Bathsheba Bloomingdales Shmutz, Baron Ezekiel Gideon Rothschild

By Catie Lazarus July 2, 2004

Bathsheba Bloomingdales Shmutz, 29, and Baron Ezekiel Gideon Rothschild, 69, were married today at the home of Queen Noor in St. Lucia. Rabbi Moishe Gawlshplatz officiated. Mr. Rothschild’s father, Baron Judah Jonah Rothschild, a cantor, participated.

The bridegroom is known as Pish and invented the zipper. He served as the Senior Undersecretary to Presidents Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson and the Chief Cultural Attache to President John F. Kennedy. Most recently, as the chairman on the Select Committee on Intelligence, he rewrote the U.S. corporate tax code.

Mr. Rothschild sings soprano in !Zest, the Afro-Jewish barbershop quartet, and is a member of the board of Zouth Ball, a Zionist ballet camp for teenage Ugandan Jews. His paternal grandfather invented the button, and his maternal great-great uncle was the official phrenologist to the Coolidge White House.

Ms. Shmutz is known as Sheebs. She graduated summa cum laude from the Massachusetts School of Technology and, as a Rhodes Scholar, received a joint master’s degree in postmodern poetry and public health at Oxford University. While hang-gliding over the fjords of Tierra del Fuego, she wrote two Booker Prize-winning novellas, “Perspiration” and “Wind” (Samson & Goliath Press). On vacation in Laos, Ms. Shmutz stapled herself to a tree to salvage the nest of the last remaining Pile birds known to exist, for which she received the Clara Barton Medal of Empathy from Greenpeace.

Ms. Shmutz’s father, Shmul Shmutz, is a psychoanalyst and co-chaired the Freudian Society’s Rorschach Subcommittee that arrived at the color black for most of the blots. Her mother, Norma L. Shmutz, an activist, volunteers for Go Freedom Go!, a non-profit organization that supplies flotation devices to Haitian émigrés. Ms. Shmutz’s paternal great-great-great grandfather created long division, and her maternal grandfather invented the “summer sale.”

The couple met four years ago on the Hampton Jitney, the bus between Manhattan and the eponymous summer get-away on Long Island. Mr. Rothschild’s plane was being reupholstered by clothing designer Marc Jacobs, so he boarded the bus known to him as a child as the “maid mobile.” The only unoccupied seat was next to Ms. Shmutz, who was clipping her nails.

It was not until her cuticle nearly sliced his cornea that they actually spoke. Embarrassed, Ms. Shmutz blushed and mustered an “excuse me,” but when her two and his one good eye locked, time stopped. The pair rode the jitney together the entire summer. When Mr. Rothschild confessed to his beloved that he owned his own plane, a g-70, she admitted she did not even have a home in Hamptons.

The bridegroom’s three previous marriages ended in divorce.

Catie Lazarus, a comedienne, is the writer of the forthcoming film “Dream Squashers.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

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