by Mark Forgy
At a party one night at Elmyr’s, I met Arlene’s soul sister, Renee Cohen, a buxom woman who delighted in shocking the locals by showing off her tits with imperturbable pride. She was rumored to be a lover of the Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, and, according to Lanny Powers, a longtime Ibiza resident and artist, was the “woman” in de Kooning’s Woman And Bicycle in the Whitney Museum in New York City. Renee was another expat Brooklynite whose colorful personality matched her profession. She also looked like Bette Midler’s twin, and Elmyr loved her company. Renee had been an exotic dancer who preferred a python to a boa. Still, he reveled in rumor-mongering, telling anyone who would listen that “her snake died a mysterious death.” He never said it without a twinkle in his eye or an absence of emphasis on the word mysterious. Since departing the crimson lights of the catwalk with her serpent, she was ever vigilant and opportunistic about exploring any prospect that looked like a moneymaker. I never saw her fail to engage the attention of any man she wanted, but this probably had more to do with her cantilevered chest than her powers of oratory. Naturally, she tested out a variety of schemes on Elmyr. He may have been irrepressibly gullible, but, fortunately, he demonstrated uncharacteristic restraint in following the investment counsel of an ex-stripper.
One day I ran into Renee in town. She pulled me into a recessed building entrance away from pedestrian traffic and the midday sun. Clutching my shoulders to engage my full attention, she stared into my eyes like an ophthalmologist looking for some defect. I was not used to her serious demeanor and found it a bit creepy. It was more what one might expect from Charles Manson awakened from a deep sleep. Nor could I avoid her mesmerizing gaze. As her grip on my shoulders tightened, I wondered if her snake experienced the same rising sense of alarm as it drew its last breath. Then, figuring the moment ripe with dramatic anticipation, and with all the portent of Lady Macbeth, she uttered, “CEMENT.” Since I did not immediately grasp the Delphic significance of what she said, thoughts began to ricochet in my head, looking for that part of my brain that sent a signal to my face revealing comprehension. Instead, I feared I was assuming the vacant look a cocker spaniel might have after electroshock therapy.
I once heard Howard Sackler refer to something “achieving gravitas.” I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I deduced that it was something grave or hugely important. Then, I twigged to why her otherwise genial personality morphed into this somber other person. Renee, I bet, had been screwing the eyebrows off some Wall Street commodities broker. That’s why her cryptic pronouncement possessed the surety of insider trading. While her foray into the world of high finance and market prognostications may have seemed like a right-angle career move, we often needed to shelve our disbelief with the people we knew. In any case, it was clear that I should speedily convey her hot tip to Elmyr lest he lose an opportunity to pad his investment portfolio. The premise of her timely advice was of course sound, if Elmyr had not spent a lifetime demonstrating his slippery grasp of money management.
It was a Dali-esque moment, conveying all the solemnity and import of her announcing she was just designated keynote speaker at a convention of the National Academy of Science. I suppose it would then be as easy to imagine Sir Issac Newton as a pole dancer.
The outdoor tables in front of the Montesol filled each day with all the locals and foreign imports from Central Casting. Another of this group was a charismatic figure that could light up a room like Joan of Arc. Vincente Ribas was one of a handful of native Ibicencos admitted into Elmyr’s inner circle of friends and frequent companion at the Montesol. He possessed an all-weather smile, like a beauty pageant contestant’s, only toothier. Combined with an unnervingly buoyant personality and Miss Congeniality enthusiasm, Vincente always seemed on the verge of announcing the funniest thing on earth but not quite able to bring himself to share it with others. Although his demeanor accompanied a naturally cheery disposition, the reasons for his effervescence were not always apparent. Moreover, I’m not sure his face was capable of any other countenance. I wondered if he looked any different at night, sound asleep. I suspect this constancy was probably more disconcerting for grieving friends and family members at funerals. Nevertheless, his friendship was steadfast. On numerous occasions he offered Elmyr any assistance he could. Again, loyalty was the mark of those Elmyr could count on without fail, and this quality above all others separated the best from the rest.
Vincente wore jaunty polo shirts, white trousers, Italian-style loafers, and a sweater draped over his back, its sleeves loosely intertwined across his chest as though he were stepping from a yacht in Capri. Working as a travel agent, his impeccable English and GQ dress allowed a seamless fit with the growing and well-healed foreign contingent on Ibiza. He and Elmyr enjoyed the universal pastime of people-watching from the sidewalk tables in front of the Montesol. One morning Vincente joined us there for coffee. Within moments of his arrival, a young male backpacker sat down at the table next to ours, placing his guitar case on a nearby chair. He wore the uniform of a hippy: a tie-dyed shirt, ragged jeans, round wire-rim glasses, and red bandana headband holding back long tresses of unwashed hair. Almost instantly, surprised horror replaced the insouciance of Elmyr’s face. With nostrils widened, he raised his head in alarm, wincing from an unfamiliar odor assailing him as though a gust of air announced he was standing downwind of a cow pasture. Then, with a tortured expression on his face, he began sniffing like a hunting dog in the direction of the hippy. “Tell me,” he said to the stranger, “do you have three feet?” After a moment of indecision, he replied, “No.” “Impossible,” Elmyr shot back, “you couldn’t stink that much with only two.” For Elmyr, personal hygiene was de rigueur, not an elective.
Elmyr’s blitzkrieg quip drew a stunned silence and frankly shocked me. Rather than voicing his instant disapproval, I had witnessed far more instances where he was likely to reach into his pocket and give people money to help them out. His response also suggested his defense of a laissez-faire lifestyle had its limits. Certain democratic notions he embraced often collided with the values learned in his youth, and they were commonly clothed in a social decorum that justified the summary judgment passed on the less-than-fragrant hippy. Far from his thoughts at that moment, I suspect, was the ease with which others condemn those who violate some rigid precepts of acceptable behavior, say, by homosexuality.
Another permanent fixture at the Hotel’s sidewalk tables was an American writer, Steve Seley, grand-prize winner of the Norman Mailer Look-Alike Contest, I imagined. Unlike Mailer, Steve long ago ridded himself of any pretense of working at his craft after a publisher printed one of his books. I guess he saw no further need to prove himself. Once emancipated from his creative slavery, he felt at ease whiling the years away sipping coffee and cognac at his usual table. He lived on Ibiza from a time when its small coastal towns were actually fishing villages, and consequently was a witness to the island’s transformation from quaint to hip. Like many seasoned drinkers, he rarely appeared drunk, and his sidewalk orations sounded logical if one could follow his ribbons of thought that flowed quickly, but not always in ordered sequence. At least, this was my take on his chats with Elmyr.
He and Elmyr shared a common acquaintance. That was April Ashley, whom I met at La Falaise. At that time, April competed with Elmyr for print space in some of the London newspapers. Her official title was Lady Ashley. Some most likely viewed her marriage to a British lord as somewhat surprising. None more than Steve Seley, not because she was American, but because he knew her from when she served as a merchant marine. She was a man at that time. As I recall, Elmyr said she/he was one of the first gender-change operations in the early ’60s. Except for her Adam’s apple and voice that descended an octave or two, depending on how much she drank, she was strikingly attractive. Not so attractive that I responded to her dance-of-the-seven-veils for me on Elmyr’s coffee table. Lord Ashley, however, according to the press, appeared surprised and dismayed that their three-year marriage ended. For a whil
e anyway, he thought there was nothing problematic about their union. Elmyr recounted how April ran into Seley at the Montesol one day. “He kept calling her George. I thought April was going to deck him,” Elmyr said. “April was no lady, and still could probably kick the crap out of a lot of men—balls or no balls.” She soon after opened a popular restaurant in London called April and Desmond’s. There, she was as convincing and entertaining a hostess as her title and past suggested.
I saw April again in London when she sublet the King’s Road flat of a good friend, Guy Munthe. Guy was just a couple of years older than I was and a frequent guest of Elmyr’s in Ibiza. It wasn’t surprising that Guy and April were friends, as he was at least as interesting as she was. When April moved into his Chelsea apartment, he moved to a house on the south bank of the Thames River directly across from St. Paul’s Cathedral. Its East End location was far from gentrified southwest London in more than distance. It sat in the shadow of a giant smokebelching power plant and industrial warehouses. Still, it possessed a heritage that appealed to Guy. On the building’s facade was a plaque stating “Sir Christopher Wren lived here” when he was designing St. Paul’s and much of London after the Great Fire of 1666, Guy told me. It had been an inn, a brothel, and finally the object of Guy’s passion and restoration efforts. Apart from its fireplaces on the ground and first floors, it had no central heating, and when I stayed there as his guest I better understood the common image of the English wrapped in wool sweaters and tweed jackets. Guy’s maternal grandfather was a leader of England’s Liberal Party. His paternal grandfather was the Swedish doctor and writer Axel Munthe. He wrote a best-selling memoir called The Story of San Michele about his life in Capri. The book’s success enabled him “to collect houses,” as Guy expressed it.
Guy entertained Elmyr and me there when we came to London. Candles illuminated the high Jacobean oak paneling, the creaking wooden stairs whose treads looked like carved-out chair seats from centuries’ wear. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined his dining room walls. Heavy draperies pooled on floors flanking tall windows. Once we enjoyed a dinner at his home with the British ballet star Anton Dolin, formerly a principal dancer in Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. After dinner Guy felt comfortable enough with Dolin to fashion his hair in an upward swoop, crowned in a question mark. His new look destroyed any notion of haughtiness. On another occasion Guy enlisted my help in liberating a casket he found in an abandoned warehouse. How we managed to carry it home after the wine and hookah-smoking that evening remains a fuzzy recollection. I’m not sure if he wanted it as an extra bed to sleep in a la Sarah Bernhardt, but getting it up his narrow stairwell was a comic challenge. He was inventive at earning money. Often, he rode a Moto Guzzi motorcycle with his parrot on his shoulder back up to Chelsea, and as a street performer played the musical saw.
On one of his visits to the island, we went to a new restaurant opening in the Ibiza countryside. It was formerly a finca but its new owners decided to turn it into a fashionable eatery. I think we toned down their efforts to create a cachet of pastoral elegance when Guy and a fellow dinner guest started a food fight at the table. He then felt inspired to pick up our waiter and carry him around the restaurant like a groom carrying his bride across the threshold. It was the only time in my life—and, I’m certain, in Elmyr’s—where the owner kicked us out of a place and said, “Never come back!” Guy was of course contrite the next morning, after the wine’s effects wore off. I think Elmyr’s fondness for him was the only thing that saved him after trampling inviolable laws of social decorum. However, Elmyr laughed as much as the rest of us at the burlesque performance that evening.
When Elmyr received letters or phone calls from people wanting to meet him, the Montesol was a landmark everyone could find. Consequently, he often sent me there in search of those people to bring them to the house, or he came himself. To make sure they recognized him, he liked to say, “I’ll be wearing a green carnation.” He never did, of course, but he liked that line, something he lifted from a Graham Greene novel, I think, but he wasn’t beyond appropriating authorship if it suited him. That was typical Elmyr. “Why obsess about the truth if it neither amused or amazed?” he once told me. This might be an appropriate motto in Latin under his coat of arms, I thought. I realized that he was prone to exercising a little artistic license from time to time when he could not remember every detail, explaining away inconsistencies thus: “I am not a court stenographer!” Still, there are things I would refuse to believe about Elmyr’s life if I had not been there to witness encounters and events as I did. “Fantastic” best describes his saga. We soon learned how his biographer, Cliff Irving, tried to make his own life as fantastic as Elmyr’s.
“Imagine my lack of surprise,” Elmyr later said to others, recounting the morning we sat at the Montesol, sharing the International Herald Tribune. Again, he did a convincing impression of someone with a thyroid disorder, his eyes bulging as he read the newspaper that sunny day in 1971. The article enthralling him at that moment was about Clifford Irving, Elmyr’s former friend. Their association started to disintegrate almost from the first day I began living at La Falaise. He told Elmyr’s story in Fake. It was an instant success, shooting to the New York Times best-seller list, and, thus, a departure from anything he wrote before. His earlier works of fiction “better demonstrated his prowess as illusionist, as each unremarkable novel made him invisible,” Elmyr later remarked, with a tincture of resentment still on his tongue.
Apart from Cliff’s alleged failure to give Elmyr final approval of the manuscript as their contract stipulated, according to Elmyr, the prospect of seeing any future profits from sales of the book looked even more precarious. After receiving an initial payment of ten thousand dollars from the publisher, McGraw-Hill, for the rights to his story, Elmyr told me he signed a private agreement allowing Irving to collect all royalties. The author was then to give Elmyr his share of the monies. I never saw any evidence that Elmyr got a nickel from Irving. Again, he invested in an expectation that Irving would feel some compunction to do the right thing. Elmyr characterized his efforts to get first an accounting from Irving, and second, his share of royalties, in a streetwise pragmatism: “It makes no sense in chasing a bus that’s not going to take you.”
By Irving’s own account, Elmyr gave him three drawings—two in the manner of Matisse, and one by Modigliani—for him to show curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York after the scandal involving Elmyr exploded in the world press. Irving claimed the curators thought the works were authentic. Elmyr said their agreement was that Cliff would return the drawings to him when he came back to Ibiza. Elmyr claimed he repeatedly asked Cliff for the drawings but “he told me he destroyed them.”
When he first asked me to help him with some of his correspondence, he dictated a frustrated letter to a recalcitrant Irving, asking for an accounting of sales proceeds from the silent writer. His overdue answer was continued silence. It left little doubt about the future of Elmyr’s benefiting from his own life’s story or that of the ill feeling between Irving and his former protagonist.
I remember that morning on the Montesol’s terrace as we shared the day-late issue of International Herald Tribune; it was different from any other. Elmyr and I were both stunned to read the Tribune’s account of billionaire Howard Hughes selecting Clifford Irving to write his biography. In an ocean of writers, he landed Cliff. What were the chances? Could Cliff really charm the eccentric recluse out of hiding? Alien abductions far outnumbered credible sightings of Hughes. From what everyone knew about this secretive man, this revelation was as incongruous as a cockroach basking under a sun lamp. A huge smile instantly displaced the look of shock on Elmyr’s face. He started laughing, handing me the paper to point out the punch line of the joke. Apparently, after much thought, the publicity-shy tycoon selected him (over all others) due to his integrity and great talent. We knew that assessment could have come only from Cliff himself or his mother. Our mutual laughter infected those s
itting nearby in a way that spontaneously happens even when the source of mirth is unknown.
This news immediately became the topic du jour for Ibiza’s sidewalk gossip vultures for a few weeks. Others, not just Elmyr and I, were scratching their scalps bloody, trying to figure out what was wrong about this picture. Cliff produced handwritten letters from Howard Hughes to him attesting their collaboration. Forensic handwriting analysts confirmed their authenticity. Based on the say-so of these experts, Cliff’s publisher, McGraw-Hill, advanced him four hundred thousand dollars for his forthcoming manuscript and coup the rest of the publishing world would envy. Not long afterward, friends spotted Edith Irving at Ibiza’s airport—in disguise. Her ruse was less than convincing. It would be like my blond third-grade teacher coming to school wearing a black wig and expecting no one to notice or say anything. Oh, come to think of it, this was exactly what Cliff’s wife did. She did not even acknowledge her bewildered audience in the airport’s lounge, even though they could not take their eyes from her, trying to figure out her Halloween persona. Within hours, she opened a bank account in Geneva in the name of Helga R. Hughes. Then, she deposited the check from the duped publisher in her newly opened account, made out to H. R. Hughes. Howard Hughes, like Elmyr, never saw the money. The outcome of this charade was delightfully predictable to us both. When Cliff’s short-lived foray into the annals of literary infamy ultimately earned him a rent-free sojourn in a federal prison, Elmyr enjoyed some righteous and poetic justice. In the same week that Nixon traveled to China in a historic rapprochement of superpowers, TIME magazine elected to grace its cover with a portrait of Clifford Irving—by Elmyr. He was their pick for “Con Man of the Year.” (In 2007, the story of Cliff’s misadventure became a feature film starring Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, and other accomplished actors. National Public Radio critic Bob Mondello, called The Hoax one of the year’s ten best movies. Cliff did not much care for it.)