"Who's Better than Us?" Remembering Cousin Wolfgang

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Our cousins are often the ones who make us. My cousin Wolfgang was one of the many who made me.

Technically my second cousin once removed, Wolfgang was born in Hamburg in 1923. After the war, Wolfgang moved to Mexico, where he became a hugely successful industrialist.

My mother and her sister adored their dashing cousin, and made much of him on his visits to the family ranch. He was the best dressed man I’d ever seen; my fondness for wearing pink is almost entirely a tribute to him.

Wolfgang liked fine things, and when he came to visit, the ranch was well-stocked. Sometimes the right caviar and the right salmon and the right whiskey would arrive by courier a few hours ahead of his appearance.

Everything got an extra scrub, the best linens went on the bed, and the silver was polished by exhausted boys who would have been resentful if the occasion had been anything other than what it was.

When he arrived, Wolfgang would demonstrate his splendid talent for appearing grateful, humbled, and surprised by the very things he had expected.

The summer I was 10, I was by his side constantly. (I insisted on handing him his towel every morning as he got out of the pool). Always, his gratitude and surprise.

Always his advice.

When I balked at trying caviar, Wolf said “You must have it. It’s so good for you. And how will you know what’s good for you if you don’t try everything?”

Try everything was Wolf’s motto. 25 years before Dos Equis created the “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign, Wolfgang was the most interesting and adventurous man I could imagine. In later years, I’d be briefly troubled by worries about what he might have done in the war and how his vast Mexican fortune was made, but as a boy of ten, I was mesmerized both by his attentive kindness to me and by his relentless insistence that I should be voracious about new experiences.

He was astoundingly patient. We talked about classical music, which I fancied I knew more about than I did. To show off, I engaged Wolf in a silly argument about whether Bernstein or von Karajan was the better conductor. (It was lost on me at the time that I, with my Jewish father, was having this argument with a family member who had worn the swastika. It presumably wasn’t lost on Wolfgang, who was respectful but unusually formal around my daddy.)

Wolfgang took me very seriously. Months later, a stack of recordings by the German conductor arrived at my mother’s home. “To continue our most interesting conversation,” the note read.

At the end of his summer visit in 1977, I walked him to his car, proudly struggling with his bags. (I would not let anyone else help.) Wolf thanked me profusely, then slipped me a chocolate bar wrapped in a $20 bill. “Who’s better than us?” he said, solemnly shaking my hand.

On subsequent summer visits, it would be with Wolfgang that I would have my first cigar, my first shot of whiskey, and when I was about 13, my first serious talk about women with someone other than my father. “Women tell themselves stories about men. So you need to become a story they will enjoy telling themselves,” he mused. When I asked Wolfgang what that looked like, his answer was the predictable one: “Show a woman she’s the one with whom you want to discover new things.”

He added two extra bits of advice. “Remember women are more like men than most men think. And do try not to lie.”

I last saw Wolfgang at my grandmother’s memorial service at the ranch in 1998. In his mid-70s, he was still the handsomest man on the place. We hadn’t seen each other in years. He asked me a few questions about my life, and I blushed and quietly confessed I was smitten with an 18 year-old — and that to my surprise, I thought I might be falling in love with her.

Wolf nodded his head. “You must be sure to leave her with a wonderful story,” he said, “and leave her soon. Or she’ll leave you, and it will hurt you much more than it will hurt her.”

I nodded. It would be as he said. Less than a month later, I’d be devastated.

Wolf patted his pockets, produced a chocolate bar. He studied it. “I thought there would be more children. I have one extra.”

He tucked the chocolate into the inside pocket of my Brooks Brothers blazer, then fingered my lapel, assessing the material. He nodded his approval.

“Who’s better than us?” he asked. “Who’s better than us?”

Wolfgang died in 2014, shortly before his 91st birthday. His memory is a blessing.

(An earlier and truncated version of this appeared on Medium in 2016).