The Lady in Gold (16 page)

Maria, middle left, at a ladies' lunch with her fashionably thin sister, Luise, middle right, suffering the misery of her first love, ca. 1937. (
Illustration Credit 20.3
)

Maria confessed she had always had a crush on the handsome Aslan. Fritz raised his eyebrows and looked at Maria with amusement. “
I wouldn't get my hopes up,” Fritz said. “He prefers men.”

Maria stared at Fritz blankly.

“
He's a homosexual,” Fritz said. He laughed at her surprise. “He's a friend of mine. It's quite all right.” He bent over and kissed Maria softly, on both cheeks, French-style, and left the party.

Maria's face burned. He had treated her like a child! It wasn't as if she didn't know about homosexuality. A childhood friend of hers was already involved with men, and it amused Maria greatly that her mother insisted on pushing him as an eligible suitor. Of course she had heard rumors. Maria was simply disappointed that
Raoul Aslan, the great sex symbol, was not interested in women.

Weeks went by. Finally Maria boldly called Fritz on the telephone. He was friendly, amusing, but cool. He never called to arrange a date. Her sister, Luise, who had always been coy and self-possessed, was dismayed by Maria's lack of artifice. Men liked elusive girls! Maria should never call
Fritz! Maria's brothers rolled their eyes and told Maria she was crazy. Fritz Altmann was in love with another woman. He would be living with this woman except for one complication: she had a husband. Maria digested the news of this arrangement. She might even have met this woman, at the same parties where she saw Fritz. Yet if the woman was married, there was hope. Each time the butler, Georg, told Maria a young man had called, she was disappointed anew.

It was never Fritz.

Maria Bloch-Bauer was a sheltered young debutante the summer of 1937, when her mother, Therese, concerned she was falling for the wrong man, packed her off to the resort town of Bad Ischl in the Austrian Alps. Ischl was hardly painful exile. Cradled between snowcapped mountains and blue lakes dotted with castles, Ischl had been a haunt of the exuberant young Mozart. Now it was a favorite of Viennese high society. It was the summer home of Katharina Schratt, the mistress of the late emperor. It was a stone's throw from Mozart's birthplace, Salzburg, a grand musical city where
Arturo Toscanini conducted like a man possessed. Ischl was tiny, but it had theater, cafés, pastry shops, and a promenade where young people strolled and socialized. In short, it was the perfect place to get Maria away from her ill-conceived longing for Fritz.

Maria, twenty-one, was deeply lovesick. She had been mooning around the Bloch-Bauer apartment on Vienna's Stubenbastei for weeks. Ordinarily, Maria was a merry young woman, with an impish smile and enormous upturned eyes that delighted her aging father, Gustav. But now Maria wore a perpetual look of melancholy as she crossed the Ringstrasse and wandered under the golden statue of the notoriously amorous Waltz King, Johann Strauss, watching young lovers stroll beneath the chestnut blossoms.

Maria had no shortage of admirers. The problem was Maria's stubborn admiration for a man whom her mother did not find suitable.

Therese Bloch-Bauer was a stolidly conventional Vienna society matron.
Her conservative inclinations had always contrasted with those of her unorthodox sister, Adele, God rest her soul. It was easy for Adele to smoke, tell people she was an atheist, and cultivate socialists. It was easy for Adele to spend inordinate amounts of time with Gustav Klimt, whose explicitly erotic drawings seemed to Therese a rather unfortunate use of his talents. And all his illegitimate children! But Adele, whatever her bohemian inclinations, had submitted to the first advantageous marriage that presented itself. Adele could do as she pleased.

Maria was not a steely, strong-willed aesthete like her late aunt Adele. Maria was a dreamer who quoted the love poetry of Goethe but showed no serious interest in the presentable young men introduced to her. When Therese was young, her dance card was full, her suitors so attentive that they presented her with corsages that matched the color of her gowns. Maria didn't even seem interested in this year's formal dance season, though she had made a gorgeous impression at the Opera Ball, in her white satin dress.

Now Maria was pining for Fritz Altmann.
The only thing worse, to Therese, would be if Fritz actually decided to reciprocate Maria's unschooled infatuation.

Adele might not have set the best example for Maria's chic older sister, Luise. Luise had greatly admired her aunt Adele, with her gold cigarette holder, her opinions, and her many interesting male friends. Luise had been sixteen when Adele died. Even at that age Luise was a cool customer, playing her admirers off against one another with the skill of a poker shark, and holding her own with her older brothers' sophisticated crowd of actors and singers. Therese had guided Luise to the altar at nineteen, three years after Adele's death, with an excellent match to
Viktor Gutmann, a Jewish baron whose family had been ennobled by the Emperor Franz Joseph.

Never mind that in her official wedding photo, Luise posed like a 1930s movie siren, staring into the camera under heavily lidded eyes so seductively people would later wonder whether she had made it to the altar a maiden. Now Luise was the Baroness Gutmann et Gelse.

Therese's son Leopold had married equally well. His wife, the former
Antoinette Pick, was the daughter of
Otto Pick, a prominent art collector and industrialist; she was also the niece of a distinguished physician who knew
Sigmund Freud personally.

In Maria's eyes, it was the social origins of the Altmann family that were most to blame for Therese's lack of enthusiasm for Fritz. The Altmanns
were
Ostjuden
from Galicia, Poland's poorest region. They were members of the Eastern Jewish immigrant wave that had flooded into Vienna, bringing poverty and Orthodox customs that were out of step with wealthy, assimilated Bavarians like the Bloch-Bauers. The
Ostjuden
had borne the brunt of the cruel pogroms that swept through Russia and Poland, and many had arrived with little more than the clothes they wore.

Fritz had grown up in the former Jewish ghetto of Leopoldstadt, Vienna's “Matzoh Island.” His mother, Karoline, started the family textile business and insisted on running it herself for years, working such long hours that Fritz joked he had been born under a knitting machine. His father,
Karl Chaskel Altmann, was a devoutly religious Galician who spoke Yiddish, spent hours studying the Talmud, and went to synagogue daily in an eastern caftan. The Bloch-Bauers had not converted to Catholicism, but they celebrated Christmas and Easter.
Aside from weddings and funerals, the Bloch-Bauers attended the elegant Stadt Temple only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, sitting alongside the Rothschilds in smoking jackets and top hats.

If Fritz was a playboy, he owed this entitlement to his brother, Bernhard. A casual passerby would never have taken Fritz and Bernhard for brothers if they saw them strolling under the arches of the Imperial Hofburg in front of the Spanish Riding School, where the white Lipizzaner stallions pranced to waltz music.

Bernhard, twenty years older than Fritz, toiled like the devil in the family knitting business. Bernhard lived like a devil, too, keeping his Jewish family in a villa in the fashionable suburb of Hietzing and a Catholic mistress with three children across town.
As everyone knew but his wife.

Fritz had little real understanding of the prejudice his family had fled in Galicia. But as a child in Poland, Bernhard had experienced the raw
anti-Semitism that turned ignorant mobs against Jewish families. Bernhard was less complaisant, and far less trusting, than his assimilated Vienna Jewish friends. At fifty, Bernhard was a hard-knuckled, self-made businessman with an intimidating stare. Bernhard had many friends in Vienna—and many enemies.

Therese raised her eyebrows at the mere mention of Bernhard's name.

But her husband, Gustav, admired and respected him. The steely-eyed Bernhard had turned his mother's cottage industry into an international wool manufacturer, with plants from the Soviet Union to England. By some accounts, he was the largest knitwear producer in Austria. Gustav told Maria that Bernhard was like the folk hero Rumpelstiltskin—he could spin straw into gold. Bernhard had acquired cultural inclinations along the
way. He was helping to finance restoration of the Roman ruins of Tiberius's old winter camp at Carnuntum, not far from Ferdinand's sugar factory.
He had amassed an art collection of more than a hundred artworks, by Degas and
Canaletto. He even had a small Klimt—not one of the grand paintings of society women, but an unknown young woman with plaintive eyes.

Maria was in no rush to be steered into a marriage arranged by her mother. After all,
Hedy Kiesler, the Jewish protégée of theater impresario Max Reinhardt, had caused such a stir at the Opera Ball in her sapphire-blue sequined dress, and made a supposedly brilliant match with
Friedrich Mandl, the arms dealer. But Mandl turned out to be a cruel tyrant.
He locked Hedy in his castle and obsessively tried to buy every copy of a titillating Czech film,
Ecstasy,
in which Hedy swam naked and gave herself to a muscular Adonis in the woods.
Mandl forced Hedy to socialize with Mussolini and Hitler.

At the end of the summer she would disguise herself as a servant to flee her husband, then make her way to Hollywood to star in a thriller,
Algiers,
as
Hedy Lamarr.

Maria would wait. Maria would marry for love.

Maria was born Marie Viktoria Bloch-Bauer on February 18, 1916.
Her middle name represented her parents' hopes that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would survive
World War I. The family followed the news of every battle, hoping for the triumph of the Habsburgs, who had ushered in an era of tolerance for the Jews. Their dreams would be dashed. The Habsburgs lost. Overnight, it seemed, Austria went from a great nation to a defeated backwater. The royalty was finished. The immense Austro-Hungarian Empire was now the small Österreich, or Eastern Reich.

Therese, forty-two, initially misinterpreted her last pregnancy as “the change of life.” Therese thought she was done with the endless needs of small children. She had raised three sons to adolescence and had an adorable eight-year-old daughter, Luise, who was vivacious and quick-witted.
Therese enjoyed having Gustav to herself. She was a fixture of Vienna society, a regular at the ladies' teas and lunches Adele had disdained.

Therese never developed a taste for the new art.
She and Gustav collected “fantasy watches,” tiny monuments to the ability to know the precise hour, created when many Austrians still relied on church clocks and sundials.
Vienna was in thrall to this “scientific jewelry,” pocket watches that dated back to the 1400s, coinciding with the revolutionary appearance of a mass-produced Gutenberg Bible. Each was as intricate as a Fabergé egg. A one-inch tulip watch created by
Jean Rousseau in 1625 celebrated the arrival of the first tulip from Constantinople to Vienna, setting off Europe's tulip mania. There was a little telescope, jewel-encrusted lutes, a tiny gold gun. Art historians were particularly taken by a white enamel skull with glittering diamond eyes and gold teeth, made in the 1600s by a Prague goldsmith. Its cranium opened to reveal a watch that seemed to tick out the precious moments of life itself, before Death reclaimed its mortal bearer.

Society columns extolled Therese and Gustav's watch collection. The Viennese had “
a craze for totally meaningless articles of decoration,” and many parlors “were not living rooms, but pawnshops and curiosity shops,” observed the cultural critic
Egon Friedell. When a museum director hustled over to Stubenbastei to write a monograph about the Bloch-Bauer watches, Therese was thrilled.

To Therese, a new baby meant the end of idyllic collecting trips with Gustav to Venice and Trieste. To Gustav, his unexpected daughter was an unadulterated delight. From the time she was a tiny girl, his “Mariechen” adopted her father's conspiratorial smile. Gustav loved to bundle Maria up in her fluffy white winter coat and hussar hat and parade her down the Stubenbastei.

When Maria was not with her father, she was often handed off to her nanny, Fräulein
Emma Raschke, a petite blonde Lutheran from a poor Germanic region of Poland. Next to her father, Fräulein Emma was the person Maria most adored. It was Fräulein Emma who dressed Maria in her embroidered flannel nightgown and tucked her into bed. Fräulein Emma told Maria bedtime stories, introducing her to the lurid world of the Brothers Grimm. There was “Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rapunzel,” and “The Pied Piper,” whose magic flute led the children away when city fathers refused to pay him for
driving out the rats. The fairy tales were collections of the myths, folklore, and magical tales the Brothers Grimm had collected all over Middle and Eastern Europe. In the early 1800s, during his quest for stories, Jacob Grimm had lived a short walk from the Bloch-Bauer apartment on Stubenbastei. Therese viewed their stories as backward peasant tales:
tasteless.
Maria craved their frightening thrill. At night, when Fräulein Emma tucked her in, it was easy to persuade her to tell just one more. All right, Emma would tell Maria, I'll tell you the story of “
The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.” Maria nestled under her blankets delightedly.