Statisticians have long been telling us how steeply the life-expectancy curve continues to rise. As a result, receiving an invitation to a one-hundredth birthday party, although surprising, is not necessarily shocking. Indeed, it is to just such an event that many in the worlds of finance, politics, and art were recently summoned. The birthday celebration in question was held in Madrid this mid-October and took the form of a symposium honoring Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who was born exactly a century ago but actually died at age eighty-one in 2002. Centenarian or not, Thyssen was certainly a commanding presence during the second half of the last century. He was a grandson of August Thyssen (1842–1926), the diminutive but hugely assiduous and successful steel and coal entrepreneur. August has often been compared to Andrew Carnegie as a quintessential example of the nineteenth-century empire-building industrialist. Besides the famous name, H. H. (“Heini”) Thyssen also sported the title of baron, by way of his father who had dubiously “inherited” the prefix via his first wife’s Hungarian noble descent. Heini nevertheless maintained a keen sense of humor and occasionally quipped: “my family was in iron and steel—my mother ironed and my father stole.”
Growing up in a post-war Europe that was still beset by deprivation, Heini enjoyed privileges that, at that time, were reserved for the lucky few: