Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Getty's longtime accountant and personal aide, Norris Bramlett, suggested a more lucrative way to dispose of the art. Rather than donate it to various institutions, Getty should create his own nonprofit museum and run it out of his Malibu home. That way, the oilman could take even bigger deductions by contributing stock, paying for operational expenses, and purchasing art—all while holding on to the collection. Getty eagerly agreed and signed an indenture on December 2, 1953, creating the J. Paul Getty Museum, a gallery and art library whose mission was "the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge." All future antiquities acquisitions were made on behalf of the museum.

  The small museum opened a few months later with no great fanfare. Los Angeles was still a cultural backwater, and at the modest opening ceremony, the city's mayor said that he hoped the new museum would correct the city's "severe cultural deficiencies." Getty did not bother to attend the opening, but in a telegram from Kuwait he said, "I hope this museum, modest and unpretentious as it is, will nevertheless give pleasure to the many people in and around Los Angeles who are interested in the periods of art represented here."

  For years, the Getty Museum did the bare minimum to preserve its tax-exempt status. Museum hours were Wednesday and Friday from 3 to 5 P.M., with appointments available on Saturday upon special request. No admission was charged, but visitors had to book reservations in advance for the twenty-four-car parking lot. The museum's five small galleries were so jammed with art that many of Getty's finest ancient statues were kept outside in the courtyard, exposed to the elements.

  By the late 1960s, even the house's expanded galleries were so full that a major remodeling was necessary. Getty asked Stephen Garrett, a young British architect who was helping him remodel his sumptuous winter residence on Italy's Tyrrhenian Sea, to fly to Los Angeles and assess the situation. Garrett was skeptical about his task, but as he turned off the Pacific Coast Highway and wound up a long driveway lined with eucalyptus trees, he became enchanted by what he saw. Before him was a lush canyon with a large Spanish ranch house, surrounded by orchards of lemon, avocado, and orange trees.

  Garrett's guide for the day was Burton Fredericksen, a toothy, fresh-faced graduate student who introduced himself as Getty's curator. Fredericksen had started working at the Getty Museum in 1951 as a part-time security guard while studying for a Ph.D. in art history at UCLA. The quiet afternoons had given him an opportunity to read in the museum's library. He never completed his Ph.D. but stayed on at the museum as curator. Despite his youth, Fredericksen knew something about displaying art, and he told Garrett that if Getty was serious, he would have to construct a new building. Garrett agreed, secretly hoping that Getty would give him the commission.

  Back in London, Garrett suggested to Getty that a new structure would have to be built on the property, one large enough to accommodate the entire art collection, which had grown by more than a thousand objects since the 1950s. Getty agreed, and by 1970 he had settled on a controversial design for the new museum: a top-to-bottom re-creation of the Villa dei Papiri, an opulent Roman estate outside Naples that had belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law. The villa had been buried by Mount Vesuvius's massive eruption in A.D. 79 and been rediscovered only in the eighteenth century by the excavation crews of Spain's King Charles III. The only record of the villa's design was to be found in the careful sketches of the Swiss engineer who oversaw the excavation for Charles.

  "It will be a re-creation of what life was like in Roman times, down to its last detail," Getty told his architect. "What better setting to display the antiquities?"

  Getty hired Garrett to supervise the construction of what would come to be called the Getty Villa, but the billionaire micromanaged every detail from his study at Sutton Place. Every three months, Garrett flew to London carrying blueprints, color schemes, marble samples, and photos. He once had a home movie made featuring construction crews endlessly pouring concrete into wooden forms. Getty made his guests watch it and then, with deep fascination, asked to see it again. But the billionaire dedicated most of his attention to the budget, which had to account for every penny spent on the structure. It was not uncommon for Getty to question even the smallest expense. He limited the number of security guards to twenty-five and considered planting electronic bugs in as many as sixty artworks to help monitor the patrons. He resisted plans to install air conditioning, reasoning that works of art had survived for centuries without it. Couldn't the museum staff clean the pool? And was it really necessary for them to have a $23 electric pencil sharpener when a manual one cost just $7?

  In January 1974, just as the negotiations for the bronze athlete were falling apart, the new Getty Museum opened to the public. Getty's choice of design was widely mocked. Newspapers from London to New York lampooned it as an intellectual Disneyland, a garish Roman parody worthy of a D. W. Griffith film—hallucinatory, horrid, weird. Most critical was the hometown Los Angeles Times, whose art critic pilloried the new Getty Museum as "Pompeii-on-the-Pacific," a monument to "aggressive bad taste, cultural pretension and self-aggrandizement" that cemented the city's reputation "as Kitsch city and the Plastic Paradise."

  The public, however, embraced the Getty Villa. A few Sundays after the opening, the queue of cars waiting to get in was so long that it clogged the Pacific Coast Highway for two miles. By March, the new museum recorded its 100,000th visitor, a hundred times the annual attendance of the old galleries.

  That the crowds came to see the building more than the art was no secret. Getty's penny-pinching over the years had left him with a collection of largely mediocre art—and deeply resentful staff members. They were chagrined that despite the opulent new building, Getty was still unwilling to dip into his wealth to acquire any artwork of lasting significance. He had idly sat by while his crosstown rival, industrialist Norton Simon, had scooped up several masterpieces. And it was only at the last minute that Getty's staff, desperate to fill out the new museum's first-floor antiquities galleries, had convinced the billionaire to go ahead with the bulk purchase of four hundred small antiquities—at a 30 percent discount—from a New York antiquities dealer named Jerome "Jerry" Eisenberg. Now, even with the museum open, the staff had to beg and plead to purchase art books for the museum's library.

  Hope arrived in early 1976, when an announcement was made at a staff meeting that Getty's health was failing. Over the next few months, there was no word from Sutton Place. Expense requests and the telephone there went unanswered. Getty had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and retreated from the world. The only people allowed to see him were his nurses and a steady stream of alternative medicine gurus and quacks—Chinese acupuncturists, a masseuse, an American Indian with "healing hands" flown in from Florida.

  By July, Getty was dead. Three days later, Burton Fredericksen, now the museum's chief curator, drove to the downtown Los Angeles County courthouse for the opening of Getty's will. He hated Getty's parsimony more than most at the museum, having witnessed countless lost opportunities over the past twenty-five years. It would not surprise any of the staff if that stinginess were somehow embodied in Getty's last will and testament. But Fredericksen had a hunch it wouldn't be. Getty supported no charities to speak of and was estranged from his surviving sons, who were already provided for through a family trust. Where else would Getty's personal wealth go?

  Fredericksen was led to a nondescript, wood-paneled courtroom, where he felt his excitement grow as he read through the will. Getty had left insultingly small sums to his children, a former wife, and members of the Sutton Place harem. Many of the other people in his life were ignored altogether. But the payoff came in the ninth codicil: "I give, devise and bequeath all of the rest, residue and remainder of my estate ... to the Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Museum, to be added to the Endowment Fund of said Museum."

  In all, Getty had left the museum nearly $700 million in Getty Oil stock. With that flick of a pen, Getty had transformed his neglected provincial museum into the richest art institution in
the world.

  Racing back to the office, Fredericksen led thirty museum employees in a champagne toast to the old man. Viewed through the lens of the museum's sudden newfound wealth, its art collection looked all the more second-rate. People took turns making speeches, hailing the Getty Museum's bright future and the untold acquisitions that would now be possible—so many, no doubt, that soon another new building would be needed to house them.

  IN A MEETING a short time later, Fredericksen and his curatorial staff resolved to make the bronze athlete their first major purchase of the new era. Gone were any concerns about the bronze's price or legal status. The museum's board voted unanimously to acquire the statue for $3.95 million, the very price Getty had recently refused to pay. And no permission was sought from Italian authorities, as Getty had once demanded.

  Although Getty family members were challenging the will, the court agreed to advance enough of the estate to the museum to make the purchase. The bronze was shipped from London to Boston and then quietly parked in an exhibit hall in the Denver Art Museum for seven months to avoid paying California taxes. When the statue arrived in Malibu in mid-November 1977, the Getty formally announced its acquisition, enshrining it in its own humidity-controlled room at the new museum. As a final tribute to the founder, the board of trustees dubbed it "the Getty Bronze."

  2. A PERFECT SCHEME

  AMONG THOSE WHO gathered to toast the death of J. Paul Getty was Jiri Frel, the museum's roguish antiquities curator.

  Frel had been hired by Getty four years earlier while he was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant curator under Dietrich von Bothmer. He was a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, which he fled in 1969 after a twenty-year career as a noted classics professor and expert in Greek art at Charles University in Prague. He came to the United States under a fellowship from Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies and brought with him a refugee's state of mind: keen survival instincts and a healthy disregard for the rules.

  Frel cultivated a closer relationship with Getty than most of his colleagues at the Malibu museum. The two met as Getty was pursuing the bronze athlete, an object that inspired awe in both men. Frel's guile served him well in convincing his stingy benefactor to purchase expensive antiquities. Mindful of Getty's fear of death, Frel presented an ancient tombstone to Getty as an "archaic relief." He once manipulated the old man into purchasing a stone Roman chair by having it delivered to Sutton Place and set before Getty, whom he gently pushed into the seat. The fit was so preternaturally comfortable that Getty approved the purchase on the spot.

  Not long after their first meeting, Getty offered Frel a job. Frel broke his three-year contract with the Met to become the Getty Museum's first antiquities curator. Garrett and Fredericksen, Frel's nominal bosses, gave the imperious Czech a wide berth. They knew of his tendencies. Frel had casually mentioned to Fredericksen that the Met had paid off a Lebanese dealer to help concoct a cover story about the provenance of the Met's famous Greek vase, the Euphronios krater. When Fredericksen expressed shock, Frel shook his head and said condescendingly, "You Americans are so naive."

  With wild gray hair, oversize black glasses, and a pathological confidence in his own opinion, the fiftysomething Czech paraded around the museum grounds like an emperor. When not bullying people with his intellect, he was delighting them with his old-world charm. He wore rumpled suits with flapped pockets and open-toed sandals over socks. He hugged colleagues and playfully bumped heads with strangers. A polymath, Frel played the violin, was an accomplished mathematician, and was fluent in six modern languages and Latin. Around him, no conversation was dead for long. Frel was always ready with a Shakespearean quote or the saucy story about why the Lansdowne Herakles, one of the antiquity collection's centerpieces, was missing its penis: Getty had been too cheap to buy the member, which Lady Lansdowne had chiseled off and discreetly hidden away.

  While living under Communist rule, Frel had learned to be a charming manipulator, all things to all people. When speaking with Jews, he was quick to pull out the Star of David he carried with him, "in solidarity" with those persecuted in World War II, he would say. Frel spewed vitriol about Eastern Europe totalitarianism but once revealed in an interview with the FBI that he had tried unsuccessfully to join the Communist Party when he was at Charles University. In the same interview, he waxed eloquent about America as a "great and good country." In reality, he detested everything American, from the mustard to the bread to the dummkopf-producing public schools.

  Frel was perhaps best known as an uncompromising womanizer. At the Met, female employees devised a telephone code to warn one another when he left his office for the stacks, where he was known to accost young research assistants. Many happily complied, succumbing to his craggy looks, his kiss of the hand, his deep gaze into their eyes as he explained how the likenesses of Jesus and the Apostles in early Christian art were copied from Roman portraits. Left in his wake in Prague, Princeton, and New York was a trail of ex-wives, heartbroken girlfriends, and abandoned children.

  But for all his flaws, Frel recognized Getty's death for what it was. As his colleagues hoisted their champagne glasses in gleeful unison, Frel was uncharacteristically quiet. He eventually pulled Fredericksen aside and whispered darkly in his thick accent, "This sudden wealth is going to cause us a great deal of grief."

  GETTY'S GIFT CAME with one big string attached: it was to be controlled by a board of six museum trustees, many of whom possessed no knowledge of art.

  Prior to Getty's death, the board existed mostly to fulfill the legal requirements for nonprofits in the U.S. tax code. The trustees met quarterly to rubberstamp the old man's decisions. Getty had stacked the board with his accountant, a Getty Oil executive (Harold Berg), the firm's outside attorney, his sons Ronald and Gordon, and his Italian art adviser, Federico Zeri, an outspoken Renaissance art historian who guided many of Getty's acquisitions, often in exchange for a kickback from dealers, some believed. The chairman was Berg, a paunchy Getty Oil vice president who had befriended Getty when both worked as young roughnecks in the East Texas oil fields. Berg's aesthetic sensibilities ran from unfiltered cigarettes to gigantic martinis, and while running museum board meetings, he sometimes nodded off. A blunt Kansan, he once rejected as "bullshit" a plan to excavate the rest of the Villa dei Papiri, where unknown treasures remained untouched under Vesuvial ash. Berg had a better idea: why didn't the Getty pool its money with other institutions and just buy out the National Archaeological Museum in Naples?

  With the founder's death, this was the motley crew that would now control the Getty fortune.

  Frel regarded the board with loathing. They were "fucking American morons" who valued their ancient art like pinkie rings—the bigger and shinier, the better. With the exception of Zeri, they didn't understand art or what it took to build a world-class antiquities collection. The Louvre, the National Museums in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art—these institutions hadn't become great just by buying marquee items. They also gobbled up pottery shards, architectural fragments, second-rate statues, and crumbling votive urns. These pieces might not be worthy of exhibition, but they formed the spine of a deeper "study collection" that attracted scholars from around the world.

  Frel was determined to build such a collection at the Getty, hoping to convert the boutique museum into a hub of modern scholarship. The board saw no point to the endeavor. So, even before Getty's death, the antiquities curator set in motion a scheme to work around them: if board members wouldn't buy the objects, Frel would acquire them as donations.

  Frel began canvassing everyone he knew for gifts. On a trip through New York, he visited the Manhattan flat of Malcolm Wiener, an investment fund manager and Met board member. Frel found Wiener, an antiquities buff, near tears. Someone had just knocked over a Mycenaean pot, shattering it. Frel got down on all fours to tenderly gather the pieces into a dirty shirt pulled from his travel bag. "I'm going to take every little piece of clay and have
the Getty staff glue this back together," he said. A few weeks later, Wiener received a letter thanking him for his "donation." Frel had accessioned the restored piece in Wiener's name.

  Frel also put the arm on antiquities dealers who wanted to keep good relations with the newly rich Getty. One donated a bust of the Greek historian Thucydides. Another contributed a head of Livia, the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus. A third handed over $9,000 worth of ancient silver and gold crowns.

  Still, the pace of donations was too slow. Frel was determined to find another way.

  THAT WAY APPEASED thanks to a twenty-five-year-old coin dealer named Bruce McNall. A natural-born salesman with cherubic looks, McNall had converted a boyhood fascination with ancient coins into a thriving numismatic business. During the early 1970s, with the Dow bottoming out at 600 and America reeling from sticker shock at the gas pumps, McNall peddled coins as lucrative investments. He threaded his way through the trimmed hedges and tennis courts of Bel Air, California, toting a boxy briefcase of samples. Placing his wares on the table, he regaled prospective buyers with colorful anecdotes about the Roman emperors depicted on the coins. Then he moved in for the kill, explaining that Greek decadrachms had appreciated 350 percent just between 1970 and 1974. His client list quickly grew to include the likes of record mogul David Geffen, Charlie's Angels producer Leonard Goldberg, and Motown chief Berry Gordy.