Hustling Hitler by Walter Shapiro

Author:Walter Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-16T14:22:11+00:00

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Not since Captain Ahab had there been a man more at home on the high seas than Freeman Bernstein. In place of the Great White Whale, Freeman was out to harpoon the Great Rich Sucker. Freeman made four transatlantic round-trips during a nine-month period beginning in December 1920. While he favored the Aquitania, Freeman also happily settled for a first-class stateroom aboard the RMS Olympic, the surviving sister ship of the Titanic.

Not bad for the Boy from Troy whose parents had arrived in steerage.

These six- and seven-day crossings offered Freeman something even better than salt air, ocean views, and invigorating walks on the Promenade Deck. “This traveling over the ocean gets you in right with a lot of nice people,” he cabled Variety from the Aquitania. “I have met people on this boat I never met anywhere else. They can’t take the air on me here unless they sew themselves up in the stateroom.”

Freeman pointed to Vincent Astor as the sort of nice person he was unlikely to meet in the elevator of the Putnam Building. Astor, who had become one of the world’s richest men when his father went down on the Titanic, was Freeman’s fellow first-class passenger on the Olympic during a mid-March 1921 crossing from Southampton. “It doesn’t do any harm to run across that kind does it,” Freeman wrote, “but it hasn’t done me any good either. But you can’t tell. I may use him yet. What a backer he would make for a carnival to travel around the world? And he would never miss the coin.”

But Freeman couldn’t just buttonhole Astor with a friendly “Hey, Vinnie” on the Olympic’s Grand Staircase or jab him in the ribs in the middle of a massage in the ship’s Turkish Bath. Freeman needed an icebreaker, although that probably was not a word to be used around a man whose father’s last memory was hearing a shipboard band play “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

Without that icebreaker, Freeman might have had to content himself with only his cigar for company under the stained-glass windows of the Smoke Room on the Olympic. Luckily, he had an accomplice who helped him make friends more easily than Dale Carnegie. Aboard the Olympic, Freeman announced that May Ward, the acclaimed star of vaudeville and the screen, would be giving an impromptu concert in the first-class lounge. When Freeman, serving as stage manager, accidentally mangled the title of one of May’s songs, his new friend Vincent Astor immediately corrected him. On the same voyage, Freeman applied his personal magnetism to magnates like Charles Schwab, the semiretired founder of United States Steel.

Working with the teamwork of Fred and Adele Astaire, Freeman and May soon perfected a lucrative transatlantic racket that they called the Anniversary Gag. On the first night out from port, Freeman and May would stroll arm in arm into the first-class salon to gaily announce, “It’s our wedding anniversary. And we want you all to celebrate with us. Champagne for the house.”

After corks were

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