Gilded Lily (4 page)

Veiga had never met Wolf before, but soon realized that the distinguished businessman who mixed the King's English with guttural Uruguayan Spanish was his neighbor in Copacabana. Following Veiga's intervention, Wolf appears to have at least partially settled the debt he had with Souza Gomes. After his difficulties with the Central do Brasil, Wolf's company continued to repair an average of 360 wagons a year for the railway.

Wolf was so grateful to Veiga for his intervention that he grandly presented him with a gold Audemars Piguet watch, which was then an extremely expensive Swiss timepiece that was difficult to obtain in Brazil, especially as the fascist Vargas government had set up even more tariff walls on foreign products to protect local industry. But for Wolf the watch was a good investment: the way he saw it, Veiga had just helped break the impasse with his most important client, so he was worth more than his weight in gold.

The intervention also helped in other ways, for when Wolf required a letter of reference from the principals of the Central do Brasil in order to apply for Brazilian citizenship in 1950, they did not hesitate to write the nicest things about the transplanted Englishman. “For ten years we have worked with Mr. Watkins, who has always faithfully fulfilled the requirements of the railroad,” wrote Hilmar
Tavares da Silva in a letter to Brazilian authorities attesting to Wolf's good conduct in business. “He is a person of absolute moral and material integrity.”

It is not clear why Wolf saw the need to become a Brazilian citizen after living quite successfully in the country for nearly thirty-one years as a foreigner. Perhaps he wanted to consolidate his business and make sure that it survived after his death. In October 1950, Wolf and Annita began to collect the letters of reference and undergo the medical examinations that would enable them to apply for Brazilian citizenship. In the black-and-white photo pasted to his Brazilian identity card, Wolf wears wire-rimmed spectacles and has a receding hairline. Annita, fifty at the time, is a heavyset woman with a double chin and a short, tightly curled coiffure. Her severely plucked eyebrows lend her a hard, defiant air.

Part of the citizenship application involved describing their children's activities in Brazil. To this end, both Wolf and Annita focused on Lily, who was their only minor child at the time.

While the Watkinses sought their Brazilian citizenship, Lily was well on her way to making a splash in Rio society—at least as it was defined within the city's upper-middle-class Jewish and English-speaking communities. Lily was enrolled at the Colegio Anglo-Americano, a traditional British-American private school, housed in a handsome colonial building that had once belonged to a Portuguese duke. The school was next door to the Sears department store in the Botafogo neighborhood, where the country's best schools were clustered. Known as the British American School when it was founded in 1919, the school was re-christened with a Portuguese name after President Vargas declared—in a fit of nationalistic fervor during World War II—that all educational and religious institutions in the country had to have Portuguese names.

Margareth Coney, the no-nonsense British matron who founded the school, duly changed the school's name but continued to direct its strict programming until just before her death in 1968. Coney had
arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the last century to work as a governess for one of Brazil's wealthiest families. By the time her contract with the family was over, Coney had begun to look for other opportunities. She bemoaned the lack of proper educational facilities for the growing colony of English-speaking immigrants in Rio de Janeiro and decided that the city needed a proper British school. The British American School soon became a tough training ground for the sons and daughters of British and American expatriates in the city, and offered Brazilian students the opportunity to become fluent in English, which was the working language of the school. Lily herself speaks a refined international English as well as Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Her multilingual skills would later prove excellent assets in elite society.

By the beginning of the Second World War, Coney had developed an impressive educational institution in Brazil that drew upper-middle-class students, although it never attained the social prestige of the elite Catholic schools, such as Notre Dame de Sion, Santo Inacio, and Dom Pedro, where the old money coffee and sugar barons sent their children.

The Colegio Anglo-Americano was particularly popular among well-to-do Jewish families in Rio who didn't want to send their children to schools with Christian affiliations, although Jewish children were welcome in the Jesuit-run institutions throughout the city. In many cases, Jewish parents who worried about their social standing in the city sent their children to the Catholic institutions, but insisted that they not participate in any of the religious classes. The Colegio Anglo-Americano was one of the few elite schools in Rio de Janeiro that had no discernible religious affiliation.

According to her parents' application for Brazilian citizenship, Lily attended the school from 1945, when she was eleven years old, until she graduated in 1951 at sixteen. In school, she was known as Lilly de Castro Watkins, using, as per Brazilian tradition, part of her mother's maiden name and signing her first name with a double
l
. Her older
brother Daniel signed her report cards and the tuition receipts on behalf of Wolf, who still worked in Mesquita, an hour outside Rio, and was probably too busy to attend to the bureaucratic requirements at his daughter's school. Sometimes Annita Watkins's shaky signature appears on her report cards.

According to her school records, Lily's best subjects were English and the Portuguese language; she scored nine out of ten on both during a final exam in 1951. But she received failing grades in physics, mathematics, and chemistry, even though she appears to have been a diligent student. In one exam she copied a descriptive paragraph three times in her neatest handwriting before including a polished final version in her examination booklet. In “Description of the Engraving,” Lily wrote about an etching that showed three people—two children and a woman. Interestingly, Lily, who was eleven years old at the time, didn't focus on the personalities of the people in her paragraph, but homed in on the interior design of the room and their clothing: “The little girl wears a little blue dress and white socks. Her shoes are brown. On the other hand, the boy's clothing is quite different. He wears brown trousers and a white shirt and vest. The woman wears a red dress with a white apron.” The floors of the storeroom where they are posing were made of ceramic tile; there was a table and two stools, she wrote.

“She was a beautiful girl, with green eyes and light hair,” said Ana Bentes Bloch, who hailed from a prominent Jewish family in the city and also attended the Colegio Anglo-Americano in the 1940s and 1950s.

But the black-and-white school photograph attached to Lily's registration shows a plump little girl with a shoulder-length bob and a very large nose.

“Children used to tease her at school because of her nose,” recalled one of her acquaintances who did not want to be identified. “Everyone used to call her ‘Lily
nariz
.'” The direct translation from the Portuguese is “Lily nose.”

But despite her nose, others remember her as an extremely poised and elegant teenager. Perhaps Lily was so beguiling in her speech, gestures, and carriage that she managed to convey the impression of beauty. Although Bentes Bloch was a few grades behind Lily, she remembers her as a striking presence in high school. “She had beautiful clothes, and was easily the most elegant girl at the school,” said Bentes Bloch. “Lily was really a pleasure to be around.”

As a result, she was also the most sought-after girl at school socials and Saturday night dances at the Clube Israelita Brasileiro, known by its acronym CIB. The Jewish community center is located in Copacabana, down the street from the elegant Galeria Menescal shopping arcade and several blocks away from the grand Copacabana Palace hotel, where many of the girls at the Colegio Anglo-Americano attended the sumptuous balls during Carnaval in February. Inspired by the Hotel Negresco in Nice and the Carlton in Cannes, the Copacabana Palace was designed by the French architect Joseph Gire to be the grandest hotel in Rio de Janeiro, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on Copacabana Beach. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Lily was growing up in Rio, the hotel was the focal point of upper-middle-class society in the city.

On the weekends, wealthy families gathered at the Copacabana Palace hotel for dinner at the Bife de Ouro, or Golden Beef, the city's most fashionable restaurant.

When a government edict shut Rio's casinos in April 1946, the hotel's Golden Room drew some of the world's biggest entertainers. The hotel became an important destination for fashionable society, even though its most popular feature was a nightly floor show featuring young women, known as the
emancipadas
, or “emancipated ones,” because most of the showgirls were under eighteen, which meant that hotel officials had to seek special permission from the local government to allow them to perform in public. The resulting permissions, when they were granted, allowed the girls to be “emancipated” from the strict laws forbidding minors from performing in a bar. “At that
time in Rio, there were very few places where you could gather to see a show,” recalled Hélio Fernandes, a former owner of the
Tribuna de Imprensa
, one of the city's leading newspapers at the time. “The beauty of the dancing girls at the Golden Room became the stuff of local legend, and anyone with any means was flocking to the shows in the evenings.”

Like many upwardly mobile Jews in Rio, Lily's family frequented the Copacabana Palace's Golden Room, although they likely never took in the rather risqué floor shows. The center of their social life was the CIB on Raul Pompeia Street. The club organized balls and other cultural events that were attended by most Jewish families of means in Rio de Janeiro. It was not uncommon for young Jewish women to meet their future husbands at the CIB socials.

In the late 1940s, CIB officials began the club's tradition of debutante balls for the daughters of their members. The balls were organized by Lygia Hazan Gomlevsky, the elegant wife of the club's then president José Gomlevsky. With her shoulder-length chestnut hair, porcelain skin, and smoky eyes, Lygia looked like a glamorous Hollywood movie star. And she was determined to inject a little bit of that glamor into the debutante balls, which were modeled after the sumptuous coming-out parties for high-society girls at the Copacabana Palace hotel. The annual debutante balls in the Golden Room of the Copacabana Palace, which began soon after construction was completed on the hotel in the mid-1920s, were considered the highlight of the Rio social season.

Lygia, herself a local socialite who attended all the best parties in the city, often showed up as a boldface name in the social columns, alongside her friends the Klabins, one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Rio de Janeiro. In black-and-white photographs of the balls, Lygia is shown ushering a group of young girls into the CIB ballroom. The girls are all beautifully dressed in puffy white taffeta or organza dresses. Every year, Lygia hired an orchestra for the annual debut and she personally chose twenty of the most beautiful girls
from among the member families. One of those girls was a perfectly poised and elegant teenager named Lily Watkins.

“I can easily say that Lily was the most beautiful and the most elegant debutante we ever had at the club,” recalled Gomlevsky. “She wore a magnificent white organdy dress embroidered with tiny white flowers on the sleeves. She was the chicest girl at the debut.”

Although cosmetic surgery wasn't as commonplace in Brazil as it is today, perhaps Lily did manage to get a little “help” when it came to her features. Gomlevsky, for one, doesn't remember that Lily had a prominent nose by the time she was ready for her debut.

Although her family otherwise kept a low profile at club events, where they would sit together
en famille
at dinners, the Watkins girl turned heads wherever she went.

“Lily used to wear the most exquisite dresses at the CIB dances,” said Bentes Bloch. “She had an absolutely wonderful lilac organza dress that was the envy of all of the girls. It was absolutely stunning.”

José Behar seemed to agree. Lily met José, or Zeca as he was known to his friends and family, at a CIB dance. Zeca, a handsome Sephardic Jew, was slightly older than the teenaged Lily, and was already out of high school, working for his uncle's currency trading business on Avenida Rio Branco in the city center.

But any union with Zeca was severely frowned upon by Lily's upwardly mobile parents. Zeca might have been a nice young man with a good job, but he would never attain the fabulous wealth that the Watkinses dreamed of for their daughter.

“Lily and Zeca had a real romance,” said a family friend who frequented CIB events in the 1940s and 1950s. “He loved her, but it was hopeless. Lily had been trained to marry money. She was educated to marry a rich man.”

In fact, when Lily found herself falling desperately in love with another middle-class boy, her parents were quick to put a stop to the budding relationship.

Her new obsession was Izidor, a classmate at the Colegio Anglo-Americano. Izidor was tall, slim, and green-eyed. He also had a way with the girls.

“He would tease them relentlessly,” said Bentes Bloch. “He knew he was popular and so he would string along all these girls who all had a mad crush on him. Then he would dump them.”

Lily ended up being one of his many victims, but she still dreamed about Izidor as her own Prince Charming, and she pursued him relentlessly, recalled Bentes Bloch.

For his part, Gastão Veiga recalled that whenever Lily wanted to see Izidor, she would tell her parents that she was going to Veiga's home around the corner from the Watkins family's residence in Copacabana. During those fleeting meetings, hidden from outside view in Veiga's courtyard, Izidor might hold Lily's hand or touch her on the shoulder. If they felt particularly daring, she would allow him to kiss her on the cheek. In Rio's middle-class Jewish society, the most risqué events for teenagers involved boys from the lower classes invading one of the orderly school or CIB dances and drinking beer.