The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  Residents of the building who knew Rappetti disagree violently with the theory that he was pushed or thrown. “He was not murdered,” said one emphatically. “He jumped. It’s as simple as that. He was depressed. He had money problems.”

  Franco Rossellini, the Italian film producer and nephew of the great director Roberto Rossellini, lives in apartment 10-J of the building. He said that police came rushing into his apartment before he knew what had happened and asked him if he knew who had jumped out the window and he saw the body, clad only in undershorts and an elaborate gold chain with charms and medals, lying ten floors below on the roof of a Volkswagen bus. “My God, for a moment I thought it was my butler,” he told me. The body had come from the apartment above his, 11-J, where Rappetti had just arrived as a guest. One article written about the case stated that he had arrived “with a small suitcase and some very pure cocaine.”

  When the police left, Rossellini contacted Diane Von Furstenberg, the dress designer and perfume manufacturer, who was an acquaintance of Denise Thyssen’s and who had, coincidentally, spoken with her on the telephone only a short time before. Although Denise Thyssen and Rappetti were in the city at the same time, supposedly neither knew the other was there. Von Furstenberg called the baroness at the Waldorf, realized she had not yet heard about Rappetti’s death, put her mother on the telephone in order to keep Denise’s line busy, and raced to the Waldorf Towers to break the news before she heard it from the police or news media. “Denise was hysterical,” remembered Rossellini. Von Furstenberg then called Heini Thyssen in Europe to tell him what had happened, and contacted Rappetti’s sister, who absolutely refused to believe that her brother had jumped. Later, Von Furstenberg accompanied Denise to the city morgue. Since Denise could not bear to go in and see her dead lover, Von Furstenberg identified the body. Only then was she able to relinquish the grieving baroness into the care of closer friends—Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, the daughter of Rita Hayworth; Nona Gordon Summers, then the wife of a London art dealer; and Cleo Goldsmith, the niece of international financier James Goldsmith.

  “Nobody pushed him out,” Rossellini asserted. “That is a fact. He was running away all the time. He was paranoid. He thought someone was after him. He was not eating anything anymore. He was afraid someone was trying to poison him.”

  Just as authoritatively, a woman who knew Rappetti well insists that he was not a suicide. “Oh, no, I don’t believe Franco jumped. He was so vain about his looks, he would never have gone out the window in undershorts.”

  “It would be almost impossible to throw a six-foot-three-inch, well-developed man out the window,” said Mariarosa Sclauzero, the person most likely to know the exact circumstances of the death. Sclauzero, a writer, still lives in Apartment 11-J, along with her husband, Enrico Tucci. They were both close to Rappetti, and Mariarosa was in the apartment at the time of the death, though in a different room. According to Sclauzero and Tucci, Rappetti had arrived in New York two days before and had registered at the Summit Hotel, after stopping to see Tucci at his office, where he told him, “There is no way out. I have nobody in the world I can trust anymore, not even my butler.” Alerted by Tucci that Rappetti was in a highly excitable state, Sclauzero went to the Summit and brought him back to the apartment. He was indeed carrying a suitcase, but, Sclauzero maintains, it contained no cocaine, just clothes and a picture of his small son.

  Rappetti kept saying over and over, “They’re after me. They want me dead. If anyone asks for me, say I am not here.” In the next hour, he tried several times to telephone someone in Switzerland, but he could not get through. There were also several calls for him, supposedly from Paris, but Sclauzero sensed that they were local calls and said that he was not there. Rappetti had left his watch in Paris, and asked to borrow one of Tucci’s watches and a T-shirt. He used the bathroom and went into one of the two bedrooms of the apartment to rest. Mariarosa remained in the living room, reading. When the police knocked on her door, after leaving Rossellini’s apartment, and asked if she had a guest, she followed Rappetti’s instructions and said no. Realizing, however, that something was wrong, she went into the bedroom and found the window wide open. Franco Rappetti was not there. On a table by the window were the watch he had borrowed and the T-shirt, folded. She admits it was a mistake to lie to the police. Later she was grilled for six hours.

  “Franco Rappetti was pushed, but not physically,” Sclauzero told me as we sat in Apartment 11-J of the Meurice. “Other people brought him to this despair. What he never said was who or why.” She said that Rappetti was convinced that he was being poisoned by a servant in Rome, who was being paid by “other people,” and that he was being pursued. She denied reports that he had money problems, arguing that he was worth about $5 million in art at the time of his death. She also said that after his death all the paintings in his apartment in Rome disappeared overnight.

  The death was declared a suicide. Several well-heeled friends who were approached to lend their private planes to fly Rappetti’s body back to Italy refused, on the ground that it would be unlucky to fly the body of a suicide. The day following the death, Heini Thyssen arrived at the Waldorf Towers. An oft-repeated story in these circles is that, on his arrival, Heini asked, “Does Denise blame me?” It is generally acknowledged that he arranged for the broken corpse to be shipped back to Genoa, Rappetti’s birthplace, in a chartered plane. The body was accompanied by the grief-stricken Denise Thyssen and her sister Penny, who is married to Jamie Granger, the son of film star Stewart Granger. There are those who say the body was shipped before an autopsy could be performed. There are others who believe that Rappetti was already dead when he was thrown from the window. The man who made the arrangements to ship the body for Thyssen was another art dealer he did business with. His name was Andrew Crispo.

  Many people who once moved in the orbit of this charismatic art dealer now seek to distance themselves as widely as possible from him. To the baron’s great distress, his name has frequently been associated in recent times with that of Crispo, who figured prominently and salaciously in the 1985 sadomasochistic murder of a Norwegian fashion student named Eigil Vesti. Crispo was a prime suspect in the murder, but his young assistant Bernard LeGeros was tried and sentenced for the crime. This past October, Crispo, who is currently in prison for tax evasion, was tried on a forcible-sodomy charge and acquitted.

  Thyssen and Crispo originally met at Crispo’s gallery during an exhibition called “Pioneers of American Abstraction.” Thyssen had lent one of his pictures, a watercolor by Charles Demuth, for the show. He complained that on the loan card beneath the picture the name Thyssen-Bornemisza had been misspelled. “How do you know?” asked Crispo. “Because I am Baron Thyssen,” was the reply. Thereafter, Thyssen began buying pictures from Crispo.

  Franco Rappetti, trying to hold on to his business relationship with Thyssen at the same time that he was conducting an affair with Thyssen’s wife, had once told Crispo that he would have to pay him a commission on any pictures he sold to the baron. Crispo had refused. After Rappetti’s death, Crispo became firmly entrenched as Baron Thyssen’s New York art dealer. In one month Thyssen spent $3 million on paintings, and the two men developed a close bond that has been the subject of endless speculation. Some people believe that the immensely rich baron financed Andrew Crispo’s Fifty-seventh Street gallery. Others believe that there was a deep friendship between Crispo and the baron’s oldest son, Georg-Heinrich, now thirty-seven. Georg-Heinrich, also called Heini, is the baron’s child by his first wife, a German Princess of Lippe, who is now the Princess Teresa von Fürstenberg. “Teresa and Heini should have stayed married,” said a grand European lady recently while lunching at Le Cirque. “She wouldn’t have cared about his peccadilloes. Ridiculous, all those divorces.” Young Heini lives in Monte Carlo and runs the vast family empire so that his father can devote himself entirely to the art collection. The Thyssen fortune, no longer connected with the original iron-and-steel business in Germany,
is now derived from shipbuilding in Holland, sheep farms in Australia, glass, plastics, and automobile parts in America, and assorted interests in Canada and Japan. Whatever relationship or relationships once existed among father, son, and Andrew Crispo no longer do.

  Tita Thyssen told a curious story about an American magazine which sent a crew to photograph her and her husband at their house in Jamaica and then used only a small picture of them, “Like a snapshot.” “There was something funny about it,” she said, shaking her head at the memory. “They stayed too long for a photography shoot—five days. I felt they were after something. Then we found out that the photographer was the boyfriend of Crispo’s boyfriend.”

  The baron now joined the conversation. “Crispo sold pictures to other people and then declared on the books that I had bought them so his buyers could avoid paying the New York City tax. Two-thirds of the pictures he said that I bought he actually sold to other people.”

  The baroness nodded her head in agreement.

  “What do you call those films where people are killed?” he asked.

  “Snuff?” I said. A snuff film is one in which a person is murdered, usually ritualistically, on-camera.

  “Snuff, yes. One of the newspapers in New York tried to say that I financed snuff films for Andrew Crispo.” He shuddered in disgust.

  “Why didn’t you sue?” I asked.

  He waved my question away with a dismissive gesture. “This is such bad coffee,” he said, putting his cup on the table and standing. “These people do not know how to make coffee. You can get better coffee in an airplane.” The conversation was over. Neither Rappetti nor Crispo was mentioned again. Back to art.

  “The baron is a man in love with his collection. Everything for him is his collection. He loves it. He is in love with it,” said the Duke de Badajoz, who is not only the great good friend of both the baron and baroness but also the man who has been, after Tita, the prime influence in guiding the baron’s decision to allow the collection to go to Spain. “After all the effort of his father and him to collect and amass 1,400 pictures, half of which are quite unique, it was more than natural that he was worried for a long time as to what would happen to the collection when he dies. He did not want it dispersed and auctioned. He has been looking around for some years for what could be a solution for the principal part of his collection, the A pictures.”

  Clearly, the pictures are the focus of the baron’s life. “I’m a lucky fellow. These pictures of my father’s I have known for fifty years, and I’ve been collecting for thirty-five years so I know them all.” Walking through the graceful galleries that his father built to house the early part of the collection and that he opened to the public after his father’s death in 1947, Thyssen was drawing more interest from the browsing tourists and art lovers than the paintings themselves. He moved with the assurance of a celebrity, knowing he was being looked at and talked about. When people came up to ask him to autograph their Thyssen-Bornemisza catalogs, he was completely charming. As he signed the books, he would say a few words or make a joke. He was dressed, as he almost always is, in a blue blazer with double vents, which his London tailor makes for him a dozen at a time, gray flannels, and a striped tie. In his hand he carried a large, old-fashioned key ring, unlocking certain rooms as we entered them and then locking them again as we left.

  “I bought this yesterday,” the baron said, looking at a Brueghel painting of animals. “I bought it from my sister. It’s not in the catalog. It belonged to my father, and my sister inherited it.” He moved on. “Now, this picture I bought from my other sister.” Although the baron inherited the major part of the collection when his father died, he has spent years buying back the pictures that his two sisters inherited. It is for this reason that he is determined that his collection be kept intact when he dies. Thyssen also had an older brother, whose story remains somewhat vague. “He lived in Cuba,” said the baron. “Then he moved to New York and lived at the Plaza Hotel. He lived completely on vitamins. He ODed on vitamins.”

  “ODed?”

  “Hmm, dead,” he said. He walked into another room.

  “This is my favorite picture,” he said, peering as if for the first time at a Ghirlandaio portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, a Florentine noblewoman, painted in 1488. “She died very young, in childbirth. We have never known if the picture was painted before or after her death. It was in the Morgan Library in New York. They had to buy some books, so they sold it.” He continued to make comments as he passed from one painting to the next: “A Titian, very late. He was almost ninety when he painted that … Who was that man who gave the big ball in Venice after the war? Beistegui, wasn’t it? That pair of Tintorettos comes from him … Everything in this room was bought by me and not by my father. I call it the Rothschild room. All the pictures in this room I bought from different members of the Rothschild family … My father bought this Hans Holbein of Henry VIII from the grandfather of Princess Di, the Earl of Spencer. The Earl bought a Bugatti with the money. When the picture was shown in England, Princess Margaret said to me, ‘Harry is one up on you.’ She was talking about his six wives, and my five. I said, ‘He didn’t have to go through all these tedious legal proceedings I do.’ ”

  Of course, only a fraction of the baron’s pictures were on view. Several of his Degas were in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of his old masters had been lent to the U.S.S.R. and were at that moment in Siberia. Still others were on loan to exhibitions around the world. He shook his head at the complexity of owning such a large collection.

  The baron unlocked a door, and we entered a part of his private museum called the Reserve. It is here that pictures for which there is no room in the galleries hang on both sides of movable floor-to-ceiling racks twenty to twenty-five feet high. In one room a restorer with a broken arm, on loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, was cleaning a fifteenth-century Italian portrait. “We have no room for this Edward Hopper,” the baron said of a picture of a naked woman sitting on a bed, “and there’s no place for that Monet.” He rolled the racks back. There was also no place for a Georgia O’Keeffe and an Andrew Wyeth and what seemed like several hundred others.

  “That’s a fake Mondrian there,” he said, approaching it and squinting at it. “I bought it by mistake. An expert told me he saw Mondrian paint it, and I believed him.”

  “Why do you keep it?”

  “I prefer to keep a small fake to a big fake,” he said, smiling.

  Behind a door, almost out of sight, hung a picture of the baron himself. He made no comment about the portrait until I mentioned it. “That’s me by Lucian Freud,” he said. The picture, which I had seen at the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, is chilling; it suggests that there is a dark side to this billionaire. “I was getting a divorce at the time,” he said, as if explaining Freud’s unflattering rendition. People who know the baron well say that it is an extraordinarily accurate portrait. “That is Heini totally,” said an American woman who had apparently known the baron extremely well for a short time between marriages and asked not to be identified. “He went into unbelievable mood swings.”

  Helmut Newton asked the baron to pose next to the Lucian Freud portrait. He did. “Your chin up a bit,” said Newton. The baron raised his chin. “Maybe that’s how I will look someday, but it’s not how I look now.” As we were leaving the room, he said, “There’s another Greco.”

  Once the Spanish government agreed to put up the necessary capital to house the paintings, and figured out what compensation should be made to the heirs of Baron Thyssen for renouncing their claim to his pictures, the deal was more or less in order. The baron has five children, starting with Georg-Heinrich from his first marriage. He has two children by his third wife, the former Fiona Campbell-Walter: Francesca, known as Chessy, who is an actress, and Lorne, an aspiring actor. After their divorce, Fiona, a beautiful English model, fell madly in love with Alexander Onassis, Aristotle’s son by his first wif
e, Tina Livanos. Although Fiona was acknowledged to be a positive influence on Alexander, who was younger than she, Aristotle Onassis despised her. In 1973, Alexander Onassis was killed in a plane crash. Thyssen also has a child, Alexander, by his fourth wife, Denise, as well as his adopted son, Borja, brought by Tita to the fifth marriage.

  “All the paintings legally belong to a Bermuda foundation, a trust, made by Baron Thyssen,” the Duke de Badajoz explained to me in his office in Madrid. “After all the proposals from all the countries were together, the Bermuda foundation met and decided the ideal solution would be to make a temporary arrangement and, if it worked out, to make the final solution.”

  The Spanish government will provide a palace known as the Villahermosa to house the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. When the old Duchess of Villahermosa died almost sixteen years ago, the time of block-long palaces for private living was at an end, and her daughters, two duchesses and a marquesa, sought to sell it. The enormous pink brick palace was first offered to the Spanish government for a relatively modest amount of money. For whatever reasons, the government turned down the offer, and a bank purchased the palace. In order to make the building work as a commercial institution, the inside was stripped, so all architectural details of the once-elegant structure have been obliterated, including what many people told me was one of the most beautiful staircases in Madrid. Then the bank went bankrupt, and the palace was bought by the Ministry of Culture, for more than five times what the government would originally have had to pay.

  The palace is huge. There are two floors below ground level which will be made over for restaurants, an auditorium for lectures, and parking space. There will be three complete floors of galleries, and the top floor will be used for offices. Several hundred of the A and B pictures from the Thyssen collection will hang in the Villahermosa Palace. A convent in Barcelona is being refitted to hang seventy-five of the religious paintings in the collection. The rest will continue to hang in the private galleries of the Villa Favorita in Lugano.