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Beyond the companies that they dominate or influence, the Rothschilds have holdings in more than 100 blue chips, including Royal Dutch/Shell, De Beers, Michelin, Rio Tinto, IBM. The French branch's string-tied bundles of stock fill an ancient five-story bank vault whose keyholes are hidden behind brass lionheads. In the buff sandstone building at 21 Rue Laffitte that has been home to de Rothschild Freres since 1817, muttonchop-whiskered family ancients line the walls in oil and marble, and ushers wearing black swallow-tailed coats attend the customers, while 300 employees quietly work. Guy de Rothschild occupies a small, white-painted office, which has on display a pastel of Grandfather Alphonse and the signatures of Meyer's five sons.
Writer & Angel. Many Rothschilds have flashed their wings outside these venerable surroundings. Versatile Philippe de Rothschild, 61, another of Guy's cousins, is a vintner, writer, and angel to assorted arts, leading a life as carefully modulated as a string quartet. He is the official French translator of British Playwright Christopher (The Lady's Not for Burning) Fry, and with his wife Pauline is translating into French the Elizabethan poems of Herbert, Herrick, Wyatt, Drayton and Sir Philip Sidney. His daughter Philippine, 28, is an actress on the French stage, and his niece Nicole, 39, produces films. In Israel, Guy's sister Bethsabee, 49, has set up a crafts industry for refu gees, is the prime financial force behind the Martha Graham dance troupe.
Large and jolly Victor Lord Roth schild, 53, the titular head of the Brit ish family, is a Cambridge don who has made a mark as philanthropist, scien tist and Labor peer, is also chairman of Shell Research. An expert on fertili zation, he once astonished BBC-TV viewers by bringing before the cameras an enormous model of a human sperm. (His daughter Emma, 15, this year be came the youngest woman ever admitted to Cambridge.) Like many Roth schild men and women who have made a tradition of volunteering for hazardous duty in wars from 1870 onward, he has several medals from his wartime post as a colonel in countersabotage.
Almost every French Rothschild lives surrounded by a museumlike collection of priceless paintings, period furniture, irreplaceable tapestries. Drawing only from Rothschild collections, Sotheby's or Parke-Bernet could hold an auction every week for a year— and each sale would make news. Curators of the Louvre and the Met can only drool at the accumulations of Egyptian sculpture, Louis XV and XVI furniture, Sevres porcelain, 16th century enamelware, and wall upon wall of Goyas, Rubenses, Watteaus and Fragonards. When Philippe and Pauline have tea, their dog Bicouille is sometimes served a snack off an aluminum dish placed upon a napkin spread over their expensive rugs. Says Pauline: "We are fortunate, of course, in that we can take ten or twelve servants when we travel, and thus can have things done the way we like them wherever we are."