Business & Finance: Death At No. 52

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

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