Gilded Lily (5 page)

“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. When 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.

B
Y 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 fleeing 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 At
lantic 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.

While war was raging a continent away, Alfred and his sister practiced their Portuguese by volunteering at the Radio Nacional, the country's most important radio station. They helped translate the news from Europe, and later Alfred worked as a producer on other shows. They also became habitués at the Vogue nightclub—a popular spot in Copacabana founded by an Austrian refugee named Max von Stuckart. Known in Rio as the Baron, Stuckart had founded the Tour Paris nightclub in Paris, which became a regular haunt of artists, such as Pablo Picasso, and French politicians and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. Like the Grunbergs, the Baron fled to Rio during the war. With the help of one of the city's wealthiest families,
who were habitués of his Paris club, he founded the legendary Copacabana nightclub, whose slogan was “open from seven to seven.” The Vogue rapidly became a de rigueur watering hole for the city's politicians, business leaders, and intellectuals. Many émigrés used its address—an art deco apartment block on Avenida Princesa Isabel in Copacabana—as a makeshift post office box for their correspondence from Europe. The nightclub featured some of the best black jazz artists (considered risqué in the 1940s) from the United States as well as Sacha Rubin, a Turkish pianist who played the piano with a glass of whisky next to the keyboard and a lit cigarette permanently dangling from one side of his mouth.

In the early 1950s, the club's most popular entertainer was a French singer whose stage name was Patachou. While crooning French songs, the sultry chanteuse would flirt with the male patrons, sitting on their laps and coquettishly cutting off their neckties with a pair of scissors. One night, a grandson of one of Brazil's former presidents exposed his penis in a drunken stupor and offered it up to Patachou's scissors. She politely declined, going for his tie instead.

After the club burned down on August 14, 1955, in a fire that left five people dead, Rubin opened his own bar in Copacabana, known simply as Sacha's. But although popular, the club never had quite the same mystique as the Vogue, especially as many of the politicians and intellectuals who frequented the famous nightclub began to head to Brasília, the country's new capital, in 1960.

But in the 1940s and 1950s, Rio de Janeiro must have seemed like a magical place, especially for young Romanian refugees transplanted from wartime England. Errol Flynn and Carmen Miranda regularly descended to the pool of the Copacabana Palace hotel, and Orson Welles held court at the Vogue when he arrived during the war years to work on a series of wartime propaganda films for the U.S. government.

After living in Rio for a few years, the Grunbergs could count themselves among the city's elite, many of whom lived like Euro
pean royalty, attended by white-gloved butlers in their spectacular apartments overlooking Guanabara Bay. The Grunbergs were close to the Seabra family, one of Rio's prominent families at the time. The Seabras were so enamored of the Dakota apartment building on Manhattan's Central Park West that they ordered an architect to make an exact replica of it, complete with a private elevator to their ballroom, in Rio's elegant Flamengo neighborhood. The socialite Nelson Seabra, whose penthouse, with its stunning views of Sugarloaf Mountain, took up an entire floor of the family building and was filled with his collections of antique furniture and objets d'art from around the world, was also a keen collector of thoroughbred horses. He installed air-conditioned stables—a rarity in the 1940s—at the family's sprawling country home. On weekends, the Seabras flew their friends, including Rosy Grunberg, in their private airplane to their country estate for riding and elaborate parties. Later, Nelson Seabra divided his time between homes in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. A Hollywood producer, he counted Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo, and Grace Kelly among his closest friends. In 1980, his Red Ball birthday party in Paris attracted everyone from the Rothschilds to Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger.

Rosy and Alfred found themselves in this rarefied world of extravagance and rather loose morals. Rio's leading socialites, for example, never did their shopping in the city, but headed to Paris once a year to buy couture at Dior or Chanel. The clothes typically took three weeks to a month to be completed, and while they waited, they attended the wild soirees chez Prince Aly Khan, the Pakistani race horse owner and playboy, who married Hollywood star Rita Hayworth in 1949. During the day, these extremely well-brought-up daughters of the rich and powerful spent their time at the Café de la Paix, “doing the
trottoir
,” or moonlighting as prostitutes, to amuse themselves in between fittings. “If the men were really good looking, they charged only a little bit,” said one woman who was familiar with the pastime. “If they were ugly, they charged a lot.”

Although he had a reputation as a bon vivant, Alfred was also determined to become a business success in his adopted country. In May 1944, four years after arriving in Rio, Alfred graduated from the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia da Universidade do Brasil with a degree in chemical engineering. He worked as a producer at the Radio Nacional before taking a job as a technician at the Shell Mexican Oil Co. in 1945. He quickly recognized other opportunities in Brazil, a huge country with a largely untapped market for imported consumer goods. Using the Romanian gold that the Grunbergs managed to ship from England after the war, Alfred incorporated Globex Import and Export in 1946, with his mother and sister as partners. In the early days of Globex, the twenty-two-year-old entrepreneur headed out along the highway from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte hawking Firestone tires to truck drivers. Later, working from a dingy, one-room office on Winston Churchill Street in downtown Rio, he imported sewing machines and kitchen appliances.

But it was the Coldspot refrigerators imported from the United States that became his best-selling items and eventually gave rise to a chain of stores that bore their name. He began selling Coldspot, which translates as
ponto frio
in Portuguese, outside a popular movie theater before he opened his first store on Rua Uruguaiana, in the heart of the Saara, or the old Arab market, in downtown Rio. His mascot was an Antarctic penguin that had accidentally washed up on a Rio beach. Although the penguin died of heat exhaustion after a few days, Alfred had it stuffed and mounted so that he could display it in his office. Later, an artist's rendition of that unfortunate penguin would grace the company's newspaper ads and become part of the corporate logo for Ponto Frio—a symbol of the extreme cold generated by one of the company's refrigerators.

At the same time that he was laying the groundwork for what would become one of Brazil's most successful companies, Alfred decided that he needed to transform himself from a wartime Romanian refugee into a successful Latin American businessman. In 1946, Al
fred and his mother embarked on the long, bureaucratic process of acquiring Brazilian citizenship, which they finally achieved in April 1948. Rosy would take a different route, applying for citizenship after marrying a Hungarian-born cameraman who had landed in Rio in 1941 to work on Orson Welles's project,
It's All True
.

A year after the Grunbergs obtained their Brazilian citizenship, mother and son applied to change their name to Monteverde, a literal Portuguese translation of Grunberg, which means “green mountain.” By November 1950, the Romanian refugee Alfred Iancu Grunberg had successfully transformed himself into the Brazilian entrepreneur Alfredo João Monteverde.

“Fred was an incredible businessman with an incredible vision,” said Victor Sztern, whose father was one of Alfredo's early business partners. Victor, who was in his teens when he met Alfredo, was co-opted into helping him set up a set of traffic lights in his office. A red light meant that Alfredo was thinking and his staff was prohibited from entering.

“Fred was brilliant,” said Gastão Veiga. “He was the only person I knew who made money selling to the poor at discounted prices. He was also the only person I knew who could do percentages in his head.”

Friends recalled that even at his summer home at Aguas Lindas, a stretch of pristine, white sand beach on Itacuruça Island, he was fond of mathematical brainteasers and absently worked on problems even while entertaining his guests.

“We'd be on his boat, and he'd be steering, and doing these incredible figures in his head, like that game Sudoku,” said his friend Vera Contrucci Pinto Dias, who met Fred at Aguas Lindas when he was still in his early twenties. “There was no one like him.”

A Rio newspaper referred to Alfredo as “one of the most important figures in commerce and industry.” The editorial also noted that he was “an exceptional human being, a dynamic spirit,” possessed of “a keen sense of accomplishment.” Even decades after his death, his
business associates and friends still marveled at his abilities, remembering his “violent intelligence,” his constantly “buzzing” mind, and his legendary whimsy.

Alfredo's whimsy and irreverence—his “dynamic spirit”—were also legendary in Rio de Janeiro. For instance, to avoid rush-hour traffic, he bought himself an ambulance. With sirens blaring, one of Alfredo's chauffeurs would speed through stalled traffic as he reclined in the back, reading a newspaper or dictating notes to one of his secretaries. One day when the speeding ambulance was stopped by traffic police, Alfredo suggested they call his friend the governor. They did, and Alfredo was promptly released.