Wolf Schwabacher

Who is Wolf Schwabacher?

Wolf Schwabacher was a prominent Jewish entertainment lawyer, a partner in the New York law firm of Hays, Wolf, Schwabacher, Sklar & Epstein, whose clients included the Marx Brothers, Lillian Hellman, and Erskine Caldwell.

He married his loving but mentally unbalanced wife, Ethel Schwabacher in 1934. She was a protegee of Arshile Gorky, his first biographer, and herself a well-known abstract impressionist painter. Brenda Webster, their daughter, is an American writer. After World War II they lived on the Upper East Side. Dorothy Parker was a social acquaintance.

Wolf and Ethel Schwabacher shared a house with the psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner and her husband, the Austrian socialist Joseph Buttinger, for more than ten years. After Gardiner and Buttinger, fleeing from Europe after the start of World War II, moved into their house at Brookdale Farm in central New Jersey in 1940, the house was divided in two, the Gardiner-Buttingers living in one part of the house and the Schwabachers in the other.

The Schwabacher-Gardiner connection came to public attention during the libel suit Hellman brought against Mary McCarthy.

When Hellman published her memoir, Pentimento, Gardiner spotted the close similarlity between her own anti-Fascist activities in Vienna in the 1930s and the story Hellman told about a pseudonymous friend called Julia. Gardiner wrote to Hellman asking for an explanation, but Hellman never replied.