by Mark Forgy
Elmyr could still not believe his misfortunate encounter with Fernand near the Gare Saint-Lazare, the train station he arrived at when he was twenty and naive. One thing, though, had not changed in all those years: he remained naive. He still had his comfortable apartment in Rome, and with the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games now over, he felt he could return to resume life at a slower pace. Once back, however, he was uneasy, restless. His bank account was diminishing rapidly, and the inevitable consequences of that were depressing. Necessity, being the mother that it is, forced him back into a defensive mode. Rummaging through secondhand bookstores and art supply shops while he was in Paris was a weathervane of the direction he was heading. He had the French canvas, stretchers, paper with French watermarks, paints, pastels, watercolors, and ink he needed in his apartment studio. Over the next month, he would produce a body of work that exhibited talent, knowledge, and verve that comes from a lifetime of familiarity with his profession. The temporary hiatus from his fakery had not softened his skill in the least. If anything, it appeared stronger and more confident.
Elmyr stood back, trying to examine objectively more than two dozen Renoir and Degas pastels, Matisse drawings, Derain watercolors, and Picasso pen and ink drawings. His history of success at selling his artwork in the styles of others suggested that what he had in front of him was the artistic equivalent of bearer bonds in the banking world. He later expressed his astonishment to me regarding the mythic stature and universal respect that made Picasso an unparalleled phenomenon of twentieth-century art. He said that no other artist throughout history could “transform a single line into gold” as he could. That was, providing it also bore his signature. Continuing in that vein, he suggested that this mercantile alchemy also debased the value of his work because it no longer had any rapport to its intrinsic artistic value. He opined that most of his work after Guernica (1937) was inferior, weak, and uninteresting when compared to his oeuvre before that creation.
Knowing there was a greater demand and that they fetched bigger prices, Elmyr preferred to mimic Picasso’s earlier works. In the BBC documentary, Elmyr alleged that a dealer showed Picasso one of his paintings signed “Picasso.” The artist then asked how much he paid for it. The dealer supposedly replied, $100,000, to which Picasso said, “Well, if you paid that much, it must be by me.” By comparison, Elmyr boasted that he “never offered a painting or a drawing to a museum or a gallery that didn’t buy it.” This may be true, but unlike Picasso, buyers did not line up outside his door for his work. For Elmyr, the creating part was always far easier than the selling, and this sad fact eventually caused him to rejoin that unpleasant but profitable alliance with Legros. In any event, he was an effective, albeit unhinged and dishonest, agent for Elmyr’s work, simply because he felt blissfully emancipated from any moral constraints whatsoever in pursuit of what he wanted. Legality? Morality? He would take careful aim in a Parisian pissoir at these things.
Everyone Elmyr knew in Rome who had any interest in art—or, rather, his art—had already bought an original Elmyr. It was not his style to pressure anyone to buy more if they did not specifically indicate further interest. That market had dried up, so to speak. It was time again to pack his well-traveled luggage. Before moving on, he invited his friends to a farewell party. Within days of deciding to leave, he packed economically around his precious portfolio in the meager trunk space of his Corvette and stored other items he could ship later on.
His internal compass wavered with no definite sense of direction or specific destination. Elmyr stopped in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and then London, making brief business calls along the way. No matter what his persona, his MO was the same: i.e., always appear smartly dressed, well spoken, plausible, and make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. It was a formula that never failed him.
Meanwhile, Fernand was once again having new suits tailor-made in Paris to look the part of a successful art dealer. His enterprising spirit now soared, as did his ego. With the valuable art looted from the Winslow trunk in his possession, it was his bankroll in a high-stakes poker game where he viewed the competition as chumps.
On his meandering trip northward, Elmyr reflected on the European market. He preferred to obliterate souvenirs of his association with Legros, but the words of his unsavory supplicant rang in his ears during their brief encounter in Paris. People would be “clamoring” for his masterpieces. The ego-caressing compliment would have meant more coming from someone he respected—a titled person, for sure. Coming from any quarter, though, like a natural sponge he absorbed a kind word. He was a vacuum, in fact, for the slightest demonstration of kindness or affection, whether they were genuine or insincere. In Fernand’s view, this made him the perfect sucker. It must have been an enormous source of amusement for him that he could con a fellow con so easily.
The art community had excellent communication channels, and, despite a voracious appetite for the kind of art Elmyr provided, he did not want to inundate the market with his work. It should filter in slowly, he thought, like an intravenous drip. He then made a strategic business plan for himself. Traveling from Ostende, Belgium, by ferry to England, he drove north to London. There, he sold a Derain watercolor to a Mayfair gallery. He booked a room at the Dorchester on Park Lane. It was good to be back in the land of Earl Gray tea, elegant men’s haberdasheries, and civilized manners. Then, strolling into a travel agency on Knightsbridge one day, he bought another one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro. That very afternoon, he sold his Corvette to a London auto dealer who was happy to pay him $2,000 for it.
On the flight to Brazil, he once again relived those memories of arriving from Stockholm wearing long wool underwear and nearly fainting from the tropical heat. Now he knew what to expect. Maybe this time he would live in Buenos Aires. The Argentines were also beautiful people, he recalled. There was one major obstacle to Elmyr’s longrange plans, though; he gauged them in months, never years. He was restless by nature. His relationships were fleeting. His profession was risky. A fortune-teller would read nothing in his tea leaves that foretold any permanent stability in his life.
Visions of residing in the southern hemisphere “faded like a mirage” as he described the rapidly changing plan for his future. “Things just did not work out as I hoped,” he wistfully shared with me. In Sao Palo, he enjoyed some success, selling his works to a museum and later to art dealers in Buenos Aires. The pursuit of happiness he knew was far more elusive than pulling out some map and planning an itinerary. After two months, no one place appealed to him enough to call a permanent home. Nor was South America the booming market that was the United States or Europe. He had about $5,000 remaining for his efforts and time there, but still felt vacant, purposeless. He wanted to return to Europe.
An Iberia Airlines flight brought him back to Spain from Argentina. An exhausted, itinerant art forger arrived in Madrid and checked into the Ritz Hotel. Unlike before, he did not immediately reach for his address book, sit on the edge of his bed, and make call after call until his social agenda was filled. Looking back at him in the bathroom mirror was an appreciably older, though, no wiser man with graying hair. He was not just physically tired from the long trip; his joy of life seemed gone. The hotel with its refined accommodations would be a salubrious spot to rest a few days, he thought. Madrid was a city he liked. There were fine restaurants, sidewalk cafés, the great Prado Museum, and even within the firm grip of Franco’s police state, there were gay bars, although many were literally underground.
A friend from Paris told him about the quaint island of Ibiza. It was one of the lesser-known Balearic chain and overshadowed by the larger, popular tourist destination, Mallorca. In the two years since he left America, there seemed to be something missing, besides a legal occupation. Remembering the easygoing companionship of his friend Jimmy Damion in Los Angeles and then Miami Beach, he longed for someone special in his life. No matter how much he enjoyed the company of his friends, there was an emotional void he needed
to fill. He was now fifty-five years old and began to question if his life would ever assume any semblance of normalcy. His friend also told him Ibiza was a sanctuary for bohemians, writers, and artists, being cosmopolitan and intimate at the same time.
He boarded a plane for Barcelona with a connecting flight to Ibiza. As the plane circled, making its runway approach, he could see the island dotted with its ancient white farmhouses, and the walled fortress of the Old City of Ibiza town. The translucent blue-green of the Mediterranean Sea gave it an instant visual appeal, possessing the same quality of light he loved about the south of France. Elmyr arrived inconspicuously, like an alien species there to just observe but not interfere with the indigenous life forms.
Ibiza town – watercolor by Elmyr
painting of matadors in Elmyr’s own style
He found the island “simpatico, as they say in Chinese,” as he later quipped. A casual encounter at a sidewalk café led him to the owner of a small home overlooking the Bay of Figueretas near Ibiza town. So far, he liked what he saw and decided to rent the house, Villa Platero. It was inexpensive, as were the restaurants and bars. Could this be the place destined to be his home? Still, the notion of settling down in one place, after moving around like a nomad his entire life, was foreign.
Later that summer, he went to Greece, visiting the island of Hydra. At that time, the filmmaker Jules Dassin was filming Phaedra with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. (She was a longtime political activist and became minister of culture in the socialist government that came to power in 1981. Retrieving the Parthenon’s famed “Elgin Marbles” from Great Britain was her cause célèbre.) Elmyr befriended both Mercouri and Dassin, who offered him a walk-on part in their movie. He did not come away starry-eyed enough from the experience to make a career leap to acting. Besides, he already was an actor. Greece and its myriad islands might be a possibility for a discreet retirement home, he thought, although his assessment was pragmatic. “It did not have a major airport and I knew one useless language, Hungarian; I didn’t see a need to learn another, Greek,” he remarked to me later.
It was time to attend to business once again. Intending to return to Paris, he chose to stop in Vienna, where he sold two Matisse drawings. On his arrival in Paris, he checked into a hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. That evening he went back to one of his old haunts, the Café Flore, where, in a city of millions of people, he ran into the starkly unavoidable Fernand Legros—again. This time he appeared better groomed but still oozing the affected charm of a gigolo. Parisian sophistication seemed to be rubbing off on him. Yet, Elmyr could not account for the confidence in his strut and absence of cloying deference he always used to get what he wanted. A whiff of something rotten in Denmark wafted under his nostrils in France. What Elmyr didn’t know was that he had unwittingly helped Legros become an enterprising hustler with a patina of authenticity that derived from sales of work stolen from his trunk at the Winslow Hotel. Fernand moved swiftly with the deft agility of his former cabaret dancing to meet art and antique dealers and collectors. Making contacts by networking the gay community and employing Kasbah marketing techniques, he now had money in his pockets, which only reinforced his natural bravado. Elmyr, in fact, would have liked to have the money Fernand had. At that moment, he also could not imagine that this role reversal would endure for several years to come.
Fernand knew Elmyr was generous by nature, so he could be as well. The difference was in the character of the two men. Elmyr’s gestures of kindness were the product of genuine altruism, while with Fernand they were like a loan on which he would exact a usurious interest and soul-snatching future payback. For the latter, the interest invariably exceeded the principle. That evening at their café table, they had a couple of aperitifs together in a cordial and relaxed setting. It was not the tense, unpleasant encounter of the year before near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Legros checkmated Elmyr’s custom of reaching for the bill when the waiter brought it. The unexpected largesse disarmed him even further, to the extent that he actually told Fernand where he was staying.
Legros’s lack of desperation lulled Elmyr into the scheming web he was weaving for the gullible Hungarian. Fernand found an apartment on the rue de la Pompe. Despite its good location, it was modest next to the one he moved to later on and had decorated to suit an Ottoman pasha. Elmyr still was clueless about the connection between himself and Fernand’s current bourgeois comfort. He was astonished, though, to find three original watercolors by Raoul Dufy framed on Legros’s apartment walls. He never dreamed his former partner could so quickly become a legitimate art dealer. Never mind that these outward signs of prosperity came directly from the booty stolen from Elmyr, which made Fernand a kind of bipedal magpie. I should not disparage magpies by this comparison, and I’m sure they feel guiltier for their thievery than did Fernand. This would not be his last visit to Legros’s new residence, but the first of several over the next few weeks.
Elmyr was not idle at this time either. He produced two Modigliani drawings that he thought were “quite good.” He was so confident in their quality that he went to see a representative of Madame Modigliani, the artist’s daughter, who allegedly provided an expertise verifying their authenticity. An eager dealer on the Avenue Matignon promptly bought them from him.
During their conversation at the Café Flore, Elmyr told Fernand about his visit to Greece, and the sketches and watercolors he did there. The ingratiating Fernand asked to see them. When Elmyr brought his portfolio with the artwork from his Grecian holiday, the once-more fawning con man praised him. “How much are you asking for them?” he inquired after he had carefully examined each one. “Fifty dollars for this, a hundred dollars for that,” Elmyr unassumingly stated. His voice rose to more of a question mark at the end. “They are absolutely wonderful. I’ll buy them all!” Fernand bellowed to emphasize the moment of his proclamation, his cunning past unnoticed by the painter. Elmyr was now mellow with good humor and as they chatted more. Sharing a bottle of Chateau Margaux ’47, he told Fernand of his fresh triumph with the gallery owner on the Avenue Matignon.
With a grave but caring look, he then leaned into Elmyr as if to share a secret and confided with the wisdom of an older brother, “Elmyr, mon cher, it is too dangerous for you to continue to take these risks! Look, you can see I’m doing well. We could help each other. I have some real Dufys here. We could hang some of your work alongside, and not only would they look more authentic, I could probably ask better prices for my pieces. Then we could discreetly sell a small Modigliani by you, or a Matisse. That way we both could profit, and you would no longer have to take any chances. You could live quietly and peacefully on that island you talked about, and we could split the profits like we did in the States.” One could almost hear the snake charmer’s flute in the background. There was no doubt about it. Fernand’s powers of persuasion were impressive and effective. Elmyr had just succumbed to the aural equivalent of a date-rape drug, insidious and stupefying. He was about to partner with a man he had described as loathsome and odious, but Fernand’s low-key euphonious evangelizing had just thoroughly seduced him, his once and future business associate.
By now Elmyr not only had replenished his coffers, he was certain that the island of Ibiza was where he was going to live. It was in the western end of the Mediterranean, where the rest of Western Europe was easily accessible, and it was nowhere near as expensive as city life. During his flight back to Spain, he mulled over the new strategy for the rest of his life. He would live an unhurried existence where work is incidental to siestas. The climate was like that of his beloved California. For less than $160 a month, he could pay his rent and have a house cleaner. Before leaving Paris, Fernand promised he would receive a stipend of $400 monthly from a Swiss bank and gave him a $500 advance with a 50 percent split of future sales. It was, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “too true to be good.”
Elmyr indeed thought that his worries were over and his career as an art forger would draw no more attent
ion than if he were an honest corner greengrocer in Shepard’s Bush. To his delight, he discovered that his $400 salary was roughly double what he needed to live comfortably in those days. True to form, he shared his good fortune with others, helping many struggling artists on the island by buying their work. He also met a young Canadian whom he mentored and helped develop into a talented artist with his assistance and encouragement. The long-lacking companionship in his life was no longer the emotional void his constant wandering had made a sad fact. To the local residents, he was Señor Elmyr. Everyone, in fact, knew others only by their first names, and it seemed everyone soon knew Elmyr.
One local gallery owner and resident since before anyone could remember was an expatriate Brit, Ivan Spence. A shock of magnificent straight white hair combed back from a broad, perpetually tanned forehead sat atop his thick six-foot-four-inch frame, making him seem like a mobile snow-capped mountain. Even more riveting was his sonorous BBC voice and articulate erudition that made it easy to think of him as Jehovah’s schoolmaster. When standing next to Ivan, Elmyr would look up at him as though he were peering up at something way above the tree line. The disparity in their stature was nary noticed when they were lost in twinkle-eyed rapture, discussing art in its nebulae of minutia. Two sandbox playmates could not have been more oblivious to the concept of time than were these aged children locked in their private world of mutual interest.