Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  By the time Getty died, McNall had branched out to antiquities. He was co-owner of Summa Gallery, a richly appointed storefront showroom on Rodeo Drive and the only major antiquities dealership on the West Coast. His plan was to upgrade coin customers to ancient art, then start selling directly to museums, taking a slice of business from the Manhattan dealers who had long dominated the market. Summa showed off its artifacts like stars at a Hollywood premiere. They sparkled under spotlights and lined glass cases in rooms with padded velvet walls of ocher and orange, colors intended to evoke a Grecian krater. A portrait sculpture of Caligula stared out from its pedestal. A golden funerary wreath that had once rested on the head of a dead nobleman shimmered under its own Plexiglas dome.

  McNall's supplier and silent partner was Robert Hecht, the preeminent middleman of the classical antiquities trade, whose swashbuckling career was legendary in the field. An heir to the Baltimorebased Hecht's department stores, Hecht had served in the naval reserve during World War II before receiving a scholarship to study classics and archaeology at the American Academy in Rome. But his passion for ancient objects couldn't be satisfied by the plodding pace of academia, and poverty held no appeal. By the time his two-year term there ended in 1949 (amid rumors that he had been expelled for punching out a classmate), he was already buying and selling ancient art. His network of loyal suppliers reached deep into the tombs and ruins of Greece, Turkey, and Italy.

  Since the 1950s, Hecht had sold some of the finest pieces of classical art to emerge on the market. His clients included dozens of American and European museums, universities, and private collectors, including J. Paul Getty, whom Hecht had once persuaded to buy an intricately carved Roman bust. For decades, Hecht single-handedly dominated the antiquities market with his brilliance, brutality, and panache. He cited Virgil as readily as the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan, and he was known to break into operatic arias. He often drank to excess and was known to gamble his money away in all-night backgammon games. He tamed competitors with an unpredictable temper and eliminated rivals with anonymous calls to the police. Even those who sold directly to museums gave Hecht a cut of the deal, earning him the nickname "Mr. Percentage."

  But the 1972 Euphronios krater imbroglio with the Met had unmasked Hecht as the source of the museum's "hot pot." In the wake of the scandal, Italian authorities declared Hecht persona non grata and exiled him from his home in Rome. The episode forced Hecht to be more discreet, but he continued to provide a steady stream of freshly excavated objects through middlemen. McNall, whom Hecht had met at a Munich coin auction a few years earlier, presented the perfect frontman for expanding Hecht's access to the American market. Their deal at Summa was strictly fifty-fifty: McNall provided the Rolodex and handshakes; Hecht provided the merchandise.

  The arrangement worked beautifully with the important, museumquality objects Hecht was able to obtain. The problem was what to do with the thousands of lesser objects Hecht felt obliged to buy to maintain his suppliers' loyalty. McNall considered them "crap" and an impediment to getting Summa off the ground. But they caught the eye of Frel, who often walked into Summa unannounced to rifle through the stockroom. "You know, Bruce," Frel purred during one visit, "we actually need these kind of things."

  ONE DAY AROUND the time of Getty's death, McNall went to visit Frel at the museum. The two men started talking: what if McNall marketed the bric-a-brac not as long-term investments for his clients, but as quick tax breaks? If he found customers with seven-figure incomes who were willing to buy the objects on the cheap, they could then donate them to the Getty and get tax write-offs for much higher values. Frel said that he could help close the deal by arranging appraisals through his friend Jerry Eisenberg to back up values reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

  The plan was brilliant. McNall could clear his shelves of leftover stock. His clients could actually make money on their donations. Hecht could keep his suppliers happy. And Frel could acquire objects through donations, without having to go through the Getty's board of trustees for approval.

  It also appealed to the triad of forces that drive Hollywood—greed, ego, and instant gratification. Actors, producers, film executives, and others who profit in the halo surrounding the entertainment industry are forever looking for ways to reduce their tax liabilities. The opportunity to make a buck while appearing to be philanthropic donors to the Getty offered a cultural immortality that rolling credits on a movie screen could not.

  The scheme might even be legal. McNall ran it past his tax attorney, who said that donors could legitimately argue that the antiquities they bought at "wholesale" values were worth a lot more by the time the Getty shined them up in its conservation lab and accepted them into its collection. After all, a reconstructed Greek vase was worth more than a bunch of pottery fragments on a shelf.

  For a test case, McNall turned to one of his best coin customers, Sy Weintraub, the former chairman of Panavision. The short, wiry, often profane mogul's claim to fame was as originator of the old Superman television series and the producer of a string of schlocky 1960s Tarzan movies with titles such as Tarzan Goes to India. What he lacked in taste he made up for in business sense. Weintraub had bankrolled McNall's coin business in exchange for a piece of the action. He had backed McNall at Summa, steering his friends to the gallery and even buying a couple of sarcophagi and a mummy to scatter around the red-velvet interior of his Beverly Hills mansion.

  Weintraub was intrigued by McNall's donation scheme, but only if he could make back at least five times his investment. By the end of the year, Weintraub was on the Getty books as the proud donor of twenty Etruscan terra-cotta roof ornaments, six thousand coins, and the head from a Greek grave marker. The value of the gifts, second only that year to J. Paul Getty's bequest, earned Weintraub a tax deduction of $1.65 million. He followed up by donating two fourth-century B.c. frescoes cut from a tomb fifty miles south of Naples. He paid Summa $75,000 but told the IRS they were worth $2.5 million. He pocketed $1.2 million in tax savings—a return of more than 1,500 percent.

  With that, the donation scheme spread like a southern California brushfire.

  Weintraub told his pal Gordon McLendon, who had made millions by reformatting AM radio with Top 40 hits and all-talk stations. McLendon's son once joked that his father couldn't even spell the word "art," much less recognize it. But within months, the radio legend had been transformed into a cultural benefactor, giving the Getty more than 120 pieces of ancient amber jewelry carved to look like tiny ships, girls' faces, and animals. The gift, which cost McLendon $20,000, went on the Getty's books at $2.1 million. McNall said later that McLendon had claimed as much as a $20 million tax write-off.

  The spark of self-serving generosity jumped through the network of McNall's clients and friends. Donations began showing up on the Getty's books in the names of prominent professionals and some of Hollywood's high rollers. Lowell Milken gave an estimated $300,000 worth of antiquities along with his brother, future junk bond impresario Michael Milken. Alan Salke, the president of McNall's new movie production company, gave the Getty a cup painted by the Greek artist Phintias with a claimed value of $300,000. Comic Lily Tomlin gave the Getty a cache of ancient coins with a book value of $123,000. Dozens of donations were attributed to Jane Cody, a University of Southern California classics professor who happened to be McNall's girlfriend (and later wife). Even two of the city's most powerful entertainment attorneys, Skip Brittenham and Ken Ziffren, appeared in Getty records as donors of $405,000 worth of antiquity donations in 1982.

  Frel did his part to find customers as well, even approaching two Los Angeles Times reporters to see if they wanted in. One was art critic William Wilson, who had written the scathing review of the Getty Museum when it opened but had since become a devotee of the charismatic curator.

  Frel invited Wilson home one afternoon for lunch. As the men balanced paper plates on their laps in the living room, Frel described the idea. "Let's say I can get these dealers to give me t
hings for the museum, but I can't be the one who donates them," Frel said. "But I'm able to give them to someone else who needs a tax break, someone who can make a gift to the Getty under their name and use the write-off..."

  "Jiri, is this ethical?"

  Frel paused. "I can see you don't need a tax break," he said, biting into his sandwich.

  Frel brought up the subject again at dinner one night in an Italian restaurant with Wilson and his pal Tim Rutten, editor of the Los Angeles Times' opinion section.

  "Well, let's say, you know, we were to come into possession of a fragment, an arm or something. Maybe it comes from Syria, maybe not. So you donate it to the museum..."

  "I donate it to the museum?" Rutten said. "And where did it come from, Jiri?"

  "Your aunt donated it. Your great-aunt. You remember, maybe your aunt left it to you and you donate it and get a nice tax write-off."

  "Jiri, I'm going to forget you ever asked me this."

  The journalists also agreed not to tell anyone else at the paper.

  FOR MCNALL, THE scheme was a sideshow, a way to move the lesser material while selling more significant objects to museums and collectors across the country through Summa. Yet the side business was substantial enough to warrant some accommodations. Hecht began shipping objects directly to the Getty, where Frel picked out the items he wanted for donations and took them "on loan" until McNall could arrange for a donation over the phone. Many donors never even saw the items they gave.

  McNall, meanwhile, began to use the Getty like an extension of his gallery. He quietly paid museum conservators to work on objects destined for sale at Summa. Some of the gallery's best merchandise found its way into museum exhibit halls, giving McNall's A-list customers the illusion that they were buying from the Getty itself. With a cheery wave to the guards, McNall took his best clients on personal tours of the mock Roman villa with the long reflecting pool before positioning them in front of the object he wanted to sell. Then, with Frel often hovering in the background for support, he closed the deal. Many hard-bitten businessmen tumbled to the psychological seduction, including Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, the Texas oil barons who bought several items off the Getty floor.

  As the scheme gained momentum, Frel himself seemed to prosper. He built a swimming pool in the backyard of his Topanga Canyon home with $25,000 in cash from McNall—a "loan" never committed to paper because both parties knew it wouldn't be repaid. One day the curator came to work in a shiny BMW. It bore the tags of an Orange County car dealership owned by Vasek Polak, another Czech refugee and former racecar mechanic. As it happened, Frel got the car around the time Polak showed up on the Getty's books as donating $761,000 in antiquities.

  Within four years, the trickle of gifts had turned into a deluge—and one of the largest museum tax frauds in American history. More than a hundred donors had given six thousand antiquities valued at $14.7 million to a museum that had absolutely no need for the help. While older, more respectable cultural institutions cultivated patrons for years before making an "ask," Frel was raking in antiquities from nobodies in embarrassingly huge numbers. Each gift was publicly reported to the IRS on the museum's annual 990 form.

  Museum director Stephen Garrett seemed amused, even proud of how Frel wrung donations from the most unlikely of sources. In a 1976 letter to Bernard Ashmole, Garrett bragged about "the panache and intrigue for which Jiri is famous (and dear to us all)."

  Others viewed the donations, and Frel's increasingly reckless behavior, with distress. In New York, Eisenberg became alarmed at the increasing prices Frel was demanding for appraisals of the antiquities. He stopped signing the appraisal forms.

  Fredericksen began hearing about Frel going in and out of the museum with artifacts stuffed in his pockets. He also noted that a number of the donations came through Frel's new wife, Faya Causey Frel, a UCLA graduate student, and her family in Orange County. And he found the sheer number of gifts suspicious. After all, how many people could there be who wanted to buy antiquities and then give them to the richest museum in the world?

  Although Fredericksen was Frel's immediate boss, he knew that he couldn't rein Frel in. He approached Garrett for help.

  "Jiri's doing things that could get us in trouble," Fredericksen said.

  "I don't know," Garrett said, after Fredericksen listed his reasons. "I don't quite see what the problem is."

  Fredericksen then went to Federico Zeri, the Italian art expert and Getty board member. After the curator confided his fears, Zeri said that he wasn't concerned enough to take on the resourceful Frel. "I don't want to make any enemies on the board," he said.

  With no support up the line, Fredericksen saw only one option. He asked for a demotion, stepping down as head curator to run the paintings department. The move meant taking a pay cut of $1,000, not an inconsiderable amount, given his annual salary of just $20,000. But Fredericksen was willing to do it. He was no longer Frel's boss, and he wouldn't be in the line of fire if Frel ever got caught.

  3. TOO MORAL

  BY 1981, THE GETTY was facing an intriguing dilemma: the rich museum was to become even richer.

  What started as a nearly $700 million endowment from Getty had swollen to well over $1 billion as Getty Oil stock climbed during the lengthy dispute among the oilman's heirs. With the dispute now settled, the money would become available in a year. As a nonprofit operating foundation, the Getty would be required to start spending more than $50 million a year.

  The Getty board had little idea of what to do with the impending windfall. Most of the great masterpieces had already been snapped up since World War II, and spending millions on lesser pieces could dangerously inflate the art market, casting the Getty in the role of international spoiler. Otto Wittmann, former director of the Toledo Museum of Art, who had joined the museum board in 1979, suggested a bolder plan: establishing an umbrella institution—a trust—that would not only fund the museum but also funnel the institution's riches into a series of other arts-related institutes.

  To carry out this vision, the Getty board needed a new kind of chief executive, someone with a knack for managing huge sums of money, someone with far broader authority and vision than a simple museum director. The board heartily agreed with Wittmann's idea and started a search that ended, suddenly, with a man who seemed to fit the description perfectly.

  Harold M. Williams had just stepped down as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a ride atop the corporate world that ended with President Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980. In February 1981, shortly after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, Williams resigned. That night, at 10 P.M., he came home to find a message on his answering machine. It was from Harold Berg, wondering if he'd be interested in running the Getty.

  It was exactly the kind of challenge Williams was looking for—an institution-building job—and it meant coming home to Los Angeles, where he had once worked as the trusted adviser to industrialist Norton Simon, running a division of Hunt-Wesson Foods before becoming dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Management. The Getty offer also appealed to his interest in art. While serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Williams began to buy Asian paintings. He learned more about art at the side of Simon, one of the world's foremost collectors of painters such as van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne. On their business trips together through Simon's far-flung food and publications empire, Simon included Williams in private excursions to hunt for art.

  Williams accepted the Getty job, convinced that he had an extraordinary opportunity to build something lasting. He moved into a small suite of offices at One Wilshire Boulevard, Getty Oil's corporate headquarters, taking over the desk that had belonged to Norris Bramlett, J. Paul Getty's most trusted aide. After his first week on the job, Williams announced that he would take a year to travel the world, talk to the leading cultural thinkers, and come up with a concrete plan. To help him map the Getty's future, he hired two talented young women. One was Leilani Duke, who
chaired the California Confederation of the Arts and worked at the National Endowment for the Arts. The other was Nancy Englander, an assistant director in the NEA's museums and historical organizations program. Englander was smart and attractive, and she spoke several European languages.

  "I don't care what you think," he told Duke and Englander. "I don't care what I think. I want to know what the field thinks."

  Duke and Englander identified the leading thinkers in the arts across the United States and Europe—museum directors, conservators, librarians, academics, curators, historians. Williams and Englander picked their brains for ideas about how the Getty could make a difference and kept asking questions until they didn't hear anything new. At times, people were suspicious. The Getty was largely unknown, and many saw its sudden wealth as a threat. At other times, people viewed it as an opportunity—to get money. More than anything else, Williams was struck by how many in the art world lacked a big vision, but then again, most didn't have the kind of money that allowed the Getty to dream such big dreams.

  At the end of the year, Williams laid out a plan that built on Wittmann's original suggestion. The new Getty Trust would not just collect art like a conventional museum; it would sponsor a conservation institute that would take in damaged objects and send experts throughout the world to save cultural monuments that were deteriorating from the elements or tourism. The trust would launch an educational institute to strengthen the arts in public schools. It would create an information institute to build a common database for art historians. And to unite these various programs, to give the Getty some cohesion, the trust would build a new public campus, the Getty Center. Once it opened, the original Malibu museum would be transformed into a new home for the museum's growing antiquities collection.

  The board unanimously approved Williams's plan. With his vision in place, Williams turned his attention to remaking the administration. As Getty's cronies left the board, the former SEC chairman recruited businessmen with art experience. He also began to clean house at the museum. The first to go was Stephen Garrett, the architect turned museum director. Although Williams's plans extended beyond the museum, he realized that the museum was still at the core of the institution. And the museum needed a real museum director if it was going to be taken seriously.