5. Am I My Brother's Keeper?

On October 14, 1908, Burnett Young Tiffany, under a court order to satisfy his creditors following his bankruptcy, was forced to sell paintings, rugs, and antique furniture he had given to his second wife. Burnie was the younger son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, who became a multi-millionaire selling jewelry and other fancy knick knacks to his fellow gilded-age plutocrats, and who had made his son the beneficiary of a trust worth well over a million dollars. So why couldn't Burnie pay for a mere $25,000 of household furnishings? Because the New York Supreme Court had ruled that Burnie's trustees were acting properly. When they decided it was better for him to go bankrupt than to increase his allowance above $1,500 a month. Hello and welcome to You Can't Take It With You, a podcast about the life and afterlife of America's greatest fortunes. I'm Eric Schoenberg, a psychologist interested in why some people leave large amounts of wealth behind after they die. A common answer is that they want to benefit their children. So in our last episode we looked at Isaac Singer and I suggested that although it's true that he left a lot of money to 19 of his 22 children, it's awfully hard to argue that he did so because he wanted his children to be happier. The story of Charles Tiffany shows that even when a rich parent wants to benefit his children, it's often not clear how best to do so. Was Charles really acting in Burnie's own best interest by leaving him a huge trust fund but not allowing him to use it? Charles Lewis Tiffany was born February 15th, 1812 in Connecticut, the middle child and only son in a prosperous family. His father owned a cotton manufacturing company and also a small general store which Charles helped manage starting at the age of 15. In 1837 the 25-year-old Tiffany borrowed a thousand dollars from his father in order to open a store in New York City with a school friend. Their timing appeared to be terrible since a financial panic that year resulted in the worst economic depression the young United States had yet experienced. But this ironically pushed Tiffany into the fateful decision to focus on selling fancy dry goods to those who would continue to buy even in bad times, the wealthy. Their first three days in business brought them just under five dollars in total sales but by 1841 they had expanded the store and brought in Tiffany's cousin as an additional partner. A few years later the firm of Tiffany Young and Ellis began manufacturing its own gold jewelry but they made their first big splash when Young traveled to France in 1848 following the overthrow of King Louis Philippe to buy diamonds and other jewels on the cheap including jewelry that had belonged to Marie-Anche-Winette which they then sold to America's new class of millionaires a term which first came into use around this time. Young's trip also led to the creation of their first overseas store in Paris in 1850 with stores in London and Geneva following 20 years later. When Tiffany's two partners retired he renamed the business Tiffany and Company. It would remain privately controlled by the Tiffany family for a century and is still one of the globes most recognizable brands. The foundation of that brand lay in Tiffany's genius for marketing while he earned his greatest profits from his reputation for selling the best of the best. In 1887 for example he paid the government of France around half a million dollars for about a third of the French crown jewels. He also scored big profits in the 1850s when he bought several large spools of wire left over from the first transatlantic telegraph cable connecting America to Europe and cut it up into inexpensive souvenirs that proved wildly popular. But while Tiffany's business success was mostly built on expensive luxuries he himself wasn't much of a customer. In 1878 he bought a massive 287-karat diamond from which he had cut 128-karat gem that he concluded was too good to sell but he certainly had no intention of giving it to his wife either and the diamond remains undisplayed at the company's fifth avenue store today an iconic symbol of extravagantly good taste. In the words of Charles's great great grandson and biographer his primary values were quote "thrift industry moderation piety" in 1891 the New York Times reported on the celebration of his golden wedding anniversary by observing. The Tiffany's mode of life is as plain now as it was before success. After his wife died in 1897 Charles continued to show up at the office regularly right up until his own death in February 1902 aged 90. Though by all accounts Tiffany was extremely charitable during his life he left virtually all his remaining estimated 12 million dollars of wealth to his four children much of it invested in the family business and that's where the story gets interesting. Charles had two sons and two daughters and in a will-data June 30th 1886 he treated them very differently. His older son Louis Comfort Tiffany and older daughter Annie Olivia Tiffany Mitchell each got $200,000 and 150 shares of Tiffany and company stock as well as three eighths of the residual estate. His younger son Burnett Young Tiffany and younger daughter Louise both unmarried each got $250,000 but only 50 shares of the company and only one eighth of the residual. But for poor Burnett Tiffany the worst blow came in a codicill to the will which is father added in March 1887. My observation of a character of my son Burnett convinces me that it may be greatly to his disadvantage to be in receipt of an incomic seating what is actually necessary for his support and maintenance and in my opinion which however is not to control the discretion of my executors unless a radical change shall take place in his life and habits the sum of $3,000 per annum will be an ample amount for his proper support and maintenance. What was it that Burnett did that angered Charles so much? To begin with his older brother Louis Comfort Tiffany served as an unfortunate standard of comparison. Louis was not only an accomplished and commercially respected artist today widely acknowledged as one of the most important American decorative artists of all time he was also the father of six daughters and crucially had provided his father with his only grandson a second Charles Louis Tiffany. When his grandfather died Charles was a newly married 24-year-old Yale graduate whose importance to his grandfather was marked by a $20,000 bequest under his will twice the amount that went to each of Charles's eight granddaughters. Now Louis didn't always serve as the role model. Charles wanted a son who could inherit his business for him good taste was simply a way to make money but Louis was born with the sensibility of an artist so in 1862 Charles sent the unwilling 14-year-old off to a military academy partly in a burst of civil war patriotism but also because as he wrote to his son a pleasant home and the care of two indulgent parents are not the best calculated to bring out and strengthen the highest qualities of a young man a diamond without hard grinding and polishing would always remain without luster. Louis was unconvinced and two months after his arrival wrote his parents a letter pleading I will go to school anywhere you like as long as it is not here but Charles held firm and Louis would stay another two and a half years until he graduated in July 1865 fortunately for him three months after the civil war had ended. Fortunately for him too Charles at last seemed to recognize that he had pushed his son as far as he could and abandoned his plan for Louis to enter the business in favor of giving full support to his son's artistic career which soon blossomed as Louis's great natural talent was magnified by his father's financial assistance and social connections. Louis began as a painter but soon became interested in decorative arts particularly glass making which provided a wonderful canvas on which to display his brilliant eye for colors. He created his own interior design firm in 1876 where he did work for Mark Twain's house and the White House and in 1885 he created the Tiffany Glass Company so he could concentrate more on glass making. That same year he also teamed up with Thomas to provide lighting fixtures for the first all-electric theater in New York, the Lyceum. When the theater failed soon after opening, Louis showed he was his father's son after all by acquiring ownership and lieu of being paid for his services, and then making a substantial profit when he got the theater back on its feet and resold it. Louis married young, but in 1884 his first wife died, leaving him with three children under the age of ten. After a brief period of fast and fancy living, he remarried in November 1886. And Burnett? Oh Burnett. I searched and searched, but could not find a photo of this guy, though apparently there is some in a Tiffany family album in an archive at Yale. A dozen years younger than his brother, Burnie was a poor student, cycling through five different schools without showing sign of learning much at any of them. But the family didn't really value education much anyway, so the bigger problem in his father's eyes was explained by Charles Cook, who began working at Tiffany as a delivery boy and ended up becoming the company's second president after Charles died. Burnett was addicted to the use of liquors. At times very much addicted. His father placed him with the hope of working him into a department, but he wasn't a success as a businessman. Charles wanted him to have employment. That was his great regret, but his incapacity to be a success in the business was a fact that was recognized as far back as and before 1887. Why does Cook mention that year specifically? Because on March 1st, 1887, three months after his older brother married his second wife, Burnie, an unemployed and uneducated 27-year-old alcoholic living at home and supported by his rich father, took things from bad to much, much worse when he suddenly followed his brother to the altar. Why was getting married so bad, you ask? Two weeks after the marriage, Charles Cook was interviewed by a reporter. The marriage was a very unfortunate thing for which Burnett is more to be pity than blamed. He was drunk at the time, crazy drunk, so he hadn't the slightest idea of what he was doing. He had been drunk for several days. He was drunk when he went to the house where the young woman was staying and he was drunk or still when he came away. We suppose that the young woman was, as he represented her, a poor but honest young dressmaker. If such had been the case, Mr. Charles Tiffany would have welcomed her to his house. Her poverty would have been nothing in his eyes. He would have been glad to see his son married to a good woman who would use her influence to restrain him. For Burnett has been a little wild. But stories began to come to us about his wife's character, and as soon as Mr. Tiffany heard them, he positively refused to see his son again, stopped his allowance, and had a new will made. Since Mr. Cook is being diplomatic here, let me interpret. While on a rip-roaring, multi-day drunk, Burnett visited a house of ill-repute and alope with one of the girls. Less than a week later, his father sat down to write that codicill to his will, and as can be seen from that newspaper report, communicated a clear message to Burnett that he would be cut off entirely from his sole source of income as long as he remained married. So on March 12, less than 11 days after the wedding, Burnett boarded a ship for Europe, leaving his new wife behind. The Chicago Tribune reported that the departure was affected with secrecy because Young Mrs. Tiffany has said to be a very alert and energetic young woman. It was feared that if she knew her husband contemplated flight, she might make trouble. So last night, on pretense of going to see a friend who would reconcile him with his father, the young man left her in the house and went on board the steamer. When his wife awoke this morning, her husband was safely on his way to Europe. Burnett would remain overseas for over four years. His abandoned wife retained a lawyer to sue for support, but the lawyer, with nudging from Charles Tiffany, suggested that a better path to a payoff would be to instead sue for divorce, which she agreed to do and was granted in 1891. Although 20 years later, she would complain that her lawyer had cheated her out of much of the money she thought she was promised. But Burnett, once more a bachelor, was free to come home to America, where he seemingly returned to his former life of leisurely drinking until finally giving up liquor entirely sometime in the late 1890s. He would live at the family home until his father's death in 1902, surviving on a $15 week allowance, plus whatever debts he was able to run up and then persuade his father to pay off. Now hearing all this about Burnett, you might not be surprised that in the two decades after Charles wrote the codicill, suggesting that Burnett get no more than $250 a month, unless a radical change shall take place in his life, he never personally saw enough change in Burnett to want to revise it. Remember, however, that Charles also made it clear that he left the judgment of how much Burnett had changed in the future and how much he deserved in consequence to Burnett's four trustees, his brother Louis, brother-in-law Alfred Mitchell, Annie's husband, the Tiffany family lawyer, and Charles Cook, the newly installed president of Tiffany and company. Based on court documents, we know that less than a month after Charles died, the four trustees met for the first time and decided to give 42-year-old Bernie $2000. They continued to meet monthly for a while, giving him first $1500 and then $1,250 before finally settling on a regular $1500 monthly allowance. It's worth trying to put these numbers in context, even though as I've already observed, comparing amounts of money across long periods of time is notoriously tricky. Based on the impact of inflation alone, an annual income of $18,000 in 1902 would be equal to one of over half a million dollars today. But factoring in economic growth, the equivalent could be as much as $16 million. Either way. It certainly was an amount of money that could provide a comfortable lifestyle. Still, this was but a small fraction of what Bernie's trust was earning. So in November 1902, the trustees agreed that excess income from the trust should be distributed to its two residual beneficiaries. That is, the people who would get the money in the trust if Bernie died without children. Namely, Bernie's siblings, Louis, and Annie. As a result, they started receiving more income from Bernie's trust than Bernie did, on top of already having an inherited three times as much. Now I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that Bernie didn't like this state of affairs one bit. And maybe he figured that if giving up drinking didn't qualify as a radical change, he needed to go even further. But if that was his notion, he miscalculated every bit as much as he had 15 years earlier. And in exactly the same way, because what he did was to get married again, secretly to a woman his family severely disapproved of. Bernie met Lucille Kaufman in the early spring of 1903 at a woman's exhibition in the Old Madison Square Garden in a booth selling rugs and moccasins where she was dressed as a Native American. She was 43, she was 37. He was immediately smitten, but according to his own testimony, Lucille's reluctance was understandable since she was already married. But Bernie promised to set her up in a manner consistent with his wealth. And after all, his trust was worth around one and a half million dollars. On April 25, 1903, Lucille was granted a divorce and married Bernette Tiffany later the same day. Bernie immediately bought $25,000 worth of art, rugs, and antique furniture on credit, which he used to furnish a newly rented house and just as immediately made a gift of to Lucille. Now all he had to do was convince his trustees that he needed more money. In October, he wrote to his brother, "You know that I am under heavy expense in furnishing my house and have made many debts for that purpose. The name of our family is too good for one of them to be done and hounded for debts and I think I am entitled to a house the same as the other. The only drawback to my complete happiness and contentment is insufficient money. I assure you, I have been in no way extravagant as you yourself could see if you would call." In a later letter, Bernie made clear what the exact cost of his happiness and contentment would be. But why, what his trustees seem to think prudent, were $35,000 a year in living expenses in addition to paying off the $25,000 debt he had already incurred. But Louis was no happier with Bernie's choice of a second wife than their father had been with his choice of a first. He hired detectives to look into her background and didn't like what he heard. The particulars are of course lost in time, but it is clear that Louis believed that Lucille was a gold digger after Bernie's money. Regardless, the trustees refused to increase Bernie's allowance, so in October 1903 he sued. Bernie's argument was simple. He had stopped drinking and gotten married, which certainly counted as a radical change in his eyes. The money his father had left for his benefit generated a lot more than $18,000 a year in income, so why shouldn't he be entitled to a larger allowance? Why shouldn't he live as well as his brother Louis and sister Annie? The lawyers for the trustees responded that $18,000 a year was not only a lot more than his father had suggested in his will, it was a lot more than Bernie had been accustomed to spending before his father died. One particularly interesting piece of evidence introduced was Charles's financial accounts, which recorded that over the two years of 1900 and 1901, Bernie had spent precisely $11,019 and $16. In his testimony, Louis further noted, "My father lived in a simple way, but in a comfortable way. It seems to me that $15,000 a year would be more than enough for a bachelor to live on in a simple, comfortable way." The case would drag on for years, but Bernie's creditors were impatient. One, Mr. Horner, went to the trouble of placing a sheriff in the Tiffany household to keep an eye on his goods. Who sealed Tiffany was annoyed. I was very miserable, and I thought the rest of the people who had trusted me and had been a great deal nicer to me than Mr. Horner should have an equal show to get the goods, and I did not want Mr. Horner to get them alone. My lawyer told me the only way to do it was if some of the creditors wanted to put Mr. Tiffany into involuntary bankruptcy, and so I telephoned around and asked him if they wanted to. Although at his wife's behest, Bernie was forced into bankruptcy in December 1904, allowing his creditors to join the legal battle to get at the money in his trust. They were no more successful than he had been, but by 1908 they were at least able to finally seize and auction off the unpaid for goods. Bernie's lawyers tried one last tactic to dislodge the money. Charles' codicill called for the trust to eventually pass to any children Bernie had, quote, "other than his issue by his present wife." By which he clearly meant Bernie's long-since divorce bride of 1889. But the lawyers asserted that this condition constituted an inducement to divorce, and thus was contrary to the public interest and should therefore make the codicill invalid. In July of 1910, the Supreme Court of New York finally and definitively ruled that Charles had the power to give the trustees total authority to decide on an appropriate allowance for Bernie, and it was therefore entirely up to them to determine what was reasonable. Two years later, Bernie was finally able to exit bankruptcy when money the trustees had been withholding from his allowance was used to pay off his remaining debt. Although the trust outlasted Bernie, Bernie would outlast all the trustees. The two non-family members had already passed away by 1907, and in April 1911 Bernie's brother-in-law Alfred Mitchell died at his mansion in Jamaica. No successors had been named to replace any of them as trustees, leaving his brother Louis as sole trustee, a position Louis clearly did not want. As early as 1904, Louis had written Bernie a letter saying he wanted to resign as trustee. And when asked at the trial how the trustees had settled on Bernie's $1,500 a month allowance, Louis had replied, "I only acquiesced in this amount. I didn't make this amount. I had nothing to do with the making of this amount. The amount was made by the others, and I agreed to it. But I mean, I don't think I was in the room at the time. I can't remember." By 1910, before his cases had even ended, Bernie and Lucille had moved to Southern California, presumably to escape his family altogether. In October 1911, five months after the death of his brother-in-law, Louis finally followed through and resigned as trustee, appointing the farmer's loan and trust company to take his place. It must have been galling to Bernie for his financial fate to be in the hands of a committee of bankers, tasked with judging his fitness to spend money. But for the next decade, the public record of the story of Bernie and his trust goes completely silent. Then, in September 1921, the New York Times reported that Bernie had applied to a court for an increase in his allowance to $40,000 annually, noting that his brother and sister were supporting the request, suggesting that his time passed, family resistance to Bernie's bride had slackened. The article also states that his allowance had been $30,000 a year since 1908, which seems unlikely given his ongoing bankruptcy at that time, but was probably correct by 1921 for reasons I will soon explain. But before I finish with Bernie's story, I first want to finish with Louis. Following his father's death, he became not only the largest shareholder of Tiffany and company, but was also named its first design director in 1902, around the same time he created Tiffany's studios to continue his glass making work, a completely independent and essentially not for profit venture. His Tiffany and company shareholdings paid for his art. He wasn't in business for the money, but he kept very busy. And then in May 1904, his second wife died. In a biography of Louis' youngest daughter Dorothy, who became a disciple of Sigmund Freud's, Dorothy's grandson suggests that the combined deaths of his father and second wife, quote, "seems to have loosened all of Louis' constraints." He moved his family from the Tiffany mansion in New York City to Laurelton Hall, a new estate comprising a huge chunk of Long Island's gold coast, which was estimated to have cost two million dollars. At Laurelton, he allowed his eccentricities to flourish, giving his young daughter Dorothy only 13 at the time of her mother's death plenty of material to share with Dr. Freud about her father's single parenting style. He began to drink heavily, showing that he was indeed Bernie's brother. He also began a relationship with a young Irish redhead named Patsy Hanley, who he had hired as a nurse and who had become his lover until his death. His great grandson says that, "The family did not condone the arrangement, but they accepted it because Patsy got him off booze and on her." And he began to spend heavily too. He lived lavishly and threw himself into the conspicuous consumption of the last years of the Gilded Age before the arrival of inheritance and income taxes, throwing one of the most scandalous costume parties of the era, his 1913 Egyptian Fett at the time of Cleopatra, which he attended in the role of an Egyptian potentate. His then 22-year-old daughter Dorothy, who played an attendant to the Queen of the Nile, was so scandalized by the whole affair that she later suggested burning the commemorative album of photographs. And like his father, Louis also gave money away freely. Six months after his second wife died, he donated $300,000 to the New York infirmary for women and children. And in 1918, he deeded his home Laurelton Hall plus its grounds and art and a $1 million in downman to the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation for the creation of an art school. He died in January 1933. Generous to the end, his will included nearly $300,000 in the quest to his 13 grandchildren and another dozen friends, including $40,000 for his mistress Patsy. But his great-grandson says that because of all of his extravagant spending, "After payment of his debts, even the cash bequest to his grandchildren could not, at first, be fully honored, and my grandmother Dorothy received not a penny, until after the 1938 sale of the Lennox Hill mansion." In an ironic twist, Louis' children only became wealthy when their uncle Bernie died in 1945, causing his trust fund, the principle of which had never been touched, to be split among Louis's seven surviving children. So what had become of Bernie? Had Louis been justified in his suspicions that Lucille was just a gold digger? There's certainly plenty of evidence in favor. As far back as 1909, Bernie testified that he gave $300 of his weekly $375 checks to his wife for household expenses. He and Lucille would remain married for 23 years, living in California until she died in Santa Barbara in March 1926, at age 60. And there's reason to believe that she continued to control the bulk of their income and used much of it to enrich herself. Because her will, signed in August 1924, gave Bequest totaling $200,000 or an inflation-adjusted $3 million plus three houses and a wide array of jewelry to a large number of relatives and friends. Since this was a mere dozen years after Bernie had exited bankruptcy, it would appear that Lucille had managed to swirl away at least $15,000 a year in the meanwhile. Even if his trust income had been raised to $30,000 as that New York Times article from 1921 suggests, that means she took half of their income and put it in her own pocket. What's more, having suffered through one Tiffany estate legal saga, Lucille took no chances and insisted on having Bernie formally consent to her will when she signed it. But he certainly wasn't going to contest it anyway. Bernie would continue to live with Lucille's sister Carrie LaRue and Carrie's husband Russell until Russell died in 1933 and then just with Carrie until Bernie died at her Santa Barbara home in 1945 at age 85. Now, you might be wondering like I did. Did Bernie also become involved with Carrie? Well there's one more ironic twist to share. In May 1942, three years before Bernie's death, Carrie, then 64, married Don Rose, a 26-year-old GI in Florence, Arizona. They parted ways after only five months, but six years later, Carrie's son petitioned for an ennormate on the basis that she "was not fully in possession of her mental faculties at the time of her marriage." Now remember, his mother was the beneficiary of a substantial trust from her sister, at least $40,000 according to the will, as much as $150,000 according to the Los Angeles Times. So the son knew his mother should not remain legally married. So yeah, it seems quite possible that Lucille was in it for Bernie's money, and maybe her sister too, and from that perspective, perhaps Louis was simply doing what his father would have wanted by not letting Bernie have the money. On the other hand, it also seems pretty clear that Charles would have been appalled by the way Louis spent the money too. Louis's son, Charles's name say grandson, certainly thought so, as he wrote a letter to his aunt Annie in 1932. "Grampa would turn over in his grave if he knew how Papa had handled the money left him." His great-great grandson steeped in his grandmother's Freudian outlook, went even further, suggesting that Louis spent precisely because it would have appalled his father. Unlike his father, Louis put quality above profit, running his business in effect as a mission, one which taught the gospel of good taste at cost. Louis readiness to spend the capital that his father had reverently earned was about as hostile and contemptuous a gesture as he could have made. From this perspective, the control that Louis exercised over Bernie looks like a far more cynical pose, allowing him to spend their father's fortune and still be able to pass on Bernie's share to his own children. So what did Charles want the money to be used for? To me, that seems to be the wrong question. He accumulated wealth because he liked his business and was good at it, even though he didn't particularly care for the luxury he represented, and he had little interest in spending his own money on such frivolity. After that fascinating piece of evidence introduced during the original trial over Bernie's trust in 1904, Charles's financial accounts, which recorded that over the two years of 191901, Bernie had spent precisely $11,019.16. Charles knew the amount to the penny, and it clearly had bothered him immensely that Bernie neither knew nor cared. His great grandson says that Louis spent precisely because it would have bothered his father. So if you think Charles was wise to have not let Bernie spend all his money, I think you'd also have to think he should have done the same with Louis. But if nobody was to spend the money, what was it for in the first place? In our next episode, I will discuss the story of William Waitman, the Quineine King, who realized that question was so hard, he basically said to his daughter, "Here, you deal with it." You can't take it with you was produced and engineered by Jim Latham. People acting by Sean Branny, Mark DeCarlo, Kate Flannery, Kai Corbin, James Latham. If you're interested in learning more about this story, I recommend Michael John Burling Ham's book, The Last Tiffany, A Biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham.