The Maestro

He's best known as the philanthropist who endowed the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra with an unprecedented collection of rare instruments. But if that's all you know about the operatic life of Herbert Axelrod, you don't know half the story.

By John T. Ward

Soon after he astonished the music world by parting ways with 30 string instruments made by the likes of Antonio Stradivari, 76-year-old Herbert R. Axelrod lays a gargantuan slice of tomato on a plate, trowels on some tuna salad, and slathers it in $150-a-bottle balsamic vinegar. As a final touch, he blasts the soggy heap with a terrifying coat of crushed red pepper. Now that, he says, is a "he-man lunch."

Photograph: Benoit Corte

Axelrod is in the conference room of the office he keeps just a mile from his oceanfront home in Deal, and signs of virility abound. On one wall hang photographs taken by Leopold III, the erstwhile Belgian king, while he and Axelrod hunted crocodiles in the Amazon. In the next room, a color copier churns out pictures of a younger, shirtless Axelrod netting exotic fish in the waters of Singapore, the Seychelles, and Brazil's Rio Negro. Around a corner, a poster commemorates Axelrod's star-packed 70th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall. Bookshelves here and in Axelrod's windowless office down the hall are filled with titles that he's published and many that he's written, including dozens on tropical fish, one on cigar appreciation, and a doorstopping biography of his idol, violinist Jascha Heifetz.

So the sudden appearance by the Father of Relativity in the epic saga that has been Axelrod's life should have come as no surprise. Born and raised in Bayonne, Axelrod spent almost 50 years turning his interest in exotic fish into a pet-care publishing empire called TFH Publications, named for its flagship magazine, Tropical Fish Hobbyist. After cashing out six years ago for a sum of at least $80 million—another $28 million is at stake in a pending lawsuit—Axelrod intensified a long but quiet campaign of philanthropy by giving away tens of millions of dollars, much of it in the form of the rare string instruments he'd been collecting since the mid-1970s. His largesse, and his sudden public profile, reached their crescendo in February, when he sold the bulk of his collection, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra at the bargain price of $18 million (the instruments were appraised at $50 million). "When an orchestra gets one del Gesu, that is big news all over the world," says symphony president Larry Tamburri, referring to the eighteenth-century instruments made by Guarneri del Gesu. The Axelrod haul—now dubbed the Golden Age Collection—included three del Gesus, an Amati, and thirteen Stradivarii, an assemblage that Tamburri says prompted an "out-of-body experience" when Axelrod first proposed the deal to him in early 2002.

Those are the verifiable highlights of Axelrod's bio. But they're accompanied by—and sometimes muddled by—numerous reports of adventures that make me wonder whether I'm chowing down with a part-time Forrest Gump. I've read, for example, about the week during the Korean War that Axelrod is said to have spent in Japan discussing marine invertebrates with Emperor Hirohito. The story goes that Axelrod, then engaged in smuggling whiskey to a M.A.S.H. unit when not at his post in an Army field lab in Korea, was invited to the Summer Palace on Sagami Bay after a chance encounter with a leading Japanese ichthyologist in a Tokyo library. Axelrod had just published his first book on tropical fish. As it turned out, His Majesty the Emperor had a jones for sea slugs.

Then there was the time Axelrod and a buddy set off into the wilds of Brazil to capture two rare black jaguars for the Walt Disney Company, which wanted them for a film. Having caught one black jaguar but unable to find a second, Axelrod and his pal sent a "run-of-the-mill" jaguar to Manaus, where they tranquilized it, had a hairdresser dye it black, and shipped it off to Hollywood.

Other credulity strainers crowd my notes. Like the report that Axelrod swam fifteen miles across Lake Ontario when he was ten years old. Or that he once stepped off a plane in Trinidad, dipped a net into a pond at the edge of the runway, and "discovered" hundreds of specimens of a bright red fish never before seen by any Trinidadian, let alone any taxonomist in the world. By comparison, the claim that Axelrod corresponded with Churchill about their common love of goldfish seems mundane.

But whether I'll even get to ask Axelrod about those reports is doubtful, if a warning I've heard about him is true. It holds that after about 40 minutes of regaling me with tales, he'll abruptly declare an end to the interview and retreat to the bubble of privacy that surrounds him and Evelyn, his wife of 48 years. In the meantime, instead of getting whittled down, my list of subjects to ask about only grows longer.

As when, for example, Axelrod casually mentions that he studied mathematics under Einstein.

Einstein? This I haven't heard before. Axelrod, a graduate of New York University, says he would travel to Princeton during his student years to hear Einstein chatter about the lattice theory, which involves the arrangement of atoms in a crystal. Alas, minutes after that revelation—and right on schedule—my host develops a case of laryngitis. It turns out that he recently spent five nights smoking cigars with fishing buddies down in Cuba and hasn't yet recovered. "Okay, goodbye," he wheezes after loading my arms with books, a draft of a paper he's writing for a Dutch publication about a Cuban coral reef, and a picture of Evelyn, circa 1954. "Here, put that in your article," he says. "Isn't she gorgeous?"

Even Todd Axelrod, Axelrod's 53-year-old son from his previous marriage and his only child, doesn't know where to draw the line between the man and the myth. A retailer of autographs and rare manuscripts who splits his time between Las Vegas and British Columbia, the younger Axelrod didn't grow up in his father's household and had a contentious relationship with him that in adulthood evolved into genuine friendship, he tells me by phone from his Canadian home.

"Ask him," the younger Axelrod says with amusement when I inquire about the veracity of the Lake Ontario story. And how about the one involving the salon-dyed jaguar? "It sounds right," he laughs.

Really, trying to disentangle the apocrypha from the facts of his father's life is wrongheaded, advises Axelrod the younger. "If you listen to his life as a song, it's the rhythm that makes sense," he says. "The lyrics don't have to be that accurate. He is bigger than life."

Burly in appearance and manner, with a voice like an ancient car horn attached to a new battery, Herbert R. Axelrod is a classic last-worder. At a Valentine's Day press conference to announce the completion of the symphony deal, Axelrod turned on orchestra officials when he thought he heard one say that his beloved "fiddles" would be stored at the Newark Museum when not being used for concerts. That represented plain heresy to Axelrod, who wanted the orchestra's musicians to take the violins, violas, and cellos home and to schools. "You're going to put these instruments away in a museum?" he thundered. "Better not happen!" The officials meekly assured him that he'd misunderstood.

People who know Axelrod, though, say his gruffness is a peppery crust that conceals a moist core of sentiment and generosity. He sobbed openly when all 30 of his fiddles were played together for the first time in history. Once, his son told me, while eating dinner at a Bradley Beach restaurant, Axelrod paid for cake and ice cream for birthday celebrants whom he'd never met. Dozens of promising young violinists have been entrusted with his instruments cost-free, often for years at a time. Never one to duck a slug-it-out lawsuit over an infringed patent or other grievance, Axelrod several times has turned over his court winnings to charities after making his point, says his lawyer, Doug Calhoun. Axelrod once won a judgment against a manufacturer of a printing press over a design flaw, says Calhoun, and then gave the defendant his patented ideas for how to fix the problem.

Though most New Jerseyans had never heard of Axelrod before the orchestra deal was proposed just over a year ago, evidence of his accomplishments is ample. Look in the authors volume of Books in Print, and you'll see an entire column of titles, and then some, under his name. Likewise, Axelrod's moniker appears in the latinized form used by taxonomists on dozens of fish and fish fossils that he first identified, including Paracheirodon axelrodi, better known as the cardinal tetra, for years the best-selling aquarium fish in the world. The U.S. Patent Office credits him with 29 inventions in animal care, publishing, and cigar production. The Smithsonian boasts five Axelrod-donated string quartets, and the University of Guelph, near Toronto, has an ichthyology institute named for him. He has a master's in mathematics and a PhD. in medicine, both from NYU, and three honorary doctorates.

Victor Parsonnet, chairman of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra board of trustees, says that about five years ago Axelrod told him that upon completion of an upcoming business deal, he'd have a million dollars for the orchestra. "You don't hear that sort of thing very often, but I sort of shrugged," Parsonnet says. "About two years later, he called me and said, `Listen, I got the million dollars for you.' It was real. He's real."

Real also, says Robert H. Boyle, are the stories of Axelrod's watery endeavors. As a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, Boyle wrote a 1965 feature article about Axelrod titled "The Strange Fish and Stranger Times of Dr. Herbert R. Axelrod." Despite the skeptical headline, the piece went on for eight breathlessly lionizing pages, recounting the Hirohito, Leopold, and Churchill anecdotes and a dozen more. Little was attributed to sources. Still, says Boyle, every word of the article went through the magazine's rigorous verification process.

"We checked it all out," Boyle says. "We sent cables to correspondents in Djakarta, Manaus, Rio—wherever he'd been in the world. We queried Japan about the Hirohito stuff. He did all that. He was known."

Axelrod says he has spent more than 50 years working seven days a week, with hardly a vacation to speak of. He credits his success to acting on inspiration. "I flow with the stream," he says. He tackles the easiest ideas first: Those that pan out, he repeats; those that fail, he doesn't. The only time he sits still is after dinner, when he retires to a favorite chair with a cigar to review the day and plan the next. He does this all in his head, without written reminders. The day we meet for lunch, he tells me he's been in his storefront office since before dawn. "I'm driven," he says. "Don't ask me why. But if I sit in the sun or relax for half an hour, it's all over."

Born in 1927, Axelrod was shaped by what he calls a "typical disciplined childhood." His family lived in a rental on 30th Street in Bayonne, between the Boulevard and Avenue C, where young Herbert's days were packed with responsibility: banking the stove and washing dishes; violin lessons and practice; homework and Hebrew school. Aaron, his father, was a published mathematics teacher and able violinist who "kept pushing me to be better than he was," Axelrod says.

Todd Axelrod says his late grandfather's influence was huge. "When you teach mathematics, there's no almost," he says. "You either have the right answer or you don't."

By his early teens, Axelrod felt himself a full participant in the world. Once, when he was about fifteen, he took his friend Norman Lasker to see Efrem Zimbalist play Carnegie Hall. After the concert, Axelrod told Lasker he wanted to go backstage to meet the great violinist. Lasker was reluctant; here they were, a couple of ill-dressed kids from Bayonne High among the tuxedoed swells. But Axelrod, undaunted, took Lasker in tow and made his way to Zimbalist's dressing room. There Axelrod plunged in and proceeded to have a pleasant conversation with his hero. Lasker remembers being "overwhelmed" by the experience.

"He had tremendous lack of fear," Lasker says of Axelrod. "He was nervy."

Less than a decade later, Axelrod wandered into the jungles of Brazil armed only with a fishnet, a ready smile, and a willingness to meet a stranger's eye. "Everybody thought I was absolutely crazy," he says. "But I was never concerned or afraid. Never."

Before he'd ever given a thought to pretty fish, though, there was the violin. Axelrod grew up in love with it. His father put a miniature one in his crib when he was an infant, and when Axelrod was a teenager, his Uncle Pascha—Paul Kochansky, a world-class violinist who owned a Strad—once visited with his accompanist, Arthur Rubenstein. That night, in the Bayonne walk-up, Axelrod got to play the Strad, a 1687 job known as the Ole Bull. Or rather, he believes he must have played it, because it was handed to him with that expectation. What he does remember, Axelrod wrote in a 1989 essay for Arts & Antiques magazine, was being "hypnotized by the golden varnish, the velvety grain of the wood, the arabesque of inlaid ebony and ivory."

Around 1975, flush with financial success, Axelrod finally bought his own Strad, a model known as the Empress Catherine, from a Philadelphia dealer. Over the next two decades, he would buy, sell, and trade several dozen rare Cremonese instruments, including the Ole Bull, which he later gave to the Smithsonian.

He also would take on the challenge of compiling a book about Heifetz, a publicity-averse musical genius whom Axelrod still regards as a "god." The resulting tome, simply titled Heifetz, is one that orchestra president Tamburri finds "astounding" in its completeness, "particularly considering that it wasn't an authorized biography."

That's putting it diplomatically.

"Accept my most fascinated `pfui' for the ugly, unfair and untrue book," Heifetz wrote to Axelrod on a promotional photo. A few days later, Heifetz sent a second autographed picture, inscribed, "Your book stinks and is undignified."

"He sued me too," says Axelrod, who included both photos in a later edition, "and then we became really good friends." There are violin dealers who carp behind his back that Axelrod's Strads aren't of the highest quality or that he's overestimated their values for tax pur-poses, but he shrugs them off. Harder on him, says his friend Eugene Balon, is the treatment by those, particularly in the fields of aquaculture and publishing, who ignored Axelrod after he gave them a toehold on success. "He has had many disappointments," says Balon, a Czech-born ichthyologist, now retired from the University of Guelph. "The people he helped most were ingracious and basically—how would one say it?—betrayed him. I think it was a true betrayal of friendship." Axelrod says his motto is "No good deed goes unpunished," and claims to believe it without qualification. The worst thing he ever did, he says emphatically, was to get rich, because everybody wants a piece of him. He says he could have lived his life just as comfortably with much less.

Though he's in fine health, Axelrod is now in the process of getting his estate in order, he tells me, after relenting to my requests for a second interview—one that also involves macho tuna. He's liquidated his company and his considerable real estate holdings. He sold the violins to protect Evelyn from vultures should he go first. He chose the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra as the sole buyer (over the Vienna Philharmonic, which he says offered $55 million) because he loves the orchestra and wanted to help it distinguish itself. In April, the orchestra raised $700,000 at a $2,500-a-plate dinner party at Liberty State Park to help pay for the collection. Axelrod was so besieged by well-wishers at the event that he didn't notice the fourteen-foot-high ice sculpture of Stradivari testing one of his instruments until late in the evening. Now, having fulfilled his "unattainable goal" of outfitting a string section with a truckload of fine fiddles, Axelrod says he wants only privacy to write and reflect. Among his near-term projects is an article about how his fish-collecting efforts gave rise to a town in the Brazilian jungle.

I ask Axelrod whether he's also thinking about his legacy and perhaps having his name on the side of a building. "Do I look like that kind of guy?" he says, relaxing in a loose-fitting shirt, his silver hair unkempt. "I'm not." (The Axelrods, though, do have their names on two modest facilities: the ichthyology institute at Guelph and a 500-seat theater under construction at the Jewish Community Center in Deal.)

And what of all those heroic—if slightly dubious—tales? Escorting me to the door a second time, Axelrod insists every one of them is true—except, maybe, the one purporting that he and Churchill exchanged letters about goldfish.

"I don't remember that," he says. "But I think I sent him some cigars..."

Contributing editor John T. Ward wrote about the case of a convicted child molester in the June issue.