Death At No. 52

Most famed financial address in the U. S. is No. 23 Wall St., the House of Morgan. Next in fame is No. 52 William St., the House of Kuhn, Loeb. Built eleven years after a Kuhn, Loeb senior partner, Otto Hermann Kahn, arrived in the U. S. from his German birthplace by way of England, No. 52 houses the great banking firm in only four of its 20 floors. There in his day, shrewd old Jacob Schiff reorganized the big Kuhn, Loeb railroads: Union Pacific, Baltimore & Ohio, Missouri Pacific, Wabash, Chicago & Eastern Illinois.

There Partner Felix Warburg, a carnation in his buttonhole, summons the eleven partners to conference punctually at 11 a. m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On the wall of his office is a portrait of bushy old Solomon Loeb who retired one year after Otto Kahn, at 17, began his banking career in Germany as a stamp licker. There is the big white Georgian partners' room, heart of Kuhn, Loeb, where "people just roll in and roll out again." There Otto Kahn worked under his father-in-law, Partner Abraham Wolff. There he became a U. S. citizen during the War. There as Kuhn, Loeb's great "personality" he chatted with railroad tycoons, painters, writers, singers--all wanting help. And there last week, in the private dining room on the fourth floor, Death came to Otto Kahn. He was sitting over his coffee with Partner Benjamin Buttenwieser. Suddenly he slumped forward. His cup rattled to the floor. Before a doctor could reach him the 67-year-old banker was dead of cardiac thrombosis.

News of his death was withheld until the stockmarket closed. At 4 o'clock the curtains of the upper floor where he lay were drawn, and the partners announced that Kuhn, Loeb would remain closed for four days. A few minutes later J. P. Morgan hurried over on foot from No. 23 to pay his respects. So did Morgan Partners Lamont and Leffingwell. At 4:30 a black box was carried out of No. 52, driven to the Kahn home at No. 1100 Fifth Ave.

Widow Kahn and the banker's second son, Musician Roger Wolfe Kahn, were waiting at the door. Mrs. Kahn wept so bitterly when she saw the coffin that she could not bring herself to announce the funeral arrangements. For three days the body lay in the hushed house of many rooms. Through the gloomy light of Manhattan afternoons gleamed the soft faces and figures of the dead man's favorite Botticellis and Rembrandts. On the fourth day the body was taken to the Kahn estate at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I. where for 14 summers Otto Kahn had walked the wide lawns in front of the French house, stepped down the stone terrace into the flower garden to pluck the tearoses he liked to wear in his lapel. The funeral was private. In death as in life he remained true to the Jewish faith. Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson of Temple Emanu-El read the services. Before sundown the body was lowered into its grave in the family plot at Cold Spring Memorial Cemetery, not far from the bones of an old friend and wise partner, Mortimer Schiff.

"I was born a Jew, I am a Jew, and I shall die a Jew," Otto Kahn once exclaimed. But there was German blood in his veins, a German accent in his speech, and two Otto Kahns before the world. By day he was Otto Kahn the banker--shrewd, suave, sometimes ruthless. The last time he made news in that capacity was when he appeared before the Senate Banking & Currency Committee last summer, admitted that he had paid no income tax for three years, flayed speculation and generally won the hard hearts of hostile Senators by his charm and grace (TIME, July 10). After dark he was Otto Kahn, patron of arts, bon vivant, first nighter at opera and theatre. As a capitalist he preached the threadbare maxims of success, pointed with pride to the fact that he was advanced in the little bank at Karlsruhe because he licked stamps faster and more efficiently than anyone else. But as an artist he loved freshness and originality. No poet was too obscure to wheedle a little something out of him. Once Communist Michael Gold brought him some play scripts he and his companions had written. Mr. Kahn examined them painstakingly, looked up and said: "You are Socialists and Communists but I don't mind as long as you are faithful to art." Back in the 1890's Banker James Stillman used to say of him: "A promising chap if he only will forget that art nonsense.'' On his office desk a friend once found a highly technical treatise, The Monetary Chaos, side by side with a 'cello concerto of a contemporary German composer.

Banker Kahn won his first fame at 34 by financing Edward H. Harriman in the $65,000,000 corner in Northern Pacific in 1901, pitting his skill and strength against J. P. Morgan and James J. Hill. Art Patron Kahn sank his profits into the Metropolitan Opera Company of which he was chairman for 23 years. He installed Giulio Gatti-Casazza as manager in 1908. He brought Toscanini from Italy in 1908 and Arthur Bodanzky from his own home town in Mannheim in 1915. He spent nearly $2,000,000 buying out Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera Company when it threatened to ruin the Metropolitan in 1910. He stood ready to build a new opera house for the Metropolitan to seat 4,500, had already bought the land when the Met's Old Guard balked him in 1928. Never a phrasemaker, he had a naive but sincere conception of his calling as a patron: A rich man must look upon himself as a community investment which must yield ''dividends of service and other things of value to the community." Said he: "No business I have ever conducted has brought me dividends comparable to the satisfaction I have working for the advancement of art."

His conversation was rapid, precise, lucid. Short, ruddy, white-haired, he wore a small mustache which he twisted with stubby white fingers when he grew excited. At No. 52 William St. he seldom sat in his private office, preferred to work in the bustle and noise of the partners' room. When the partners next meet in that room they will have a hard time finding a man to take Otto Kahn's place--a man with the personality and power to maintain the firm's great prestige. Felix Warburg, last of the old partners, acts today mostly as an adviser. Jerome Jones Hanauer, Jacob Schiff's trusted "inside man," retired last year. Sir William Wiseman is a Briton who has been a partner only five years. Today much of the work is done by Elisha Walker, onetime ally of Amadeo Peter Giannini, and by able Benjamin Buttenwieser, who, as manager of the firm's syndicate department, is considered one of the most brilliant young men in Wall Street.

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