ing American industry. I don’t want you to think that forty years ago I suddenly had a full-blown vision of all the incredible things that were going to happen. What I did get was one small inkling that change was becoming a basic factor in the way Americans live.... You could see how the car was bringing an end to the isolation of our small towns.” Fisher would become noted for his ability to envision change; it would be considered among his greatest assets as a businessman, and he would bring it with him into the civic, philanthropic and political arenas. He would tell groups that one has “to be a visionary if he wants to accomplish anything,” and that “a person who goes through life on a day-to-day basis —he just lives.” He would tirelessly reiterate this theme —sometimes to the chagrin of his colleagues. In 1932, William Fisher was the first to hear it and, coming from his twenty-four-year- old son, whose resume was limited to working in a kitchen and lugging blocks of ice, it understandably annoyed him.

Max’s efforts began to pay modest dividends. Service stations and department stores were stocking Keystone products, and Max initiated a marketing program, writing a history of oil refining that Keystone used as a sales manual and bestowing brand names on their rerefined oil —Korlube, Penny and, his favorite, Maximile, for which he com- posed a bit of advertising copy: “Max Sez /more miles/more smiles/ with Maximile.”

Financially, though, Keystone was hampered by the Depression-rav- aged economy. And Detroit was hit hard. In 1931, total U.S. car sales dropped below two million for the first time in a decade, and that sum - mer Henry Ford I closed his production lines. Nearly one out of every seven persons was on relief and, according to Robert Conot, author of American Odyssey, a comprehensive history of Detroit, “children scavenged through the streets like animals for scraps of food.... Among high-school students in the inner city the incidence of tuberculosis tri- pled. Each day 4,000 children stood in bread lines. With their sunken, lifeless eyes, sallow cheeks, and distended bellies, some resembled the starving children in Europe during the war.”

A half-century after the 1929 stock-market crash, Fisher told an interviewer: “[The Depression] gave [me] a point of view. It helped

41

[me] build a little character.... Whenever I hear about people who are washed out or lost their homes ... I feel tremendous sympathy, because I [think] back to those days and remember.... It was very rough. People were selling lubricating oil out of barrels on the street corner along with apples. You learned to do almost anything to get by. I’ll never forget paying my dentist with five-gallon cans of lubricating oil. It’s funny, you couldn’t give oil away then.”

Other than the occasional date, Max’s chief form of entertainment was strolling along West Grand Boulevard, in the soaring shadow of the Fisher Building, the twenty-eight-story masterwork of architect Albert Kahn. Kahn had been commissioned to build it in 1928 by the seven Fisher brothers (no relation to Max), who earned their fortune providing bodies for the automobile industry. The brothers picked a parcel of land a few miles from the heart of the city, in the New Center, their vision of a secondary business district that would relieve the con- gestion downtown. The building itself, arguably the most prestigious edifice in Detroit, was magnificent, Gothic in design, with a tapering majestic tower and pinkish-gray granite and white marble facing. Attracted by the name of the building, Max enjoyed pausing in front of the ornate display windows of its expensive street-level shops and watching the executives and lawyers and bankers file in for lunch. They would walk down the grand, arch-ceilinged, mar- ble-walled arcade, past the plush Fisher Theatre, and ride the eleva- tors up to the exclusive, members-only Recess Club, renowned for its deft waiters in tuxedos, starched table linen, muted oak paneling and opulently prepared food.

In the early 1930s, Max was stuck on the outside looking in, a quar- ter-inch of shining plate glass standing between him and his dreams. It seemed as though everything that had ever made him feel like an out- sider —his growing up Jewish in Salem, his poverty at Ohio State, his father’s criticism —was still conspiring to make him feel that way. He was a Jew in Detroit, a city not only closed to Jews, but hostile toward them. Henry Ford I had turned anti-Semitism into a local pastime, and a new right-wing group, the Black Legion, casually murdered WPA workers, trade unionists and the treasurer of the Auto Workers Union.

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Meanwhile, Father Charles Coughlin, stationed nearby in Royal Oak, Michigan, became among the most popular radio personalities in the country, broadcasting anti-Semitic invective from his Shrine of the Lit- tle Flower.

In addition, Max’s fiscal situation was hardly improved. Although he was earning fifteen dollars a week, more than most men who had families to support, Keystone rarely made enough money to pay him. Decades later, Max recalled “walking through the lobby of the Fisher Building and staring up at the beautiful architecture. This was ... when they had vaudeville there, and I didn’t have the money to go in and see the shows.” Most trying of all for him was that he was chafing under his father’s thumb at Keystone. In these years, his yearning to be among the privileged and powerful who lunched inside the Fisher Building was almost palpable.

By 1932, Keystone was selling one million gallons of reprocessed lubricating oil per year. The volume was heavy enough that William Fisher hired another salesman, Maurice S. Schiller.

“I had graduated from the University of Michigan the year before,” says Schiller. “My parents were a hair away from losing their house and I wanted to help them. I needed a job. My father played pinochle with Bill Fisher, so I went to see him.”

“You’ll get fifteen dollars a week when we have the money,” Wil - liam said. Schiller wasn’t thrilled with that prospect. Then William said: “And I’ll give you a car and gas. Hell, you’ll be able to go out on dates.” That clinched it. Schiller accepted.

Schiller remembers that Max would go to extreme lengths to nail down a deal. One afternoon, Schiller recalls, he and Max had driven to Ohio to see a distributor. He was out hunting geese when the two men arrived at his office. Max got directions and, dressed in overcoats, suits and oxfords, he and Schiller hiked through the woods with mud up to their knees and an icy wind snapping at them until they located the dis- tributor, who was walking through a meadow of brown grass with his shotgun. While they waited for the geese to appear, Max closed the sale. Despite the increased volume, there was not much profit in repro - cessed oil. The Keystone plant was inefficient, and the owners lacked

43

the technical expertise to correct it. (Leon B. Komisaruk —later Leon B. Kay —who had been hired as an electrical contractor to help reas- semble the plant, was made a partner because he had a degree in chem- ical engineering, the only one with the vaguest notion of how the plant should operate.) Even though the used oil was obtained by Keystone at no cost, they had to pay truckers to drive to the service stations to collect it, and that expense, along with their other operating expenses, kept Keystone in the red.

Max’s entry into the oil industry coincided with the discovery of crude oil in eastern Michigan, where, during the next decade, over a dozen oil fields were uncovered. As Max traveled around the state he learned of the strikes and saw that the most profitable end of the pe - troleum business was in crude-oil exploration and refining. He finally persuaded his father to dedicate a small section of Keystone’s refinery to crude, and Max shortly had the operation under way, arranging to have the oil trucked in from the Michigan fields and personally super - vising the technical modifications to the plant.

“It was only 200 barrels a day,” Fisher says. “But, at a dollar a bar- rel, we were making $200, which was fantastic money then.”

In the fall of 1932, Fisher cast his first vote in a presidential election. “I voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt,” remembers Fisher. “Being a good Republican now, I don’t talk about it too much. I remember [his ‘We have] nothing to fear but fear itself’ [speech]. I heard [it] on the radio in the lobby of the Detroit Leland Hotel. It gave you quite an uplift.... Those next couple of years were very tough, and that speech helped.” Actually, with Keystone now refining 200 barrels of crude per day, Max was feeling sanguine enough about his financial future to take a vacation. Max had a friend, Joseph Falk, a hardware salesman who occasionally drove around Michigan with Max in order to share trav- eling expenses. Max and Joe had each been saving a dollar a week in a Christmas club, and by late December of 1932 they saved enough to visit Cuba.

“It was quite an experience,” says Fisher. “It was my first trip on an airplane, a Pan Am Clipper, fifteen dollars round trip. In Havana, we stayed at the Isle of Cuba Hotel for three dollars a day, including

44

food. While I was down there we found this tailor who made me a wonderful suit —a three-piece gray gabardine —and was willing to accept an American check. Well, on my return from that trip, I heard that the banks had closed. And, gee, I was worried about that because I thought the tailor had trusted me and now my check wouldn’t clear. But he must’ve deposited it just in time because the check cleared and cleaned out my account.”

What Max also learned when he returned from Cuba was that, due to faulty equipment, the Keystone plant had burned down.

“It took a long time to get the insurance settlement, and those were the darkest days for me,” says Fisher. “I figured I was one of the lucky ones —at least I had the new suit from Havana.”

Keystone received a $90,000 insurance settlement, and with the money, William bought out most of his partners, leaving himself as president, Nathan Epstein as vice president and Leon Kay, secretary. Max felt this was the opportune moment to build a crude-oil refinery and drew up technical and financial plans, which he presented to his father. Max pointed out to William that a refinery with a 1,000-barrel-a day capacity would cost $40,000, and would yield $10,000 a month. William was not impressed. “We’re only rebuilding a reprocessing plant,” he said. “Our trouble started with your refining crude. The fac - tory burned because of it.”

Over the next several weeks, Max pressed and William sank into an angry silence. It was as though Max were a teenager again and Wil- liam was disgusted with him for wasting his time playing football. One afternoon at the office, their argument boiled over and William turned to Max and said furiously, “You’re so smart, college boy. Go do it on your own.”

It was then that Max went to Henry E. Wenger.

***

Two mentors significantly influenced Max Fisher, both of whom he met by the age of twenty-five. The first was his scoutmaster in Salem, Lee Chamberlain; the second was Henry Wenger. These two men had

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little in common except that Fisher was able to seek them out when he was battling with his father. Chamberlain gave Fisher the confidence to pursue the pleasures of his American boyhood despite William’s criti- cism that hiking and camping were frivolous. Wenger was, in a sense, an extension of Chamberlain. He helped Fisher surmount William’s provincialism in business, enabling him to achieve his conception of what it meant to be an oil man —that is, a modern industrialist. Henry Wenger was a year older than William Fisher, and like William, he was an immigrant. Wenger was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1887, and came to the United States in 1912, after having lived in England and France. He was a gentle, urbane man who loved opera and golf and bore a striking resemblance to the actor Adolphe Menjou. In Chicago, after World War I, he married Consuelo P. Slaughter, and they moved to Detroit in 1929. Three years later, Wenger, along with his brother-in-law, William E. Slaughter Jr., founded the Aurora Gasoline Company, which sold gas to service stations in tank-car lots, at markups as low as a quar- ter-cent per gallon. Wenger was in charge of the selling, and Slaughter, who was nineteen years younger than his brother-in-law, handled the books. They ran Aurora out of the basement of Wenger’s brick Tudor house on La Salle Boulevard in northwest Detroit.

Max, who had dabbled in the gasoline-brokerage business on the side, knew of Wenger, and drove over to his house and presented his financial projections. The success of the venture, Fisher said, rested on the fact that the few refineries around Detroit were committed to buying crude oil from Texas and Oklahoma and were forced to pay enormous shipping charges. But this new refinery would rely exclu - sively on Michigan crude, thus saving a significant sum in shipping and making it possible to undersell local competitors and to compete with the major oil companies. He added that he had a good location for the refinery, on the Keystone lot; he had experience in crude-oil refin - ing; and the refinery would be a joint venture with Keystone, thereby minimizing the risk.

Wenger said he would consider it. Discussions continued for two months, and Wenger agreed to invest all of his cash, $38,000, if the first profits were used to pay off his investment.

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In his later years, when interviewers asked Fisher how he convinced Wenger to invest with him, Fisher jokingly replied that he “must have hoodwinked him.” Fifty years after the fact, Fisher is at a loss to answer whyWenger bankrolled the venture. He simply states that “Wenger was sold on refining and my strategy for getting into it.” William Slaughter, who also listened to Fisher’s pitch in 1933, says that “Henry looked at the figures and they made sense.” Neither of these statements seems adequate to explain why a forty-six-year-old man with a wife, young son and daughter to support would hand over $38,000 in the depths of the Depression to a twenty-five-year-old who had been in the oil reclaiming business for three years.

Wenger’s son, Henry Penn Wenger, who became a successful oil man, supplies a more complete explanation: “My father was a dreamer,” says Penny Wenger. “And so was Max. Dad wanted to earn his fortune and he sized up Max and thought that he had a lot of promise. Max was among the first Jews to be involved in oil refining and the Texas Anglo-Saxon oil industry wasn’t waiting for a smart young Jewish boy from Ohio State. That didn’t matter to my father. He was a maverick and I think he saw the same thing in Max. They were kindred spirits.”

As Wenger mulled over the proposal, Max approached his father with his new proposition. Although William was in the midst of re- building his reclaiming plant, he consented to participate in Max’s plan since his son assured him that it would only require Keystone to put up land, not money. Max then negotiated a half-interest in Keystone’s 50-percent share of the venture for himself as compensation for putting the deal together. Certain that the refinery would never show a profit, William gave Max his share without a fight.

Hearing that The Ohio Oil Company was scrapping three of its Oklahoma refineries, Max went out west and purchased their old equipment. He hired an engineer, E.G. Guy, to design the refinery. Max supervised its construction and oversaw every aspect of the refining. (Until 1945, Aurora had no engineering staff beyond him.) The pro- jected cost of the refinery, $40,000, was too low by $28,000, but Max’s prediction of the refinery’s financial success was on target. He had pro - jected a $10,000-a-month profit; the first month they cleared $10,125.

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Although Max had predicted it, the swiftness of their success startled him. He discussed it with Henry Wenger, and the older man gave him a piece of advice that Fisher was still quoting sixty years later. “Max,” said Wenger, “don’t be afraid of big numbers. Ahundred or

a million —it’s only a matter of zeros.”

Within months, Aurora moved out of Wenger’s basement, setting up offices in a converted bank —a wedged-shaped, sandstone build - ing —on the comer of Wyoming and Puritan. It was around this time that Max met Irving L. “Bucky” Goldman, a Brooklyn native who had relocated to Detroit to be near his wife’s family, and the two men, so different in appearance and temperament, became fast friends. Gold- man, who had worked in New York and California as a salesman, was a small, compact man, an extrovert comfortable in groups of people, a nonstop talker and amusing storyteller. Fisher brought him to meet Wenger, and Aurora hired him as a salesman for fifty dollars a week and the use of a Ford. From the beginning, Goldman felt that Wenger was “one of the smartest guys I ever met,” and he saw a side of Wenger that surprised him. Wenger was a member of the Detroit Golf Club and the Detroit Athletic Club, both of which excluded Jews from member- ship. Yet, Goldman says, Wenger was without prejudice, even when it cost Aurora a substantial amount of money.

“I went to see a man whose company sold gas nationally,” says Goldman. “I made my pitch and he told me he would have to think about it. [After I left], he called Henry at the office and he said he’d like to do business with Aurora, but he wouldn’t deal with a fellow named Goldman. Henry replied, ‘There’s nothing we’d like more than to do business with you. But Mr. Goldman will be handling your account.’ The distributor said no thanks, and we didn’t do business with him.”

In the fall of 1934, with Aurora piling one profitable month on top of the other, Max decided to get married. Bucky Goldman’s wife, Frances, had introduced Max to her friend, Sylvia Krell. Two years younger than Max, Sylvia was a pretty, dark-haired, dark-eyed wom- an, with high cheekbones and fine features. She had grown up in De - troit and lived on Poe Avenue, just off West Grand Boulevard, an area

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that, when her parents, Max and Edith Krell, moved there, was more like the country than the city, with gardens bordering the wide streets. Sylvia, a talented pianist, had a large circle of friends. She attended Northwestern High School and, upon graduating, worked at Pack- Wolin, a tony women’s shop downtown.

On their initial date, Max drove Sylvia to the refinery, his bottles of oil samples rattling in the backseat, and proudly guided her on a tour. Although it was not Sylvia’s ideal of romance, over the next several months Max treated her to more traditional romantic fare, and on Octo- ber 4, 1934, they were married at Sylvia’s parents’ house. The Fishers, Krells, Wengers and assorted friends crowded into the living room. The rabbi kept calling upstairs for Max to come down. The delay was not due to nervousness. Max and his best man, Bucky Goldman, were in a bedroom huddled around a radio listening to the Detroit Tigers playing the St. Louis Cardinals in the second game of the World Se- ries. The Tigers were batting in the bottom of the 12th, the scored tied 2-2, with Charlie Gehringer on base and Hank Greenberg, the slugging first baseman (and eventual Hall-of-Famer) at bat. Fisher and Goldman were devoted fans of the Tigers, who had not won a pennant in a quar- ter-century, but their devotion was more than home-team fealty. Hank Greenberg was a rare, great Jewish big-leaguer, a folk hero to Jews of the era who were struggling to swim into the American mainstream, and Fisher and Goldman would not consider budging from the radio. Greenberg walked, and after Goose Goslin knocked in Gehringer with the winning run, Fisher and Goldman joined the wedding party. Fol- lowing the ceremony and a supper, Sylvia and Max left on their hon- eymoon, boarding a United Fruit Company ship for a cruise through the Panama Canal.

***

When the Fishers returned they rented a series of flats and then settled at the Wilshire Hotel-Apartments. At Aurora, Max was responsible for the procurement of crude, refining and sales, and he was gradually buying into the company. In 1936, for instance, he assigned Aurora

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his contract for one-half of the Keystone profits and chose to forgo his salary of $21,000 in lieu of stock. (He eventually owned 38 percent of Aurora; Wenger had 40 percent; and the rest was divided among Slaughter, Goldman and several other executives of the company.) His original notion of relying on Michigan crude oil had earned substantial sums for Aurora, but now an obstacle arose. Aurora was refining 3,000 barrels a day and Michigan crude was high in sulphur and did not yield a good quality gasoline. Fisher utilized the local oil and produced cheaper gasoline by installing a blending plant. When the plant super- visor complained that the high-sulphur oil was corroding the refinery’s overhead condensers, Fisher, instead of switching to a different crude, scribbled some figures on a pad, factored in the costs of rebuilding the condensers every month and continued producing premium gas from the cheaper crude.

“Everybody wanted to operate on ‘sweet crude’in those days,” Fish- er recalled for Forbes in 1981. “I would take any grade of oil because it would be cheaper [than sweet crude]. Then I’d build a process to operate on it.... If you are an independent competing against the large companies, you have to do something different.... To compete against Standard Oil we had to turn out a better product more cheaply. Those were the only things we could do. We sold only one grade of gasoline —premium —but we sold it for the price of regular.”

With Aurora’s rapidly rising volume, Fisher was obliged to tap other sources of crude. He made the rounds of the Michigan fields and traveled to Texas and Oklahoma. His constant traveling, his sev- enty- and eighty-hour work weeks, were interfering with his person- al life. Sylvia was unhappy and he attempted to reduce his sched- ule, but by the beginning of 1938 Aurora was expanding beyond his expectations. One February evening, Bucky Goldman remembers, Fisher came to his apartment. When Goldman opened the door he was alarmed. Fisher was shaking as though suffering from malaria. Goldman asked him if he wanted a drink. Fisher shook his head and blurted nut, “Sylvia’s pregnant.”

Goldman understood why his friend was frightened. Doctors warned Sylvia against pregnancy. Ateenage bout with rheumatic fever

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had caused mitral stenosis, a narrowing of the valve between the upper and lower chambers of the heart, which disturbs blood flow. She was also developing a serious fibrillation, the heart twitching instead of contracting smoothly, a condition that frequently leads to congestive heart failure. Sylvia was often tired, her legs swollen, and on occasion she had to gasp for breath. Becoming pregnant, the doctors told her, particularly if it was a difficult pregnancy, would tax her heart, causing further —and potentially fatal —damage. Though aware of the risks, Sylvia would not allow her illness to rob her of having a child. “Sylvia was a brave woman,” says Goldman. “She was terribly sick. She just lived to try to live.”

Her pregnancy was without complication, and Max was soon im- mersed in a deal with The Ohio Oil Company that would springboard Aurora into the front ranks of independent petroleum companies. (In 1962, The Ohio adopted the better-known name of a subsidiary, Mara- thon.) The deal that Fisher struck is renowned in the petroleum industry and has been extensively examined, from The Wall Street Journal to Hartzell Spence’s definitive history of Marathon, Portrait in Oil. How- ever, what has not been discussed is why he sought the deal, which, Fisher says, was the result of a humdrum incident familiar to the oil business in the late 1930s.

Because of a gross overproduction of crude, independent refiners could buy all the oil they wanted at a considerable discount from the posted price. Now, several weeks prior to approaching The Ohio, Fish- er ordered a shipment of crude from a Michigan supplier. In between the time he placed the order and the day of delivery, the price of oil jumped slightly. Pressed for cash, the supplier did not ship the oil to Aurora, but peddled it to another refiner who was willing to pay the higher price. Furious, Fisher promised himself that Aurora would nev- er again have to worry about a steady supply of crude, and so he drove to the town of Findlay, Ohio, to meet with The Ohio Oil Company’s vice president, James Donnell II.

Donnell was glad to see him. By 1938, The Ohio was heading to- ward trouble. With its prolific production in Illinois and Wyoming and heavy yields from wells in eight mid-continental states, the company

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had amassed critically high levels of unsold crude. The Ohio had re- cently tried to capture a share of Aurora’s 3,000-barrel-a-day business, but without success.

Donnell was a tall, impeccably mannered man, two years younger than Fisher. His grandfather, James, had headed the company, as his fa- ther, Otto, was now doing, and though James Donnell II was a product of a privileged boyhood and a Princeton education, he shared a number of personality traits with Fisher. Ahard-working, imaginative perfectionist with an abiding respect for technology, he had a phenomenal memory and a precision of mind that effortlessly grasped the crux of a dilemma and its prompt solution. He disdained small talk and was impatient with factual errors and muddy thinking. Most important, in light of the deal Fisher had come to make, Donnell possessed what historian Hartzell Spence describes as “an inviolate honesty and fairness.”

Fisher sat in Donnell’s office and got right to the point. “I want to buy some crude,” he said. “And I’m willing to pay the posted price.” Donnell leaned forward, shocked at what he thought Fisher had said. Paying the publicly announced field prices for crude in 1938 was unimaginable —an oil man’s shortcut to a career change. “Did I hear you correctly?” Donnell asked.

“Yes,” Fisher replied, “you did.”

“Excuse me a moment,” Donnell said, and summoned two col- leagues, Hal Stewart, the company counsel, and Charles Bunje, head of the pipeline division, to listen to Fisher’s proposal.

When Stewart and Bunje were seated, Fisher outlined his deal. True enough, he said, right now he could purchase all the crude Aurora could handle below the posted price, but he was looking toward the day when crude would be in short supply.

“I’ll pay full price now,” Fisher told the men, “provided that when the shoe is on the other foot, you’ll protect me and deliver all the crude I need.”

It did not take Donnell long to decide. “Done,” he said, and shook hands with Fisher.

Their agreement was never drawn up in writing. With a handshake, The Ohio gained its largest single crude oil customer when it desper-

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ately needed the new outlet. Over the next three years, Aurora forfeited some profit by paying the posted price, yet it continued its expansion. Aurora built storage tanks on a seven-and-a-half-acre tract adjoining the Keystone lot and erected a thermal cracking unit, which made it possible to manufacture a range of higher-type petroleum products, particularly high-test gasolines. By the end of November 1941, Fisher, Wenger and Slaughter divided a cash dividend of $100,000, and the deal with The Ohio would become even more lucrative weeks later, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war.

***

On September 9, 1938, Sylvia gave birth to a girl, Jane Ellen, at Harper Hospital in Detroit. Sadly, soon after her daughter was born, Sylvia who was contending with a painful recuperation, suffered a series of setbacks.

“She became depressed,” says her younger sister, Shirley Krell Schlafer, “a postpartum depression. And then my mother became ill. She had a congenital heart problem. She was at home in an oxygen tent with nurses [attending] her. It was so sad because [neither Max nor I] could bring Sylvia to visit. We didn’t want my mother to see her in that condition.”

Sylvia recovered, but six months after Jane was born, her mother, Edith Krell, died. There was more bad news. Dr. Laurence F. Segar, along with a number of the Detroit physicians who treated Sylvia, told her and Max that because of her rheumatic heart disease, “her life could be jeopardized by repeated colds and their complications.” Awarm cli- mate was suggested. Sylvia chose Tucson, Arizona. For the next four- teen years, Sylvia spent part of the year in Detroit, the other part in Tuc- son. Max joined her for weeks at a clip. Business always brought Max back to Detroit and then sent him around the country in pursuit of more deals and sources of oil. Initially, Jane went to Tucson with Sylvia, but even before she began grammar school Sylvia decided she should be in Detroit, near her aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents.

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Bucky Goldman recalls the effect of the separation on Max. “Most men,” says Goldman, “work until six or seven, or, if they stay late at the office, until eight. Once Sylvia was away, Max had no family to go home to, nothing to organize his life around. He lived on and off with my wife and me. Max had always worked hard. Now, instead of just working hard, he worked all the time. Day and night.”

Since college, Fisher had been plagued now and then by an inability to sleep, but by 1940 he was a full-fledged insomniac. He rarely man - aged to sleep for more than a few hours and often not until four o’clock in the morning. So at night he drove out to the refinery by the Rouge River, or to Aurora’s newly acquired refinery in Elsie, Michigan, and talked with the men working the graveyard shift. He studied petroleum journals and geology reports or sat in his office —with his shoes off and his feet up on the desk —scanning financial statements or phoning business contacts in Texas, Oklahoma, Chicago and New York.

Fisher also filled his time traveling through the Southwest in search of oil. He had been attracted to the industry by technology. But as he became acquainted with a wider circle of oil men, he started to enjoy their legendary flamboyance. By nature shy and reserved, he secretly savored —even envied —their outlandish antics. He relished the faith of the wildcatters who believed they could smell oil and pinpointed wells through nasal wisdom; the “poor boys,” who drilled with any equipment available in order to get in the game; the promoters who put together big-money deals over poker hands or shots of bourbon — men who bet it all on black-gold dreams and acted as though it were nothing more than a wager at the two-dollar window.

One such man was Max Pray, an oil promoter who operated out of Chicago. Maurice Schiller remembers Pray as “a hail-fellow-well- met.” Pray also enjoyed a drink and he knew instinctively who would dig a dry hole and who would tap a gusher.

Now, one Saturday, Fisher and Schiller were in Dallas, Texas, on business. According to Harry Hurt III, author of Texas Rich, “Dallas was then the queen city of Texas ... [boasting] the 46,000-seat Cot- ton Bowl stadium and the sophisticated fashions of Neiman-Marcus ... and transcontinental airline service from Love Field.” Oil men

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were drawn to the downtown hotels, which overflowed with promot - ers, investors, pipeline operators, oil-well scouts, lease hounds and drilling contractors. Fisher and Schiller were staying at the Adolphus (built by the Busch brewing family of St. Louis), with its beautiful German baroque facade and lobby of rich loamy carpeting and deep leather chairs. Fisher and Schiller were planning to drive to South Oak, Oklahoma, on Sunday, to look in on the drilling of a new well in which Aurora owned a quarter-interest. That Saturday, they got a call from the site; the well had just come in and, Schiller says, “it was a monster.” To celebrate, Schiller made reservations at the Cipan- go Club, an exclusive dining establishment frequented by oil men. Fisher phoned Max Pray, who also had an interest in the well and had participated in several deals with Aurora. Shortly before Fisher called him, Pray had received a payment of $300,000 for one of their joint ventures and he had yet to forward Aurora their half of the mon- ey. Fisher told Pray the good news. Pray, who was in Chicago, said: “Hold on, I’ll be right there.”

Neither Fisher nor Schiller thought much of it, though Fisher did hope to see Aurora’s $150,000. It was late in the evening as the two men ate at the Cipango Club when an inebriated Max Pray burst in, explaining that he had chartered a plane and flown down to celebrate. “Did you check into the Adolphus?” Fisher asked Pray.

“Nah,” Pray said, shaking hands and taking a seat. “I sent my bag up to Maury’s room on the twelfth floor.”

“I’m on the eleventh floor,” said Schiller. “Aah, so what,” Pray re - plied, signaling the waiter for a drink. “I didn’t bring much luggage. I only got a suitcase with a pair of underwear and the hundred and fifty grand I owe you.”

Pray drained his drink and requested a menu, while Fisher and Schil- ler stood, paid the check, grabbed Pray and hurried to the Adolphus. Fortunately, Schiller was known in the hotel and the suitcase was in the correct room. Pray must have been talking about the money because a house detective was in the room guarding it. The money was wrapped in a map. Pray removed the package from the bag, tore off the cover and started jumping up and down on the bed flinging $100 bills in the

55

air and shouting: “You guys thought I was bullshitting you, didn’t you? You didn’t think I brought the dough, did you?”

The house detective was not amused. He said: “The bellhop knows that money is here and you can bet that in five minutes so will every thief in Dallas. I want that money counted and put in one of our safe- ty-deposit boxes.”

Fisher and Schiller complied. By Sunday evening, Pray had flown back to Chicago, and Fisher and Schiller were preparing for their drive to South Oak. They checked out of the Adolphus and the clerk handed them a manila folder stuffed with $150,000.

“We don’t want that,” said Fisher. “Keep it here in the safe. We’ll come back for it.”

“Sorry,” said the clerk, “we can only extend that courtesy to guests of the hotel. You have checked out.”

Schiller said: “Then we’ll check in again.”

“I’m sorry,” said the clerk, “you can’t check in without a reserva- tion.”

“So we’ll make a reservation:” Fisher said.

“You can’t,” replied the clerk. “We have no reservations. We’re full.” Fisher and Schiller quickly departed with the money, and in the middle of the night, on a dirt road somewhere between Dallas and South Oak, Oklahoma, one of their tires blew. They had no flashlight or matches, and it was pitch dark, so while one changed the tire the other kept a lookout for stickup men. At five o’clock in the morning they pulled into South Oak and parked outside the bank.

“I won’t say that we were scared,” Schiller says. “But we were aw- fully relieved when the bank opened and we could deposit the money.”

***

With the United States enmeshed in World War II, the nation’s oil sup- plies were taxed to the limit. Emergency fuel rationing could have pro- vided The Ohio Oil Company with a convenient excuse to slip out of its old unwritten bargain with Aurora. Fisher was aware that they could have pleaded that government regulations or the inordinate appetite of

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the war machine made their deal unacceptable. But Fisher was pleas- antly surprised. Donnell kept his word, and the deal Fisher struck with The Ohio paid off. Aurora had all the oil it needed. Aurora had added another refinery in Muskegon on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, and its capacity reached 65,500 barrels per day. Detroit, as “the arsenal of democracy,” had an enormous industrial market for oil, and Aurora captured much of it.

“We were able to plug into the public-service pipelines,” says Wil- liam Slaughter. “And we built a pipeline right from our Detroit refinery to Ford in Dearborn. Once you’re a public carrier, it’s like a railroad. We could buy here, there and everywhere. [Crude oil suppliers] put crude in the pipeline and then we would refine it.”

Additionally, Aurora was slowly diversifying. “During the war,” Fisher says, “we got further into the chemical engineering phase of the industry. For example, when the war began, there was a shortage of rubber, and as a result there was a crying need for isobutylene — which was used to manufacture synthetic rubber. Washington wanted it and so we installed a plant to produce it. It wasn’t that successful, but later on we revamped this plant and turned out codimer —a high-pow- ered ingredient of aviation gasoline. That was very profitable.”

When the war ended, Aurora was among the largest independent petroleum companies in the Midwest, employing 1,150 workers; and the pipeline they had installed made Detroit’s heavy industrial firms (automobile manufacturers, steel producers, forge plants and chemical companies) particularly dependent on Aurora to maintain their winter production schedules. Since Michigan is surrounded on three sides by water, a greater burden falls on railroads and trucking companies when the lakes are not navigable. While other petroleum suppliers were hampered by shipping delays, Aurora was the only refinery of its type in the city that was capable of transporting its product by a pipeline that ran underground to Trenton, Michigan, where it connected to a supply that drew crude from the midcontinent, Southwest and Illinois Basin. Perhaps most attractive to industry was Aurora’s ability to con- vert crude into finished products and ship to its customers within hours after receiving the raw materials.

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Aurora’s productive capacity and its stature as a supplier was un- derscored by the figures released in a 1949 report of the Bureau of Mines. That year, Aurora produced almost one-fifth of the industrial fuel oil refined in Michigan —90 million gallons of a total statewide production of 475 million. Of 625 million gallons of domestic fuel oil, Aurora supplied 83 million gallons — more than one-eighth of the state’s gallonage. These numbers consistently climbed after World War II until Aurora was annually producing over 500 million gallons of petroleum products.

Along with its increased volume, Aurora was about to win a reputa- tion for technological sophistication.

“With the peacetime economy,” explains Fisher, “Detroit was churn- ing out cars, which generated demand for even higher-octane gasoline. Aurora had to get in a favorable position to meet the rising octane specifications. To keep the costs down we wanted to use as much of our existing equipment as possible, and we did it by installing the first postwar fluid catcracking unit. It gave us the flexibility to produce ev - erything from maximum quantities of high-octane gas to distillates for whatever way the market changed. The technology had been invented during the war. It had never been used commercially. If we wanted to stay competitive, we had to do it. So we took the chance.”

The unit, dubbed the “Aurora type,” was widely adopted by smaller refiners throughout the world.

Business steadily improved, in no small measure due to the deal Fisher cut with The Ohio Oil Company in 1938. Even with the post- war fuel shortages and the escalating requirements for gas and oil be- cause the country was back on the highways, Aurora never lacked for crude. The Ohio made no effort to strike another bargain with Aurora or to press for a written contract. The basic commitment, sealed with a handshake, was sustained by mutual trust. And the profits from oil refining financed Aurora’s continuing expansion.

Says William Slaughter: “If there was a way to make money from oil, Max found it. He didn’t miss a trick.”

Aurora was now manufacturing asphalt and kerosene, and Fisher, through his connections to different types of industry, was able to

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purchase vast quantities of scrap steel. Right after the war, oil drillers were scrambling for pipe and fittings. Since there was a shortage of steel, Aurora was able to meet the demand and even bought into oil wells with pipe, because just at that moment, it was more precious than cash. The investment in steel was also the beginning of Fisher’s relationship with John S. Bugas, Fisher’s first friend among the city’s Gentile elite. Since the mid-1940s, Bugas, once head of Detroit’s FBI bureau, was a powerful executive at the Ford Motor Company and a confidant of Henry Ford II. One day, Bugas heard from an acquain - tance that there was an oil deal brewing in Wyoming, but there was no pipe. Bugas worked his contacts, but everyone told him the same thing: You need pipe, call Max Fisher. “I didn’t know [Max] from a load of lumber,” Bugas told Monthly Detroit in 1980. But before too long they were investing in Wyoming oil wells together, along with Ernest R. Breech, the Ford president who had been hired to teach Henry Ford II how to direct an automobile company. Fisher and Bu- gas soon became close friends.

Southern Michigan was proving to be a bonanza for oil companies, and Aurora discovered both oil and natural gas there. What was unique about this discovery was that Aurora relied on the advice of a for- tune-teller.

Fisher explains: “Aurora owned land in Southern Michigan, but we had drilled twenty-four dry holes. Back then, it cost about $15,000 to drill a hole, so we had a lot of capital tied up. One day, a man by the name of Clifford Perry came to our office and spoke to Maurice Schil - ler, who was in charge of Aurora’s production and handled requests for dry-hole contributions —meaning, we would stake drillers, and if they came up dry then they wouldn’t have to absorb the whole loss. Perry was retired and drilled in his spare time. He wanted to drill on Hosneck Farm. We owned much of that land and our geologist swore that there was nothing underneath it except dirt. But we gave Cliff Perry $1,500 to drill and forgot about it. Eleven months later, Schiller walked into my office and said Cliff had hit natural gas. Gas is often on top of oil and so I gave Cliff more money to drill deeper. The typical time to drill a hole is thirty days, but it took Cliff almost a year because he

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worked on it with his son part-time. He knew where to drill because a gypsy fortune-teller, traveling through the area, had informed Mrs. Hosneck that there was oil under her house. So Mrs. Hosneck gave Perry $3,500, told him where to drill, and he made her rich because it turned out that there was oil under the gas. This was the beginning of the Albion-Scipio field, which subsequently became one of the largest fields east of the Mississippi River.”

Huge gas and oil strikes, of course, were welcome, but Fisher had always hoped to transform Aurora into an integrated oil company, where it would own or control or have easy access to every link in the supply-and-demand chain. Already, Aurora had refineries, oil wells, a supply of natural gas, steel and the ability to manufacture a multitude of petroleum products. In 1947, the company became fully integrated when it bought its best customer, the Speedway 79 gas stations. Fisher had his eye on Speedway for some time. Aurora had been its principal supplier for years, and the gas-station chain was owned by relatives of Sylvia Fisher —C. William and Harry Sucher. An extremely prosper- ous operation, Speedway was coveted by several oil companies, but Fisher devised a sure-fire method for making his pitch to the Suchers. He invited them for a discussion and locked them in his office.

“I’ve got tickets to the Army-Navy football game,” Fisher told them. “So we’ve got to get this done.”

“Max!” Bill Sucher protested.

“I’m leaving in two hours,” Fisher replied. “Let’s go.” Perhaps im- pressed by Fisher’s resolve and undoubtedly amenable to his terms, the Suchers agreed to sell Aurora a 50-percent interest in Speedway for $2.5 million. A decade later, Aurora acquired the other half of the corporation in a stock swap, and went on to operate and supply 680 service stations.

***

In 1947, the Fishers, after nine years of living in apartments, hotels and rented houses, finally bought a home in Detroit, a brick colonial on Parkside Road, in the Sherwood Forest section —an island of green-

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ery that seemed far from the city, with broad lawns and old shade trees and kids playing baseball in the streets. Every October, Sylvia would depart for Tucson, and during Jane’s Christmas vacation from school, Jane and her father traveled by train to Arizona, and along with Sylvia stayed in one of the adobe houses at the Double-U Ranch.

“My father taught me to horseback ride when I was four years old,” says Jane Fisher Sherman. “We would ride out through the foothills to Sabina Canyon for picnics.”

During the winters in Detroit, with Sylvia in Tucson, Jane was her father’s main companion. He taught her how to play gin rummy and took her to Briggs Stadium for Lion football games and to Olympia Stadium to watch the Detroit Red Wings play hockey. Each night they listened to the news on the radio, and Jane must have picked up her father’s interest in politics because she attacked his Repub- lican sympathies by chanting, “Phooey on Dewey!” (Max cast his first Republican vote for presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie in 1940, saying that he did not think any president, even FDR, should serve more than two terms.) On Thursday evenings, they dined at Beauchamps, a pleasant family restaurant on Six Mile Road, where Fisher, a constant dieter, introduced his daughter to a ritual that he would one day share with his other children. He instructed Jane to order a chocolate parfait for dessert, and when it was set in front of her he swooped in with his spoon and ate it. Jane, like her father’s future children, gazed at him quizzically.

“The calories don’t count if they come from your plate,” he explained.

But the central factor in the Fishers’ family life was Sylvia’s illness. She was now periodically confined to a wheelchair, and the enforced separations during the interminable Michigan winters were a strain on both her and Max. Their daughter, Jane Fisher Sherman, recalls brief stretches when her mother was well, but says that “basically she was always ill.” Fisher was at his best when confronted with practical puz- zles he could solve. This was beyond his comprehension. Though he was characteristically reserved, his anguish about Sylvia’s suffering and his helplessness in the face of her physical deterioration over-

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whelmed him. His insomnia grew virulent; he now needed a prescrip- tion for phenobarbital to get his four hours of sleep each night. And he fought a triweekly battle with migraine headaches, the pain so severe that he required intramuscular injections of Gynergen, a vasal constric- tor, to relieve them.

Nathan Appleman, a Jewish oil man raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a boy wonder who earned a fortune in oil and then relocated to New York and earned another fortune in stocks and bonds. Along the way, he met Fisher and they invested in oil and gas wells in the West. They also became close friends. Appleman remembers that when Fisher was in New York on business he would come to his apartment at the Hotel Pierre and talk about his distress over Sylvia’s failing health for hours. Appleman also remembers Fisher’s migraines.

“Max’s headaches were occasionally so intense,” says Appleman, “that he couldn’t hold the syringe, and I had to give him his injections.” Sylvia’s health steadily declined. Cardiac surgery was in its infancy, and Max sought advice from cardiologists around the country. On June 1, 1951, Max wired birthday flowers and greetings to Sylvia, saying how “wonderful [and] courageous” she had been while undergoing the necessary tests and hospitalizations. Amonth later, though, Dr. Benson Bloom wrote Max from Tucson that a surgical solution to Sylvia’s re- peated bouts with congestive heart failure was too risky, “since the op- erative mortality in her type of case seems to be 75 percent and more.” By the beginning of 1952, Fisher, trying to cope with Sylvia’s situ- ation, did what he had not done since he was a student at Ohio State: he attempted to examine his feelings in writing. He bought a green leather-bound diary for the purpose and religiously made his entries. His examination met with mixed success. It becomes clear early in the diary that his overriding feeling with respect to Sylvia was guilt that he could not help her. At the same time, his insomnia and migraines besieged him, and so the diary became a record of a husband’s horror at witnessing the painful physical deterioration of his wife.

By June 1, 1952, Sylvia’s forty-second birthday, she was bedridden in Detroit, her breathing badly labored, her heart not beating strong- ly enough to prevent fluid from collecting in her lungs. Jane Fisher

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Sherman, at the time just thirteen years old, remembers walking into the house one afternoon it was June 22 —and seeing her father sitting on the sun porch. It was odd for him to be relaxing at that hour. She went to him. His face was calm. He told her that her mother had died that morning. The next day, after services at the Ira Kaufman Chapel in Detroit, the funeral procession drove down Woodward Avenue and stopped outside the city, in Birmingham, where Sylvia was buried be- neath a circle of oaks in the Clover Hill Park Cemetery.

***

By the conclusion of the Second World War, William Fisher and his partners at Keystone were rich men. Although Keystone had expanded since 1930 — testing and grading reprocessed oil in its own labora- tory and canning it in its own plant — the reprocessing operation re- mained marginally profitable. However, Keystone’s quarter-interest in the joint venture with Aurora was a bonanza for the partners. William Fisher, never enthralled by the oil business, was now free to indulge his passion: speculating in real estate. He invested in Detroit and, after 1934, when he and Mollie took their first annual winter vacation in Miami Beach, in Florida. William and Mollie loved the balmy weather and dependable sunshine. William was adamant about not missing his vacation, and it was this adamancy, coupled with his penchant for real estate speculation, that propelled him into the hotel business. During World War II, the Army and Navy ran short of barracks and requisi- tioned nearly every hotel in the Miami area. Ever resourceful, William guaranteed himself a room by buying a hotel, the Winterhaven. After the war, the Florida tourist industry erupted, with hotel and apartment construction booming in Miami and Miami Beach, particularly along what would become known as “the Gold Coast.” By the early 1950s, William and various partners had bought and sold the Atlantic Tower Hotel, the Palm Beach pier, and an apartment house on Biscayne Bay. In 1952, he sold the Winterhaven, and with some Detroit investors purchased the Martinique in Miami Beach, the first luxury hotel built in south Florida after World War II. Three years later, Aurora bought

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Keystone, giving William several million dollars more to invest. He and Mollie moved into the Martinique in 1957, and William soon bought the hotel next door, the Delmonico.

Mollie shortly became a dance fanatic, taking daily lessons from the hotel instructor. Her favorite step was the rumba. She also had two of her grandchildren, Stephen and Sharon Ross, to dote on. (Gail and David Ross had moved to Miami from Detroit.) William, when he was not digging up a new deal or checking in on his hotels, could be found at his cabana playing pinochle. His only other distraction was fishing, which he pursued with his accountant, Norris Friedlander. Friedlander was twenty-eight years old when he met William Fish- er. With Max, William had encountered someone who was stubborn and determined to go his own way. Friedlander was more malleable, and his father had died when he was three, so he was grateful when William took a paternal interest in him. They met regularly. William had a French chef at the Martinique who specialized in oxtail soup, William’s favorite, and he insisted that Friedlander have lunch with him whenever the soup was served. William helped Friedlander estab- lish his own accounting firm, loaning him and his partner the capital to open their office and sending them clients. William urged Friedlander to hold his son’s bar mitzvah party at the Martinique, and when Fried- lander replied that it was beyond his means, William told him not to worry, that he would pick up much of the tab.

At the Martinique, William established a life to which he was per- fectly suited. He popped in and out of offices, greeted guests, contem - plated deals and played pinochle. But there was one problem. He loved investing, not the day-to-day grind of overseeing a business, and so within three years of moving permanently to Florida, William Fisher, without mentioning a word to anyone, was on the brink of bankruptcy.

***

The past year, 1952, had been confusing for Marjorie Switow Fre- hling, but as Thanksgiving approached there was one thing she was sure about: She did not want to go to Carolyn Alexander’s party in

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Detroit. Marjorie’s divorce from George Frehling had recently been fi - nalized and she was living with her children —four-year-old Mary and two-year-old Phillip —in her parents’ house in Louisville, Kentucky. Marjorie was relieved to be among her family. Her mother, Florence, was a genteel southern lady, a housewife who had assiduously looked after Marjorie and her younger sister, Joyce, and was treating Mary and Phillip to the same care. Her father, Harry, owned and operated a string of movie theaters in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. He was a generous, gregarious man who loved to sing and accompany himself on the piano, and by all accounts, he worked as hard as he played. As a bonus, Marjorie’s sister, Joyce, was now married to Stanley T. Burkoff and residing across the street.

Marjorie’s ex-husband, George, had been her high-school sweet- heart, a relationship that endured through her fine-arts studies at Mar - jorie Webster Junior College in Washington, D.C. Now, though, after eight years, their marriage was over, and Marjorie was feeling content and unwilling to dive into another relationship. Which was why she didn’t want to fly up to Carolyn Alexander’s party in Detroit. Carolyn, Marjorie’s distant cousin and erstwhile college roommate, was insist- ing that Marjorie attend. She had lined up a platoon of potential suitors who kept questioning her about her cousin, the pretty southern belle. “Marjorie,” says her sister, Joyce Switow Burkoff, “was definitely the beautiful one. When we’d go horseback riding —you had to ride if you lived in Kentucky —and Marjorie fell off her horse, everyone would run over to see if she had been hurt and she’d stand up and ask, ‘How’s my hair?’”

Since her separation, however, Marjorie often refused dates, or went out and then returned disappointed. Carolyn was on the phone to her every day, and Florence Switow urged her daughter to fly to Detroit, and so Marjorie relented and packed her bags.

***

Five months after Sylvia’s death, Max was getting a stream of phone calls from self-appointed matchmakers among Detroit’s Jewish com-

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munity. Reticent, he rejected most dates, and submerged himself in work. He did purchase a Cadillac in case he had a change of heart. However, he preferred his old Plymouth, and the Cadillac was chief- ly driven by one of his employees, Randall Martin. He had promised Carolyn Alexander to drop by her party —but just for a few minutes, because he was taking Jane to the theater to see The Four Posters. Fisher was standing inside the door of Carolyn’s house when a young woman appeared at the top of the stairway. She was wearing a magnif- icent red satin dress. Another guest at the party remembers that while the men were impressed, they affected a suave nonchalance. Fisher did not. He was transfixed as Marjorie gracefully descended the stairs. Her thick dark hair framed her face, which was lovely as a cameo. She was small and beautifully built, a collection of curves meandering into other curves. Carolyn introduced her to Max.

Recovering his equilibrium, he quipped: “Hello, Scarlett.” “Hi, Rhett,” she replied.

“How about a date next Monday night?” Fisher asked.

“Fine,” Marjorie answered, and disappeared into the party.

When Fisher met Jane at the theater, he told his daughter: “I just met the cutest little girl and she’s only” —he raised his hand five feet from the floor —“this big.”

Fisher flew down to Louisville to take Marjorie to dinner. He had always been somewhat withdrawn and serious, but as they saw each other over the ensuing weeks his demeanor changed. Right out of col- lege, he had responded to the Depression by burying himself in the oil business. He had earned enough money to feel safe about starting a family, but then his marriage was tragically marred by Sylvia’s illness. Now, he was past forty and there was something about this winsome twenty-nine-year-old woman from Kentucky that coaxed him from his shell. At Carolyn Alexander’s party, he had been bowled over by her beauty. Yet there was also her sudden laugh and swift repartee — there was something so lighthearted about Marjorie — and he courted her as enthusiastically as a high-school sophomore with a crush. He inun- dated her with flowers, telegrams and phone calls. He picked her up in Louisville in a private plane, flew her to Detroit for dinner and then

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returned to her parents’ house late in the evening. Marjorie loved his courtly manner.

“After my divorce,” says Marjorie, “the men I dated were in such a rush to paw me. Since I was divorced, maybe they thought that was appropriate. Max was different. He was such a gentleman. And I ap- preciated that.”

Fisher responded to Marjorie’s gaiety by becoming more outgoing and, on occasion, what for him would have to qualify as outrageous. For example, in the spring of 1953, he went to a seder at the Switows’ house. When the gefilte fish was put on the table, Max stared at it and said: “Your fish is black.”

Southerners, he was informed, preferred spicy food. Pepper was re- garded as “Kentucky sugar” and lavished on many dishes. Max ate several platefuls, perspiring and complaining that gefilte fish should not have pepper on it. Then the chicken soup and kreplach were served. “The kreplach are too white,” Fisher said. “There’s no chicken fat on them.”

As everyone watched, Fisher stalked into the kitchen, donned an apron and demonstrated the proper method —that is, Mollie Fisher’s method — for fixing kreplach. He rubbed chicken fat on the doughy pockets, then broiled them. The Switows were laughing hysterical- ly, and they must have been impressed by the recipe. According to Marjorie’s brother-in-law, Stanley Burkoff, from that Passover on, the kreplach were prepared with chicken fat.

Fisher realized he was in love with Marjorie, but he was hesitant to propose marriage and thought a trip would help him decide. He visited Mollie and William in Miami. Bucky and Francis Goldman were also in Florida. Bucky recalls that there was an attractive red-headed judge who was pursuing Fisher. Uncomfortable, Fisher suggested that the Goldmans accompany him on an overnight jaunt to Cuba. The judge invited herself along. At the hotel in Havana, Fisher and the judge reg- istered in separate rooms. That evening, while Fisher was chatting with the Goldmans in their suite, the phone rang. The judge was phoning from down the hall saying that she had a headache and asking if Max would please bring her two aspirin.

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“Don’t go,” Bucky warned.

Ignoring his friend’s warning, Fisher took the aspirin to the judge and was back with the Goldmans in five minutes. The next thing Bucky knew, Fisher was asking the hotel operator to ring Louisville. When Marjorie got on, Fisher proposed. She accepted.

Max and Marjorie were married in New York City on July 1, 1953. Nathan Appleman and his wife, Janet, arranged for them to be married in a rabbi’s study, and they gave a lunch for them after the ceremony. The Fishers spent their honeymoon in Hawaii, and then Marjorie gath- ered up Mary and Phillip in Louisville, and they moved into Max’s house on Parkside.

***

Mollie Fisher had encouraged her son to donate money to charities in general and Jewish ones in particular. Even in 1932, when Fisher’s fifteen-dollar salary was a hit-or-miss proposition, he pledged five dol - lars to Detroit’s Allied Jewish Campaign. Each year, as his finances improved, so did his pledges. Now, with his wealth in the millions, Fisher promised himself to do more. Yet getting involved in high-lev- el fund-raising meant turning himself outward, not an easy task for a man so innately shy. He was supremely confident in his facility for speaking at business meetings or for talking oil with the boys at the refinery, but the notion of addressing a crowd was unthinkable, and he lacked the talent for sprightly chitchat, as de rigueur at formal, big-dol- lar fund-raising dinners as tuxedos and gowns.

Fisher was fortunate in his selection of a wife. Marjorie believed deeply in charity and glided through social situations, putting her re- laxed charm and easy humor and the gentle southern cadence of her voice on display. And Marjorie felt that her husband was selling him- self short.

“I told him,” Marjorie Fisher says, “’Max, you’re wonderful. Peo- ple like you. You just don’t have any confidence. Anything you want to do you can do.’”

In October 1954, Max made his initial visit to Israel with the first

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United Jewish Appeal study mission. (Marjorie, five months pregnant with their first child, a daughter, Julie Ann, stayed home.) The purpose of study missions is to witness the results of campaign funds and to demonstrate the importance of giving. Historically, the missions have helped to increase pledges.

Although thrilled by the improbable reality of a Jewish state, Max was horrified by how poorly many Israelis were forced to live. Across the arid, rocky hills, he saw 200,000 Jewish immigrants huddled under makeshift tents, reminding Fisher of the shanty towns during the De- pression. Jobs and medical care were scarce; so were food and water. The Arabs were an ever-present danger. As rapidly as the UJA provid- ed money, the Israelis spent it; progress was slow. Fisher must have impressed the others on the mission, for they elected him to represent their group at a talk with Israeli leaders. And so Fisher, the creative, prosperous American businessman, met Finance Minister Levi Eshkol. Fisher was anxious to help, and voiced what he conceived of as a logi- cal stopgap solution to some of the fledgling country’s economic woes. “Because you’re short on money,” Fisher asked, “wouldn’t it make sense for Israel to shut down immigration for a while?”

Eshkol’s reply was instantaneous. “Every Jew in Israel remembers how six million fellow Jews died under Hitler because they had no place to go,” the finance minister said. “Even if you don’t give us an - other dime, no Jew is ever going to add to that six million. Israel may go under, but one thing we’ll never do: we will never close the gates. There has to be an Israel so there can be one place in the whole world where Jews may come in —any Jew, in any condition —as a matter of right.” Then Eshkol added: “Israel exists so Jews may exist.”

In retrospect, Fisher says that Eshkol, who would later serve as prime minister, taught him “the greatest lesson I would ever learn about Zionism.” He returned from Israel with an even stronger com- mitment to Jewish philanthropy and discovered that he was a more ef- fective fund-raiser than he initially thought. According to Carl Bakal, who wrote Charity U.S.A., “One reason Jewish philanthropy is so spectacularly successful is because of its ... techniques, some of them unique to Jewish fund-raising.” Bakal cites how Jews pioneered solic-

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itations of a single donation on behalf of multiple charities and how they personalized Benjamin Franklin’s concept of the matching gift. “However,” Bakal writes, “sui generis as a means of raising money is the arm-twisting techniques of ‘card calling’ or ... public pledging, in- vented in the 1930s, and still a uniquely Jewish phenomenon.... Upon hearing his name ... the person publicly announces his new pledge. Naturally, it behooves him to pledge an amount that makes him stand tall in the eyes of his ... friends [and] neighbors.”

While Jewish fund-raisers concede that this style of raising mon- ey can be harsh, they point out that it is effective, delivering over 60 percent of the funds raised, with an incalculable influence on the other 40 percent.

“Obviously,” writes James Yaffe, author of The American Jews , “the effect of card calling depends on who calls the cards,” and Fisher seemed to have a knack for it. Fisher’s friend, John Bugas, who de- scribed card calling to an interviewer as “putting the slug on people,” claimed that Fisher “developed a hide as thick as an alligator’s as he perfected his art.”

James Yaffe recounts a story that illustrates Fisher’s technique: In 1957, Fisher “had just been appointed chairman of [the Jewish Welfare Federation of Detroit], and a Gentile friend of his, who was the new campaign chairman for the nonsectarian [United Foundation], came to him for advice. ‘How do you Jews manage to raise so much money?’ asked the friend. Fisher invited him to sit in on the first meeting of the board for the new Jewish campaign. Adozen men attended this meet- ing, all of them wealthy and prominent. Fisher opened the proceedings by telling them that they themselves, in the past, had always made inadequate contributions to the campaign. How could they expect oth- er Jews to be generous if they didn’t lead the way? ‘I’m naming no names,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to start the ball rolling with a pledge of $30,000.’ He then asked the man on his right for his pledge. In a tenta- tive voice this man pledged $3,000. The man said, ‘Isn’t that enough, Max?’ Fisher shook his head wearily. The man said, ‘How much do you think I should give?’ Fisher said, ‘In view of your circumstances, Sam, I think you could afford $35,000.’ Sam gulped a little, but he

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came across with his pledge. When Fisher continued around the room to the other board members, none of them wasted his time with inade- quate pledges. By the end of the meeting the board itself had pledged half of the campaign goal.

“Afterward, Fisher went up to his Gentile friend and said quietly, ‘That’s how we do it.’”

Fisher raised $5,841,000 for the 1957 campaign, the most in the Detroit federation’s history. His success attracted the attention of the board at the United Foundation’s Torch Drive. The drive was started by Henry Ford II in 1948. The board was exclusively drawn from the Christian power elite of the city’s auto executives and bankers. It was, traditionally, a closed shop, particularly to Jews. One day, a United Foundation board member ran into Fisher and he asked him why the Jewish community raised money so out of proportion to their numbers and yet did not participate in the Torch Drive.

“That’s easy,” replied Fisher. “You don’t have enough Jews on your board.”

With a phone call, Benson Ford, Henry II’s brother, changed all that, and Fisher became the first Jew to head the United Foundation’s annual Torch Drive and to be chairman of the UF board.

***

At the beginning of 1957, the Fishers left the city of Detroit for the suburb of Franklin, moving from the Parkside house into a white-brick Georgian with a sprawling garden that bordered the eighth fairway of the Franklin Hills Country Club. On December 30, 1957, they had an- other daughter, Marjorie Martin, called “Little Margie” by the family. (In 1960, Max legally adopted Mary and Phillip.) Now, along with his charity work, Fisher was expanding his friendships by reaching out to the younger members of Detroit’s Jewish community.

One of those young men was A. Alfred Taubman. Born in 1924, the son of immigrants, Al Taubman grew up outside Detroit, in Pontiac and then Sylvan Lakes. His father was a custom-home builder and, after studying fine art in college, Taubman dropped out to enter the building

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business. His interest was not in following the spread of suburbia, but in creating it, and he did so by erecting commercial malls across the country. He built his initial shopping center, North Flint Plaza, in 1952, and ultimately became one of the premier developers in the United States, being among the first to build malls with two and three lev - els connected by ramps, elevators and escalators, which assured equal traffic —and equal rents —on every level. He then parlayed his real estate earnings into a variety of immensely profitable ventures.

There is a wonderful, oft-told story in Detroit of how Taubman be- came lifelong friends with Fisher and how both men wound up wheel- ing and dealing together and rising on the Forbes 400 list. Taubman, so the story goes, was a young, financially strapped builder when, in the mid-1950s, Fisher requested that he redesign the islands of Aurora’s Speedway gas stations. Taubman redesigned the islands, a break that boosted his career and established his multifaceted empire, his wealth rocketing into the billions.

It is a charming story. And it is also not true. Fisher did ask Taub- man to redesign Speedway’s islands and Taubman assisted him, but he says he did it out of friendship, and that it would be at least ten years before he reached the front ranks of developers. Three decades after that first phone call, Taubman was eating dinner with the Fish - ers in Palm Beach. He had recently read the story again and men- tioned it to Max.

“I don’t know why the journalists keep writing it,” Fisher said. Taubman laughed. “Because they repeat it when they interview you and you smile and you never tell them it’s not true.”

Smiling slyly at his friend, Fisher placed his hand over his heart and said with all sincerity, “Al, would you deny me the pleasure of that story?”

No, Taubman would not. Fisher was seventeen years his senior and, according to associates of both men, their relationship was that of a loving father and son. They spoke on the phone several times a day, regardless of what they were doing or where they were. But in the 1950s, the first call that Fisher made to Taubman had nothing to do with business.

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“Max contacted me at work,” says Taubman, “and said that he want- ed to see me in his office. It wasn’t the sort of invitation that someone starting out in Detroit turned down. Young businessmen measured their dreams by what Max had accomplished. It was flattering to be invited.” Fisher says, “There was something about Al. I knew when I met him that he was going to be incredibly successful. He just had this way, and he was so intelligent.”

What Fisher wanted was for Taubman to join the Franklin Hills Coun- try Club. Their membership was aging and they needed young blood. “I told him,” says Taubman, “‘Max, the dues have to be $5,000 a year. I can’t afford that.’”

“Don’t worry about the money,” said Fisher. “The important thing is that you have to join before the other members get to know you.” Taubman says that he wasn’t sure if Fisher was teasing or insulting him, and he didn’t know him well enough to ask. Then Fisher explained that there were so many petty feuds in country clubs that membership committees invariably had a case against someone they knew. Those who did not belong to their social circle could not be condemned be- cause they lacked information about their personalities. It made sense to Taubman —and even if it didn’t, Fisher was requesting him to do it —and he agreed to apply for membership.

***

As the Fishers settled into their new house, Aurora was about to un- dergo an enormous change. Henry Wenger, the controlling partner, turned seventy-one in 1958. Because Aurora was a tightly held com- pany, Wenger was concerned about what taxes would do to his estate. Also, says Wenger’s son, Penny, “Aurora had gone through gas-price wars, had their oil and chemical workers on strike, and my father thought it was time step back from the daily operations of an inde- pendent oil company.”

Gossip spread in the industry that Aurora was shopping for a tax- free stock swap with a public corporation. They attracted a dozen of- fers; Ashland Oil was especially interested, but The Ohio Oil Compa-

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ny did not bid. Fisher, how-ever, favored a merger with them because he trusted James Donnell II, who was now president, and The Ohio was a well-managed, financially sound company whose stock would hold its value over the long term. Pocketing his best offer, Fisher flew to Findlay. Donnell was interested. The Ohio could only refine 40 per - cent of its crude and had to sell the balance; Aurora’s three refineries would solve that predicament, and its 680 gasoline stations would give The Ohio a foothold in the tremendously profitable Detroit market. But Donnell had bad news for Fisher. The Ohio could not meet Aurora’s top offer. Fisher, primarily concerned about what the merger would be worth in ten or twenty years, was willing to merge with them anyway. His partner, William Slaughter, was not.

“I wanted more money for it than we got. Max made a deal too short for me. I knew what our potential was.”

But Wenger sided with Fisher, who argued that The Ohio “gave Aurora what we wanted — security.”

The merger, which historian Hartzell Spence characterized as “one of The Ohio’s largest forward thrusts,” was finalized in the summer of 1959. The Ohio Oil Company gave Aurora 874,422 shares of its stock and assumed $2,800,000 in debt, and Aurora became a wholly owned subsidiary of The Ohio. The deal was worth nearly $40 million, Fish- er’s portion in excess of $15 million.

The July before the merger was Fisher’s fiftieth birthday, and Mar - jorie gave a spectacular party, with a fireworks display lighting up the sky above the Franklin Hills golf course. Al Taubman was a guest at the celebration. The rumor that Aurora was seeking a merger had al- ready spread. Taubman recalls standing off on the edge of the party and watching Fisher talking to his family and friends.

“I was thirty-three at the time,” says Taubman, “and I stood there, watching Max and putting myself in his place, thinking about what I would do if I suddenly sold my business. I was terrified for him. I kept wondering: what would he do with the rest of his life?”

It was a question that was also on Fisher’s mind.

***

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In 1957, William Fisher suffered a coronary that was so serious nei- ther his family nor his physicians thought he would survive. He fooled them. But the following year he had another, though less severe, at- tack. The stress of operating the Martinique and the Delmonico were not aiding his recovery, and although Mollie and their children were unaware of it, he was pouring his personal money in to keep his hotels afloat and he was frightened about the drain of his capital.

William’s accountant, Norris Friedlander, saw what was happen- ing. “The hotels in Florida were changing,” says Friedlander. “They were becoming family hotels, with meal plans, and William did not want to change the way he did things at the Martinique. He wanted top-quality food, at top prices. Miami Beach wasn’t like that any- more. Also, William did not like paying attention to details and that got him into trouble.”

Arash of unseasonably cold weather kept tourists away and contrib- uted to William’s financial reverses. Gail discovered her father’s plight and contacted her sisters and brother. Together, they prevailed upon William to sell his properties to Max. Max paid his father every dollar he had invested, and then William and Mollie moved to a penthouse apartment at the Fontainebleau Hotel. In 1958, Jane Fisher married Larry Sherman, and they were willing to transfer to Miami and try the hotel business. After Larry decided that he didn’t want to manage hotels as a career, the Shermans returned to Detroit and Max shed his holdings in Florida real estate.

***

Once the excitement of the Ohio Oil-Aurora merger passed, Fisher saw several options. He had been named president of the subsidiary, agree- ing to remain in management until Aurora’s operations were integrated with The Ohio’s, which took until early 1963. (He also served on the board of directors.) He worked with his friend, oil man Leon Hess, for a year, and through his efforts in Jewish philanthropy, he met Vice President Richard Nixon, and began dipping into national politics. He also learned that philanthropy, Jewish and nonsectarian, could be a

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vocation. In 1959, in response to pressure from communities for his presence, he tentatively ventured out as a public speaker. Representing the United Jewish Appeal, he spoke at a UJA federation fund-raising meeting at the San Francisco home of Madeleine H. Russell, a nation- ally known philanthropist whom President Kennedy would appoint director of the State Department’s reception center in San Francisco. According to Irving Bernstein, who in 1959 was head of the UJA’s West Coast region, Fisher was tense. He had his speech written on in- dex cards and insisted on keeping them out of the audience’s sight. So Russell seated him at a desk and he stashed the cards behind a gold-in- laid box, which Bernstein claims “was probably worth more money than I was making.” Fisher was anxious and spoke haltingly, but his willingness to speak in public, despite his diffidence before groups and extreme nervousness, was a personal milestone. In 1961, he chaired the United Foundation’s Torch Drive, raising a then-record $19.5 mil- lion. And once he was relieved of the daily obligations of directing a company, he was free to take a more aggressive stance as an investor. He began with a multi-million-dollar deal that possessed enough rags- to-riches irony to qualify as a twentieth-century addendum to the col- lected works of Horatio Alger.

In the late autumn of 1962, Fisher and two prominent Detroit real es- tate men, Louis Berry and George D. Seyburn, formed the Fisher-New Center Company (FNC). Then, on December 7, after nine months of negotiations with the four surviving Fisher brothers, FNC purchased the Fisher Building and adjacent properties — the eleven-story New Center Building and parking lots —for $10.3 million.

Following the purchase, Fisher told reporter John M. Carlisle of The Detroit News: “I have great admiration and respect for everything [the Fisher Building] stands for. When Lou [Berry] came to me to discuss this I felt as he did that this great building should always belong to De- troit and be owned by Detroiters. We both felt it was a symbol.”

In broadest terms, what the Fisher Building stood for was the grand triumph of capitalism in Detroit. Fisher had portrayed it as a symbol, and, for him, the symbolism extended past his civic pride. For Fisher, owning the landmark was a proclamation that his face was no longer

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pressed against the glass of the exclusive shops downstairs, that he was no longer stuck on the outside looking in. Although he had been jour- neying through the highest echelons of the Detroit business commu- nity for some time, being among the landlords of the Fisher Building marked his spot beyond a reasonable doubt. Perhaps the doubts had only been in his own mind, but now he was undeniably part of “this great building,” inseparable from its meaning and the city to which it belonged. And as Robert Lacey, biographer of the Henry Ford dynasty, wryly noted, when Fisher established his headquarters there in a twen- ty-second-floor, four-room suite, he even “saved himself the expense of putting a new nameplate on the door.”

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Chapter 4

BUILDING BRIDGES

ON SUNDAY MORNING, December 13, 1964, Max Fisher was in the Grand Ballroom of the New York City Hilton, seated among the delegates at the United Jewish Appeal’s annual meeting. Fisher had just been elected general chairman of the UJAfrom 1965 to 1967. The position, among the most prestigious in American Jewish philanthrop- ic life, had been held by such moneyed and influential men as Henry Morgenthau Jr., Edward Warburg, William Rosenwald, Philip Klutz- nick (whose tenure was cut short when President Kennedy appointed him ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council), and the man Fisher was succeeding, Joseph Meyerhoff.

Fisher would characterize the importance of the chairmanship when he told a group: “When you say to me then, that a man is ‘an American Jewish leader,’ I take it for granted that you are also saying he is a lead- er in UJA. I see the two things as synonymous. And I can’t see how it can be any other way.”

The UJA was founded in 1939, but until Meyerhoff and Fisher the general chairmanship had been almost the exclusive domain of German Jewish immigrants, those gilded representatives of Stephen Birming- ham’s Our Crowd. But in the early 1960s, the baton of UJA leadership passed to the descendants of Eastern European Jews, the children of immigrants like Malka and Velvil Fisch, the waves of “homeless, tem- pest-tost,” a phrase from the poet Emma Lazarus that Fisher was fond of quoting in his speeches. These were the Jews that Birmingham de- scribed in The Rest of Us, his sociological sequel to Our Crowd. “Fisher represented the Eastern European prince,” says Irving Ber- nstein, who by 1964 had left Los Angeles and was working as the as-

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sistant executive vice chairman of the UJA in New York. “He was the counterpart to Warburg and Rosenwald. He had made it —in politics, in the oil business; he was friends with Henry Ford II, and he had roots in his local Jewish community.”

A son of Polish immigrants, Bernstein grew up during the 1920s in Ellenville, New York, which he describes as “a transplanted shtetl in the Catskills.” Bernstein felt that Fisher “made [the children of Eastern European] immigrants look good. He was our role model. He was a dif- ferent kind of Jew. Very comfortable with himself and the Jewish world, very comfortable in the non-Jewish world. He was a totally different type of personality. That’s one of the reasons for the impact he had.” However, the change in UJA leadership —in fact, the financial as - cendancy of America’s Eastern European Jews —had far more potent consequences than a shift in social structure. Certainly there was, as Birmingham meticulously documents, a class struggle between the two groups, a cultural gap and the discordant strains of Old Money versus New Money. But Birmingham, who admits that his “interest has always been in the romance of people,” and is “more concerned with what people are than what they do,” understandably passes over the net political outcome: the marriage of American Jewish philanthropy and Israel.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the German Jewish elite who guided the UJAfocused the organization’s resources on the Jews resid- ing in Eastern Europe as opposed to those who returned to Palestine. (Morgenthau’s father, Henry Sr., had been a doctrinaire anti-Zionist; Julius Rosenwald was a practical anti-Zionist; Felix Warburg and Ja- cob H. Schiff were non-Zionists.) Their argument was that Eastern Europe was in the midst of the Enlightenment and was another latent America for Jews, a land brimming with tolerance and opportunity. That is where the funds should be spent, developing a sister commu- nity to the one already flourishing in the United States. Why squander it on those dreamers —a fair amount of whom were socialists — who were knee-deep in the dangerously disputed sands of Palestine?

The cause of the reluctance, it would seem, was not fiscal, but psy - chological.

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For Jews in the United States, Zionism frequently presented the predicament of “dual allegiance.” Simply stated the predicament is: To whom do I belong? Am I a Jew who has been longing for a home in Israel? Or am I an American? In back of this identity crisis was the specter of anti-Semitism. Jews, having struggled to enter a Christian society, did not want to furnish ammunition for the anti-Semitic allega- tion that, because of their allegiance to Palestine (and later on, Israel), Jews were incapable of being faithful Americans.

Barbara W. Tuchman, in her essay “The Assimilationist Dilemma,” writes movingly of this concern, one that plagued her renowned grand- father, Henry Morgenthau Sr. He was among the largest contributors to President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign, but, Tuchman writes, “the reward was not, as [Morgenthau Sr.] had hoped, a Cabinet post ... but a minor ambassadorship ... to Turkey, the more disappointing because it was a post set aside for Jews. Given Morgenthau’s passionate desire to prove that a Jew could ... be accepted in America on equal grounds ... the offer was peculiarly painful. It was ... the fear of being thought to have another loyalty, that made him and others like him resist ... a movement for a ... Jewish state.... Jews like my grandfather ... felt that ... Zionism would supply an added cause for discrimination.” However, there were other distinguished American Jews who were not haunted by the charge of dual allegiance Louis D. Brandeis, for one, the first Jew to sit on the Supreme Court. Brandeis, raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and a graduate of Harvard, was an assimilated Jew. His ap- proach to Zionism, he stated, “was through Americanism.... Jews [are] by reason of their traditions and their character peculiarly fitted for the attainment of American ideals.... To be good Americans we must be bet- ter Jews, and to be better Jews we must become Zionists. Jewish life cannot be preserved and developed ... unless there be established ... a center from which the Jewish spirit may radiate and give to the Jews scattered throughout the world that inspiration which springs from the memories of a great past and the hope of a great future.”

Fisher, like Brandeis, was bicultural, at ease among Jews and Gen- tiles. Yet where Brandeis’s view of the compatibility between Zion- ism and American ideals sprang from his philosophical bent, Fisher,

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the utilitarian, the businessman, grounded his belief in the realpolitik. For by the time Fisher became general chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, he was convinced that the policies of Israel were not only in harmony with U.S. foreign policy, but complemented it.

“Jews would come,” recalls Fisher, “and argue with me. They used to say: ‘If the United States attacked Israel, what would you do?’ That’s silly. The United States is not going to attack Israel. There’s no hang- up there. I can be a good citizen of the United States and be a supporter of Israel. Israel is something that I love. It’s something that the Jewish people have dreamt about: they wanted a homeland. Where’s the dual allegiance?”

And on that Sunday in the last weeks of 1964, Fisher stood on the dais at the Hilton Hotel and addressed the UJA delegates. He thanked them for honoring him with the chairmanship and spoke about “Israel — proud and progressing — a dream of generations, realized.” Fish- er mentioned the $109.4 million in pledges he hoped they would raise. The amount was staggering. Even Fisher, renowned for his fundraising skills, knew that his objective would be an exacting one to reach. But he had a more strenuous goal on his agenda. He wanted to lessen the historical competition over procedures and fiscal allocations that existed between “the alphabet soup” of Jewish groups, particularly between the UJAand the CJF —the Council of Jewish Federations. Fisher’s purpose was twofold. He felt that cooperation among the groups would translate into more dollars raised, and if he could bring the organizations closer together he would have the makings of a coalition, a cohesive block of voters, a precious commodity to those in Washington. And so he con- cluded his address by reminding the UJA delegates of an old Chinese saying: “’A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.’”

***

Only in a broad sense is the United Jewish Appeal a fundraising agency. It organizes campaigns, but collects funds only in the smaller communi- ties that do not have an established federation to conduct the campaigns. (The federations, although independent, are under the umbrella of the

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CJF, which is the coordinating body of all the organized Jewish com- munities in the United States and Canada.) AUJAin-house report of the Long Range Planning Committee, issued in March 1982, stated that the organization’s role was: a) “to facilitate and enhance the fund-raising efforts of the American Jewish communities by actively providing ser- vices to federations and non-federated communities so that through joint efforts maximum funds may be raised for local, national and overseas needs,” and b) “to be an advocate for overseas needs.”

Operationally, the UJA resembles a variety of fundraising bodies in that it is an amalgam of volunteers and professionals. This arrange- ment presents the possibility of operational tensions. Lay leaders, like Fisher, make policy, and professionals implement it. The lay leaders rotate every few years, while the professionals are involved over the extended course of their careers.

Over the years, Fisher quoted a homily that he used as a guide when directing organizations: “If you run a business like a charity, then you won’t have a business. But if you run a charity like a business, then you won’t have a charity.”

This, combined with Fisher’s first rule of leadership, “You’re only a leader as long as you keep looking back to see if people are following you,” were his guidelines for directing the UJA. His method was to set policy with the board of directors and turn the implementation of that policy over to the professionals.

“Max,” says Irving Bernstein, “was probably the best chairman that I’ve ever worked with in terms of division of labor. Once the policy was formulated, he didn’t interfere. Most leaders have difficulty mak - ing the decision. Then, after it’s made, they don’t know where policy stops. Max wasn’t like that. That’s why he can do so well in so many areas. For example: you establish a budget for a staff and you hire your people. Another [chairman] would say: ‘I want a breakdown of the salaries?’ That wasn’t how Max operated. He let professionals be creative. He’s the only one I know of in my forty years of professional life who knew how to use professionals constructively.”

While Fisher was general chairman of the UJA, he was also serving as president of the United Foundation of Detroit; was deeply involved

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in other Jewish and nonsectarian charities; was pursuing political fi - nancing in his role as vice chairman of Michigan’s state Republican committee; was looking after his personal investments; and was sitting on more than a dozen corporate boards —Michigan Bell, Consolidat- ed Gas, the Loyal American Life Insurance Company and Fruehauf Corporation among them.

“I’ve always been able to compartmentalize things,” says Fisher, “and keep a lot of balls in the air.”

This ability was bolstered by Fisher’s drive, a feeling, he says, “that I never made it,” and even his recurrent insomnia: late-night and ear- ly-morning phone calls to associates were commonplace. For despite his operational laissez-faire, he was not as removed as it might ap- pear. Just as he regularly telephoned business partners, politicians, fund-raisers and the big givers — Fisher became a constant presence in the lives of the UJA professionals.

“Max calls people,” says Irving Bernstein, “at least once a day, maybe twice or three times, to get a sense of what’s happening. At first, you think you’re the only one he’s doing it to. Then you find out he’s calling this one and that one, he’s calling twenty people. He calls more than any other layman I’ve met. And you appreciate it, his always ask- ing for your opinion. So [professionals] speak well of him. And he’s a gentle man in most areas, so there’s a good feeling about him.” Although Fisher was respectful of the separate realms of the lay leader and professional, he had little patience with those whom he felt stepped beyond the bounds of their responsibilities.

“There is a tendency in all professionals to do things without con- sulting the chairman,” says a UJAprofessional. “It’s part of life; things happen quickly, or you don’t want to bother the guy, or you don’t want to do it. I forget the specific incident that Max felt impinged on policy. But he told the [top professional] point-blank that policy was a matter for leadership, and administration was the responsibility of the profes- sionals, and if that wasn’t adhered to then it would be a problem for the board to deal with. Max looked him straight in the eye and said it; he didn’t play games. With Max, you knew exactly where you stood.”

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***

Fisher, “the Eastern European prince,” brought another dimension to the UJA, a social dimension that, according to a professional col- league, “softened the atmosphere surrounding any highly charged fund-raising group.”

“That was [one of] his [goals],” adds Irving Bernstein. “[Fisher] created something that has never existed since [in the UJA] and may never exist again: a prestigious social venue. I think it was the first time we had a black-tie affair, the first time we had a meeting on a [yacht]. Because of this, Max brought in more men and women from around the country. He was not like [other leaders], who dealt with business and were gone. Instead, there seemed to be a sense of welcome.” What, perhaps, was most uncommon about Fisher’s approach was that it transgressed the classic skyrocketing mobility of America’s moneyed Jewish elite.

In his essay on the relationship between Jews and the Protestant es- tablishment, E. Digby Baltzell writes that while most Americans “are moving up the class hierarchy within each of our larger religious com- munities ... class tends to replace religion as the independent variable in social relationships at the highest levels of our society.”

Fisher had developed friendships among the WASPupper crust, but by 1964 he was too involved in Jewish affairs to separate himself from his identity. His social egalitarianism was in some measure a result of his small-town beginnings. (As one Salemite recently observed: “In a small town, the richest man knows the poorest man, and may even have grown up next door to him.”) But Fisher’s approach had another, more politic purpose: it was the start of his relentless consensus build- ing among the major Jewish fund-raising groups.

“The question for me,” says Fisher, “was how could I get [people] to work together? I started by gathering them socially for a common purpose. You have to make people feel comfortable, and they have to be part of the process. The next question was: how could I start a cause? The answer —you have an idea and you sell some people on it and then you expand the cause from there.”

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In a further attempt to unite people, Fisher widened the UJA’s Study Mission Program. The missions, which brought UJA members throughout the United States to Israel, were designed not only as ed- ucational expeditions, but occasions to socialize. Under Fisher, the meetings also took place in London, Paris, Rome and Geneva.

“It was Margie,” says Irving Bernstein, “together with Max, who created the gracious social atmosphere.”

Max may have provided the impetus, but the countless nuts and bolts of the social planning fell to Marjorie Fisher. “We hold [these parties] wherever we are,” says Marjorie. “To pay back people. And not just that, but to spend time with people we like. I did it in Israel and Europe and Detroit and NewYork. I wanted the parties to be lovely, so Max would be proud of them.”

Marjorie was responsible for pushing Max to turn his attention out- ward. Yet if she had intended back in 1953 when she married him to live a relaxed suburban life with their children, by the start of 1965 she found herself drawn into a frenetic lifestyle more familiar to the wives of politicians than those of prosperous businessmen. It may have been slight compensation, but at least the political wives had some vague notion of what would be asked of them during their marriage.

On the other hand, Marjorie Fisher recalls: “I had no idea what I was in for.”

Marjorie, always the perfectionist, always hoping every party pro- ceeded as planned and suffering when they did not, faced that pressure, along with the added burden of raising children, her husband’s travel- ing and his focus on events outside the family.

“An interviewer once asked me,” Marjorie says, “’ [Max is so busy], where do you fit into his life? What comes first for him?’ And I said: ‘The Jews of the world, then the people of Detroit and after that the political arena. I’m fourth. But that doesn’t bother me. He could have had three mistresses.’”

Despite the amusing quip, and the snapshots of her beaming in the Jewish press, and such other quotes in the Detroit papers as “Life is just a bowl of charities,” Marjorie would grapple with her role. She would tease her husband by hiding his vitamin pills — “to conserve

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his boundless energy,” she said, although later conceding that it had no noticeable effect. Marjorie Fisher’s outgoing nature, her flair for do - ing the unexpected, her humor and well-known generosity, would only take her so far. There would be a price to pay, and decades would pass before Marjorie and Max could look back and determine that it had all been worth the cost.

***

The underlying causes of the friction between the UJA and the Jew- ish federations had its roots in two explosive issues: money and pow- er. Although, when reduced to its simplest form, the UJA is a service agency for the federations, its primary interest is in supplying funds for overseas needs, chiefly Israel, but including Jews throughout the world who require financial backing to maintain their educational and religious institutions.

It had long been asserted by some leaders in the federations that it would be more efficient for the UJA to be incorporated into the ma - chinery of the federations. This proposed incorporation, though, posed a problem. Since there was, by definition, a built-in tension between those who promoted domestic needs and those who championed over- seas needs, if the UJAwas removed, one side would suffer at the hands of the other.

Those, like Fisher, who opposed the incorporation, argued that the UJA, as an outside advocate for overseas needs, provided a safeguard against the local interests of the federations. Furthermore, as Jonathan S. Woocher points out in Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of Ameri- can Jews, Israel was the ballast on which much of America’s Jews now rested their identity. For a rapidly growing percentage of America’s assimilated Jews, Israel had replaced religious ritual as the exclusive tie to their Jewishness. It was a sentiment that Fisher reiterated in his speeches across the country in 1965.

“We face the obligation,” he told audiences, “to help Israel show the world, as America once showed it, that ‘from the wretched refuse of teeming shores’ we Jews can build a new, modern successful society.

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We are a chosen generation. In our time we have seen the lowest point in Jewish history [and] we have also seen the greatest revival of the Jewish people on record. We must continue to make the revival possible.” Fueling much of the friction was the issue of power. The federa- tions, their hands gripping the reins of the fund-raising network, were responsible for 80 percent of the collections, while Israel’s unflagging promoter, the UJA, was revered for its formidable skills in organizing fund-raising campaigns. Thus, the politics of the Jewish community had become a circuitous and, occasionally, acrimonious debate over budget allocations.

Fisher, with his ability — and need — to cast conflict in its least divisive light, cornered representatives of the federations and the UJA and used a rebuttal to their positions that he had used when confronting the battling camps of self-proclaimed Zionists and non-Zionists. “Don’t you want to have a place to bring all the refugees?” Fisher would ask. “Don’t you have a responsibility to all of the Jewish people —in America and abroad? All of these Jews are troubled. Don’t they have a right to a Jewish education? Do you agree with all of this? Yes? You don’t want to live in Israel —O.K. You want to allocate funds for a Jewish day school in Cleveland —fine. You are still as much a Zion - ist as anyone. You have got to preserve unity. It’s precious.”

Unity became Fisher’s abiding theme. “There is more that unites us than divides,” he would say repeatedly, while he tried to lead warring factions to common ground. Fisher’s critics would eventually claim, not without some justification, that he was not comfortable in the thin air of ideology, disdaining it to pursue certain goals and, in the pro- cess, shedding layers of principle. To some degree, Fisher’s reaction to ideological debates came from his dislike of conflict, but as a rule he avoided them because he felt they were useless.

“Look at American politics,” says Fisher. “Do you think you can convince the far-right conservative to change his view? Or the fellow on the far left? You can’t. But if you can bring these parties into the mainstream than you’ll have a coalition and you will get things done.” When it came to deciding on monies for Israel versus domestic needs, Fisher thought that in practical terms it was counterproductive

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to sever the two. Realistically speaking, barring any domestic disaster, it was Israel that supplied the drama for any Jewish fund-raising cam- paign. Upon visiting a new Jewish home for the elderly in Long Is- land, a giver might increase his contribution from $10,000 to $15,000. But Israel — and only Israel — was the basis for dramatic giving, because then it was no longer charity: it was nation-building. After a study mission, meeting with ministers of the Israeli government and touring kibbutzim, hospitals, military bases and schools, contributors have been known to jump from $5,000 to $25,000, from $25,000 to $100,000. The aftermath of Israel’s wars has seen the most spectacular rise in UJA donations: following the Six-Day War, when Fisher was the chairman, contributions rose 230 percent; and in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the increase was in excess of 150 percent.

Fisher, according to Abraham J. Karp, author of To Give Life: The UJA and the Shaping of the American Jewish Community, “recognized the symbiotic relationship between the UJAand federations.” After all, most of the UJA’s money came not from the backwater hamlets where UJA field operatives passed through like migrant workers, but from cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York and Mi- ami. Here, in these metropolitan centers teeming with the institutions of Jewish life, the federations were firmly planted in the community and superbly organized.

Fisher also knew that while it was viable for him to use his contacts and friendships among corporate heads and the rich to court a select conclave of sizable contributors —those willing to pledge $50,000 or more —the federations remained, in Fisher’s words, “the salesmen for the UJA.” Fisher understood that there was no percentage in alienat- ing the people who carry your product —in this case, a philanthropic message — door-to-door.

Conceivably, Fisher’s greatest asset in his attempts to bridge what one commentator euphemistically described as the “formal and cool relationship between [the federations and the UJA]” was that unlike other UJAheads, Fisher had not erupted onto the national philanthrop- ic scene. He did not begin as a “prince.” Rather, as with his start in the oil business, he began on the bottom rung of the ladder.

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The ultimate importance of this facet of Fisher’s philanthropic — and later on, political —career was identified by Abraham Karp in his history of Jews in America, Haven and Home. Karp writes: “ [Fish- er] came to national leadership through activity in the Detroit Jewish community as president of its Jewish Welfare Federation, one of the most powerful in the nation. He went on to become president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, while at the same time serving as chairman of the United Israel Appeal. Later he became chairman of the Board of Governors of the reconstituted Jewish Agen- cy, as well as chairman of the executive committee of the American Jewish Committee. He thus held leadership positions in all the power bases of the American Jewish community. In a sense, he represented the final consolidation of the Jewish community into a unified entity.” Karp’s point became apparent immediately upon Fisher’s election to the chairmanship. Boris Smolar of the Jewish Telegraph Agency headlined an article, “Fisher, ’65 UJAHead, Is Grass Roots Man!” The resentment that the members of the CJF might have felt toward a UJA leader was absent in Fisher’s case because to the federations his ascen- sion at the UJAwas a tale of local-boy-makes-good.As if to underscore this point, the same year Fisher was elected to the chairmanship of the UJA, he was also elected vice president of the CJF. Fisher united the groups by assuming leadership posts in both. It was an unprecedented paradigm of coalition building that Fisher would repeat in 1969, when, as president of the UJA, he was elected to the presidency of the CJF. As for the competition over funds, that was lessened by long-range allocation agreements and, in the end, Fisher reached his goal. In 1981, Boris Smolar reported: “Elaborate preparations are now being made by the leadership of the United Jewish Appeal to honor Max Fisher in grand style as a unique leader of the American Jewish communi- ty.” Smolar compared Fisher to other eminent Jewish personalities: Louis Marshall, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Felix Warburg and others, but indicated how Fisher had differed from his predecessors: “While each of these great Jewish men reflected the philosophy of just a certain segment of American Jewry —they were either outspoken Zionists or non-Zionists —Fisher represents all segments of the American Jewish

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community. His philosophy is based on the idea of achieving Jewish unity.” Then Smolar called Fisher what he had always aspired to be- come. “Max Fisher,” Smolar said, “is a builder of bridges.”

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