily marry well,” recalled Veiga.

  But Bentes Bloch remembers things differently. She said that Lily was so heartbroken over Izidor’s antics and how he toyed with her affections that her parents feared that she might do something rash. According to Bentes Bloch, Lily was determined to marry Izidor.

  “Her parents must have been beside themselves,” said Bentes Bloch. “What do you want for such a beautiful girl? You want to give her the most you can—the maximum.”

  When they realized that the relationship with Izidor was becoming too intense, the Watkinses decided to go on a long vacation, and get their daughter out of Rio de Janeiro, and far away from Izidor. During summer vacation in her last year of high school, the Watkins clan headed back to Uruguay to visit Annita’s family. In order to dissuade their daughter from an improper match, they found her someone much more to their liking. Lily eventually did get over Izidor, and following the trip to Uruguay she returned to Rio de Janeiro already engaged to a handsome and older Italian-born Jew named Mario Cohen.

  “Lily went on vacation for a long time with her parents, and when she returned we all heard that she was going to be married,” said Bentes Bloch. “That’s how we all heard about her first marriage.”

  Lily married Mario Cohen in Montevideo, Uruguay, on September 19, 1952, two months before her eighteenth birthday. Mario, who was nearly nine years older, came from a respectable family that had made a small fortune manufacturing hosiery in Argentina, where their company was based. Less than a year following the wedding, Lily gave birth to her first son, Claudio, on July 16, 1953. She had two other children—Adriana and Eduardo—in rapid succession.

  After her pampered adolescence in Rio de Janeiro, life as a mother of three young children in Montevideo, far from friends and family, must have come as a bit of a shock. Although the Cohens lived amongst upper-middle-class Jews in Montevideo, the city and the country were growing increasingly unstable as the world market for agricultural products began to decline in the 1950s. In Montevideo there was massive unemployment and inflation coupled with increasing student militancy and unrest. The civil unrest led to the birth of an urban guerrilla movement known as the Tupamaros, who first made their mark robbing banks and distributing food to the poor. By the 1960s, the guerrilla group began to play a part in high-level political kidnappings in Montevideo.

  If Uruguay was emerging as an increasingly unstable country, Lily Cohen took little notice. In the early days at least, she was the wife of a successful hosiery magnate who occupied her time organizing the servants, fixing her hair, and vacationing in Punta del Este, an upscale resort and casino town on the southern tip of Uruguay where upper-middle-class Jewish families flocked between December and February at the height of the austral summer.

  But Lily, who seems to have inherited Wolf’s passion for spending money, also indulged in what was to become her favorite pastime—shopping. During one memorable spree in downtown Montevideo, Lily managed to spend thousands on lingerie—an astonomical sum of money in the late 1950s. Whe
n he received the bill, Mario was so furious he ripped up all her new purchases, said a family friend.

  “Mario wasn’t like Lily’s father when it came to money,” said Marcelo Steinfeld. “I think he had very little patience when it came to Lily’s excesses.”

  IN FACT, WHEN it came to money, Mario was the polar opposite of Wolf, which might explain why Wolf seemed to have little tolerance for his new son-in-law, who, he believed, failed to treat his daughter in the manner to which she had become accustomed in Rio. In Uruguay, where the young couple lived to escape the severe economic policies and other repressive measures directed at Jews during the presidency of Argentine leader Juan Peron, Mario bought his new wife a car. It was a Morris Minor, a British import designed for the working classes. Furious at his new son-in-law’s miserly gesture, which he viewed as a slap in the face to the entire Watkins clan, Wolf ordered a Cadillac through his friend Gastão Veiga and had it shipped to Lily.

  THROUGHOUT THE DECADE she spent in Montevideo, Lily yearned to return to the cosmopolitan city of her youth. She missed the family dinners at the Bife de Ouro in the Copacabana Palace hotel and high tea at the Confeiteria Colombo in her old neighborhood. She missed the family vacations at the hot springs at Poços de Caldas and Caxambu, where many well-heeled Jewish families escaped the month-long frenzy of Carnaval in Rio. By the time she was pregnant with her third child, she had already grown tired of Mario.

  When her beloved father died of a liver ailment while on a visit to Montevideo in March 1962, Lily was already plotting how she would tell Mario that their marriage was over. She’d had enough of their sleepy existence in Montevideo. She wanted to return to Rio, to recapture at least part of what now seemed such a glamorous life as a promising debutante in her white organdy dress. In her late twenties, her youth was slipping away, and life with Mario was not the fairy tale she had envisioned it to be. Although he appeared to be a good father, he was distant with the children, overwhelmed by his own concerns with the Cohen family company. Often when Lily and the children prepared for family vacations in Punta del Este, Mario was absent for weeks at a time, tending to business in Montevideo and Argentina.

  Although she yearned to return to her old life in Rio, Lily wanted to do so in style. In the early 1960s, it simply wouldn’t do for a respectable mother of three young children to leave her husband and set off for another country, even if she could move quite easily into her parents’ sprawling apartment in Copacabana. No, Lily would have to wait for another way out of her marriage to Mario Cohen.

  Lily’s escape route may have been made patently clear to her when she met Alfredo Monteverde, the handsome owner of Ponto Frio, Brazil’s most successful chain of appliance stores. Alfredo was tall and worldly with a devastating sense of humor. He was also extremely wealthy. Friends say that it was on one of those long family vacations in Punta del Este that the married woman and mother of three began to flirt with the Rio millionaire after the two had been introduced by their mutual friend Samy Cohn.

  After his second failed marriage, to a former Air France stewardess named Scarlett, Alfredo was ready for another relationship. He fell in love easily with Lily. She was beautiful and refined, and she would have none of Scarlett’s difficulties of adaptation to life in Rio de Janeiro. Lily must have seemed to him practically a native.

  “She was even more charming as a young mother,” recalled Veiga, who saw Lily again at Alfredo’s office for the first time since she was a fifteen-year-old sneaking into his courtyard to kiss Izidor.

  Veiga, Wolf’s former neighbor and valuable intermediary, also did business with Alfredo, who was planning to add car imports to his burgeoning appliance business. Veiga recalls finding out about the relationship between Alfredo and Lily during a business meeting at the Ponto Frio corporate offices in 1964. “I was completely stunned,” recalled Veiga. “I saw Lily followed by three small children at Fred’s office, and it was very clear to me that she and Fred were very much a couple. I knew from the way they were behaving with each other that they must be married or on their way to being married.”

  Alfredo married Lily in a civil ceremony at the Office of the City Clerk in lower Manhattan on February 26, 1965. According to friends and family, Mario was not happy about the divorce, and desperately tried to hold onto his young wife. Alfredo was forty and Lily had just celebrated her thirtieth birthday the previous December.

  The following year, on October 16, 1966, they married again at a registry office in downtown Rio de Janeiro, attended by Lily’s brother Daniel and her best friend in Rio at the time, Carmen Sirotsky. Carmen’s husband Sani, an advertising executive in Rio, had worked on many of Ponto Frio’s advertising campaigns and knew Alfredo well.

  The Monteverde-Watkins marriage (on registry documents, she didn’t acknowledge that she had once been Mrs. Cohen) was also registered in Brazil’s new capital, Brasília, on April 5, 1967.

  It is not clear why they felt the need to register their marriage in so many different places. As with his previous marriages, Alfredo made a point of registering the union in New York. Perhaps he felt that legal unions carried more weight when they were registered outside of Brazil, which was well known for its bureaucratic red tape and corruption.

  Lily would have gladly married Alfredo twenty times over. She appeared desperately in love with her second husband, and tried to do everything to please him. And for a while at least, it seemed she did.

  TWO

  “Everything in Its Place”

  BY MOST ACCOUNTS, it was initially a happy marriage. Alfredo, a striking European émigré with wavy brown hair and an easygoing manner, was head over heels in love with Lily—at least in the early part of the courtship and the marriage, while the conquest was still fresh.

  For most of his adult life, Alfredo was known as a serial womanizer; he had been married twice before. But Lily was different, he told his family. Here was a beautiful woman and a wonderful mother whom he adored. The marriage to Lily had been a good decision, Alfredo assured his friends and family.

  Alfredo João Monteverde, born Alfred Iancu Grunberg in Galati, Romania, on June 12, 1924, was the younger child of Iancu Grunberg, a prominent Jewish banker to the Romanian royal court, and his wife, Regina Rebecca Leff Grunberg. Alfred and his older sister, Rosy, lived a privileged life in Romania. Black-and-white family snapshots show the Grunberg children posing with their French and Austrian governesses and attending children’s parties in a palatial family residence. In one photograph, Alfred, who appears to be six or seven, is dressed up as Mickey Mouse, after the popular Walt Disney comic strip that was first released in 1930. Although the Grunbergs were Jewish, the family was so assimilated that photographs show them posing in front of a beautifully decorated Christmas tree in their living room. Their aunt Josephine, on their mother’s side, ended up joining the Catholic Church and becoming a nun.

  From an early age, Alfred was extremely close to his sister Rosy. The two siblings shared a made-up language to confound their nannies, and were pretty much inseparable even as they were both sent off to the Millfield School, which was the first elite boarding school in England to become coeducational in the 1930s.

  Tragedy struck the Grunbergs on November 21, 1937, when Iancu, forty-three, committed suicide while undergoing treatment for his severe depression at a hospital in Vienna. Following the death of her husband, Regina Grunberg, thirty-nine, decided to join her children in England. With a war looming in Europe, Regina packed up the house in Romania and traveled to London with the family’s gold reserves. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, the Grunbergs applied for permanent residency in England. Told that they would have to surrender their large fortune in order to stay, Regina and her teenaged children began to cast around for another country that would take them in without such a huge financial penalty. They applied for visas to the United States but were told that the wait would be long, and that there was no guarantee the American government would issue travel documents to Jews f
leeing from war-torn Europe, no matter how wealthy they were. Then, as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England came under fierce attack by the Germans, the Grunbergs knew they were running out of time and needed to act quickly. When they managed to obtain visas to Brazil, they didn’t hesitate for a moment even as the British government froze their assets after the outbreak of hostilities. In December 1940, as German bombs rained down on London during the Blitz, Regina, Rosy, and Alfred sailed from the port of Liverpool aboard the Andalucia Star to Rio de Janeiro.

  It was a dangerous voyage and proved to be the ship’s final Atlantic crossing before it was sunk by German U-boats in 1942. The Grunbergs spent much of their time at sea practicing lifeboat drills with their fellow passengers, dozens of Mormons sailing third class. Like many other moneyed refugees escaping the horrors of the war in Europe, the Grunbergs felt that the Brazilian capital was to be a temporary destination—a safe stopover, far from the battlefields and concentration camps and bombings—where they could wait in relative comfort until the U.S. visas they had applied for were issued.

  But the U.S. visas never materialized and the family decided to settle permanently in Rio, which was rapidly becoming a glittering cosmopolitan city, the temporary home to a glamorous international crowd of spies, exiled royalty, and artists. They included the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, at the time one of the world’s best-selling authors, who settled in Petropolis, a mountain town outside Rio, before committing suicide in February 1942.

  After the strict confines of a British boarding school, Alfred and his sister entered an exciting new world. Alfred was sixteen, and Rosy had just turned eighteen two months before they sailed to Rio. They’d left behind the bitter damp and early darkness of an English winter, and arrived in the land of seemingly permanent summer—a tropical paradise, full of sultry women and artists and intellectuals from around the world.