The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  He no longer found the stonewalling of Austrian officials amusing. Now he was as impatient as Randol. “Maybe you do understand, now, that from time to time I want to sue the whole republic! They play games—with you, with the heirs,” Czernin wrote Randol in a furious e-mail on December 29, 1998. “I asked Frodl yesterday if he could fax to me Adele’s last will. He didn’t want to, because ‘If I do, it will be sent around the world.’ And that’s the reason I’ll send HIM around the world.”

  Hubertus had moles in the Vienna archives. Adele’s will was key. Randol believed it was a nonbinding request and that Ferdinand had paid for the paintings, making him, in Austria’s patriarchal society, their legal owner. After World War II, it was difficult to argue that Ferdinand would have given them to Austria. In January 1999, a fax from Czernin began to scroll into Randol’s office. It was Adele’s will. Czernin found more damning evidence: Erich Führer’s letter transferring Adele’s portrait to the Belvedere, signed “Heil Hitler.”

  That same month, a Vienna Advisory Council on art restitution, the Beirat, recommended that Austria return 241 pieces of the Rothschild collection, which it had long insisted were “donated,” to the Rothschild heirs.

  Things were changing.

  ——

  That March, Maria’s spirits soared as she flew over the Alps, her resolve strengthening with the sight of the massive peaks and luminous glaciers. She had been invited to speak at a restitution conference. Life was picking up for this octogenarian. She had a mission now—a score to settle with history.

  When the taxi stopped at Karl-Lueger-Platz, Maria was overwhelmed with nostalgia. Here was the composers’ park, where the young Maria had wandered disconsolately while Fritz dallied with a married woman. At the Stubenbastei, Maria stopped at the front door of her long-ago home, the peaceful haven where she had climbed into her father’s arms and inhaled the smell of his leather chair. The concrete Roman legionnaire with wings on his helmet and snakes at his sternum still held vigil above her doorway. She thought of ringing her doorbell. But what was the point? There was nothing left. The names on the apartments belonged to strangers.

  The Austrians had shamelessly stolen her family’s life and offered no contrition. Even Maria’s favorite actress, Paula Wessely, who had made her weep in Liebelei, had remained in Austria to entertain Nazis. Her Gestapo minder, Felix Landau, was barely punished, Maria would learn. He escaped American detention and lived for years in Bavaria as an interior designer. He finally got a life sentence in Germany, but was freed after ten years. Landau was a free man in Vienna the last decade of his life; he died in 1983. Former Nazi governor Baldur von Schirach had served only twenty years, and lived long enough to be interviewed by David Frost.

  Maria hailed a cab. The Ringstrasse curved near Adele and Ferdinand’s house, which still housed national railway offices now of Austria. The cab stopped at the Belvedere. Maria climbed the grand staircase until she came face-to-face with Klimt’s golden Adele in the grand salon.

  Maria remembered listening to Adele hold forth as famous men listened. So intimidating to a little girl. Now Maria looked at Adele’s pale face with a lifetime of understanding, and saw the vulnerability and discontent. Maria saw her eagerness, the aspirations never realized. Now her aunt seemed poignant. Maria asked someone to photograph her in front of Adele. As the camera flashed, a young guard warned that photos were prohibited. “This is my aunt!” Maria retorted angrily. “This painting belongs to my family.”

  The young man regarded Maria with respectful curiosity. Museum guides never explained this enigmatic woman. The guard asked: Who was she?

  When Maria met Hubertus Czernin, he was terribly ill. Yet he was so intelligent and drily funny, so charming.

  Hubertus arranged a meeting with the culture minister, Elisabeth Gehrer. Maria told Gehrer she would consider a negotiated solution.

  Maria would later testify that she also met with Frodl.

  She said he took her to a café near St. Stephansplatz. “Now that we are alone, let’s say what’s in our hearts,” she quoted him as saying. Maria said she told Frodl they were not truly alone, she and other heirs had a lawyer—but he should speak frankly. She said Frodl told her: “Look, we have enough landscapes. We can spare landscapes, but just don’t take the portraits away.”

  Frodl would later deny this exchange took place.

  Randol got a free ticket to Europe that April by accepting an invitation to appear on a German game show, I Carry a Big Name, a sort of European What’s My Line in which contestants guess a panelist’s famous relative. Jet-lagged, Randol sat next to a great-grandson of opera singer Enrico Caruso and a grandson of German writer Heinrich Mann, who dressed like a rock star and said he wanted to found an “Island of Love” off Brazil.

  Randol made it through the show with his college German, and took the next plane to Vienna. He carried an eighty-five-page argument for the return of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts to present to the Beirat council. But in June, the Austrian panel recommended against returning the Klimt paintings. It said only sixteen Klimt drawings of Adele and twenty pieces of Ferdinand’s porcelain should be restituted. The decision was far from unanimous. One panelist resigned in protest.

  The Belvedere “is not the legal owner of these paintings,” Maria wrote to the Beirat. We “are keenly aware of the Gold Portrait’s importance as a national treasure. Once the Beirat decides to recognize our legal right to the paintings, we would then be in a position to work out a way with you that leaves the portrait in Vienna.”

  Maria never got an answer to the letter, or any others she wrote to Austrian officials. “In the old Vienna, people kissed the hand, they answered letters,” she would grumble.

  ——

  Randol was furious. “The recommendation of the Beirat is based on lies,” he wrote Hubertus in a scorching e-mail. “The world now knows that the Klimt paintings are Nazi-looted art. No amount of whitewashing, or legalistic argumentation can erase that fact.”

  Randol strafed Austria in the press. “To have argued that Ferdinand and Adele would have wanted this is to be a Holocaust denier,” he told the Los Angeles Times. His outburst made headlines in Austria.

  Czernin was delighted at his unfettered rage. Randol was barging into the fragile china shop that was Vienna and trashing the place.

  Not everyone was happy with Randol’s confrontational approach.

  “Trottel,” the skinny girl in Yugoslavia who had tried to save her father’s life, was now Princess Nelly Auersperg, an internationally known cancer researcher at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver. She had spent her life searching for markers that could detect ovarian cancer in time to save women’s lives. When Maria had asked her to join the legal claim in October 1998, she agreed to allow Randol to represent her. Now she had mixed feelings.

  Nelly felt a deep kinship with her cerebral great-aunt Adele, and shared her passion for learning. Adele had loved Austria, and Nelly believed in her heart that the Klimt paintings belonged there. Most Austrians today hadn’t even been born during this terrible history. Why should they be deprived of their paintings?

  Nelly wanted to be left in peace. She had never really gotten over her father’s death. She was trying to get his name cleared of the accusation that he collaborated with fascists in Yugoslavia. She had married into a conservative royal dynasty and made a good life. And she wasn’t even sure the paintings belonged to her family. Nelly feared Randol was headed for a messy public showdown with the Austrians. “I am horrified,” Nelly had written Randol, in a long, furious missive in November 1998. “It is clear to me that we have an irreconcilable difference of opinion as to how the case of the Bloch-Bauer estate should be handled. In the circumstances, it is better that you do not continue to represent my interest in this matter.”

  “I Can’t Afford for You to Lose”

  Randol now appealed directly to the Austrian culture minister, Elisabeth Gehrer, offering to settle the case through arbitration in Austr
ia. Her response was simple: If you disagree with the Beirat, you can contest the decision in court. But the Austrians demanded $1.8 million as a deposit against court costs, based on a portion of the estimated value of the paintings. Randol got the sum reduced to the equally unaffordable $500,000. This was war. Randol and Maria would pursue the case in the United States.

  After he returned from Vienna, Randol got a call from Stephen Lash, a top executive of Christie’s auction house in New York. Lash was also making overtures to Maria and Nelly. Lash put Randol in touch with Ron Lauder, the chairman of the new Commission for Art Recovery. In August 1999, by Randol’s account, Lauder’s chauffeur picked him up at JFK Airport and drove him to the former diplomat’s Long Island estate.

  Lauder was in his robe, chatting with the author Louis Begley. Colin Powell was making phone calls in the next room. Randol chatted with Powell’s wife, Alma, in the breakfast room.

  Lauder and Begley finally summoned him. Randol explained his strategy to recover the Klimts. To his dismay, they only nodded politely. Randol had hoped he could get a job at the Commission for Art Recovery so he could leave his law firm and work on the Klimt case full-time.

  Lauder told Randol he had seen the gold portrait of Adele for the first time when he was fourteen years old, on a trip to Vienna, and had thought about the painting ever since. He looked at Randol sternly. “Randy, I can’t afford for you to lose,” he said. But Lauder didn’t seem confident Randol could win. Randol said Charles Goldstein, the legal counsel of the commission, had a colleague look over Randol’s legal briefs and strategy. But no one offered Randol a job.

  Randol was deeply disappointed. He had a baby girl, Dora, and a son on the way. With chronic Crohn’s disease, Randol was tough to insure. He quit his job anyway, in April 2000. A friend, Mitch Stokes, sublet him a law office at Wilshire and Bundy for $1,200 a month. Randol’s father and father-in-law lent him money. Randol was on his own.

  But Randol and Maria had an ally of sorts. In February 2000, Lauder stood before the U.S. House of Representatives and declared that since the return of the notoriously extorted Rothschild collection, Austria had resolved few art theft claims. Lauder spoke as the founder and chairman of the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress. “I see this as part of the movement of the far right” of Austria, Lauder said. He told Congress that Minister Gehrer had “invited” Maria Altmann to sue for the return of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts in Vienna courts, but required a “bond of half a million dollars just to get started.”

  “Yes, you heard me correctly,” Lauder said.

  In August 2000, Randol and Maria filed the suit in U.S. federal court in Los Angeles. Austria asked that the suit be dismissed, saying U.S. courts were denied jurisdiction by the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which shields foreign governments from most lawsuits in U.S. courts. At the time, many lawyers might have agreed with Austria.

  How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?

  It might have surprised and disappointed Randol to discover he was not the worst fear of Gottfried Toman, the Vienna attorney defending Austria’s claim to the Klimts.

  Toman, a bald, bearded man with expressive eyes, dismissed Randol as a socially tone-deaf Los Angeles lawyer. Toman rolled his eyes when he heard that Randol called himself Viennese. To Toman, Randol was just a pushy American trial lawyer—the kind of assessment Randol chalked up to anti-Semitism.

  In Toman’s eyes, Randol’s frankness and transparency would go nowhere in subtle, opaque Vienna. But Maria was a problem. Toman had seen Maria on television. She spoke the poetic, musical German he had not heard since he was a small boy. It was the Italianate German of the Habsburg empire, with flourishes, courtesies, and the instinctive impulse—even in open conflict—to be charming. It was like a magic spell, this lilting, delicate dialect, and it was all but extinct now. Toman was entranced as Maria conjured up the possibility of an affair between her aunt and Klimt, then demurely waved it away with a smile and fluttering eyelashes that suggested the romance was indeed consummated.

  Toman was charmed by Maria. This worried him. He didn’t believe that either he or Randol had definitive proof that they were right. But Randol had Maria. Toman had only the Austrian state, and the liability of the terrible past that he called “the burden of history.”

  Klimt’s Stolen Women

  As Toman tried to anticipate Randol’s next move, the burden of history reared its head in a manner no one could have predicted. In September 2000, Belvedere director Gerbert Frodl and curator Tobias Natter opened a long-awaited exhibition, Klimt’s Women. It was to be a stunning triumph for Austria, a comprehensive showcase of Klimt’s work surpassed only by the Nazi-sponsored 1943 show of Klimt works now unavailable to art lovers because they had been burned at Immendorf.

  The poster of the 2000 show, Klimt’s sultry Lady with Hat and Feather Boa, hung all over Vienna. But heirs stepped forward to claim the painting when the show opened. “The figure’s bedroom eyes no longer seemed to signify an erotic gaze, but rather to convey something more akin to anxious anticipation, as if she were waiting to be picked up by her rightful owners,” quipped historian Leo Lensing in the Times Literary Supplement.

  As in the 1943 show under the Nazis, Adele was at center stage. But this time the inclusion of her portrait drew merciless barbs. Vienna culture reporter Joachim Riedl compared Austria to a “gangster’s moll, parading around after a bloody robbery with jewelry that she insists the victims actually gave her as a present.” The portrait of ill-starred Ria Munk, radiantly resurrected by Klimt, was also in dispute, claimed by the heirs of her murdered mother.

  The book produced for Klimt’s Women was a diary of tragedy. Here was a reproduction of the long-lost painting of Anton Felsovanyi’s mother, Gertrud, in her diaphanous white dress, bought by the Nazi propagandist Gustav Ucicky and still at large. Amalie Zuckerkandl’s bare white shoulders now evoked the vulnerability of an old woman who died at the hands of brutes. Klimt’s high-minded Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt seemed naïvely unprepared for the treachery that would darken her most intimate life.

  These women were not just portrait subjects. They were martyrs.

  The parade of stolen paintings could not have been more ill-timed. Some European leaders were already refusing to shake the hand of Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel. In early 2000, Schüssel had formed a coalition with the Freedom Party of infamous right-wing politician Jörg Haider, the son of a Nazi who called SS officers “men of honor.” The European Union even briefly imposed sanctions.

  Now Haider was using this strengthened political platform to attack U.S. attempts to win compensation for elderly Austrian former slave laborers and Holocaust survivors. “There must be an end at some point,” Haider told a Vienna meeting. “Not a cent more,” echoed the new Freedom Party finance minister, Karl-Heinz Grasser.

  A month after the disastrous Klimt opening, Haider defended the SS to an annual gathering of SS veterans October 1 in a mountain town in Carinthia, where Haider was governor. He openly flouted the Nuremberg tribunal’s definition of the SS as a criminal organization. “It is unacceptable that the past of our fathers and grandparents is reduced to that of criminals,” said Haider. “They are not criminals.” Chancellor Schüssel did little to improve Austria’s tattered image in a November interview with the Jerusalem Post when he insisted Austria was “the first victim of the Nazi regime” and the Nazis “took Austria by force.”

  The Klimt’s Women exhibition was scheduled to travel to Canada. But only a few paintings left Austria. Austria claimed that the gold portrait of Adele was too fragile. The art world, however, believed Austria feared that sympathetic foreign courts might pull the disputed paintings from museum walls.

  Then, in May 2001, Austria got an ominous shot across the bow. Los Angeles federal judge Florence-Marie Cooper ruled Randol and Maria’s case could go forward in U.S. courts.

  Judge Cooper ruled that Maria had made a “substantial and non-frivolous claim that thes
e works were taken in violation of international law.” Austria was an inadequate forum for the claim because of its “unduly burdensome” court filing fees, she wrote.

  Suddenly, the annoying Los Angeles attorney and his octogenarian plaintiff seemed a lot less easy to blow off.

  A Lost Cause Célèbre

  In the fall of 2001 there was a column in a Los Angeles Times community section, the Westside Weekly, by the columnist Robert Scheer, about an elderly woman trying to recover a painting of her aunt the Nazis had stolen from her family.

  One often heard these stories in Los Angeles. A family painting seized by Nazis, on display at a European museum. This case probably had the proverbial chance of a snowball in hell.

  I looked closer. That painting? I still recalled the first time I saw a reproduction, in my early teens, at a show of Germanic artists at the St. Louis Art Museum. I was now a reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

  The plaintiff, an eighty-five-year-old woman named Maria Altmann, lived nearby, in Cheviot Hills. Her number was listed. I dialed it, and an elderly lady with an Old World accent answered. Of course, my darling, she said. Come over at once.

  An elegant woman in a cream knit pantsuit opened the door. “Hello, my love!” Maria said warmly. “Can you wait just a moment while I finish with my client?”

  Still working, at her age? But yes, her client, a stylish older woman in a flattering navy blue blazer was regarding herself with pleasure in a three-way mirror in the living room. Maria presided over the fitting with the gracious, ceremonial air of a diplomat.

  With its orange sofa and tattered shag carpet, the place appeared to have been decorated in the seventies. Or the fifties. On the mantel was a large antique gilt clock with a cherub perched on it. A wall case held tiny pocket watches; one was shaped like a miniature skull, with diamonds for eyes. Macabre.