Money's Royalty

THE ROTHSCHILDS (305 pp.)--Frederic Morton--Atheneum ($5.95).

From time to time, real life apparently decides to put fiction's eye out and creates characters like Byron, monarchs like Louis XIV, and families like the Rothschilds.

Real life provided the Rothschilds with too much of everything--luck, power, possessions. As fiction, their story lacks only one thing: suspense. The Rothschilds played every trick; they also won every trick. Inside one generation, the founder's five sons resembled a hand whose jeweled fingers covered the map of Europe. In succeeding generations, while thrones toppled and nations faced bankruptcy, the Rothschilds went upward, always upward, and on. Their story becomes a magnificent seven-generation dinner slightly drowsy from its own great wines.

Coins to Deals. The beginnings are sufficiently classic: Mayer Amschel Rothschild was a secondhand-shopkeeper, locked at night inside the Frankfurt ghetto. Appropriately enough, Mayer began to specialize in coins, and rose by way of highborn coin collectors. From selling coins, the family went on to lending money; the sons left home, and went from trading in commodities to dealing in finance. In those days, when news traveled no faster than the stagecoach or sailing ship, the five brothers realized that a speedy communications system could mean money, organized their own version of a private pony express and courier service. The system paid for itself many times over when Nathan, in London, achieved a two-day beat on the news of Waterloo, allowing him to score one of the greatest of stock-market coups. He had much at stake, since he had largely financed Wellington's army in Portugal anyway.

But it was at Aix, where the European allies met in 1818 to divide up the spoils after Napoleon's final defeat, that the Rothschilds elevated themselves from moneyed power to financial grandeur. Secretly manipulating European markets to the point of imminent crash, the Rothschilds managed to discredit rival moneylenders and emerged as bankers for all the huge reparations the victors extracted from defeated France. Thereafter their aura outshone the cunning it derived from.

Author Morton meshes the Rothschilds' sense of style with his own sense of theater. There is often too much jangling modern slang ("chicken feed," "throw" a dinner). But there is also an ability to turn a phrase, and in its storybook fashion this is a lively, well-told story.

If Author Morton comes off best with the English branch, it is perhaps because they come off best themselves. A Rothschild was the first Jew in the Commons, a Rothschild was the first Jew in the Lords, there was a Prime Minister (Rosebery) with a Rothschild wife, a host of great English families with Rothschild blood. Disraeli was dining with Lionel Rothschild the night a Rothschild courier brought in a message from the Khedive of Egypt, offering to sell his shares in the Suez Canal for -L-4,000,000. Since the Bank of England could not scrape up the money to meet the 48-hour deadline. Lionel politely supplied the cash.

Snubs & Snobs. On the Continent, there was James, the Paris grandee who was painted by Delacroix, hobnobbed with Meyerbeer and Rossini, was the subject of a story by his friend Balzac, the object of a snub by his friend Heine. In Austria, during the early days, the Rothschilds had Metternich as their friend at court.

In modern times, it was to an Austrian castle of theirs that Edward VIII went after abdicating; and it was upon the Rothschild fortune that the incoming Nazis trained a covetous eye. With steel-helmeted SS men, pistols drawn, two yards from his table. Baron Louis ate lunch amid footmen and sauces, used the fingerbowl after fruit, enjoyed his cigarette, took his heart medicine, approved the next day's menu, and went into custody. When they invaded France the Nazis looted 4,000 "major art items'' from various Rothschild mansions. When reassembled after World War II, the collection required a "committee of Rothschild butlers'' to determine which masterpieces belonged to whose masters.

Sons &. Sense. Sons have not just been the keystone of the House of Rothschild but the actual edifice: only sons can be partners. The Italian and German banking houses ceased in the 19th century not from lack of shrewdness but from lack of sons. But in France, there has been no lack of sons; the current heir is Guy, who heads what is still the largest private bank in France.

With a sense that their faith is their fortune, the Rothschilds have borne it before them like a banner, whether socially, interrupting lordly stag hunts to fast and pray on Yom Kippur, or financially, refusing help to anti-Semitic nations and regimes. In terms of traditions, Rothschilds do not merely resemble, they rival royalty, and are as much given to intermarriage (of 58 weddings of old Mayer's descendants, 29 united first cousins).

Unlike today's diminished royalty, the dynasty still retains vast power, but reticence and bourgeois practicality temper the imperial wealth. The Rothschilds are rarely glimpsed these days, and outsiders are left to speculate that the legend may at last have become larger than life.

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