Gilded Lily (3 page)

In the more fashionable capitals of Europe and in New York, there was shock and sadness at the horrible turn of events in Monaco. Initially, there was also a great deal of sympathy for Lily.

“I don't know how she has coped with so many things that have happened in her life,” said Carlos Monteverde, Lily's adopted son, who considered Safra “a second father.”

How would she cope?

Perhaps it was a question posed in the immediate aftermath of Safra's death. Perhaps it occurred to the Monegasque police and firefighters as they glanced at Madame, forlorn and shivering in the lobby.

“She is really the prettiest of women,” a society columnist had noted about Lily some years earlier. “In a land of giants it's a pleasure to see someone who looks as though she's made of porcelain.”

But Lily Safra is made of much stronger stuff.

In Rio de Janeiro, where family friends and acquaintances could still recall Lily as an upwardly mobile young woman in the 1950s with the single-minded goal of marrying a rich man, few people had any doubts about how she would cope without Safra.

“I have always believed that Lily is a woman of great luck and fortune,” said Gastão Veiga, a family friend who had known Lily as a teenager and young adult in Rio de Janeiro. “Her life has always struck me as the plot of a great novel.”

G
ASTÃO VEIGA, WHO
knew Lily as a teenager before her first marriage, said he wasn't surprised that she had landed one of the richest men in Brazil before her thirtieth birthday. It was clear to him that the only daughter of Wolf White Watkins had been trained from an early age to marry up in the world. In the end, it didn't seem to matter how many times she needed to walk down the aisle.

“Lily was a social climber, it's true,” said Veiga. “The Watkins family lived around the prospects of Lily marrying a wealthy man.”

The Watkinses were well off by most standards, but they had fallen short of the wealth dreamed of by Wolf White Watkins, who had left his native London in his early twenties to seek his fortune in the wilds of South America. Wolf, an engineer by profession, settled first in Uruguay, where he met his future wife, Annita Noudelman de Castro. Annita, an Uruguayan of Russian-Jewish descent, was still a teenager when she married Wolf and became pregnant with the couple's first child.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Jews escaping hardship and persecution in Europe had moved to the southern reaches of South America, most of them aided by the Jewish Colonization Association. The organization was founded by the Baron
Maurice de Hirsch in 1891 to help Jews who were in danger of being targeted in anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. The baron's organization gave the mostly Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland a plot of land and helped each settler buy livestock and a horse in agricultural colonies in South America where they could practice their religion without fear of persecution.

It's not clear if the Noudelman family arrived in Uruguay under the Baron de Hirsch scheme, but for many Jews fleeing persecution in Europe, Uruguay was not a destination but merely a stopover on the way to more prosperous communities in Brazil or Argentina. Although there are records of Jewish settlement in the country dating back to the 1770s, the Jewish presence in Uruguay in the early twentieth century was negligible. There were fewer than two hundred Jews in the capital Montevideo in the early 1900s and the first synagogue in the country was only established there in 1917. Still, the government of the day seems to have been extremely tolerant of Jews. At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, a post–World War I meeting of the Allied Supreme Council to divide up the former Ottoman-controlled lands of the Middle East, Uruguay boldly supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

Most of the Jews who decided to stay in Uruguay eventually gravitated to Montevideo, where they opened small businesses. The Noudelmans appear to have gone against the grain, settling in Rivera, a small frontier town in the northern part of the country, near the Brazilian border, where the small Jewish community worked as traders, gauchos, or farmers.

It's not clear how Wolf White Watkins ended up in Rivera, but it certainly wasn't religion that drove him there. The twenty-three-year-old dreamer headed to the New World after the First World War because he wanted to strike it rich.

“Watkins was a controversial figure,” said Veiga, a business associate in the 1940s and 1950s, who, in later years, imported luxury vehicles, such as Rolls Royce and MG, to Brazil. “He was mixed up
with everything and he was determined to earn money. Whether it was clean or dirty, he didn't care. The line in business that he followed was never straight.”

Despite his fierce-sounding name, Wolf White Watkins was a slight, balding, and bespectacled man. The photo on his Brazilian identity card shows a rather mousy middle-aged man in a smart business suit who looks more like a mild-mannered accountant or school-teacher than a tough, enterprising businessman who traveled across the world to seek his fortune.

In February 1919, Wolf and Annita, who were living in Rivera close to Annita's family, decided to move to Sant'Ana do Livramento in Brazil. It's not clear that they actually crossed a border since both Rivera and Sant'Ana do Livramento are twin cities with an undefined crossing. One could easily get lost in the outskirts of Rivera, only to find that he had unwittingly crossed the border into Brazil. In the early twentieth century, the region, marked by rolling hills, lush vineyards, and fruit trees, was a haven for smugglers, who could easily move contraband goods, such as petrol, tobacco, machinery, salted beef, leather, and precious metals, into Brazil and Argentina, where tariff barriers on imported goods were extremely high. Although Wolf's expertise lay in the construction of railway carriages, like most enterprising frontier residents, he also tried his hand at smuggling, says Veiga.

At some point, Wolf and his wife must have made the conscious decision to move to Brazil to start their family. Compared to rural Uruguay, which was at the time a sleepy agricultural backwoods, Brazil was turning into an economic powerhouse where the booming coffee trade was fueling rapid industrialization and attracting a steady stream of European immigrants who came in search of economic opportunities.

Less than a year after the couple established themselves on the Brazilian side of the border in Sant'Ana, nineteen-year-old Annita gave birth to the first of the couple's four children. Rodolpho Watkins
was born in Sant'Ana do Livramento on January 1, 1920. His brother Daniel was born a year later.

The Watkins family's next move, in 1922, was to Porto Alegre, a relatively prosperous city of German and Italian immigrants where most afternoons gauchos in capes and faded cowboy hats gathered around the central plaza to share a gourd of maté, the strong herbal tea which is a staple in the Southern Cone. Porto Alegre, which was 250 miles away from Sant'Ana, was also becoming an important center of Jewish settlement, and by the time Annita and Wolf moved to the city, Ashkenazi Jews were beginning to settle in the Bom Fim neighborhood, a middle-class enclave dotted by kosher slaughterhouses and other Jewish businesses. In 1928, their third son, Artigas, was born in Porto Alegre. He may have been named in honor of General Jose Gervasio Artigas, the nineteenth-century hero of Uruguay's independence movement. Wolf must have felt a special bond with the long-deceased general because both of them began their professional lives as smugglers on the Brazilian border.

Six years after the birth of Artigas, Wolf and Annita's only daughter was born in Porto Alegre, on December 20, 1934. An opera buff, Wolf insisted upon naming the baby girl Lily in honor of the petite French soprano Lily Pons, who was at the height of her fame just as her Brazilian namesake was born.

By the time Lily was born, residents of Porto Alegre were keenly following events in the country's capital, Rio de Janeiro, where one of their own native sons, President Getúlio Vargas, a lawyer and former populist governor of Rio Grande do Sul, was turning Brazil into a fascist state. Vargas, a gaucho who had seized power in a coup d'état in 1930, began to consolidate his powers in the 1934 constitution, which cracked down on left-wing opposition, centralized the economy, and set up economic incentives to spur industrial development.

Wolf watched events in the capital with keen interest and wondered how this new Vargas “revolution,” as it was hailed throughout Brazil, could make him rich. Watkins knew that in order to prosper
even further he needed to leave Rio Grande do Sul, where promises of cheap land had drawn thousands of migrants from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Most of the Jews who were settling in Bom Fim brought their professional experience from the Old Country and were happy to be able to open up a small shoe store or tailor's shop. But Wolf wasn't interested in owning land or running a small business. His specialty was the railway, and he followed its development in Brazil, hoping to get rich.

Just before his forty-fifth birthday, in 1940, Wolf decided to uproot his family yet again, still in pursuit of the fabulous wealth he had dreamed about as a young man in England. This time, the Watkins clan headed to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil's capital. At first they settled on the city's outskirts in the down-at-heels municipality of Mesquita, moving three times in their first year until Watkins established the Society of National Reconstruction, a company that specialized in building and fixing railway carriages, known by its Portuguese acronym SONAREC. Mesquita, the site of a large sugar plantation that had fallen on hard times after Brazil's Princess Isabel abolished slavery in 1888, was named for the plantation's owner Baron Jeronimo José de Mesquita. Although the rolling hills and lush landscape must have reminded the Watkins clan of Uruguay, Mesquita was no pastoral retreat populated by well-mannered European immigrants. The town was located in the mosquito-infested Baixada Fluminense, the lowlands north of the city of Rio. It was hot and sticky in the summers and endured punishing torrential rains in the winters. Most of the town's nine thousand residents were impoverished farmers, factory workers, and aging former slaves who had never left the ruins of the former plantation. There were few diversions in Mesquita, and the good schools were nearly an hour away by rail in Rio de Janeiro. It was hardly the place for an upwardly mobile businessman like Wolf and his young family.

By the time the Watkinses arrived in Mesquita in the 1940s, local businessmen had largely failed in their efforts to turn part of the
baron's old plantation into orange groves for the production of orange juice. Still, Wolf saw opportunity. With its proximity to Brazil's capital, Wolf felt that it was only a matter of time before Mesquita would turn into a booming industrial center, especially as it was strategically located on Brazil's great Estrada de Ferro—literally “the highway of iron,” or the railroad. Yet, in the early days of their life in Mesquita, the Watkins family must have faced some difficult times.

But it was there that Watkins began to make his important connections among Brazilian politicians and railway barons that would ensure his success for years to come.

Although Watkins did end up making a lot of money, the bulk of his earnings weren't exactly from the repair of railway carriages. From his base in Mesquita during the war years, when gas was severely rationed in Brazil, Watkins entered into a lucrative if not quite legal partnership with a powerful politician and military man named Napoleão Alencastro Guimarães. A former minister of transportation, the tall, dapper politician was also the director of the Central do Brasil train station in Rio de Janeiro, one of the country's largest transport facilities at the time. Alencastro Guimarães, an anglophile who was fond of bespoke suits and an habitué of the most elegant supper clubs in Rio, took an instant liking to the plucky Englishman. And so when he sent railway carriages to SONAREC for repair, they would arrive loaded with cans of petrol. Watkins, who had developed a healthy network of black-market contacts from his years spent in the towns strung along the border of Brazil and Uruguay, easily sold the petrol on the black market. He then returned the railway carriages empty to the Central do Brasil and divided the spoils with his friend Alencastro Guimarães.

“He made a tidy fortune,” said Marcelo Steinfeld, who first heard the stories of Wolf White Watkins from Lily when she was living in Rio in the late 1960s. “But even though he was rich, Watkins was too much of a spendthrift to ever be successful.”

Wolf's partnership with Alencastro Guimarães proved so profit
able that he was able to move his family to a stately apartment in Rio at the end of the Second World War. Wolf managed to install his family in a large, ground-floor apartment on Joaquim Nabuco, a leafy residential street of some prestige in Copacabana, a block and a half from the beach. It was a good address, but far from the opulence of Flamengo and Laranjeiras, home to diplomats, high-ranking government officials, and the country's president—the seat of old money in Rio de Janeiro. Still, one of his neighbors on Rua Joaquim Nabuco recalled that Watkins's home was “nicely furnished and very comfortable.”

In Rio, Wolf loved nothing more than showing off his wealth by tipping extravagantly and dressing in the custom-made linen suits he ordered from his tailor on the fashionable Rua do Ouvidor in downtown Rio, where the city's wealthiest businessmen and politicians all ordered their made-to-measure suits. Wolf thought nothing of tipping extravagantly, and friends recalled that he once gave an attendant the equivalent of $100 to park his car. When he invited business associates to lunch, it was always a lavish affair, and he wasn't content unless he invited six or seven people at a time.

Wolf also loved spoiling his daughter. At first, he bought her toys and Belgian and Swiss chocolates that he ordered from the Portuguese import houses in downtown Rio. But when she became a teenager, Wolf was determined to give his little girl—the apple of his eye—the most exquisite clothes that money could buy.

But Wolf's extravagances often landed him in debt. According to some of his business associates he moved from place to place in order to escape paying those debts—a rather dangerous proposition in twentieth-century Brazil, when many disputes over money and women were settled with a bullet.

Wolf was, however, nothing if not street-smart and wily, and he had become an expert at extricating himself from particularly difficult situations. For instance, when he wanted to hang onto the lucrative contract to repair railway carriages for Rio de Janeiro's Central do
Brasil Station, he knew his debts to a wealthy
coronel
, or local strongman, threatened to sink his prospects. But Wolf was undaunted. He ignored the repeated requests for repayment and stalled, knowing that top-level officials at the Central do Brasil desperately needed his company's services after the Second World War. His strategy eventually proved successful. Eurico de Souza Gomes, who was in charge of the administration of the Central do Brasil between 1951 and 1953, and was a leading
coronel
in Rio, finally reached out to Watkins, through an intermediary, to collect part of the debt. Souza Gomes asked his friend Gastão Veiga to collect the money that Watkins owed him. If Watkins paid even part of the debt, the managers of the Central do Brasil would continue to do business with SONAREC.