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

by Mark Forgy

  Throughout the years of their association, Elmyr explained away his ignorance of the extent of Fernand’s success at selling his work with some partially believable rationalizations. Yes, he was inherently gullible. Yes, he had no head for numbers or business. (This may explain why his parents never groomed him for the family banking business.) Yes, others easily manipulated him. In the seven years that I knew him and lived with him, he vigorously downplayed his knowledge of what was really going on, but this simply does not tally with his output at that time. He knew the truth was far more incriminating than a lie. I call this the Lenny Bruce Defense. The comedian advised that if “your wife catches you in bed with another woman—deny it!” This prudent counsel, it seems, has been widely embraced by a good share of our elected officials.

  During those years of 1963 and 1964, Fernand established some solid business connections in Japan with dealers and collectors, and even sold a number of works to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. Elmyr later discovered, when the sale of his art to the museum was pending, that the cautious Japanese buyers solicited the advice of the visiting French minister of culture, André Malraux, the great art connoisseur and writer. He reputedly remarked that their prices seemed extremely reasonable. However, he was surprised how the paintings ever got out of France. The sales went through, and Fernand allegedly pocketed a cool quarter of a million dollars. Elmyr’s share was substantially less. When Fernand next went to Ibiza, he carried on about what a wasted effort the trip had been. It cost him a lot of money, and claimed he just could not get them to commit to buy anything, but he generously brought his friend a small Japanese television as a gift anyway.

  After Fernand thoroughly charmed his clients in Japan to open their checkbooks, he purchased a Paris apartment for $350,000 on Avenue Henri Martin, previously owned by King Hassan of Morocco. As Elmyr recounted this story, his tone turned increasingly peevish as it usually did with these testimonies of his gullibility and self-professed stupidity. “Fernand,” he went on, “spent something like a $160,000 to remodel it. He wanted to surpass the opulence of its last owner, I think. I heard about the new apartment, but he always tried to keep me away—but I did see it in 1965 when I made an unannounced visit to Paris. When I saw it, it looked like a set design from Scheherazade. Red brocade covered the walls with gilt trim. There were three large bathrooms in marble; the sinks and bathtubs all had gold faucets. It was trop voyant—too showy. I told him it might impress the nouveau riche, but…he laughed and said his clients were nouveau riche.

  “I also told him I thought the ambiance overwhelmed the artwork, and mentioned that most dealers show their pictures in a more subdued, even somber setting to focus on the artwork.” Fernand then vigorously waved his arms like an orchestra conductor bringing a rehearsal to an abrupt halt upon hearing a sour note. “Mon cher,” he explained to Elmyr, oozing his self-assured charm once more, “please, let me do the selling, and you do the artwork.” The in-command confidence of his demeanor turned dark instantly, as though just informed of a plot to poison him, when Elmyr asked for some of his long-awaited bonus money most likely already spent on interior decoration. Fernand’s bile ducts were probably backing up when he sat down to write Elmyr a check for $2,000. With that distasteful burden out of the way, his mood morphed quickly back to joy. Like Beelzebub expecting new contracts relinquishing fresh souls, he enthusiastically rubbed his hands together and asked Elmyr what art he had brought him.

  Since business was wildly profitable for him that year, Fernand purchased a Renault limousine for himself, a mink coat and jewelry for his mother, two new Corvettes for his boyfriends to use, wardrobes for them, and even a new Mustang for Elmyr. For obvious reasons Fernand speedily tried to dispatch Elmyr once he had his current masterpiece-on-demand list fulfilled. He knew the flagrant spectacles of prosperity might cause his gold-egg-laying Hungarian goose sudden constipation. If his theatrics and bogus excuses for withholding his ill-gotten gains from Elmyr were less than convincing, his elder partner could be stubborn and uncooperative. Elmyr’s temperament needed careful handling, but any miscue in that regard was still not like handing a vile of nitroglycerine to an agitated chimp, as Fernand’s volatility always suggested.

  Any slight, real or imagined, was enough to nudge Fernand into a rampage that terrorized those around him, and who were powerless to stop him because no one had an elephant gun loaded with a tranquilizing dart. Elmyr cited stories of Fernand’s fits of jealous pique that would cause any reasoning person to flee. One famous incident Elmyr relayed involved a bitter quarrel that erupted between Fernand and his lover who just purchased a new cream-colored Alpha Romeo sports car. As they drove it from the dealership down the Champs Elysee in Paris, Fernand put out his cigarette on the carpet and started berating his driver. With a freshly lit cigarette, he began burning holes in the red-leather seats. Mutual accusations escalated to blows as the car careened through traffic. Then, pulling up to the nearest gendarme, the driver angrily told the police officer that the man next to him sexually propositioned him and he wanted him arrested. The cop took them both to the police station, where they stayed until Legros’s bruised friend dropped the charges. Fernand promised a truce and full reparations for the damages after renewing pledges of love and fidelity.

  Another time in New York, visions of his lover’s betrayal seized his overactive imagination because his boyfriend neglected to tell him he was going to a movie. When he arrived two hours later than expected, Fernand, it seems, had already exacted punishment for his treachery by throwing all the traitor’s clothes from their fifth-floor hotel room to amazed but open-armed, joyous spectators on the sidewalk below. Pierre Cardin suits, tailored shirts, and silk ties rained down like a sartorial wet dream. New, inventive ways to avenge any offense as he saw it, never failed to invigorate Legros. These challenges found him at his resourceful best.

  For as slippery as Fernand’s grasp was of his own mercurial behavior, he was still an astute observer, and consequently, manipulator of others. His manufactured altruism possessed as much stagecraft as his cabaret choreography. He enjoyed the showmanship of spontaneous generosity although it was rarely, if ever, unpremeditated. These gestures, in all probability, were regular steroid injections for his self-image—better still, reminders of his power and control over others. Gifts of cash, on the other hand, were more fleeting and promoted dangerous independent thinking. This simple fact made it necessary to dole out just enough money to Elmyr to not weaken his dependence on him, yet still give him enough incentive to continue producing his paintings, gouaches, watercolors, and drawings. This tactic did not pass unnoticed.

  Even though Elmyr deduced what one could not easily ignore, that Fernand was lying to him about the profits from sales, he could prove nothing. Ibiza was by now not just a safe house removing him from harm’s way. It was his home. For the first time in his life, that previously unknown impulse to live permanently in one place had become an idée fixe. Fernand’s once-improbable suggestion of building a place of his own did not now seem so far-fetched. He also thought Fernand would happily contribute to its construction costs in exchange for the artwork he wanted. Yes, it was an epiphany for Elmyr, and it made perfect sense, a claim he rarely made about anything he did.

  Elmyr Builds His Villa

  Through a friend on the island, Elmyr found a small piece of land on a hillside between the old walled city of Ibiza town and the Bay of Figueretas with a commanding view of the countryside and the Mediterranean. The property’s edge plummeted down a rocky precipice about forty meters to a beach. On this site Elmyr eventually had his villa, La Falaise, constructed. A resident German architect, Irwin Brauner, designed his home. Elmyr’s intention to leverage his talent to get his house was clever in its conception, although Fernand’s devious wiles ultimately conjured it away from him. He agreed to pay for the home’s building costs by setting up a special account at a local bank. These funds were to be dedicated to building costs. When Fernand found tha
t Elmyr was actually using a little of the money for his personal living expenses, he exploded in a late-night call from Paris. Not only did he accuse Elmyr of violating their compact of sacred trust, but he screamed that his ungrateful boyfriend and Elmyr were plotting against him. Elmyr found his paranoid rants always discomforting, but their shock value had dulled somewhat over the years of their association. It was just when there was an audience present that he found his outbursts an insufferable breach of social decorum.

  Even though he had an ample stipend to cover his modest living expenses, modest was one of those words he liked to say was “open to interpretation.” However one chose to define it, it was too imprecise to frequent his vocabulary, so he was less likely to see that it applied to him in any way. It is perhaps because Elmyr did not feel bound by the vagueness of their financial arrangement that he saw nothing wrong with augmenting his “modest” salary from the unaccountable Legros.

  Fernand once suggested that Elmyr rent a small studio in the old city of Ibiza so as not to arouse his neighbors’ suspicions around Villa Platero. Elmyr parried this idea, explaining that within days people would be peering through windows and keyholes to see what he was up to. Satisfying one’s curiosity on Ibiza was at least as important as nutritional sustenance. He found one way to slip under the gossip radar was to escape the small island altogether. During the winter he often went to Kitzbuhle in Austria or Lisbon, Portugal, where in a creative flurry he produced all that Fernand requested—and more. His extracurricular activity always paid off; he would produce some Dufy watercolors, Vlaminck gouaches, or Matisse drawings that he sold for easy money in Munich, Vienna, or Milan. Since Legros was certainly withholding monies from him, he saw no reason to share the proceeds from his own entrepreneurial efforts. On one of his trips to the Austrian ski resort, however, Fernand sent along his boyfriend from Paris to make sure “mother”—or the “gypsy,” as they derisively referred to Elmyr—might not cheat him.

  Legros’s penetrating ability to see demonic subterfuge among those entrusted to be faithful and demonstrate proper veneration to him, made the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada’s, suspicions look cheerily optimistic by comparison. In view of this inescapable reality, the inspiration behind Legros’s right-angle logic is as freshly mystifying today as it was then. His confidante and lover, who was to keep an eye on Elmyr, was himself the most common object of Fernand’s fits of jealousy and rage, a constantly ducking target in his personal shooting gallery. Elmyr never had difficulty making friends of his own, so he never coveted Fernand’s bevy of boyfriends, even though Legros forever anguished over such thoughts.

  The surprise in Elmyr’s voice as he regaled me with this story is still unforgettable. Legros’s spy drove his Corvette down from Paris to Munich, where he was to meet Elmyr. As it had been snowing heavily that winter, they needed to get snow tires for the American car to safely negotiate the slippery Alpine roads to Kitzbuhle. They waited patiently at the luxury Hotel Bayerischerhof a couple of days for the tires to arrive. About one o’clock in the morning on the second night at the hotel, the phone rang in Elmyr’s room. An irate Fernand demanded to know his companion’s whereabouts and insisted on speaking to him. Elmyr curtly informed him that he was not his guardian and said, “Why don’t you ask him?” and then hung up the phone, knowing how that would likely soothe Legros’s troubled mind. Elmyr finished his nighttime reading and went to sleep. About an hour later, he awakened to an aggressive staccato of knocks at his door. In walked Fernand’s friend, the blood drained from his face like someone about to go into shock. The phone rang once more. Again, it was Fernand. Elmyr held the phone away from his ear and with the audibility of a bullhorn, it announced for all to hear, between the strangulated cursing, “If I were there, I would kill you both!”

  Elmyr didn’t know Fernand’s threat was not for him. However, Legros’s cross-eyed indignation seemed to justify every former and future tirade against his friend, who weathered his verbal assaults with the practice of a battered spouse. Fernand once more phrased his denunciation in the insane imperfect tense of someone dressed in a canvas jacket with overly long sleeves clasped in the back. In anticipation of their arrival, Fernand had the forethought to bribe the hotel desk clerk to report their every movement. It was through him that Legros discovered his friend’s return to his room, but his friend was not alone. He unwisely invited an acquaintance to come back with him. Elmyr, his face still signaling his disbelief, then said the accusatory call Legros made was from Orly airport in Paris. He knew every detail about the boy that returned to the room with his wretched companion.

  The following day, the new snow tires arrived, so they could depart Munich for the ski resort and ascend the switchback roads through the Austrian Alps to Kitzbuhel. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, Fernand arrived two hours after they did by taking a cab from the Munich airport and traveling the hundred-mile distance. Dressed only in casual trousers and red sweater to match the color of his face, he had no coat, no luggage, and no money, but somehow managed to find their rented chalet. Elmyr was flabbergasted to hear his familiar shrieks and see his violent arm-flapping, as though trying to disprove the notion that one cannot simultaneously become airborne and argue with a German-speaking cab driver. Fernand demanded that Elmyr pay the driver, and he did, to stave off Legros’s one-man reenactment of the Second World War. At the sight of his unfaithful friend, Fernand uncorked his recriminations once more. Elmyr found himself in the middle of the combative couple and, like a prizefight referee, forced the two apart. At times like these, loneliness probably seemed an attractive alternative to him.

  Over the next several weeks, Elmyr sequestered himself in the mountainside chalet, locked his door, and worked prodigiously. These moments of single-minded purpose were rare for him; the lack of distraction contributed greatly to his focus. Fernand appeared less convulsed by anxiety and suspicion now that he could personally observe everyone’s activity. Well, according to Elmyr, the fights were fewer, at least. Fernand’s strategy was to have Elmyr do enough Dufys to mount an exhibition in Paris by late November. He secured the Galerie Pont-Royale Hotel for a show entitled “Homage to Raoul Dufy.” Of the thirty-three works they planned to display, twenty-six of the watercolors and oil paintings were by Elmyr. True to form, when Fernand and his companion returned to Paris with Elmyr’s work, he stayed behind, probably to recover from the Sturm und Drang of the not-so-dear but thankfully departed others.

  By the time the show opened in Paris, Elmyr had returned to Ibiza. A well-known critic, Gerald Messadie, wrote some suitably pontifical praise in the exhibition catalog. Curiously, a real Dufy graced its cover, Les Courses, Deauville 1925, an oil painting from the private collection of Fernand’s attorney. The smattering of legitimate works among the fakes was apparently an effective trompe l’oeil to make the show a huge success. The news of this social, artistic, and financial triumph never quite reached Elmyr, tucked away on his Mediterranean isle. No surprise there.

  Fernand was again feeling spontaneously generous on the heels of the profitable Dufy exhibition. He showered those benefits first on himself and then his growing entourage of young boys, who seemed to be getting younger all the time. Elmyr later told me in order to pacify the families of his underage harem, Fernand paid hush money for their silence as well. There may well have been little money left to give Elmyr. In any event, Legros knew how to handle him—or exploit him properly.

  Elmyr not only knew nothing of the money Fernand made from the Dufy show, he was also unaware that a fauve-style Derain painting he did in Kitzbuhel reputedly sold through a gallery in New York for around $115,000. This was also part of the booty Fernand took to Paris after his winter ski vacation in Austria. This instance, like so many others, points to Elmyr’s dismal negligence of even keeping any record of his output for which he could hold Fernand accountable. It seems that once he handed over the artwork to Legros he became lost in a fog of amnesia.

  I consistently witnessed his inabili
ty to keep track of records, receipts, or documents that became irretrievably lost within piles of newspapers, magazines, or correspondence. While I tried to bring some order to the chaos, his lifelong pattern of disorder routinely thwarted my efforts. These mountains of paper he then often relegated to boxes or suitcases and left with friends when he moved between ever-changing addresses.

  To further illustrate this point, I returned to the States in 1975 to visit my family. This included a trip to Los Angeles to see my brother. While I was there, I looked up someone I met in London, a wildly entertaining bantam fellow with the incongruous name Samson. In his small home tucked away in the shadows of one of the movie studios, he lived in a time capsule like a diminutive Miss Haversham. Everything was vintage 1900 art nouveau and a delight to behold. Knowing my connection to Elmyr, he led me to a back room where he brought out a suitcase of Elmyr’s and let me browse through it. There was a wealth of letters from various museums regarding the purchase and selling of paintings; I found mementos and other personal effects that were intimate and revealing. I wish I had had the presence of mind to ask for the valise, but I did not. I believe that material would have been exceedingly insightful in writing this book. Alas, I still have more than can be confined to these pages.

  Nineteen sixty-four was an eventful year for both Elmyr and Fernand. Elmyr continued living quietly on Ibiza, receiving his monthly allowance, and occasionally, a begrudgingly sent bonus check, but it was never enough to declare his independence from his partner. In April, construction began on La Falaise. At age fifty-eight, ownership of his first home ought to have been a turning point in his life, signifying stability and finally reversing years of impermanence. Fernand still exerted an irresistibly persuasive influence over Elmyr and convinced him that since he was a refugee with no legal citizenship, it was too risky to put the house in his name. “Don’t you agree, mon cher,” Legros said to him, “that it would be better not to have anything to do with the courts and banks that might bring attention to you, attention you don’t want? I think it would be safer to put it in my name, since I’m an American citizen and they’re not likely to make any trouble for me. We can have a contract stating that you have a right to use and live in the house as long as you live.” This was simply more of Legros’s oral conjuring he used so well in hypnotizing his victims. The promise of long-term happiness in his home was another mirage. Even though Elmyr knew every peseta paid for the villa’s construction had some residue of oil paint, he again acceded to Fernand’s spurious overtures. Elmyr later characterized this as the “worst decision of my life.”