Dismantling an Opulent Fossil

By ROBERT HUGHES

Treasures from Ben Sonnenberg's mansion go on auction

In recent years it was the greatest private house in New York: not comparable to the great mansions of Fifth Avenue at their height of extravagance in the Brown Decades, but an astonishing survivor, a solid, heavy and opulent fossil, that went on living long after estate taxes had killed its rivals. It stood, 37 rooms of it, on the southern side of Gramercy Park, that most Jamesian of Manhattan's squares, and last week it was proceeding, slowly and irreversibly, to come apart, as the photographers, appraisers and people from Sotheby Parke Bernet moved through it, checking and cataloguing, preparing the four-day auction that in June will scatter the mansion's contents for good. What had been the background to a life had already acquired a museum glaze; the invidious perfection of the showroom lay, like a cold sheet of plastic, on every tabletop and drawing. Its memory circuits had been cut.

The dissolution of 19 Gramercy Park is a sad sight for anyone who knew it in its former days, but it has a certain fitness. The house was a stage set; its natural fate was to be struck. The man who inhabited it, the producer, director and short, waddling star of the comedy of manners that unfolded in its rooms for some 40 years, was Benjamin Sonnenberg.

By a stroke of irony that he would, no doubt, have relished, Ben Sonnenberg died last September, at age 77, during the New York newspaper strike. Thus he had no obituaries of any size, and his passing, though mourned by friends, made little news. But then, Sonnenberg's profession was to be the midwife of stories, not their subject. He was one of the first modern public relations men. Indeed he had been at the game so long--"fashioning," as he once put it, "large pedestals for small statues"--that many people thought he had invented the p.r. business. He had not, but Sonnenberg outlived all its other pioneers, and was to ordinary flacks what Rubens is to LeRoy Neiman.

"I gravitate toward people with money," he once said, with winning simplicity. The money brushed off like pollen; at one time or another, Sonnenberg handled the p.r. needs of CBS, Philip Morris, David Sarnoff, Lever Brothers, Samuel Goldwyn, Pan Am, Squibb, Pepperidge Farm and others too numerous to count. A prodigios host and incessant partygiver, he was Manhattan's equivalent of the "talking chief on other, Polynesian islands--the chamberlain who enunciates the real chiefs dicta to the tribe, or, as he put it himself, "I supply the Listerine to the commercial dandruff on the shoulders of corporations." As an American success story, Sonnenberg's was cast in the old epic mold.

He was born in Brest Litovsk in 1901, the son of a penniless old-clothes dealer named Harry Zonnenberg, who emigrated to New York, scrimped and saved, and brought his family over in 1910. The boy studied; he worked as a journalist; he peddled tinted portrait photographs in the Midwest, worked as a $25-a-week movie critic, and then wandered into a job with an American organization distributing food and medical relief to postwar Europe. Thus, in 1922, the young Sonnenberg went back to Europe--armed this time with a salary and an expense account. He went to Rome, London and Paris; "the significance of having a man draw your bath and lay out your clothes," he told The New Yorker a quarter of a century later, "burst upon me like a revelation ... I think it was while feeding the people in Odessa, paradoxically, that I first decided to become a cross between Conde Nast and Otto Kahn."

Back in New York, he started as a lowly flack, a pressagent. But he worked his way up so fast that, before the end of the Depression, he and his wife Hilda were able to move into the house on Gramercy Park, which for years had been subdivided into poky flats. No. 19 had been built in 1845, rebuilt in the 1860s and finally remodeled in the 1880s by Stanford White. It had fallen into disuse, and the Sonnenbergs, sensing their ideal domestic theater in it, began the long work of restoration, accumulating the furniture (Sheraton and Chippendale-pattern credenzas, hunt tables and German porter's chairs, a rare George III circular rent table), the 17th century English paneling for the William and Mary Room, the busts and knickknacks, the paintings and drawings, the metalwork, and so on down to the 54 tablecloths, 624 napkins and 283 bath towels, which by 1950 had become necessary to the running of this large establishment.

The result was a collection that was a pure demonstration of its owner's fantasies. The clothes peddler's son from Grand Street was, at heart, a displaced Edwardian grandee, longing for the class (high, slightly raffish, demanding and Anglophile) into which he had not been born. His conversation had the pungency of a vanished era; it demanded, and got, a great deal of time and attention. It coiled and ran and turned back on itself, wandering off into apparent non sequiturs to test the listener, piling metaphor on private joke, allusion on trope, and then puncturing the entire edifice with some foxy gag.

Sonnenberg was exquisitely conscious of dress as costume. In the '40s and '50s his style of accouterment was a wonder of Manhattan--cane, tight four-button suits, massive cuff links, a bowler hat, and a mustache that almost rivaled Dali's in local celebrity: not the zigzag antennae of the Spaniard but a drooping bunch of Habsburg bristle, which in his last years came to resemble the questing barbels of an old and sagacious carp.

As in dress, so Sonnenberg's obsessive pursuit of relics and emblems. Every trophy was a souvenir, one felt, of some conversation he had missed but confidently expected to enjoy in the afterlife: the autographs of Tennyson, Swinburne, Thackeray, Kipling, Whistler and Wilde; the wall of Max Beerbohm cartoons; the portraits of literary figures, from Virginia Woolf and Ottoline Morrell to Wyndham Lewis and Dylan Thomas. Of the more abstract emblems, he liked brass. Nineteen Gramercy' Park consumed more metal polish in a month, it was rumored, than all the Russian Orthodox churches of America in a year. Brass was the Anglophile's metal par excellence, and it was everywhere--kettles, candlesticks, urns, samovars, chandeliers, sconces, plates and mortars. Brass was to Sonnenberg what bullion was to Ben Jonson's character Volpone: "Good morning to the day; and next, my gold! Open the shrine, that I may see my saint!"

The result of this staging, this accumulation of many generations' residue in the span of 40 years' hard bargaining, was apparent the moment one crossed the threshold of No. 19. It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope. Its guests felt cushioned and cocooned in objects, lapped in the carpets and thick soundless upholstery, protected by the military glitter of brassware. No other house in New York, perhaps none in America, conveyed so powerfully the impression that the outside world stopped at the front door and that all discourse, as a result, was in club.

This illusion seems to have affected every one of Sonnenberg's regulars, from rich old ladies to wary middle-aged politicos to shellbacked young journalists--with the result that they all disgorged their secrets into Sonnenberg's ear. Consequently, the house was as much a business asset to Sonnenberg as, say, River Rouge is to Ford. "To the public," he once remarked, "the business I'm in still seems a flimflam, fly-by-night business. I want my house and office to convey an impression of stability and to give myself a dimension, background and tradition that go back to the Nile." And so they almost did; but with the death of the Pharaoh of Gramercy Park, the pyramid itself is being dispersed, the contents soon to be pecked away at auction by a thousand checkbooks. What mattered was the ensemble, not the parts; and the greatest masterpiece the house contained--ebullient, wry, kindly, vain and shrewd--was the old man himself . -- Robert Hughes

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