Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  The final break in faith came when Munitz learned that the Times was gearing up for a profile of Murphy. He decided it was time to cut her loose. "You need to be out by the fall," he told her. "You need to tell the paper you're leaving."

  "I want two years of pay," she replied. "And I'm not saying anything publicly until we sign a deal."

  Munitz agreed and asked his staff to draw up the paperwork, ignoring an order that he seek board approval before making any more contentious decisions. When Biggs confronted him about it, Munitz denied any knowledge of the deal. The lie fell apart when the human resources department confirmed that Munitz was behind the negotiations. Since Munitz technically had the authority to offer the deal, the board was forced to approve it. But the episode destroyed Munitz's last shred of credibility and goodwill with Biggs and turned his staff, particularly Murphy, against him.

  The timing was lousy. At the request of MTO, Murphy sat down the Monday before Thanksgiving to answer questions about her boss. The session lasted five hours. They also met the next day, and the next. As Munitz's trusty protégée, Murphy had spent years "interpreting Barry" to those around him. She was exactly what the lawyers needed to pick through all the documents they had gathered.

  After three days of grilling, they had one final question for Murphy. When she formally left the Getty, would she consider becoming a paid consultant to their investigation?

  She thought about it over Thanksgiving. Her last day on the Getty payroll was in January 2006. The very next day, she began working as a consultant for MTO.

  WITH THE ITALIAN investigation and the revelation of a loan to True, Barbara Fleischman, the Getty's most generous living donor, faced her own reckoning. MTO began exploring how to remove her from the board. But Fleischman wasn't about to go quietly.

  During a closed session with her board colleagues on November 10, 2005, she asked the attorneys to leave the room, prompting a murmur of protest before Munitz agreed to go along with her. When the door was closed, Fleischman stood up, clutching a prepared seven-page statement, and started to read.

  She began by saying that her collecting practices and loan to True had been portrayed in a "distorted, untrue and malicious" manner. She then reviewed the events that had led up to the museum's acquisition of the Fleischman collection in 1996, which had been accomplished "in no small part because of the work of Marion True." After lavishing praise on the curator, Fleischman said that she had been delighted that her late husband had given True an "arm's-length commercial loan" at a prevailing interest rate to refinance her Páros house. "I thought it was a lovely and helpful gesture," she said, bristling at intimations by Erichsen and others within the Getty that it was a payoff. "It was neither hidden nor camouflaged because, quite simply, he was assisting a young friend in a straightforward and open manner." If True showed a lapse in judgment by not disclosing the loan, she continued, then the Getty staff was guilty of a "myriad of bad judgments" for bungling the response to the Italian investigation.

  When Richard Martin wrote his now infamous 2001 memo about troubling documents in the Getty's files, Fleischman continued, why hadn't anyone immediately gotten to the bottom of it by meeting with Harold Williams, Arthur Houghton, John Walsh, or Debbie Gribbon? Why had Munitz dodged responsibility for the investigation, leaving the matter to Gribbon, Erichsen, and Murphy, all of whom had no experience in such matters and continued to make things worse? Why had Gribbon sat on her hands when Fleischman urged her to rally the support of the American museum establishment to fight back? And why had well-connected board members refused her call to seek a diplomatic solution by using their business and personal connections? The result of the Getty's serial bungling, she said, was to let the loyal Marion True take the fall for Walsh and the trust itself.

  Fleischman then went on to contrast that treatment with the $3 million Gribbon had received upon her departure from the museum, even though her performance had not been "held in high esteem." Gribbon had committed a "serious breach of ethical behavior"—an apparent reference to her affair with former drawings curator George Goldner and the costly legal settlements with Goldner's successor, Nicholas Turner, to avoid an embarrassing trial. "Despite her disloyal behavior toward the Trust and ultimate treachery, what was her punishment? A golden parachute."

  Now visibly angry and shaking, Fleischman said that she could understand Paolo Ferri's "despicable" political motivation in pursuing the illicit antiquities case, even the "contemptible" agenda of the Los Angeles Times reporters. But what she simply could not fathom was "the malice, the attempt to bend the truth and the injustice within the Trust itself."

  She continued, "As trustees, we are only beginning to feel the depth of outrage and contempt throughout the world for the Getty's administration and governance in these matters. As a member of this board, I am deeply saddened to witness the dimming luster of a great institution."

  Fleischman concluded with a bitter final swipe. "I must express that I now regret that Larry and I ever made the donation to the Getty Trust," she said, and took her seat.

  21. TRUE BELIEVERS

  AT 10 A.M. ON January 28, 2006, Barry Munitz flung open the doors of the newly renovated Getty Villa and allowed in the first visitors in eight years. "You're here at a very important moment," he said in an uninspired inaugural speech, looking awkwardly casual in a Getty baseball cap and varsity jacket.

  It should have been a shining moment for the Getty. But Munitz and other Getty officials had all the gaiety of pallbearers. A global debate over cultural patrimony now focused on this sixty-four-acre plot of land off the Pacific Coast Highway. Staff were tired and beaten down by the year of turmoil and scandal that had dogged the institution. Rather than a celebration, the Getty Villa's public debut had become a cruel reminder of just how far the world's richest art institution had fallen.

  Barbara Fleischman—whose name was memorialized in stone above the villa's new amphitheater—had resigned from the board just three days earlier. Munitz was clinging to his position amid the various investigations into his spending. The entire institution was rudderless.

  Worse, the Getty's probl ems were spreading. Munitz's financial foibles had thrown a harsh spotlight on spending by nonprofit foundations across the country, attracting the attention of the Senate Finance Committee. And foreign authorities were beginning to ask about the antiquities collections of museums and private collectors in New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Toledo, Princeton, Richmond, and St. Louis. The Getty had always wanted to be the world's best-known museum. Now, in ways it had never imagined, it was getting its wish.

  The visitors who thronged to the villa on the unusually cool morning seemed only vaguely aware of the Getty's internal strife. They were awestruck by the magnificently restored building they entered. J. Paul Getty's original museum had been transformed by the $275 million renovation, which cost more than fifteen times what the original structure had. The museum's awkward entrance—into an underground parking garage and then into the lobby via elevators—had been entirely reconceived. Visitors arriving from the Pacific Coast Highway now steered their vehicles up a lushly planted driveway of broad Roman flagstones and entered a new parking complex carved out of the canyon wall. There they donned laurel wreaths made of foam and approached the villa on foot, like Roman pilgrims, walking up a series of staircases that zigzagged up a massive outdoor façade of alternating layers of building materials—wood, stone, and cement. The idea was to give visitors the feeling of walking back in time, through the strata of an archaeological dig, to discover a site seemingly excavated from the hillside. Indeed, this was the defining metaphor of the entire redesign. The villa's architects used the horizontal layering motif as a recurring theme, one that underscored the Getty's professed respect for the world's ancient art and the villa's position as the only museum in the nation dedicated solely to classical antiquities.

  At the top of the stairs, patrons found themselves standing on the rim of the new open-air
Greek amphitheater. Of all the additions, the amphitheater was the most dramatic and the most difficult to complete. The Getty's lawyers had battled neighbors all the way up to the California Supreme Court for the right to build it. Once it was approved, work crews had to carve tons of dirt from the canyon wall to make room for the performance space dedicated to Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman.

  The bowl of the Fleischman Theater emptied into a plaza leading to the villa itself, a re-creation of a first-century Roman country house painted in shades of ocher and red. Getty's original museum had never looked more beautiful. The columns of its gardens stood like soldiers dressed smartly in new coats, with a cream-over-cardinal color scheme. In contrast to the clinical white of the Getty Center, the villa's vibrant colors carried through the interior, forming a rich backdrop for the black Greek pottery and alabaster statuary positioned against the walls.

  Then there was the light. The old villa had been dark and stuffy, with heavy drapes hung over the second-floor windows to keep the California sunshine from fading J. Paul Getty's collection of French furniture and paintings. Now, with the furniture and paintings moved to the Getty Center, the drapes removed, and new skylights punched through the roof, the marble statues in the upper galleries were bathed in natural light, just as they had been in ancient times.

  All these touches reflected the impeccable taste of Marion True. Since the Getty had tightened its acquisition policy in 1995, she had spent much of her time conceiving of this transformation. It was True who had championed the idea of archaeological tribute, had fought for the theater, had chosen the colors, had unleashed the light. It was True who had met with prickly neighbors in their living rooms and represented the Getty at public hearings about the restoration. It was True who had insisted on redoing the entrance to a more historically accurate one, a change that had added substantially to the project's costs.

  True also had conceived of the villa's unusual approach to displaying its ancient art. Instead of lumping the artifacts together by time period or culture, she assigned them to thematic rooms. Dominating the gods and goddesses room was the Aphrodite, her fingerless right arm extended as if pointing to her worshipers. Across the way in the Trojan War room, a large glass case displayed the marble basin acquired from Maurice Tempelsman, adorned with the mythical scene of three sea nymphs carrying the weapons of Achilles. On the second floor, True had cleverly positioned things so that as the elevators opened, patrons were greeted by the riveting scene of the Getty's marble griffins tearing into the flesh of a hapless doe. Down the hall was the kouros, prominently displayed but with an awkward acknowledgment about its questionable authenticity. The golden funerary wreath was hung amid an array of other ancient jewelry. In the theater room were dozens of pieces from the Fleischman collection. And in the ultimate place of honor, the Getty Bronze occupied its own humidity-controlled room with a guard at the door.

  True's hard work had paid off. But, as has always been the case at the Getty, visitors were more taken with the spectacle of the building than the antiquities True had risked her career and reputation to acquire. Since J. Paul Getty's death in 1976, the antiquities collection had quadrupled to more than 44,000 objects and now ranked among the best and biggest in the world. Much of it consisted of the study collection, accumulated for scholarly study by way of Jiri Frel's decadelong tax scheme. But among the few thousand antiquities worthy of display were pieces whose equivalents could be found in no other museum in the world. Indeed, three-quarters of the objects now on display had been acquired under True's direction. Most visitors were keenly aware that the woman of the day was absent, facing criminal charges in Rome, and that Italy was demanding the return of dozens of the celebrated items as stolen property.

  Oddly, there was no public acknowledgment of those troubling facts. A video featuring True welcomed visitors, and True's high-pitched voice narrated much of the audio guide. The curator's staff, who had worked toward this day for more than a decade, wore T-shirts bearing a Latin motto inspired by Julius Caesar's famous boast "Veni, vidi, vici"—I came, I saw, I conquered. The Getty version was "Venimus, vidimus, retranstulimus"—We came, we saw, we moved back. In the current situation, it was unclear whether the reference was to the Getty reoccupying its original home or to the fact that many of the objects on display would soon be returning to their countries of origin.

  At what should have been the high point of her career, True had vanished. The bitter irony was not lost on her staff, many of whom silently honored her contribution with lapel pins that read TRUE BELIEVER.

  ANOTHER PROMINENT GETTY official conspicuously absent from the Getty Villa reopening was the museum's new director, Michael Brand, an up-and-coming Australian whom Munitz had hired away from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Now, just days after starting his job, Brand was on a plane to Rome. His mission: to kick-start negotiations with the Italians over their demands for many of the most glorious artifacts featured at the villa. Brand had seized on an invitation by Italian minister of culture Rocco Buttiglione to explore "new avenues" to break the deadlock.

  Since Debbie Gribbon's disastrous trip to Rome in 2002, talks with the Culture Ministry had gone nowhere, leaving the Getty and its antiquities curator to struggle against Paolo Ferri in the crocodile jaws of the Italian criminal justice system. Brand concluded that the Getty had become too legalistic in its negotiations. This approach, focusing on technicalities and loopholes at the expense of the larger message, infuriated the Italians. Source countries were tired of being ripped off and belittled by museums in rich collecting countries that eagerly snapped up the fruits of illicit digs while deriding foreign officials as being stooges or corrupt. They wanted respect and control over their own cultural narratives, Brand saw. The fight over antiquities had become the perfect proxy war.

  Before arriving at the Getty, Brand had had little or no experience with ancient Greek and Roman art. He had come to appreciate how looting devastated native artworks through his studies of Southeast Asian and Indian art. As director of Asian art at the National Museum of Australia, Brand had mounted a 1992 exhibit on the treasures of Angkor Wat, the twelfth-century Khmer temple complex in Cambodia that had been ravaged by plunder. Yet this introduction had done little to prepare him for what was awaiting him at the Getty. The Greeks and Italians were hopping mad, and the Getty seemed to be doing its best to egg them on.

  Brand got a glimpse of this during a get-acquainted trip to Brentwood shortly before he was to take over as museum director. His meetings included a background briefing about the antiquities problem from Peter Erichsen. As the Getty general counsel went down the list of suspect artifacts and foreign claims against them, Brand shuffled through a pile of background documents, then stopped.

  He was looking at a letter dated November 14, 2005, from Lazaros Kolonas, the Greek director general of antiquities and cultural heritage. The Greek official wanted to know why no one at the Getty had responded to a letter sent six months earlier demanding the return of the funerary wreath and three other objects, including a marble relief purchased by J. Paul Getty himself in 1955. As Brand looked through the file, it was clear to him that as far back as the mid-1990s, the Greeks had furnished evidence suggesting that the pieces had been looted. The last they had heard from anyone at the Getty was in 1998, when True had promised to forward the request to museum lawyers. Since then, nothing—not a peep.

  Whoa, thought Brand. Not even a courtesy reply to the Greek director of antiquities? No wonder he thinks we're stonewalling.

  By the time Brand sent off a reply in December 2005 suggesting that he and Kolonas speak face-to-face after the New Year, rapprochement was even more remote. Between Kolonas's letter and Brand's reply, the Los Angeles Times and Nikolas Zirganos, a crack investigative reporter at the Athens newspaper Eleftherotypia, had written several stories about the funerary wreath and Greece's failed diplomatic attempts to secure its return. Greek cultural officials looked hapless compared to their Italian counterparts. Thorou
ghly embarrassed, the Greeks had now abandoned their diplomacy and opened their own criminal investigation of the museum and its former curator.

  In a late December reply to Brand, Kolonas claimed that Greece had been "deceived" by the Getty's smooth talk about protecting cultural heritage. "Indeed, Mr. Brand, what evidence do you have in order to persuade us that the Greek antiquities which we claim for years now, as well as dozens of others which presumably are kept in storerooms of the Getty Museum, are not products of clandestine activity in Greece?"

  With two foreign courts now gearing up to take on the Getty, Brand decided that something had to change—something fundamental. And perhaps he was the perfect person to make that change. Unburdened by the sins of the Getty's past, the new museum director wanted to reopen the diplomatic and academic channels with foreign officials—to engage them as cultural colleagues, not courtroom foes.

  His trip to Rome on the eve of the Getty Villa opening was the first test.

  AS THE WINDS whipped Rome on a cold, wet day in early January, Brand entered the Ministry of Culture building from a side entrance to avoid a clutch of reporters lying in wait at the front door. He was accompanied by a small contingent of Getty representatives, including Luis Li, an MTO partner assigned to look into the antiquities claims.

  While Brand was there to set a new tone, Li was on hand to gather information. A former assistant U.S. attorney, Li had cut his teeth on prosecuting racketeering rings and white supremacists. Now the lead attorney for the firm's delicate antiquities probe, Li played the conciliator, with an easy smile and breezy, loquacious style. His team—which included several associates, paralegals, and Getty curators—had carefully vetted each of the objects being demanded by the Italians and Greeks—examining museum files, translating Italian court records, and interviewing Getty experts, including Marion True, over two days in Rome. Li's task was to present to Getty trustees the most definitive report on the legal status of the objects and, once a decision had been made about what to return, help craft a deal.