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

by Mark Forgy

  For a while, Elmyr’s existence on Ibiza was an edgy one fraught with uncertainty; he thought that art, with its aura of respectability, might just be the right avenue to ingratiate him to the local authorities. He contributed a number of paintings to Ibiza’s Museum of Contemporary Art, works of his own and those he collected from various artists who had some connection to the island. These gestures of generosity and civic endowments were accepted graciously and duly noted in the local newspaper, but were quiet useless in the sense of granting him any preferential treatment vis-à-vis the law, which they were ostensibly designed to do. They were, in fact, much less effective than the direct payoffs to the right people, as he previously had done. Despite his disingenuous motives, the museum still possesses some wonderful examples of his work.

  Money Barks

  One truth became immediately apparent to me in Elmyr’s world. First, money was the axis around which we all rotate as unavoidably as the law of gravity. Second, one could not ignore the fact that it did not rule his life, which seemed to defy the first immutable law I just mentioned. Perhaps it was due to his unconscious disregard of money learned from the bourgeois comfort of his upbringing. When he had it he didn’t give it much thought. It was about as far from his mind as Louis XIV looking at his palace at Versailles, thinking, “Well, there sure are a lot of windows. Who’s going to clean them all?” Again, Elmyr would enjoy any simile connecting him to the King of France. Still, since the days of crossing borders, using the gems sewn into his coat lining to ease his path back to Paris, he respected the power cash gave him as a tool to survive. Yet its acquisition was never his end goal.

  During the last two months of 1969, my eyes remained dilated from the flurry of social activity. In early January 1970, I accompanied Elmyr to Madrid. It would be the first of many trips there, and these visits were a mix of pleasure and business. One obligatory pilgrimage, however, was to the apartment of Nini Montiam. She was one of Elmyr’s circle I met who influenced events in his life, both good and bad.

  One room she converted into a bar. It was red with smoked mirrors on the walls, tropical kitsch everywhere. It was what hell might look like with a Polynesian theme. Behind the bar, two large brandy snifters filled with matchbooks from her travels anchored each end of a shelf with liquor bottles. It was in “Bar Nini” that Elmyr and I met Lita Trujillo. The dark-haired beauty had recently lost her husband. She married Ramfis Trujillo, son of the longtime dictator of the Dominican Republic. Banner headlines covered the story, reaffirming that reality trumps invention. On a fog-shrouded highway outside Madrid, he crashed his Ferrari head on into the Jaguar driven by the Duchess of Albuquerque. She died instantly, he later in a hospital. That evening his bereaved widow stood before us in her black, spaghetti-strapped, lowcut cocktail dress, relaying the tragic events. Placing her clenched fist below her left breast, she pressed her chest, administering a mini-Heimlich maneuver, almost jiggling free her ample bosom the dress could barely contain. Then, maybe forgetting which side of the body her heart was on, moved her hand underneath the other breast, again attempting to free it from her garment. She repeated the somber burlesque motions a few more times before another guest captured her attention. Elmyr then turned to me and asked, “Did you know it was a Duke of Albuquerque who led the Spanish Armada?” Incidental but apparently important lessons in genealogy lurked around every corner, I thought. Nevertheless, his subsequent reenactments of our encounter with Trujillo’s widow were both accurate and funny.

  Nini retained a curly mane of auburn hair, a reminder of her youth but long past what nature intended. Her appearance was exactly what a casting director would desire for the role of a red-light district madam. Heavy makeup, mascara, and lipstick, designed to hide her age, just accentuated it. Her time in front of a mirror was more than simple narcissism. As a stage and film actor, she was accustomed to the glare of bare lights surrounding her image. One silver-framed photo of herself on a piano shawl in the living room revealed her association with Eva and Juan Peron, another of her and jaw-jutting Mussolini. In fact, she was the daughter of a general, well connected in certain circles of Spanish society, and made a good living as an influence peddler. Her calling card should have read, “Friendship for Hire.” When visiting her at her apartment, filled with portraits, gilded Rococo armchairs and settees, every available niche suggesting the marshal pomp and mustiness of a bygone era, favor seekers waited patiently in anterooms. She and Elmyr had more than a cordial relationship, she helping him negotiate the labyrinth of Madrid’s bureaucracy and making sure bribes went to the right people. During the Franco regime one’s ability to avoid problems with the police depended on having the right signature and officially stamped document. Apparently, she had not yet exhausted her passion for men in uniforms when I knew her. A colonel in the army called on her regularly. According to her, he had romantic designs on her, although I think it was more likely another link based on mutual interest. “He has dreadful table manners. He eats his peas with a knife,” she said. Now, if he managed to balance whole peas on the flat side of the knife from his plate to his mouth, then that feat alone should have earned him a promotion, I thought.

  Nini was an efficient procurer of whatever one needed. In a moment of prophetic candor, Elmyr once said to me, “God help me if Nini ever became my enemy!” In about 1973 that’s precisely what happened. Her self-serving instinct prompted her gravitation to the dark side and an alliance with Fernand Legros. Forever bent on Elmyr’s demise, with her help they orchestrated his incarceration for three months in a Palma jail. While the manufactured charges against him were bogus, the gears of Spanish justice moved imperceptibly before the accusations were dismissed. This temporary success, however, provided the pathway that would ultimately guarantee their goal. Their clever manipulation of the legal system vividly illustrated that the law and justice are very often incompatible.

  However, while Elmyr and Nini were friends, she devised a plan to help ingratiate him with the Spanish authorities. As his existence on Ibiza always had an edgy uncertainty that brought him uncomfortably close to the justice system, they thought that a little positive public relations spin would be helpful. They agreed that Elmyr should establish an art foundation in his name and leave an endowment that would promote art and the enhancement of cultural life on the island. This would entail making La Falaise the foundation’s new home. The fact that it was not in his name or power to give away was an inconvenient detail that became conveniently fuzzy when his monocle fell out because of relaxed scruples. This little bit of stagecraft was again more show than go, as so much PR actually is.

  Never mind that the insincerity of this ploy was utterly calculating to bend public perception and do a little image-polishing at the same time—it worked. The local newspaper, the Diario de Ibiza, duly applauded the altruistic gesture and acknowledged him as a great artist but also a generous benefactor. Truth is apparently expendable as long as one’s approval rating gets a boost. Knowing him to be generous, the idea was not incompatible with his character. However, as was so often the case, there was a slight reality gap that didn’t bridge between idea and fact. So long as the winds of fortune seemed to blow in Nini’s direction and her relationship with Elmyr worked for her, she was willing to assume those duties of publicist and protector. While I was too young and unworldly to see through that curtain of artifice that really masked her vampire instincts, Elmyr more presciently demonstrated a rare insight into her character when suspecting more accurately her mercenary nature.

  She may have quite enjoyed her duplicitous nature; after all, she honed her ability to deceive through her profession as an actor. I shudder to imagine if her treachery that reached Biblical proportions with Elmyr had proven to be as venomous to others. I often thought but for Legros’s being gay and considerably younger than Nini, they would have made ideal bed partners. I just don’t know who would have eaten whom after sex. There was a little story, however, that Nini often recounted with a sparkle in he
r eye. Her father was in Cuba in the days when they had a revolution about every eighteen months. She explained that he offered amnesty to some of the rebels if they would turn themselves in and stop their insurrection. A number of peasants accepted the peace overture and surrendered. He immediately ordered their executions. His justification was simply, “What do you think they’d have done with us?” Her glee never diminished with each retelling. It also disclosed a lack of hesitation and obvious subscription to the notion that the end justifies the means. Even if I’d grasped the implications of this queasy and gruesome tale, I’m not sure anything would have changed. Events seemed to gather momentum and their eventual deep impact suggested disaster.

  Elmyr never needed to travel far from home to witness deceit. There were plenty of people on the island, as I’ve already suggested, whose ability to deceive ranged from harmless to dangerous. One of these was his lawyer. He was a rotund man. It looked like someone drew his facial features on a balloon inflated beyond its capacity. His thinning black hair slicked back with gleaming pomade did little to disturb this impression. Still, dapperly dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and black tie, and black Buddy Holly glasses, he was an imposing figure. Nor was he devoid of charm. Moreover, he was intelligent, loved Italian opera, possessed a sonorous baritone voice, and spoke fluent French, which helped him pick up hookers in Paris.

  Once, before leaving for France, he cheerily announced, “This will be my sixty-fourth trip.” Always before departing, he came up to La Falaise and presented Elmyr a hastily concocted bill for services not rendered. I suspect he passed the collection plate among other clients, as well. Elmyr knew these minor extortions were similar to the periodic payments he made to Nini. In other parts of the world, this custom is called “baksheesh.” It’s a widely accepted practice and cultural norm. Elmyr’s lawyer also understood the notion of money as a tool. He was well connected and familiar with bribes and under-the-table payoffs. For probably a good two thousand years, this small island of traders and merchants knew this marketplace tradition, and it was certainly alive and well among the current batch of residents. Unlike the mafia, there was no fraternity, or secret society bound together by oath or arcane rules. It was a more laissez faire, individualist kind of banditry. In a collective gesture of civic pride, they erected the largest bronze statue on the island in Ibiza town, dedicated not to a national hero, but to a pirate!

  Another visitor who made the pilgrimage to Elmyr’s villa also had a reputation as a charlatan. They said, “Be careful. He doesn’t pay his hotel bills—or any bills. He’s charming, but don’t trust him.” The French called him a “monstre sacré.” That was Orson Welles.

  Intrigued by Elmyr’s story after seeing the BBC/Reichenbach documentary made on him, Welles used it as the basis for his 1973 film F for Fake. Filmmaking, according to him, was another art form that is as unabashedly illusory as Elmyr’s canon of fake art. In this respect he felt well qualified to draw intersecting lines between these two visual media to illustrate how each relies on a degree of duplicity or trickery to manufacture a “truth” that is more a product of stagecraft than a reflection of reality.

  In the opening scene of his movie, Welles is dressed in a black cape, performing sleight-of-hand magic tricks before a small boy in riveted wonder. He introduces his audience to his subject with his hypnotically sonorous voice. “This is a film about trickery and illusion…” For the rest of the picture Welles goes on an escapade questioning what is real or not and the value society attaches to their perceptions of art. The notion of tweaking the nose of convention or propriety becomes a joyful idée fixe and underlying theme that he squarely embraces and of course counts himself as a contributing iconoclast as well.

  Orson Welles and Elmyr – 1972

  He revels in recounting his 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s story “War of the Worlds,” with its simulated reality and impending doom that caused widespread panic, instances of suicide, and claims of abduction and rape of innocent victims by the invading Martians. A contrite Welles made a public apology the following day for his program’s too-lifelike and sporadically tragic consequences. I am sure he felt especially devastated for those cases of brutal Martian rape. It also cemented his reputation as a hoaxster that he afterward never entirely disavowed nor shunned. He also shares an admission that he curiously started his professional life as a young painter in Ireland. When his artistic endeavors brought him to the brink of starvation, he told his Irish hosts that he was actually a famous American actor and thereafter tried to make good his lie. By virtue of his own dubious beginnings, his treatment of Elmyr’s chicanery is perhaps understandably lighthearted and generous. He is also acutely aware that Elmyr’s skill as an artist is close to his own, an interpreter of art.

  Welles was what the French describe in a shudder of awe and respect as a “sacred monster.” Prior to his visit to Ibiza, his reputation of course preceded him. The temperamental nature and easily ruffled sensibilities of this star were already common knowledge. Rumored to have a taste for only Titinger champagne, we dared not risk incurring the wrath of Zeus by not having any. Elmyr delegated me to seek out the expensive and rare ambrosia on the island. After several stops at various bodegas, I found a bottle. That was it, one lonely bottle. We all were queasy, apprehensive in advance of his arrival.

  At La Falaise the BBC crew of technicians readied the house as an improvised sound stage. I had seen the blindingly brilliant lights used before and wondered if they would be unnecessary, as his star power might be sufficiently luminescent by itself. After all, he had that incandescent status of “living legend.” That evening he entered the house looking surprisingly mortal, casually dressed in a traditional Spanish shirt with fine pleats running vertically from symmetrically matched breast pockets to its bottom and worn outside the trousers about hip level. Elmyr, by comparison, was dressed for a night at the opera and was lost in Welles’s shadow that further contrasted their different appearance and stature.

  He and Elmyr needed no introduction; instead, they bounded into a friendly banter that suggested a comfortable familiarity or merely a reconnection only interrupted by the passage of time rather than a first-time encounter. Taking my cue from Elmyr for being an attentive host, I asked if he would like a glass of French champagne. He replied, “A glass of vino tinto would do.” OK, a little red wine, I thought, was not too godlike. When he later asked me where I was from and I said Minnesota, he informed me that he was from Wisconsin. He not only proved to be entirely human but my respect for this fellow Midwesterner grew even greater. His approachability and charm were unaffected, and his inimitable voice was as soothing as the sound of a purring cat. I no longer saw him as some fearsome temple deity and object of worship, but as someone who would cordially pass you the jam across the table if asked.

  It was indeed an edifying glimpse of a unique meeting between two remarkable men. For about three hours Welles and Elmyr exchanged views on life, spirituality, love, religion, philosophy, and art. Both were thoughtful, erudite, and appeared to enjoy their spontaneous conversation. I only wish I had kept a private recording of the dialogue, as it all but vanished on the editing room floor. My impression throughout their metaphysical expositions was that while Welles was clearly an intellectual titan, Elmyr proved to be at least his equal. After the filming concluded, Welles stayed the night as Elmyr’s guest. Early the next morning we expected to breakfast together; however, he disappeared, leaving only a long three-page letter on his bed thanking Elmyr for his hospitality and excusing his sudden departure. I do not recall the reason given for his abrupt flight, but he succeeded in maintaining an air of mystery about him.

  The film debuted at the San Sebastian Film Festival in northern Spain in 1973. For seven days, the city became a cultural wormhole attracting an interstellar array of celestial bodies. I could only compare the teeming carnival atmosphere to what I had experienced at the state fair back home in Minnesota, but for the absence of the gleaming new farm
machinery, corn dogs, and cotton candy. Those attention-grabbers, however, paled next to the glittering human confetti of the film world. Festivals, as the name implies, are fanciful, joyous occasions, in this instance an international swap meet designed to promote, display, buy, and sell movies for the pleasure of a visually voracious public. Just beneath the glamour of these tony events is a hardscrabble world of the marketplace. Along with a plethora of actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, distributors, et al., an army of paparazzi, tabloid journalists, television reporters, and even representatives of the mainstream press were present to record and interpret their every word and movement on and off screen. It was a colorful, entertaining zoo.

  Elmyr and I went to a number of the premiers that week. Festival organizers probably lobbied long and hard to capture Elizabeth Taylor to inaugurate the event, which may have been a misplaced effort. She arrived two hours late, sweeping across the stage in a bolt of sari fabric à la Isadora Duncan to boos and shrill whistles from the audience, whose patience was long spent. Elmyr took the occasion to lean into me, saying, “You see, it doesn’t matter who you are, never be late and never waste people’s time.” There was a lesson in most everything.

  Madrid

  In 1972 I bought my first Nikon camera. A romance ensued. The schools of visitors to La Falaise offered me opportunities to create a visual logbook of famous people coming to see Elmyr. One of his friends was a Catalan woman, Juana Biarnes, who owned a small press agency in Madrid with her French husband, Michel, a correspondent for Paris Match magazine. While visiting one day, Juana suggested that during the off-season when we closed the gallery, I should come to work for them in Madrid, and they would teach me everything about photography. I accepted her offer and flew to Madrid for a few weeks’ internship that would open my pupils to a wide aperture. Someone I met gave me the address of a cheap cold-water pension with meals included. Its style was basic military, but I had my own room.