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

by Mark Forgy

  At one of their breezy August night soirees, I met Brigitte Bardot, the Bad Girl Sex Kitten of the French cinema. She lived up to my fantasies. Elmyr later told me she asked him, “Who’s the beautiful boy?” It was ego polish without equal. What further made the evening memorable was the party’s location, a seaside grotto. One had to climb down an improvised path that would inspire caution in a mountain goat. Illuminated by flickering candles, danger and death flirted with a wavering sense of balance along the precipitous descent. Bardot, I imagined, expected a stand-in to take such risks and expressed her dismay in emphatic “C’est pas possible… mon dieu” (It’s not possible, my God) on the way down. Only after the trek back up without the aid of a Sherpa guide did she regain her sans souci demeanor. Elmyr chatted with her while I fixated on her pouty lips and gorgeous body. He asked if she could come to La Falaise for a lunch or dinner. She said she would love to but was returning to France the next day.

  What I began to observe was that even the privileged few blessed with fame or fortune were not so different from other people. They sought validation, acceptance, and love the same as the rest of us. It was on this emotional plane where I gained an equal footing, allowing me to be comfortable with people I formerly thought unapproachable. However, that first summer was my novitiate, becoming acquainted with many of the island’s French contingent. All my private lessons at the Alliance Française made perfect sense to me now.

  Ançi entertained us at her home in this enclave of the French Foreign Legion. When she invited us to lunch or dinner, one knew not to ask for seconds. If there were eight people at the table, there would be eight meager portions. No more, no less. God couldn’t save you from her serial-killer glare if you asked for more. One conclusion I made early on remained unchanged: she was difficult, spoiled, self-absorbed, and likely capable of harboring grudges that could clog the Bay of Naples. I know she consistently challenged Elmyr’s diplomatic skills.

  In her home, scores of Haitian primitive paintings hung on her walls. She loved collecting these colorful naïf works for their irrepressible cheeriness. Haiti was then, and still is, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Life is near the bone. I have no difficulty imagining her glee at bargaining down the prices of these pictures amid their dire living conditions. She was used to getting whatever she wanted and paying as little as possible for it, even in Haiti.

  Once, while I was driving her somewhere, she expressed her upset with Elmyr because he refused to paint a recently acquired “Modigliani” on an authentic period canvas. Anger contorted her face for two reasons; she was unused to not prevailing in a test of will, and it cost an extra $150 to have the new painting glued to an old canvas. I offered the unacceptable defense that the sum sounded cheap. Her rage was instant and unequivocal. Only twice during those years with Elmyr did I feel my sphincter heat up as it did at that moment.

  When she came for her summer getaway, her sister and brother-in-law came along. She gave them a stipend that was probably less than stable costs for one of her horses. She was, in her brother-in-law’s words, la reine des enmerdeuses. Hard to translate, but the key word there is shit. On a solo trip to Paris, she invited me to lunch at her home. Expertly framed and hanging in her stairwell was Elmyr’s Modigliani. Again, Elmyr’s signature vanished. It bore the signature: Modigliani. She once came to London when Elmyr and I were there and asked if I would help her. For a few hours I was her personal valet, carrying her packages while on a shopping safari at Harrods. After my putting them in her chauffeured Rolls, she said thanks and drove off. Offering me a ride back to where I needed to go didn’t occur to her, but I knew her by then, and it didn’t surprise me.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ançi was her involvement with a society dedicated to the teachings of the mystic philosopher G. I. Gurdgieff, which promised her immortality. Apparently, she intended to leave the bulk of her estate to this group that would thaw her cryogenically preserved body at a future date, thereby allowing an unsuspecting upcoming generation the opportunity to rethink the virtues of life after death.

  La Falaise

  My first exposure to modern architecture in any meaningful way was my introduction to Elmyr’s villa, La Falaise, French for the cliff. It sat atop a saddleback hillside at the edge of a precipice. A paean to radical, early twentieth-century design, it seemed oddly placed in this ancient setting. They called the hill where the house stood, Los Molinos, “the mills.” You could see windmills, perhaps a half dozen, in various states of ruin, reminding one of those formidable foes of Don Quixote in the pages of Cervantes. The remaining foundation of one of these round stone towers just meters from his bedroom terrace was converted to a barbeque pit. Along the spine of the hill was a dirt road, little more than a two-rut goat path. The Romans, who ultimately became the island’s governors after displacing the Carthaginians, said of Ibiza that “it was the right size for man,” meaning that no part of the island was beyond a human’s gait. I have no doubt that for thousands of years every dominant Mediterranean culture trod upon this primitive thoroughfare.

  Mark, Elmyr, and Ursula Andress at La Falaise

  Historians credit Ibiza as the birthplace of the father of Hannibal, the famous Carthaginian general whose elephants were a precursor to modern tanks and who nearly defeated Rome for supremacy in the western Mediterranean. A British woman who lived nearby once showed me artifacts such as coins and pieces of jewelry she found in the vicinity, reminders of former glory and transience of the flesh. The next hump along this pathway was the necropolis or burial site of toga-wearing residents. My interest in archaeology made it easy for me to become distracted for hours at this timeworn cemetery in hope of finding my own physical remnant of history. A few weeks after meeting Elmyr, I became a regular itinerant on this road, walking daily to the Alliance Française for my French lessons. It was at his urging that I began studying French. He explained its importance in a way that any opposing point of view was inconceivable.

  La Falaise faced the old walled city of Ibiza, with its appearance of impenetrability due to its massive, high, and thick stone walls. This looming monument is one of the finest intact fortresses of Europe, dating from the reign of Phillip II, when Spain was in its golden age and the dominant superpower. Its geographically endowed location, overlooking a natural harbor the Romans called “portus magnum,” with a commanding view of the surrounding countryside and translucent blue sea, it offered a superbly strategic site along well-traveled trade routes. Consequently, its heritage and continual habitation dates back to Neolithic times.

  Ascending stone steps to his front entrance one stood before a late seventeenth-century decoratively carved panel door. The wood’s distressed appearance was the authentic by-product of age and use. (I later found out it was another source of conflict between Elmyr and the architect who wanted something simpler, more industrial.) Strangely juxtaposed to the slightly recessed entrance was the home’s exterior facade, a whitewashed flat plane interrupted by a large glass window bisected by a thin black vertical line. It was twice the width of the door and about a half-meter above it, but still left one clueless as to its interior space.

  This visually chaste style of architecture had a name—Bauhaus. At the time, this meant little to me. I just thought it was a cool house to live in. Today, its minimalist lines send shivers through me, this invention of ascetic German shut-ins, intellectual sadomasochists wearing pince-nez glasses and peach fuzz haircuts, deprived of sunlight and human contact and able to drink cod liver oil without wincing, I suspect. This, however, may be an overly sentimental view. La Falaise’s creator, Irwin Brauner, a German architect, was a student of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school of design.

  It is easier to understand and appreciate the thrust of this minimalist aesthetic in its historical and cultural context. In a kind of academic revolt against the visual gluttony of nineteenth-century art and design, early twentieth-century creative activists thought an emetic was needed
in order purge this corpulent excess and Victorian hangover. Their response, as in Gustav Stickly’s furniture, George Braque and Pablo Picasso’s cubist paintings, the Japanese idea of “less is more” gathered currency. “Simplicity rules!” was the mantra that animated the Bauhaus philosophy.

  More than forty years after entering La Falaise, I think of it as an expression of predominantly straight-line architecture, a paradigm of simple geometry—its right angles rarely punctuated by a curved line but, perhaps, only then by testosterone-deficient effetes unable to resist the feminine side of their nature. Brauner, being a good soldier of this rigid mind-set, came prepared for battle. Armed with the self-righteous dogma of a fundamentalist, those not in agreement with his design notions he dismissed altogether. This set the stage for Olympian clashes between two strong-willed individuals. It was easy to imagine the echoing, thunderous cracks of head-butting Alpine rams, challenging each other in territorial dispute.

  Elmyr’s world was that of figurative art, interpretively rendering nature and the human form based on reality. Reading schematics was not part of his visual vocabulary, so deciphering Brauner’s blueprints for La Falaise was not easy. Therefore, he was compelled to express his design wishes in oral arguments in vociferous German before his unmoved and stone-faced architect. Looking over the house plans one day Elmyr noticed a small square with WC, indicating water closet or toilet printed on it. It was the quintessential, no-frills-needed room in the home, to Brauner’s thinking. Questioning him about its phone-booth size, Brauner responded, “You need it for one simple function. It doesn’t have to be big!” Elmyr’s rejoinder was, “When I’m there I don’t just want to read Reader’s Digest; I would also like to read the New York Times!” Another unwelcome assertion followed. The master bathroom was absent a bidet. Brauner’s retort: “You don’t need a bidet!” After considerable verbal arm-twisting, Elmyr prevailed. He enlarged the room to accommodate one. I am sure Brauner was greatly chagrined seeing his precious spatial economy sacrificed to petty whims.

  (Hitler, by the way, was none too keen on his contemporaries advancing what he deemed “degenerate art.” That included Gropius’s Bauhaus group. Since Hitler had only one testicle, he knew a thing or two about what was abnormal. Having been a house painter along with producing a handful of landscapes and still-life paintings, and a self-ordained avatar of Teutonic culture, he was also unequivocal about what art was supposed to be. He chose the architect Albert Spear as his paladin to realize a redesigned Berlin in a classical Greek style and would have nothing to do with avant-garde thinking. His taste in art also reflected his own swivel-eyed vision of Aryan taste. Judging from the many officially sanctioned commissions by good Nazi artists, they strongly suggested that the new Reich’s inhabitants felt no compunction to wear any clothes at all!)

  When the villa was nearing completion in late 1964, Brauner approached Elmyr, soliciting a design change. He not only considered himself a world-class architect but also a world-class artist (a widely held view among, well, him and his wife). He thought Elmyr should buy some of his large abstract oil paintings and prominently display them in his home. This epiphany simply required more wall space. The plan originally called for a wall-to-wall bank of windows in the second-floor living room. Through these south-facing windows, shafts of sunlight would cascade in, filtered by the branches and leaves of two ancient olive trees just a few meters from the side of the house. The clarity of the air and quality of light was what attracted artists like Picasso, Matisse, Dufy, Delacroix, and others to the Mediterranean region. Beyond the trees lay the garden, the freshly excavated site of the first swimming pool on the island and an expansive view of a blue sea. With the whisk of a pencil eraser, it could all be gone, replaced with a solid wall on which to display his architect’s “wretched art,” as Elmyr described it. His response: “Are you mad?”

  The austere, enigmatic exterior did little to prepare one for the shock that accompanied opening the front door. Immediately, the angular planes and crisp lines of the foyer directed one’s attention, as if looking through an open-ended box, through a wall of glass, into a verdant oasis of semi-tropical plants, succulents, fig, mimosa, carob, olive trees, yucca, agaves, and hanging geraniums, sunlight and water everywhere. The stark construction, an invention of man’s mind, was no longer in competition but in harmony with nature. One felt at peace—spiritual.

  Frank Lloyd Wright coined the term “organic architecture,” a concept advocating a compatible coexistence between fabricated structures and their environment. While Wright’s Prairie School philosophy shares some common threads with the tenets of Bauhaus design, such as hard line geometric minimalism and spatial economy, Wright dismissed any comparisons between them. His stand-alone genius and accompanying megalomania compelled him to suggest that any stylistic similarities to him—i.e., Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, et al.—was the product of also-ran imitators borrowing from a cannon of design principles he alone had invented. Then, Wright was likely to think the chap staring back from a mirror was not as clever as he was.

  I believe what made the overall design of La Falaise work so successfully was that it reached a treaty between abstract thinking and a gracious acquiescence to the natural beauty of the home’s setting. Brauner remained faithful to his teacher and executed a clean-lined residence whose spaces were functional, unpretentious, and simple. He even softened its appearance by introducing rare but strategically placed curves: a short, rounded wall on the second floor above its open stairwell and a semi-circular wall for a rooftop solarium. Apart from its low, flat ceiling and off-white ceramic floor tile that gave the house a seamless continuity as it covered the expanse from the front door, through the garden to about the pool’s edge, the structure became essentially a three-sided shadow box. The abundance of glass and openness to its southern exposure, however, made one feel more like an actor on stage under nature’s powerful spotlight. Heavy, double-lined, pale gold draperies that glided easily along a small track attached to the ceiling diminished summer sunlight and heat.

  Under the living room’s south-facing windows was a bookshelf, a meter high and wide as the room itself. In the middle beside it were two matching natural leather easy chairs facing each other. Elmyr began selecting reading material from these shelves, compiling a must-read list of great authors. It became my new college course, “Introduction to European Literature.”

  Separating the chairs was a cushion-height trestle table, nothing fancy, just a plain wooden table a little darker than the chairs, the kind that invited you to put your feet on it to relax. Perpendicular to that seating area was a long, raised stone hearth approximately a half-meter high. A full-view glass door at the southwest corner accessed a secondfloor terrace and balcony that wrapped halfway around the south side of the house. Adjacent to where the hearth stopped and thin metal door frame began, a flat, steeply angled, white stucco-textured fireplace hood about two meters wide vented large wood fires during the mild but often damp winter days and nights. The heat from those fires warmed and comforted us as we read, lounging like country squires.

  It was this home and its friendly atmosphere, with a caring mentor to guide me that made an education gain an appeal it never had for me in school. And what an education it turned out to be.

  Island Life

  By the summer of 1970, life with Elmyr began to assume a recognizable pattern. His rise to fame made him a local supernova and there was little evidence of any foreseeable burnout. The path to his house was like the runway of a Paris fashion show, with callers eager to bask in his glow. Many were rich, glamorous, famous, titled, and fashionable—or not. Some, like Prosky, hoped to capitalize on his celebrity. I soon learned that good judgment is not an inherent trait like eye color. For Elmyr, its absence made each day a game of chance whose risks were unpredictable. For all the good people and true friends he attracted before or during the time I knew him, it had more to do with luck and happy accident than design. He liked to say, “
Friendships are easy to make, hard to keep.” Those who stuck with him remained faithful for the same reasons that form the glue of any relationship—generosity, kindness, empathy, common interests, reliability, etc.—and the success of those friendships were due more by virtue of their appreciation of his humanity, not his fame.

  Since he became a recognized personage, people knew where to find him. He had a postal box he checked each day. The volume of mail often exceeded its available space. One day he picked up an envelope addressed: Elmere, pintor, España. Despite the lack of any specificity of address, the bulk of letters found its way there as dependably as in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. This is not to imply that expediency was part of the equation. Sometimes delivery took months. This quaint feature of the Spanish postal service was also certainly the product of some personal touch automation could not replicate.

  Once, Elmyr and I went to pick up his mail after an absence of several days. The postal director came out, gesticulating with great excitement and urgency, and exclaimed, “Señor Elmyr, Señor Elmyr, thank you for coming to get your mail. A number of my people have been very upset and threatened to go home if I did not do something about your package!” We had no idea what the distraught fellow was rattling on about. We collected the amassed correspondence along with a brown-paper-wrapped box and placed everything on the car’s backseat. The package seemed battered from its journey. While driving away I looked at the rearview mirror. It was odd, I thought, to see the director standing in the dusty road, waving a fond farewell, or maybe waiting to see if we would leap from the moving vehicle—an unsurprising possibility with Elmyr’s little clown car. A smell of putrefaction engulfed the car’s interior. We shared a look of horror as I floored the accelerator, racing the short distance home as though the car were in flames. Arriving at the house, we leaped out, stood away from the vehicle, and wondered about the source of this smelly assault. I picked up the carton and held it at arm’s length like it was my first day on the bomb squad. (I am sure instances like this justified my presence.) The last time I whiffed anything comparable to this disgusting odor came from a commercial hog farm in Minnesota, a smell so repulsive it must damage the central nervous system. It seems Elmyr’s friend Eugene Weinreb, while unmindful of the Ox Cart Express mail delivery system the Spanish Post Office sometimes employed, was nevertheless thoughtful to send him a gift. Inside was a collection of Switzerland’s deadliest cheeses that, even when fresh, would send cadaver dogs fleeing with their tails between their legs. Unfortunately, the well-intentioned offering meandered along a circuitous and halting path on its way to the island, leaving, I suspect, an ever-growing contingent of misfortunate victims in the wake of this natural disaster.