The Forger's Apprentice: Life with the World's Most Notorious Artist

by Mark Forgy

  Elmyr felt uneasy about George Alberts’s reaction to the uninvited second houseguest when he returned from Europe. On his arrival, it turned out there was little cause for concern. Elmyr introduced the two as graciously as he could, and Fernand was as charming as he could be. Elmyr discovered that Legros was actually born in Egypt, and Alberts was born in Syria. The two hit it off immediately, chatting away in Arabic like two hookah-smoking friends in a Kasbah café. The following day Legros capitalized on their instant bonhomie and promptly borrowed fifty dollars from George. He then packed Elmyr’s suitcases, a small one of his own, and placed them in the spacious trunk of George’s Cadillac. Before lunch they left the city, rolling south to Florida on the car’s fat white-sidewall tires. Along the way, Elmyr slept, still exhausted and weak. Fernand stole frequent glimpses of himself in the rearview mirror, thinking himself every bit as stylish as George’s Caddy. In Elmyr’s words, “That turned out to be the beginning of everything.”

  From the time Fernand insinuated himself in Elmyr’s life, their destinies were sealed. During their trip to Florida, Fernand was accommodating, helpful and deferential to his older and still-fragile traveling companion. The two were the unlikeliest pair conceivable, and their alliance by need would soon end. Despite Legros’s attentiveness and Elmyr’s forced civility, nothing in their manufactured cordialities predicted longevity of their relationship past their destination. They also shared their life stories along the way. Legros was born in Ismalia, Egypt, and his father worked for the Suez Canal Society. As he was half-Greek, perhaps, unsurprisingly, a relative had some connection in the shipping industry and gave him access to travel aboard freighters across the Mediterranean and later across the Atlantic to the United States. Elmyr probably thought his proposed journey to America evoked no protests from his family. Elmyr’s distasteful first impression of the unwashed Legros was an image that still lingered in his mind, although he begrudgingly accorded him a little respect for his genial assistance during their trip.

  Fernand left Cairo, where he had been living after the war, and went to France to serve his compulsory military service at age twenty. He told Elmyr, “I was almost immediately discharged,” but was never clear about the reason for it. He was a lithe young man who then pursued a career as a dancer “in cheap cabarets,” as Elmyr described it. Legros’s own account of his life as a dancer is considerably more respectable, including stints with the Ballet of Monte Carlo, a member of the famed ballet of George de Cuevas, and even appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. These claims all became part of a mytho-maniacal yarn, often recorded in the French press in later years, and a pipe-dream biography concocted by him and written by Roger Peyrefitte in the 1970s.

  Given Elmyr’s loquacious nature, it is not surprising that their conversations drifted into topics that were not only revealing, but also likely trespassed that line between candor and indiscretion. Admitting Fernand into that sanctum sanctorum of his secret life was not only thoughtless, it was dangerous. The fact that he was going back to Miami Beach, where the FBI came close to catching him before, should shed some light on the lack of forethought he displayed when most anyone else would have been more gun-shy. What possibly allowed Elmyr to share these keyhole insights into his illicit activities and daring past was Fernand’s assertion that he had studied art at the L’Ecole du Louvre in Paris. This, according to Elmyr, seemed to be another invention of Fernand’s imagination. When he told me this, he shrugged his shoulders dismissively and went on. “Even at the time when he was asking me to do everything he could get his hands on, he still didn’t know the difference between a gouache and a watercolor or a Matisse and a Picasso. It’s just that he had the cold-bloodedness and powers of persuasion of an oriental rug merchant that made him sound like he knew what he was talking about. He really was completely ignorant about art.”

  Before leaving New York, some of Elmyr’s friends helped him with some of his bills, and George Alberts was kind enough to make him a small loan until he could later repay him. Two weeks after arriving in Miami Beach at George’s apartment, Legros was still with him and Elmyr, naturally, was still paying the bills. He then suggested he was well enough that he no longer needed Fernand’s help. His implication was clear that their temporary union of convenience was over. “Besides,” Elmyr informed him, “it is not my intention to go on supporting you, and I have very little money left.” Legros, blithely ignoring the first part of that declaration, exclaimed with alarm, “What are we going to do?” The elder statesman then volunteered an automatic response as if it were the most natural thing in the world to him. “You could go out and get a job.” Fernand’s soured expression immediately signaled how unsavory that idea was. Even though he was considerably younger than Elmyr, he learned early in life that by various means of manipulation it was preferable to use others to get what he wanted. He had precisely the kind of street smarts that Elmyr always lacked. Whether by temper tantrums, as Elmyr would discover soon enough; “emotional blackmail,” as he called it; or a kind of seductive, evangelical oratory, others became his tools to do his bidding.

  Elmyr told me much later how attentively Fernand listened by his bedside as he recovered from his attempted suicide. All the details of his personal history spilled from his lips into an eager vessel. His rapt attention could not have been greater than if Elmyr had given him the knowledge to spin straw into gold. This was essentially the alchemy of his thought processes. No sooner had the accent on the word “job” ended that Fernand rejoined Elmyr’s proposal with one of his own, one much more palatable. “Why don’t you just give me a couple drawings to sell?” he urged his keeper. “We could live for a month from selling just one.” With the nonstop persistence of a street peddler, he shadowed Elmyr, relentlessly imploring his cooperation, trying hard to reverse his objections. Fernand correctly sensed that if he pestered him long enough, he would prevail. He was right. Elmyr caved in under the harangue of his endless, erosive rhetoric.

  As strong as his doubts were, Elmyr had few options. He was nearly broke again, and a haunting recollection of J. Edgar Hoover’s minions sniffing around for his scent required desperate measures for a desperate situation. Stepping back to look over Fernand from head to toe like an examining physician, he shuddered from the challenge before him. To pull off this charade, it would only take transforming the straw man from The Wizard of Oz into Cary Grant or some even more improbable metamorphosis. Elmyr felt weak and exhausted from Fernand’s full frontal assault. With a sigh of resignation and extended right arm, he seized the taller Legros by his shirt collar and marched him in the direction of the bathroom. “You will never be a gentleman, but you can’t smell like a bum. You will take a bath, shave, and put on clean socks,” Elmyr insisted.

  Elmyr retrieved blank sheets of paper from a suitcase. On the kitchen table, he drew three Matisse lithographs in the time Fernand took for his toilette. They then sat down together; Elmyr went over a plausible story for the gallery owner Fernand would visit. “Stick to the story I tell you,” he admonished his would-be agent. Elmyr then looked through his wardrobe for something that Fernand could wear. He had him try on one of his tailored suits, a navy blue one. Until Elmyr regained all his lost weight, it looked better on the dark-eyed young man from Ismalia. Elmyr gave Fernand directions to a gallery whose owner was already acquainted with L. E. Raynal. “Remember, stick to the story and don’t ad-lib,” were his last words of caution as he exited George’s apartment on a sunny Florida afternoon. Elmyr waited with the trepidation of a mother whose virgin daughter had a date with a sailor on shore leave. Returning two hours later, a grimacing Fernand entered the apartment with the portfolio under his arm. Before Elmyr could ask about the apparently failed sortie, he erupted in laughter and started doing pirouettes, holding a check for $750 in his raised hand. Elmyr may have felt like Pygmalion for the moment. Later he would feel more like Dr. Frankenstein.

  Fernand bargained his percentage of the sale price up from 30 to 40 percent. Elmyr cons
istently said Legros’s brashness and fearlessness never wavered throughout the years that he was associated with him. If anything, he became bolder and more confident with his success. That sense of youthful invincibility never left him. With utter conviction in his voice, Elmyr later described him to me as someone who “has a kind of diabolical charisma and can convince anyone of anything. If he spoke to your mother, he could convince her that the best thing she could do is kill you. She would do it!”

  At that time, Fernand began to realize the potential wealth that he could gain if he handled Elmyr right. This thought became his “mission statement” and only business ethic. Any subservient role vis-àvis Elmyr also ran contrary to his ego. He further knew a little flattery and attention thrown Elmyr’s way would help get him what he wanted. Irving wrote of their burgeoning partnership: “Rising to the surface now in Fernand’s character were two dominating traits—ambition and greed—with which Elmyr, for the better or for worse, had never been cursed.” Before fully catching his breath after his celebratory dance performance around the apartment, Fernand urged Elmyr to do some watercolors or a few gouaches to sell. He was twenty-eight years old and saw no reason to put off getting rich.

  A week after Fernand’s successful venture as a seller of fine art, he exerted some more of his verbal Rolfing on Elmyr to try other markets. He had passed his test and apprenticeship nicely, he thought, and already hungered for bigger challenges. Elmyr agreed to fly with him to Chicago. Elmyr created a Braque watercolor, two Matisse drawings, and a Picasso lithograph. Fernand dispersed these among three galleries. Upon returning to Miami, Elmyr discovered that the FBI were again on his trail. The two men decided to leave Florida the next day. Nervously, Elmyr insisted on traveling alone to New Orleans. Legros was to join him only after a circuitous trip to Atlanta and then to Louisiana by bus. Fernand persuaded Elmyr to give him the portfolio containing a small trove of postimpressionist treasures. He played on his fears, telling Elmyr it would be safer for him if they were not in his possession. Elmyr conceded without objection.

  While Elmyr, waiting to rejoin his new partner, dined on Cajun cuisine in the Latin Quarter or took in the nightlife in dimly lit bars or jazz clubs, a disgruntled Fernand traveled across four states by bus to their appointed rendezvous. He vowed it would be the last time he would take low-class public transportation. (I suspect it was.) Elmyr’s snobbery seemed to have fertile ground in him, too. By the time they reunited, Fernand was given free reign to exercise his innate entrepreneurial spirit. Moving from New Orleans to Dallas to St. Louis and then to Denver, something akin to Henry Ford’s assembly line was operating effectively, churning out convincing examples of impressionist and postimpressionist art for those better able to afford Cadillacs. When they were in Denver, Fernand booked a room at the elegant Brown Palace. Elmyr, for some peculiar reason, could afford only something less than his partner’s five-star accommodations. He did his calculations again in Hungarian: two and two equals five. Yes, that’s right. Something was not adding up. He suspected Fernand was paying him less than his 60 percent share. Despite that unpleasant revelation, he still did not want to upset their arrangement. He was, after all, making money again and not having to assume all the risk.

  In Houston, their portfolio of fauve watercolors and drawings were popular with their clients. Fernand was pressuring Elmyr now for small oil paintings. “I explained the difficulties associated with paintings, but he didn’t seem too concerned, or he was simply more concerned that they would bring in a greater amount of money,” he recounted of Legros’s insistence. Elmyr still enjoyed a wide network of friends and social connections he did not necessarily feel compelled to share with Fernand. Although Legros sought out exclusive men’s clothing stores for tailored suits and shirts, Elmyr still thought he resembled a parvenu sponge diver.

  One day Elmyr ran into an old friend in Houston, a French art dealer helping some well-healed Texans satisfy their desires for instant culture. The dealer asked if he knew of anyone who had a Modigliani portrait of Soutine for sale. Elmyr pondered thoughtfully for a moment, and said he knew a dealer in Chicago who had one and would probably sell it for the right price. Elmyr would find out. He then went to a bookstore, bought a book on the artist Chaim Soutine, returned to his hotel, and did his portrait à la Modigliani. He called the dealer and told him he could get the drawing in three days for $1,500. After the customary bickering over price, they settled on $1,250.

  The dealer in this instance was François Reichenbach, who by 1970 had become a filmmaker and collaborator with the BBC on the documentary about Elmyr called Elmyr, The True Picture? Orson Welles later incorporated some of that footage in F for Fake. In that film, Reichenbach tells the story of this incident, leaving little doubt that he suspected Elmyr was manufacturing these artworks, but choosing to turn a blind eye. This just raises the question to what extent was there knowing complicity in the buying, selling, and reselling of Elmyr’s work. I personally doubt this was an isolated instance.

  Elmyr felt rather pleased with himself for his renewed initiative in selling his art, and without too much difficulty. When Elmyr mentioned it to Fernand, he let out the scream of a wounded howler monkey, awakening most, if not all the sleeping hotel guests on his and adjacent floors. Wild-eyed, profanity-laced protests made clear Fernand’s upset at this news. He claimed Elmyr owed him 40 percent because they were partners and had a “gentlemen’s agreement.” Scenes of any sort were distasteful to Elmyr, and he avoided them whenever he could, but not only was he the target of Fernand’s tirade, he could not escape as Fernand physically blocked the door. He continued his rant until he extracted a promise from Elmyr to pay him his share. Elmyr glimpsed Fernand’s willingness to use his temper and public displays of anger to intimidate him and others around him. What he couldn’t yet assess was the latent violence underlying Legros’s outrage.

  They continued their road show westward back to California, the place Elmyr most felt at home outside Budapest and Paris. Money was also flowing again, although thinking of life’s demands beyond tomorrow was the kind of long-term planning better left to bankers, brokers, or fortune-tellers. His habitual insouciance about finances, cavalier spending, and generosity were simply part of his nature. Fernand was well aware of this behavior pattern by now. It soon became an important leveraging tool to manipulate Elmyr as long as their relationship lasted. Elmyr was also certain that Legros shortchanged him on sales, and this most likely prompted some solo sales calls when an opportunity arose. He just needed to avoid detection and triggering his partner’s fury.

  A young man Elmyr met and liked had some car problems, and the repair costs were more than he could afford. Taking the bus down to La Jolla and Laguna Beach, Elmyr paid a visit to a couple of art galleries and sold some of his lithographs. As predictable as his disregard for money was, his impulse to rescue others was even stronger. After giving his friend the cash to fix his car, the young man drove Elmyr back to his Hollywood apartment. There, in front of Fernand, he thanked Elmyr again for his help. Legros was by now the decided paymaster and quickly tallied a discrepancy in Elmyr’s available funds and the cost of his friend’s auto repair bill. Fernand instantly flew into a rage on the apartment’s balcony where they stood. His audible tantrum began drawing curious spectators in the parking lot below in the way a fire would. A genuine Hollywood soap opera unfolded before their growing audience. Epithets rang out between strangulated refrains of, “You stole money from me” or “You stole money from me,” uncertain where to place the accent before his audition. Elmyr’s friend stood back in shock. Elmyr, for a moment, huddled beside him, frozen in horror, then tried pushing Fernand back inside the apartment. Legros, who by then was more mindful of his audience that surely sympathized with his denouncement and discovery of this sinister betrayal, let out one last screech worthy of Sara Bernhardt, “you stole money from me!” Oh, the treachery of betrayal—Fernand could honestly say he had the crowd on their feet.

  Their 60/
40 split now became 50/50. Fernand, however, was soon appreciably more subdued, not due to spiritual conversion, Zen meditation, or pharmaceutical drugs, but just a bout of infectious hepatitis. It seemed to be Elmyr’s turn to help Fernand through bedridden days and nights for the next four weeks. Through Fernand’s convalescence, Elmyr enjoyed the unexpected tranquility of his high-strung associate. He also took the time to tutor him in art history. If his teacher had not punctuated these stories of the great artists’ lives with lurid accounts of their loves, intrigues, struggles, rise and fall from grace and so forth, he would have found them a huge soporific. What details Elmyr might have neglected to share about his own past, he now imparted to a sick, but listening Legros. These confidences were little more than chits to be used later for whatever advantage Fernand could gain from them. Still, this nurturing role came easily to Elmyr, being a caregiver by nature. During the years I knew Elmyr, I recognized this instinct and witnessed his abject incapacity to resist this “broken-wing syndrome,” as I called it, as in rushing to aid a wounded bird. This impulse was also very much bound up in his notion of dependability, plainly helping anyone who needed help, and that others could count on him—even when the beneficiary was someone totally vacant of appreciating or reciprocating such gestures—like Fernand.

  As soon as Fernand recovered from the hepatitis, his petulant temperament rebounded too. Elmyr was not used to living under the surveying eyes of anyone before now and was fed up with his petty jealousies and embarrassing public tantrums. He also thought that if he continued his illicit career, it was just a matter of time until his luck ran out. Since he narrowly escaped his suicide attempt, he had thought about much in its aftermath. For the last six months, he considered returning to Europe but wasn’t sure how he would accomplish that. An unforeseen opportunity answered that question. Someone Fernand knew had the connections to procure a passport for him.