The ultimate shack in the woods is looking for a buyer.
A sportsman`s paradise, its windows look out on Lake Superior`s crystal waters. The surrounding forest so teems with game that deer and coyote amble across meadows and trails, scarcely acknowledging a visitor`s presence. Prospective owners, though, better have deep pockets in their hip waders.
Granot Loma, as the place is called, carries a $12 million price tag. Also, the current proprietor, a 34-year-old Chicago bond trader, isn`t about to dicker, said Marilyn Hoffman, the Dallas-based real estate agent handling the sale.
”I have a representative in Japan who married into one of the country`s leading families and therefore has entree to the kind of people who can afford a property like this,” Hoffman said. ”You don`t market a Granot Loma the same way you do a suburban tract home.”
A specialist in estate properties, Hoffman has no fears that Granot Loma is a white elephant. Her listing book also has photos of a Texas ranch, priced to move at $18 million, and an estate in New York`s Catskill Mountains for a rock-bottom $5.6 million. She estimates that within 6 months to a year, she`ll have a buyer for Granot Loma.
If you are not to the manor born, you don`t sleep as well here as in your own bed. The sheer size of the place kills any possibility of curling up for a cozy little nap.
The Great Hall, as the principal living room is known, has 24-foot ceilings. Its sofas, their coverings hand-loomed by Navaho weavers, were built considerably overscale, so they wouldn`t seem out of proportion with the surroundings. Put your back against the bolster, and your feet barely make it to the front edge.
Nearby a mammoth Kodiak bear stands on its hind legs, fangs bared in a permanently menacing grimace. Indeed, except for the Field Museum`s hall of mammals there can`t be too many comparable collections of stuffed animals. Especially in the last light of day, their eyes seem to follow your every movement.
Nor do the bedrooms offer refuge. Their tables have bases that were fashioned from huge tree roots, carved with all sorts of animal heads and Indian portraits. In that twilight zone between sleep and waking, you have to keep reassuring yourself that your chambermates are inanimate.
Normally I like to read in bed. On my night at Granot Loma, I felt a psychological imperative to postpone turning out the lights. So I picked up the two thick volumes of ”Superior Heartland: A Backwoods History,” which happened to be close at hand. Its author, C. Fred Rydholm, a retired school teacher and former mayor of Marquette, has spent a lifetime gathering the legend and lore of Michigan`s Upper Peninsula. The story of Granot Loma is one of his book`s continuing themes.
Back in 1893, the book recounted, a local boy went to work as a bank clerk in nearby Marquette. Eventually the boy, Louis Kaufman, would be lord of this estate and sleep in the very bed where I was reading his story. But he started out with more moderate fortunes: His father ran a clothing store. The boy, though, turned out to be a financial wizard, who by the turn of the century had worked his way up to head Marquette`s First National Bank.
Then he was called to a similar position in New York, where he put together the financial package out of which General Motors was organized. Later he would underwrite construction of the Empire State Building. By World War I, when a dollar still meant something, Kaufman`s net worth was $150 million.
Even after going off to Manhattan, Kaufman retained an attachment to the place of his birth and returned to the Upper Peninsula in summer. But he wanted to make his annual pilgrimage in the style to which he and his wife, Marie, had become accustomed. So he applied for membership in the Huron Mountain Club, a rich-man`s playground, about 20 miles northwest of here, reserved for the creme de la creme of Detroit and Chicago society.
Indeed, the club is so exclusive that even Henry Ford`s application was tabled for years, pending a vacancy. The by-laws limit membership to 50 families and no wonder: Start letting just anybody in, and things could get crowded on a mere 24,000 acres of hunting and fishing preserves.
In Kaufman`s case, though, it wasn`t a question of no openings. He was given to understand that before they would admit him, hell would freeze over, an apt metaphor in this North Woods country where 200 inches of snow in a winter is not uncommon.
To this day, local tavern gossip is divided over the reason for Kaufman`s black ball. Some bar-stool historians say it was because his wife was part American Indian, others because his family was Jewish.
”Louis and his wife belonged to the Episcopal Church, and the third generation asked the historical society to eliminate any mention of the family`s origins,” author Rydholm later told me. ”But old Sam Kaufman, Louie`s father, wrote and read Yiddish.”
Rydholm also said that in amassing his fortune, Kaufman stepped on a lot of important people`s toes, among them the president of the Huron Mountain Club.
Whatever the case, Kaufman found himself publicly snubbed in his own hometown. So he set out to build a pleasure palace of his own that would dwarf the other millionaires` club.
Even if Kaufman hadn`t had such strong feelings, his wife aspired to play mistress of the manor long before he even thought of building this estate. Rydholm recalled that Marie Kaufman always appeared in town wearing jodphurs and a big floppy hat and carrying a riding whip. When the Kaufmans` oldest son died, she insisted on riding horseback behind the hearse.
”She also wanted the boy to be laid out for the funeral in one suit and then buried in another one,” Rydholm said. ”The undertaker protested there wouldn`t be time to make the change, but Marie was determined to have it her way. So the poor undertaker had to rig up a pair of quick-change suits, slit open down their back sides, so the corpse could be slipped out of one and into the other after the ceremony, while the cortege was lining up for the trip to the cemetery.”
Propped up in Kaufman`s bed and balancing a copy of ”Superior Heartland” on my knees, I discovered that the Kaufmans brought a similarly slightly daft intensity to the building of Granot Loma (the Kaufmans created the name by borrowing letters from their children`s names). Like the ancient pharaohs, they hired a small army of construction workers and ordered the foreman to spare no expense.
Nor did they recruit only local talent. George Gershwin, whom they knew from Manhattan cafe society, personally selected the grand piano, which still stands in the music room. Bill Tilden supervised construction of the estate`s tennis courts.
To ensure their privacy, Marie Kaufman took the family`s checkbook and bought up large tracts of land along Lake Superior, eventually fashioning a 20,000-acre estate, comparable to the Huron Mountain Club. She was aided by a slump in logging, the backbone of the region`s economy. In one instance, she bought up the whole town of Birch, a community of 300 to 400 lumberjacks, that had gone belly up.
For four years, 250 workers labored on the Kaufman estate, assembling the main house out of huge timbers shipped from Oregon. The main house, which was completed in 1923, has 26 bedrooms, each with its own fireplace. One of the Kaufmans` corps of 25 house servants was permanently detailed to keeping those home fires burning.
While Granot Loma was being built, the Kaufmans realized Prohibition would soon be upon them. So they bought a New York liquor store and shipped its inventory here, to be stored in the basement in side-by-side bank vaults. Their massive steel doors are still marked ”his” and ”hers.”
Louis and Marie used that stash of booze to throw some of the more celebrated parties of the Roaring `20s. Fred Astaire, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Pierre du Pont, Max Schmeling and Sydney Sheldon were house guests here. Gershwin and Cole Porter sat down to play at the piano that Gershwin had selected for the Kaufmans. Tenors and sopranos from the Metropolitan Opera offered arias from a balcony overlooking the Great Hall, and entertainers and guests alike traveled here on Kaufman`s private Pullman car, arriving at the estate`s own railroad station.
”At 11, I was recruited as a sleep-over playmate for one of the Kaufman grandchildren,” Rydholm said. ”The next morning, I got out of bed, stepped out onto that balcony, saw the Great Hall and thought it must be Grand Central Station.”
After Louis Kaufman died in 1942, the big house at Granot Loma was seldom used, I read in ”Superior Heartland” (available from the Marquette County Historical Society). Marie Kaufman discovered there was more to life than swatting mosquitos and one-upping the neighbors. She remarried, took to exploring Europe`s casinos, and died in 1956, while ensconced in Monte Carlo`s Hotel de Paris.
Eventually Granot Loma passed to Joan Kaufman, Louis and Marie`s much-married daughter. Indeed, the whole family had an addiction to marriage and divorce. Louis` brother, Nathan, came to Chicago, became head of the Congress Hotel and, according to Rydholm`s account, was divorced posthumously: When his estate was probated, it was discovered that one suite in the hotel had paid no rent and was occupied by a young woman friend of Nathan`s, prompting his widow to take revenge.
For her fifth marriage, Joan Kaufman selected a local boy, Jack Martin, who originally tended Granot Lomas` hog pens. Martin must have quickly realized the limited opportunities of the position, and so made himself first Marie`s, then Joan`s confidant.
Yet even after making himself master of the place, Martin found himself cash poor. Joan and he weren`t able to maintain the main building, and they lived in the caretaker`s house instead. After Joan died, in 1973, Martin had to sell off parts of the estate to pay his annual property tax bills, and Granot Loma thus shrank from 20,000 to 5,000 acres.
Three years ago, its present owner bought Granot Loma for $5 million from Martin`s heirs, then spent a similar amount on restoration before putting it back on the market recently. Marilyn Hoffman, the real estate agent, likes to note that her client updated the kitchen facilities, using the White House kitchen as a model.
On that happy thought, I closed the covers of ”Superior Heartland” and straightaway fell asleep. Perhaps for having read all those plutocrats`
stories, I had a dream:
The age of Gatsby isn`t over, a voice announced, and I saw myself as a young man in his 20s, making a big killing on Chicago`s Board of Trade. I was such a financial whiz kid, I didn`t need to bother with mortgages, but plunked down hard cash for Granot Loma.
Unfortunately, I woke up to realize that this wasn`t my biography but Tom Baldwin`s. A plumber`s son, Baldwin came to Chicago eight years ago, and started trading Treasury bonds. He and his wife had scrimped and saved to lease a seat on the exchange, and Tom allowed himself six months to see if he had any talent. Three years ago, Forbes gave its verdict, forecasting that Baldwin will be enrolled in a future edition of that magazine`s list of the richest people in America.
Baldwin, 34, noted that he long since ceased trading simply to make money. For him, it`s now pure sport, a kind of intellectual challenge, whose profits are chiefly useful to him as ”markers” of his mental dexterity. He was similarly motivated to buy Granot Loma, just as he is also undertaking the restoration of Chicago`s famed Rookery Building.
”It was fun to have and to fix up, and if the proper buyer comes along, I`ll be ready to leave go of Granot Loma,” Baldwin said. ”But it sure has been nice being able to say to people, `I own the world`s largest log cabin.”`
