During the 1920s, humorist Rube Goldberg wrote a gag piece in the The New Yorker about
a tourist who comes to New York. Everywhere he turns — from the docks
to the Ritz, from Wall Street to a first night on Broadway — he keeps
running into Otto Kahn.
Otto Kahn on the cover of Time, November 2, 1925.
When Kahn finally appears on stage at two
in the morning playing drums at a Harlem after hours club, the visitor
loses his mind and is carried off to Bellevue.
Yes, the great financier and patron of
the arts, Otto Kahn (1867-1934), was the inspiration for Parker
Brothers’ Mr. Monopoly. Kahn made a fortune as a partner in Kuhn Loeb,
the great underwriter of American railroads, absorbed by Lehman Brothers
in 1977.
Kuhn Loeb in its day was second only to
the House of Morgan, but no one was second to Otto Kahn as an investment
banker of skill and imagination, a bon vivant of legendary charm, and
an influential patron of the arts.
Kahn gave millions to the Metropolitan
Opera, despite a management loath to let him buy a box because he was
Jewish. (When they finally did, he refused to use it, lending it instead
to important visitors).
He cultivated, subsidized and/or enjoyed close personal relationships with Nijinski, Stanislavski, Toscanini, Caruso, Pavlova, not to mention Isadora Duncan, Max Reinhardt, Paul Robeson, Will Rogers, the Moscow Art Theatre and Charlie Chaplin, to name only a few. Wags of the period said he wouldn’t rest until he met every important person on earth.
Otto Kahn in recognizable mode, tossing greenbacks.
Kahn was the beau ideal of the
cultivated, cosmopolitan New York millionaire of the 1920s –
immaculately dressed, immensely rich, irresistably charming, seemingly
ubiquitous and profoundly influential.
In 1933, Senator Ferdinand Pecora,
lead counsel of the U.S. Senate hearings on the causes of the Great
Depression, wrote of him, “No suaver, more fluent, and more diplomatic
advocate could be conceived. If anyone could succeed in presenting the
customs and functions of the private bankers in a favorable and
prepossessing light, it was he.”
Here he is playing golf, or perhaps
simply posing, possibly at a club somewhere, but more likely on the
links of his private golf course at Cold Spring, Long Island.
And here is the house (above, right)
that was attached to that course. It is called “Oheka,” the name being a
conjunction of Otto Herbert Kahn. Perhaps Kahn himself gave it that
unsophisticated name, although absent a dependable citation I tend to
doubt it. (The place is called ‘Oheka Castle’ today)....
