Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Led into the Getty's conservation lab by Houghton, Hoving looked at the kouros and felt as if he had been punched in the gut. Something was wrong with the statue's appearance. It was simply too pristine to be twenty-five hundred years old. "Have you paid for this?" Hoving asked. "If you have, try to get your money back."

  Later, Hoving met with Walsh in the museum director's office. The two had not seen each other for years, and Hoving still harbored ill will against Walsh going back to their days at the Met. Walsh had led picketing of museum employees to protest Hoving's plans to cut staffing. He had subsequently resigned over Hoving's decision to ship a delicate painting to Russia for an exhibition.

  Hoving said that he'd just seen the kouros and shared the doubts about the statue's authenticity that Pico Cellini had expressed. Walsh countered that many other experts disagreed with Cellini and that the piece had undergone scientific testing for fourteen months. He refused to name the owner of the piece or the dealer, but he assured Hoving that the Getty had "solid proof" that the piece had been in a Swiss collection for more than fifty years.

  Hoving's questions forced Walsh into defending the statue with documents the museum director believed were suspect, if not outright false. Hoving would no doubt try to poke holes in the story for his upcoming article in Connoisseur.

  Soon after Hoving's visit, Getty officials moved up the public announcement of the statue by several months. They were determined to reveal their new purchase before Hoving's article went to press.

  TWO DAYS AFTER Hoving's visit, Walsh summoned Houghton and True to his office to discuss the kouros documents. Walsh and Debbie Gribbon were sitting next to each other, their backs to the large windows that overlooked the gardens. Walsh asked Houghton to recap the discrepancies he had found between the Langlotz signatures. When Houghton finished, True volunteered her own information.

  "Frel told me some time ago that the Langlotz letter supporting the archaic relief had been forged," she said tightly. She had the habit of pursing her lips when she was nervous. "I think the letters supporting the kouros were too."

  Houghton was stunned. It was the first he'd heard of problems with the archaic relief documents, after months of research to find out whether the piece was authentic. Curiously, neither Gribbon nor Walsh seemed particularly surprised by the news. Houghton wondered whether the other three had rehearsed this conversation before the meeting.

  After a brief silence, Walsh weighed in. The fact that the kouros documents were fake was not a surprise, he said. "It appears to me that the kouros was found recently, most likely in South Italy. Whoever found it gave it to Becchina, who has now sold it to us. At this point, it is better for us not to know whether the documents are authentic or fake. In short, I don't think it's wise to pursue the matter of the letters further."

  True agreed. "I just want to say that I do not think we should find out whether these letters were forged. That's what I think."

  Houghton walked out. Walsh had decided to shut down any investigation of the kouros documents. True and Gribbon were on board. Soon after the meeting, Houghton began drafting his letter of resignation. He now had no doubt that True would be offered the curator position.

  A MONTH LATER, Houghton executed a carefully orchestrated plan. He came into the office late one day and went directly to Walsh's secretary. He asked for a 4:30 appointment and gave her a sealed envelope.

  Houghton left Walsh's office, got into his car, and drove to Wilshire Boulevard to deliver another envelope to Harold Williams. Both envelopes contained Houghton's letter of resignation.

  The five-page letter addressed to Walsh began:

  My reasons should be no surprise to you. They involve my belief that you have chosen a path of self-enforced ignorance of fact, and of treating knowledge of the facts as the problem rather than the facts themselves. They concern your decision to bring back to the Museum and even honor the person whose trail of fraud and deceit may still have the most damaging consequences for the institution. They have, in the end, led me to believe that to continue to serve under current circumstances would compromise my better judgment and my own sense of integrity.

  The letter outlined Houghton's recent disputes with Walsh, concluding with Walsh's order that no further investigation be done into the kouros documents. "The implications of forgery of the documents are profound, as you know: for the possibility that the kouros was very recently excavated and exported from, for example, Greece or Italy; or for those who do not believe in its authenticity, that it, too, is forged ... While self-imposed ignorance of the facts in this case may offer some comfort in the short term, it lays the basis for profound embarrassment later."

  In closing, Houghton issued a dire warning that later proved to be prescient:

  The issues which Frel has left behind are not resolved. Many of the most difficult ones, made so by careless research or curatorial avarice, are still pending. It is virtually certain that others will appear. They may involve the demand by another country or institution for the return of material in the Museum's collection ... Those issues which do arise will be unavoidable. No "miracle," of the kind which you have suggested has kept Frel's most damaging behavior from the public eye, will shepherd the Museum through them ... The effect ... on the Getty's reputation would be catastrophic; its ramifications could extend very broadly, conceivably to the point of a sweeping external investigation of the Getty Museum's records, and possibly to the point of enactment of legislation affecting the activities of all museums in this country.

  Houghton had timed his deliveries so that Williams would read the letter before Walsh had a chance to intercede or begin constructing a cover story. At 5 P.M., Walsh called Houghton into his office. Both men were extremely calm.

  "I regret that it's come to this," the museum director said, a study in understatement, "but given the circumstances I think it's the right thing to do. Our differences are obvious and we've discussed them many times. But I must say, I'm puzzled by your letter."

  "Why puzzled?" Houghton asked.

  "Well, why did you feel the need to put all this down in writing?"

  Walsh was less concerned about the substance of the serious issues than the appearance they might create—the optics. Perhaps, Houghton thought, he had been too good of an ethics tutor.

  As Houghton was getting up to leave, Walsh fired a parting shot. "I must say, it is ironic that this comes now, as I had intended to tell you today that we've completed our search for a new curator of antiquities. We've decided to appoint Marion True."

  5. AN AWKWARD DEBUT

  MARION TRUE HAD come to California as a refugee, too—not from the Eastern bloc or the demands of a family fortune, but from her working-class roots and a run of bad luck.

  True was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and raised in the Irish section of Newburyport, Massachusetts, then a dying mill town near Boston. Her mother was a secretary at the local bank. Her father was a machinist and war veteran who cluttered the house with military memorabilia, including a shrunken head, a disabled World War I machine gun, and enough other firearms to fill a spare bedroom.

  The only daughter and middle child of three, Marion possessed more delicate sensibilities. An interest in ancient art was stirred during childhood trips to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts with her mother, whose fascination had been sparked by the Indian burial mounds scattered around Oklahoma. As Marion grew into a polite and awkward teenager, tall and self-conscious about her glasses, she learned French and became salutatorian of the Newburyport High School class of 1966. Her yearbook photo shows a straight-haired girl with a smoldering look next to a one-word prediction: "artist."

  While her brothers went off to fight in Vietnam, True studied Greek masterpieces inspired by the Trojan War. As an undergraduate at New York University, she was a poised, obedient student who dressed in matronly clothes and blossomed under the rigors of classical scholarship. True demonstrated an early interest in ancient Greek vases, won a prize for Latin and Greek s
tudies, and graduated magna cum laude in 1970. Two years later, she earned a master's degree in classical archaeology after a summer spent toiling in the trenches at Aphrodisias, Turkey, looking for traces of the Greek vase painters of the fifth century B.C.

  As a student of archaeology in the early 1970s, True had a frontrow seat for the scandal that drove a wedge between museum curators and their peers in academia. The catalyst was the Met's purchase of the Euphronios krater in 1972, two years after the UNESCO treaty. Dietrich von Bothmer had infuriated archaeologists by dismissing questions about where the vase had been found. What interested him was its beauty, not its archaeological context. Weeks later, the Archaeological Institute of America denied von Bothmer a position on its board, with one archaeologist declaring that the interests of curators and archaeologists were no longer in sync. The rift between curators and archaeologists over the ethics of buying looted objects would follow True throughout her career.

  Forced to choose between the two camps, True opted not to pursue the sweaty life of an archaeologist. During a 1973 internship at the Boston MFA under Cornelius Vermeule, she discovered a talent for designing museum displays. She arranged an exhibit of Greek pottery according to shape rather than by time period, as was the custom. The public loved it. She also got a taste for behind-the-scenes curatorial work, cataloguing the MFA's vases and meeting antiquities dealers such as Robert Hecht and Elie Borowski, who came to the museum offering their latest finds.

  True's abilities and ambition soon led her to Harvard University, which accepted her into its Ph.D. program in art history, with a focus on classical art. Her thesis advisers there included Emily Vermeule and von Bothmer, a sometimes cruel taskmaster. In Cambridge, True was thirty miles and a universe away from her old Newburyport neighborhood. She had little in common with her classmates, many of whom came from privileged families. She came off as eager to please, the one most likely to bring treats to seminars. If she felt left out, she brooded.

  It was at Harvard that her bad luck started. Her two-year marriage to a prominent cardiologist, nineteen years her seni or, collapsed in 1979. They had been together for eight years, during which time True had shown a growing taste for extravagance. She had convinced him to sell his Victorian home in middle-class Waltham, Massachusetts, and buy a historic seventeenth-century house in the more prestigious Groveland. While his kids bought clothes off the rack, True hired a personal shopper and came home with several pairs of expensive shoes. Eventually, her husband decided to return to his first wife, and the irate True left with the couple's Irish wolfhound and filed for divorce. Her husband later told his daughters that True had cleaned $50,000 out of a joint bank account. True claimed that she had taken only enough to buy a Honda CVCC and make a down payment on a Cambridge apartment.

  She was struggling professionally as well. Her MFA internship led to a full-time curatorial assistantship, but it paid precious little. With few museum jobs to be had, she abandoned her doctoral studies before completing her dissertation to look for work on the commercial side of the art world. True took an hourly job working for Steven Straw, a high-flying Newburyport art dealer with a gallery full of O'Keeffes and de Koonings and a growing national reputation. Impressed with True's meticulousness and fluent French, Straw hired her to research nineteenth-century American and European paintings. She quit a year before an art publication exposed Straw's business as an elaborate Ponzi scheme: he never owned much of the art he was selling. True said that she was ignorant of the scheme and testified in bankruptcy court that she was owed back pay by the disgraced dealer, who served twenty months in federal prison for fraud and eventually committed suicide.

  True's next job was with Bruce and Ingrid McAlpine, two of London's most prominent antiquities dealers. But that arrangement also ended badly. Four months after hiring True to drum up business for a possible New York gallery, the couple canceled the deal, accusing True of frittering away her time on unworthy prospects. True complained that the dealers were being unreasonable, expecting too much, too soon. She refused to return her $900-a-month stipend. Livid, the McAlpines threatened to sue.

  By 1981, the once promising graduate student found herself working as an executive assistant to Stanley Moss, a poet, art dealer, and occasional boyfriend. Her tasks ranged from checking galley proofs for his publishing house to painting his dining room.

  Then, on a trip to Los Angeles, True was introduced to Jiri Frel. The curator promptly offered her a job doing menial clerical work in the antiquities department at the Getty. True accepted without a contract, hoping to start over in Malibu. She began working at the Getty in January 1982 and spent the first year secluded in J. Paul Getty's old ranch house, creating a central file for the burgeoning antiquities collection, including the thousands of shards that Frel was squirreling away for study. She put new labels on the vase collection, then rearranged shelves of Roman portraits. Before long, she began attracting favorable attention for her handling of the exhibit and catalogue of Athenian vases lent by textile mogul Walter Bareiss, a collection the Getty bought in 1984. Her annual performance reviews swelled with adjectives: dedicated, productive, articulate, creative. Frel believed that she had everything necessary to be a genuine connoisseur. After Frel left, Houghton, a Harvard classmate and friend of True's, promoted her to associate antiquities curator in 1985 and increased her responsibilities, sending her to meet European dealers and make acquisition pitches to the board of trustees.

  Among her colleagues, True was known as a perfectly competent junior colleague who otherwise kept to herself. In the Getty's sexually charged atmosphere, where office affairs were common, True hid her buxom figure and kept her long hair swept back from her plain face in fashionable curls. She spoke so little about her private life that some thought she might be a lesbian. She volunteered little about her family and even less about her brief misfortunes in the commercial art market. There was good reason for the latter: many in the curatorial ranks considered work on the commercial side of the art world an ethical taint. Although her résumé included her time with the McAlpines, she mentioned nothing about how it ended, and she left the controversial Straw off her résumé altogether.

  When True did speak up in the office, almost everyone noticed the quality of her voice. It often scaled into a Marilyn Monroe falsetto, a high-pitched trill reminiscent of someone cooing to a baby or a favorite pet. Some thought it gave her an air of unreality; others interpreted it as a sign of insincerity.

  True won the antiquities curator position largely by default. After Frel's departure, Houghton was appointed interim curator, and the museum launched a worldwide search for a replacement. It dragged on for months as European scholars and museum officials dropped off the list one by one. Walsh flew to Athens to recruit Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum. But Delivorrias declined when his wife refused to move to California, still regarded as a cultural wasteland. By the time of Walsh's showdown with Houghton, True had emerged as an obvious candidate, having belatedly finished her doctoral dissertation with von Bothmer's help. Still, Walsh held out, much to the growing dismay of True. Shortly before Houghton's resignation, Walsh told her that she had been chosen for the job. The tide had gone out, he said, and True was what was left on the beach.

  In the spring of 1986, during Houghton's final days at the Getty, he sent his successor a handwritten note about her dispute with the McAlpines. The London dealers were still considering a lawsuit, and True would no doubt have to do business with them at some point.

  "I am more than ever convinced, after much reflection, that you have no alternative but to provide ... the fullest possible information on your relationship with the McAlpines" to the Getty leadership, Houghton wrote. "The issue can be as much appearance as substance, and my advice is that you guard yourself and the Museum against even the appearance of a past problem by signaling it to the Trust, now, as you begin."

  True never did tell her bosses; she didn't see the need.

  IN AUGU
ST 1986, the Getty hurriedly revealed its purchase of the kouros, months before the statue was ready to be displayed. It was hailed as a major find, "arguably the most important art purchase made in this country in the past half-century," said the Los Angeles Times. But it proved to be an awkward debut for True.

  She had a personal stake in the piece, even before being promoted to antiquities curator. True's paper defending the kouros was due out in a few months in the Burlington Magazine, a London-based art publication that was widely respected. But in the months since she had submitted the piece, new doubts had arisen about the object's authenticity.

  Publicly, True revealed far less than she knew. She told reporters that the museum had conducted a "rigorous examination for authenticity" during the three years the statue had sat in the museum's conservation laboratory. The Getty Museum had sought the opinions of virtually every expert in the field, she added, and most thought the statue was authentic. In regard to its origins, True cited the very documents she had privately denounced as forgeries, stating flatly that the statue had been purchased from a Swiss family through a Swiss dealer. Nothing else was known. But True left some wiggle room, saying the field of ancient art was always murky. "We have to be especially careful and not even trust ourselves," she said.