It is only the second women's full-service bank in U.S. history (the first was a small country bank in Tennessee which lasted seven years in the 1920s). More important, the FWB has been a trailblazer for at least seven others now starting up across the country.
The funding in New York was far from easy. In mid-project New York State changed its banking law, barring discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status—long a prime feminist grievance. Then tight money and recession forced the bank's founders reluctantly to lower its initial capitalization goal of $4 million to $3 million.
Part of the money came from some 7,000 shareholders, 81 percent of them women. Success in attracting the rest was in no small part due to a socialite charity fund raiser, 52-year-old Livia Weintraub. In an unending burst of enthusiasm, Livia drew up a list of 2,000 potential stock purchasers, cajoled her friends (including Beatrice Joyce, founder of the International Debutante Ball) into subscribing, and then corralled half a dozen of her charities into making deposits. By last count, she had single-handedly accounted for one-third of the bank's corporate accounts.
Officially, Livia Weintraub is assistant to the president, Madeline McWhinney, a no-frills type who was the first woman officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. By contrast, Livia is a blithe spirit with red hair bright enough to illuminate a closed bank vault. She sets off her favorite blue-and-white Adolfo outfit with a 35-carat sapphire ring and gold earrings, and to make certain all eyes are upon her, she likes to affect a twirling, frilly white parasol.
"Never fear—Livia is here!" is Weintraub's motto, and it has seen her in and out of some extraordinary circumstances. A former Transylvanian Ping-Pong champ, she was caught up in the Gestapo's dragnet and survived six months in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The ordeal still reverberates in her mind. "Then I made myself look for what was tolerable. I made myself live," she says. The camp also awakened her sense of charity. "When they came with the water, I gave it to the sick people, I never took for myself," she recalls.
After the war, the destitute Livia set up a dress shop in Paris, then made her way to the U.S. via Geneva and Montreal, and soon was a successful designer in New York and Palm Beach. Grateful to be in this country and widowed soon after her arrival, she threw herself into charity work. In fact, it was through her volunteer efforts for cancer research that she met her second husband, millionaire industrialist Stanley Weintraub. Livia Weintraub soon became known as "the doyenne of New York charities." (She says of her contemporaries, "Girls my age are old and wrinkled because they think all the time which psychiatrist to go to.")
The idea of high finance particularly appealed to her. "For centuries women have ruled countries and thrones," she says. "So surely they can run a bank."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
