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

by Mark Forgy

  For a brief moment, Elmyr waltzed through the radioactive fallout from the scandal that pegged the needle of any Geiger counter in Fernand’s vicinity. His temporary luck was about to change. In June, officials in Madrid initiated an investigation of Elmyr and determined that he had not broken any laws. Since his association with Legros was well established, his link to a known criminal brought his case to a court for Vagos y Malientes, meaning “vagrants and undesirables.” His circle of friends in Ibiza rallied round him. A number of actors, writers, artists, business owners, and local government officials signed a letter attesting to his good character. Other influential people in Madrid did the same. The indictment against him consisted of three accusations: consorting with known criminals, having no visible means of support, and homosexuality. The collective display of support of so many people bolstered his confidence. For him, it was, after all, that social network of those he liked and respected that was his psychological and emotional safety net. His reliance on who one knows never seemed as crucially important as it did at this time.

  His lawyer vigorously defended him on all counts. It was the unwitting testimony of his friend Princess Smijlia Michalovich that took the inadvisable tact of admitting that Elmyr was homosexual, but “so was Julius Cesar, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci…” However delighted she may have been with her grasp of history, this rationalization apparently did not favorably impress the judge. He consequently sentenced Elmyr to serve two months in jail. While the court did not expel him from Spain, he had to leave Ibiza for one year. Amazingly, none of this had anything to do with his fakes.

  With a gesture of lenience, the judge allowed Elmyr a few days to put his affairs in order before he reported to the jail to serve his sentence. An appreciably dispirited artist elected to give a dinner party for his friends who demonstrated unflagging support throughout his travails. That evening each of his guests assured him they would continue to assist him however they could during and after his incarceration. One comforting thought dulled his depression: his prison term was only eight weeks, not eight years. He would somehow get through the difficult two months ahead. Together, he and his steadfast friends dined around his massive mahogany table, savoring his famous Hungarian chicken paprika and drinking robust Spanish red wine. The conversation was understandably less animated than usual.

  One of his many daily visitors later captured a vivid impression of his sojourn in Ibiza’s jail. According to Irving’s account, he said, “Around the periphery of the courtyard, many of the prisoners, young people mostly there for drug possession, sat listlessly in the shade. Elmyr sat in one of his patio chairs in the bright sunlight, wearing white shorts, short-sleeve polo shirt, and dark sunglasses, reading yesterday’s copy of Le Monde. The only thing missing was his morning coffee and croissant.” He once more proved he was not only a survivor, but also a gentleman, displaying his irrepressible class despite his current predicament. His visiting friend also reported that Elmyr cheerily exclaimed, “My dear, can you guess how many visitors I had yesterday? Fourteen!”

  Shortly after his liberation from jail, Elmyr arranged to lease La Falaise to an American woman during his imposed twelve-month exile. Life was not as bleak as this suggests. His new notoriety prompted an international interest in him and his art. As Clifford Irving worked on his biography in 1968, the American magazine LOOK published a lengthy article about his exploits. The world’s curiosity about Elmyr de Hory was not yet satisfied.

  A few weeks after he returned to Ibiza in September 1969, I met him. That chance encounter changed my life, and from my perspective, things were about to get a lot more interesting.

  Part Two

  Elmyr introduced me to his world and his friends. Well, his world was his friends, a Jackson-Pollock splash of people, and he collected them in the same way static electricity attracts all forms of matter, though, he thought their presence in his life was the result of a conscious act, the product of free choice to admit those individuals into his private realm. This perception served his ego, but a history of dicey choices should have taught him differently. He was charming, articulate, well educated, and easily convinced of his own rationalizations. This last part was not immediately apparent to me. However, as my emotional commitment to him grew, I tried to maintain some clarity in the shadow of Elmyr’s influence and help him avoid the tiger traps of his misjudgment. And that wasn’t always easy to do.

  Meeting a stream of new people every day became as predictable as breakfast. One evening we drove to Santa Eulalia, a small town where some friends of his owned a restaurant. There, a group of people joined us. With pride in his voice, he said, “Mark, I would like you to meet Princess Smijlia Michalovich.” Elmyr was good enough to prime me on court etiquette earlier, as you never know when you might need it. She extended her right arm toward me. At the end of her rigid limb dangled a limp hand in a way I might otherwise have thought injured in a farm accident. I was then supposed to bend from the waist and pretend to kiss her hand. No puckering or drooling, just swoop in like a bat going for a mosquito. Oh, in order to give the impression that I was way used to doing this in Minnesota, Elmyr had me practice on him a few times before we left the house. “No problem,” I thought, just like that toy duck that repeatedly dips its bill in the water glass and bobs back up. Well, it worked.

  Smijlia was a forever-blond woman of self-ordained royalty with the blue blood of Queen Latifa. She claimed to be a princess, a Montenegrin Anastasia of sorts. After years of practice, affected body language revealed her idea of regal carriage through deliberate and selfconscious movement in a weird kind of Central European Tai Chi. A rumor, most likely started by her, that she had been the lover of “Peter of Yugoslavia,” made her believe, according to Elmyr, that she had been impregnated with royal blood. Everyone humored her and treated her with the respect accorded her title. Even though I was used to Elmyr’s enthusiasm for aristocratic name-dropping, “Peter of Yugoslavia” sounded like a Beverly Hills hairdresser.

  In one of the newer high-rise apartment buildings near the Bay of Figueretas, she held court, receiving her tolerant friends, and was always elegantly dressed and well coiffed. Her exalted charade and pretense to a station beyond her birthright, while accepted with a wink and a nod by others, was not all that sustained her many friendships. Underneath the mask of theatrical artifice was an inherently warm and caring person, and it was these qualities that held those in her entourage close to her. When greeting guests at her small but chic apartment, and commonly wearing a form-fitting gray velvet pantsuit with a white blouse, she would, with a slow sweeping gesture of her arm, invite visitors to take a seat. The only catch was there was nary a place to sit for the small tables everywhere overflowing with collected objects in polished silver. They were, I thought, given her modest means, the most affordable symbols of stately comfort within her reach. Her livelihood, however indistinct, was the product of her wits. In keeping with her high social standing, she would insinuate herself in organizing various civic functions as a kind of Chamber of Commerce plenipotentiary and fund-raiser.

  In contrast to her carefully stage-managed image, Smijlia deigned to take on a French lover barely taller than a dwarf, who seemed better cast as her court jester. His only redeeming quality, we all assumed, was his wealth, which, as Elmyr liked to say, was “a good explanation but a poor excuse.” He was nouveau riche and a Latin version of a used-car salesman who frequently forgot which direction of his trouser zipper meant “closed.” Once invited to lunch at Elmyr’s for no reason I can remember, he demonstrated the same table manners as participants in a State Fair pie-eating contest. He then proceeded to suck clean every metacarpal of every finger as though they were stuck in a cow-milking machine. We sat dumbstruck, as silent as the prairie. After he left, we all agreed that your average cannibal would look like Emily Post next to our departed guest.

  These entertaining theatrics were a part of everyday life on the island. There, the characters performed without charge
, unscripted, as walk-ons in each other’s plays, and no one suffered from stage fright. Everyone, or so it seemed, was used to role-playing, not just Elmyr. This was one reason his parties were so fun. They were like Venetian masquerade balls, difficult to distinguish the actor from one’s real identity, which likely increased Elmyr’s comfort zone, blurring reality and fantasy. They also provided me with opportunities to practice all my lessons of social etiquette “expected of a gentleman,” as he reminded me. Despite feeling an inner discomfort with some of these newly acquired affectations, he beamed at my apparent mastery of these maneuvers in the same way the stage mother of a talentless child is blind to imperfections obvious to everyone else.

  Since in Elmyr’s company I was learning about all things Hungarian, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover more of his fellow expatriates cropping up on Ibiza. Another Hungarian friend of his was Ançi Dupres. “She started life as a putain [whore] as he described her colorful past. It was still easy to see how this diminutive blond woman with limpid blue eyes attracted admirers. One seduced by her beauty was François Dupres, owner of Paris’s three premier hotels, the George V, Tremoille, and Plaza Athenée. Their marriage conferred a respectability that often accompanies wealth. She, along with a close-knit group of friends from Avenue Foche, bought summer homes on the island. They flew down from Paris to Ibiza each summer like a flock of Canada geese. Never tiring of each other’s company, they took turns entertaining their clique in their seaside cul-de-sac in a sort of incestuous conviviality. I thought their enchantment with themselves a bit bizarre, as though they felt compelled to maintain the purity of the gene pool. Ançi’s being Hungarian, however, made her a member of an even more exclusive tribe, so she and Elmyr automatically enjoyed a hometown familiarity, quacking away in a language indecipherable to everyone else. Although, in contrast to Elmyr’s spontaneous largesse, she was as avaricious as she was rich. When her husband died, she not only inherited his hotels, but a home in Deauville, a stable of 125 thoroughbred horses, and a private house in Paris with museum-quality furnishings and an impressive art collection. Her adopted interest in art animated long conversations in their cryptic Magyar tongue with Elmyr.

  The degree of familiarity with callers was evident in the fake handkissing or the cozy French cheek-pecking. One day Ançi arrived with the usual gaggle in tow. I rushed downstairs, opened the front door, and promptly forgot which cheek to kiss first. I lunged into her headlong. She parried, avoiding a bloody collision. We weaved and bobbed like two flamingoes in courtship until I finally kissed her forehead as the Holy Father might a supplicant.

  Elmyr prepared his famous chicken paprika for lunch that afternoon. “The secret,” he confided, “is the paprika. You must use the Hungarian sweet paprika. Nothing else will do.” Everyone knew his prowess as a gourmet chef, so an invitation to dine with him and enjoy his charm, hospitality, and conversation was a coveted treat for those invited to the house. He also sensed any opportunity to sell his artwork. Ançi was a bargainer, a master of getting what she wanted and paying as little as possible. “Leave it to an ex-whore to know the value of a franc,” he once said after a down-market haggling session with her. Their body language needed no translation while the two discussed a tentative transaction. After much eye rolling and head shaking, punctuated by an emphatic “yes” or “no” in Hungarian, they reached an agreement on a price that seemed to satisfy both. Their verbal sparring concluded before we sat down to eat. Elmyr later used his own favorite malapropism to describe her reaction to their negotiation, “She looked like the cannery that swallowed the cat.”

  On one of her visits to Elmyr’s studio, she noticed a portrait Elmyr had done of Simone Vogue. She resembled Catherine Zita-Jones and Elmyr had captured this in a head-and-shoulders painting. It was a sensuous tour de force, revealing her long neck, bare shoulders, large brown eyes, full lips, slightly cleft chin, and silken hair that rested on her shoulders. Her beckoning regard captivated the viewer. It thrilled me. Like Gainsborough’s portraits, she wore an oversize flowered chapeau, a colorful counterpoint to her English rose complexion. The picture remained in Elmyr’s studio, rejected by her husband as too romantic. He returned it, and Elmyr did something entirely different. This time a scarf covered her hair, the colors bold in wide brush strokes. Elmyr was happy to keep the first portrait. Ançi then asked Elmyr to paint her portrait. He told her he could do something similar. “No,” she insisted that he use that painting, probably thinking it would cost less, as he merely needed to paint in her face. They argued in Hungarian and, predictably, he conceded. The result was a disaster—George Washington in a bonnet. She of course hated it and refused to pay for it. Wealth, power, hubris, self-indulgence, and vanity trapped her in a Dorian Gray perception of her past beauty, although not even Elmyr’s cosmetic brushwork could mitigate the forty years’ difference in age between her and Simone.

  We first met Ançi at the home of David Stein. His brother Jules owned MCA, Music Corporation of America. David, apparently, had also been involved in the business, but was now retired. Some years before, he discovered Ibiza. The little known island was unspoiled by tourists then. He and Elmyr met there in the early ’60s. Elmyr told me, “At that time everyone knew me as an art collector—of independent means,” he said through a smile. “I asked David why he wanted to live in such a remote area.” He found a lot on the waterfront in a pine-covered cove. “Because no one will build out here,” he told Elmyr. The parcel of land he purchased was slightly bigger than the house he wanted to build. “David,” he questioned again, “why don’t you buy more land? You can afford it.” The reason was the Achilles heel of many wealthy people I began to observe. David was cheap. When Elmyr and I made the trek to his distant home, we drove down an alleyway, as the house was now sandwiched between two large hotels. Elmyr laughed at the poetic justice of it all and was giddy knowing his suggestion was a rare instance of precognition.

  The house was a Spanish-style Beverly Hills transplant. David cheerily greeted us, opening the paneled mahogany door to the home’s cavernous lobby. Now a suburban requisite, it was then showy and ostentatious, a stagy expression of an entertainment mogul’s ego and architectural opposite of the spatial economy of Elmyr’s villa, La Falaise. Like a car salesman kicking the tires, David pounded on the stucco wall, claiming that he was the first to introduce reinforced concrete on the island—“a solid epitaph for his headstone,” Elmyr thought. He whisked us through a house tour. The white walls, ceiling, polished marble floors, and furniture caused instant snow blindness relieved only by a large bouquet of silk flowers atop his white grand piano. His bathrooms boasted gaudy gold faucets, all done in a Vegas Revival style.

  We met David’s other lunch guests on his terrace just meters away from the aquamarine Mediterranean. At that time one could not buy the land right to the water’s edge, so as we sat and chatted, a constant stream of tourists from the adjacent hotels peered at us with the same proximity and curiosity of the lowland gorillas in the San Diego Zoo leering at an endless parade of weirdly dressed humans. David looked unfazed by the ringside spectators and rather like the giddy matchmaker, introducing Elmyr to the Count and Countess de Chabrol, and the Marquis and Marquise d’Harcourt, Mme. Dupres’s fellow colonists. Their family names littered French history. David immediately added, “There were seventeen Marshalls of France between their families.”

  Given Elmyr’s rapture with aristocrats, that afternoon I thought he would faint, or, worse still, start explaining the connectedness of us all from early man to present tense. He stored a mental file of every genealogical detail associated with a world obliterated by transformative events of the twentieth century. His manners and values often seemed closer to 1870, not 1970. It may have been the fragrance of rank and privilege that he found so intoxicating. All this banter about who was related to whom by this or that marriage made my eyes wander in random orbits. Family trees looked like an invasive ground-covering weed without beginning or end,
which just happened to be his specialty. I imagined the sun/moon cycles spinning around us, Day-Night-Day-Night. Thankfully, the subject of art came up to redirect the conversation. “Which of the impressionists are you most drawn to?” Count d’ Harcourt asked him. Off we went on a stream of consciousness while Elmyr opined on the French colorists, and they seemed as impressed by his knowledge as they were starstruck by his celebrity.

  Elmyr was especially pleased to meet a fellow Hungarian in Ançi Dupres. He had a special view of his compatriots. Even though Prosky, for example, was everything Elmyr was not and the least likely guest in his home, the fact that they both were from that small Central European country made them members of the same club, like Freemasons without the secret handshakes. One symbol identified him as Hungarian, though. He always wore a pinky ring—two, actually: one in platinum and the other in yellow gold. Each had a row of three round-cut gems, separated in their settings. “Whenever you see someone wearing a ring like this,” he said, “it means that person is Hungarian.”

  They all seemed cordial to me that afternoon. Countess de Chabrol asked where I was from. I said “Minnesota,” evoking the same blank stares as when you forget what you wanted to say—in mid-sentence. I try to recover in these moments of awkwardness by offering some factoid like “Minnesotans own more reindeer per capita than any other state.” This is probably not true, but I trust its uniqueness redeems me from early onset of Alzheimer’s or at least from imparting that notion to others. I then mentioned that I planned to visit my family back in the States in a couple of weeks. First, I was going to visit my sister in Detroit. “Do you know the Fords?” she asked. She was dead serious. After checking my memory banks for any missed recollection, I replied. “No.” I couldn’t help feeling that I was playing Eliza Doolittle to Elmyr’s Henry Higgins. The chasm between their lifestyles and my working-class upbringing seemed unbridgeable. While this was my impression at our first meeting, the more I came to know them, the more endearing they became. They were upper crust, for sure, but warm, charming and genuine, I discovered. The d’Harcourt’s daughter, Lesline, was an unassuming brunette beauty around my age, and one I quickly fell in love with. Elmyr gave any such liaisons his approval, as long as I set the bar high enough. This reflected his standards, which I was supposed to adopt as well.