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

by Mark Forgy

  We dashed into the house, then upstairs to his bedroom. As I approached his bed, I found him on his side with his face in his pillow. I tried to rouse him gently, saying, “Elmyr…Elmyr!” He then rolled over to see who was disturbing his sleep. As soon as he looked at me, I could see his gaze was vacant, without a glimmer of recognition. Henri and I picked him up and carried him to his car. I cradled him in my arms in the back of his vehicle. He drove with Monique beside him, speeding back to the hospital in Ibiza. When we arrived, I shouted that we needed a doctor. One of the nuns came out, gently picked up his wrist to feel his pulse, and whispered we were too late. He died en route. When he had turned in his bed, I knew his spirit was trying to flee his body, and he was trying mightily to let it go. They placed his body on a gurney and wheeled it into a room. Standing next to him, I picked up his right hand; feeling his cooling fingers, I cried, knowing his life was gone and that hand would never create again. Elmyr shuffled off his mortal coil in the ultimate act of desperation and courage.

  I am not sure we can ever fully recover from the loss of a loved one. We become inured to their absence over time, but the emotional pain leaves scar tissue on our souls. The growth rings of our remaining years just cover the disfiguring hurt, but it never completely heals or goes away.

  It rained the day of Elmyr’s burial, appropriate for the occasion, I thought. The rain also renewed the island this time of year. Wildflowers sprang up everywhere, speckling the countryside as in a Monet painting, reminding one of the cycle of life. That overlooked fact of nature never before conveyed the significance or grief it now possessed. No one close to me had ever died before, so I guess my education on Ibiza was not yet over. I was now at the opposite end of that emotional Rorschach, further away from happiness than I ever knew possible. Can you fully understand or appreciate life without knowing what death is? I asked myself that in my solitude. I imagined a grin on Elmyr’s face if I had slid this ontological question into our evening conversations, or, better yet, brought it up during a metaphysical chat with Arlene or Sandy. Before, I had no reason to explore such notions surveying the depth or breadth of sorrow. I thought I careened close enough to sadness in the secondhand tales of Elmyr’s hardships and heartaches. In the days following his death, I felt like an alpinist clutching a severed lifeline, falling from the rock’s face, jolted awake from a recurring nightmare, except this nightmare was real.

  The evening of the day he died police came to the house in the country, placing that yellow plastic tape over the front door as though it were a crime scene. Well, to them that’s what it was, suicide being against the law and, more importantly, keeping his soul out of heaven, kind of like the way WASPs used to keep Jews out of country clubs. None of it made any sense to me. Elmyr’s good friend Mariano Llobet explained to me that since he took his own life in this arch-Catholic country, we might not get a church-sanctioned service anywhere, and that extended to his being non grata in a cemetery. It looked like Elmyr was heading to the dog graveyard, wherever that was. Mariano had been the prefect of Ibiza for years, so he knew everyone. Years earlier Elmyr had done portraits of him and his wife, Carmen, who died at forty of cancer. Hung side by side, the portraits faced one another like early fifteenth-century Italian renaissance pictures, suggesting love and fidelity. If anyone knew what strings to pull it was Mariano. He arranged for a service at a church in the old city. The only catch was that we had to piggyback with another service of someone else who died more honorably, or at least in accordance with church doctrine.

  News of Elmyr’s death traveled fast throughout the island and abroad. My brother later told me he read about it in the L. A. Times. Peter One sent a telegram of condolence from New York. Isidro Clot came from Madrid. Our longtime friend Jamie Goodbrand flew down from London. Before I arrived, Elmyr fostered Jamie’s budding artistic talents. He helped him get an exhibition at Ivan Spence’s gallery near the Romanesque cathedral in the old city. Sandy drove out to the house, offering to help me in any way possible. Friends rallied to my support. All the while, Moody, his terrier, stayed close to me.

  That night I stayed at the house in a small, attached room but with no door accessing the home’s interior. I dragged in a single mattress and blankets from inside before the police sealed the entry. At dusk two uniformed soldiers arrived from the military barracks in town to make sure no one disturbed the house. The soldiers always looked ominous to me because they wore those Nazi helmets, souvenirs of Hitler’s support of Franco during the civil war. Their barracks was also just below Los Molinos, the same one the naked girl’s car crashed into and caught everything on fire when they released Legros from prison a couple of days early for good behavior. I brought them two rattan chairs I had painted canary yellow when we lived at La Falaise. There was also a pile of firewood outside, so they built a fire to keep themselves warm that night. It was impolite not to ask guests if they wanted something to drink, so I offered them a bottle of wine from a case in Elmyr’s studio, even though I had no way to open it. They said, “No, gracias.”

  I could only cry that night and cuddle with Moody, who curled up by my side. I rose at first light. Heavy dew dripped from everything outside in the cold morning air. The soldiers sat in their chairs near the exhausted fire; their long canvas coats covered them like blankets. Around nine o’clock, the chief of police and a couple of officers arrived. I knew the head of the police department and found him likeable even though he had busted friends of mine for drug possession. He cut the yellow tape. We entered the house. They wanted to see his bedroom. Together we climbed a few steps to a barren room whose purpose was never clear, then up a few more steps to our left to the master bedroom. On Elmyr’s night table, a small empty yellow bottle lay on its side. Its contents, barbiturate sleeping pills, were now in Elmyr’s stomach, along with much of the Courvoisier from the bottle next to it. One plainclothes officer bent over, picking up a couple of the pills from the pale yellow rug next to the bed. Another man offered a bag for the evidence.

  We went downstairs then to the living room. Beside Elmyr’s chair lay his sesta. It was no longer the hand-woven straw basket with two ropelike shoulder straps. He had one of the local artisans fashion one from smooth mahogany-colored leather. Inside were all the letters in their Wedgwood-blue envelopes. These were his good-byes to his close friends, and, from the authorities’ viewpoint, evidence that exonerated me from any criminal implication in his death. It was an inference I never once contemplated. At that moment it first entered my mind that in some way they might view me as—a suspect. What if he had not written those letters, I thought, what then? My mind lurched to the possibility of stepping in my own snare of injustice. I just learned the most lurid lesson about the inadequacy of innocence. That’s why it’s aptly named “the criminal justice system,” that inner voice was telling me.

  They looked through every room in the house for any anomalies, I suppose, that might shed light on any details helping their investigation. This is the sort of instance that triggered Elmyr’s gag reflex and sweat glands. Now, I felt that queasy anxiety he must have experienced whenever he was near the police. And I hadn’t done anything wrong. Wait, how many times did Elmyr tell himself that? The police director then expressed his thanks for my cooperation and regrets about Elmyr’s death. “Could you come to see me in a few days?” he asked. “I think I can then return these letters to you,” he added, opening the door to leave with the other two men.

  Mariano helped make funeral arrangements, contacting the undertaker and paying for a niche in a kind of aboveground honeycomb for the dead. For some reason, Mariano picked out a coffin with a pane of glass on the lid. Perhaps because of this initial exposure to death and funerals, I find any reason possible to excuse myself from these ceremonies. Viewing his lifeless body was the last image I wanted of him in my mind. I don’t know if there was any announcement in the local newspaper, but still, many people arrived at the cemetery the day of the burial. Rain pelted opened umbrellas. Tearf
ul friends stood silently. Mariano then approached me, whispered in my ear that the police had just received word from Madrid. The French government wanted his fingerprints. Someone apparently wanted proof that the body in the casket was actually Elmyr—and not someone else. After all, if anyone could fabricate his own death, it would be Elmyr, right?

  They moved his coffin inside a small chapel within the walled cemetery. I couldn’t witness this last indignation. Mariano, the coroner, and two police officials went inside. Five minutes later they came out, allowing some other men to carry the casket. They climbed a short ladder and lifted it into a niche about six feet high. Before they began mortaring in bricks, I climbed the ladder and kissed the coffin as though I were alone, unafraid to show my grief and my love for him. Learning what it is to lose someone you love must be the hardest thing to learn in this world.

  Aftermath

  Throughout the weeks following Elmyr’s death, I had the support of friends who long before welcomed me into their lives, not for my proximity to him, but for who I was. Together, we reminisced about happier times. Everyone felt his absence. To me it was a sucking chest wound. Moody, now my constant companion and link to Elmyr, came everywhere with me. I was saying my good-byes to my extended family, preparing for the inevitable separation of leaving the island.

  In January, within about a month of Elmyr’s hearing in Palma, I read an article in TIME magazine. French police arrested Abu Daoud, who reputedly masterminded the Munich Olympic massacre. Germany requested his extradition. Instead of sending the terrorist suspect back across the Rhine to stand trial for the atrocities, the French spirited him out of the country aboard a plane to Algeria. Some speculated that the French government simply wanted the politically volatile situation to vanish and not derail a multi-million-dollar deal to sell Egypt Mirage jets and other French-made military equipment. Egypt took delivery of the hardware that very week. While this kind of dollars-and-sense pragmatism commonly disorients the moral compass of elected officials, it is interesting to note how easily French president Giscard d’Estaing’s administration cooperated in demanding Elmyr’s extradition. The moral imperative to hand over Abu Daoud somehow seemed less clear.

  No matter how much I thought about Elmyr’s death, it wasn’t going to change anything. I had to look ahead. Overnight, all those daily decisions governing the present and future were up to me. He had a contract with Clot, giving his gallery exclusive rights to his work, so I returned to Madrid to take care of unfinished business with Elmyr’s estate. Those world-wise skills I had been learning were supposed to ease me into independence. From my first days at La Falaise, Elmyr attempted to give me those tools to empower me, to make me self-sufficient. Still, nothing Elmyr ever imparted to me resembled anything as practical as money management. How could he pass on something that eluded him his entire life? Another irony neither Elmyr nor I saw coming was apparent only after we had been together a few years. It is an awakening that stirs mixed feelings in parents, I imagine, when all one’s protection, caring, and guidance culminates in the departure of their offspring. As I matured, he seemed proud and wistful—proud of himself for giving me the education that he wanted me to have, and wistful for completing his mission. His death, however, renewed that sense of disconnectedness and purposelessness that initiated my eight-year sojourn in Europe. Life with Elmyr not only anchored me but also instilled in me the conviction that my future looked promising. The stellar social network with which I had grown comfortable would yield a niche for me, I thought. If I had elected to stay in Spain, I could have continued to work in the Madrid art gallery. Clot, however, knew I wanted to return to the US and suggested I act as their agent, selling Dali’s jewelry and gold sculptures. That was my intention.

  In the spring of 1977, I flew to New York, where many of my friends from Ibiza were living. There, I sublet an apartment for six weeks in west Greenwich Village. At the time, I couldn’t have foreseen that the first few years back in the States would be so awkward. I felt dressed for the cotillion ball, waiting for my date who never arrived. Maybe it was my hairy legs underneath those crinoline petticoats, but there was something wrong with this picture. Anyway, that’s the way it seemed. I never dreamed that my carefully tailored education would isolate me from most everyone. It was supposed to be just the opposite. Social etiquette didn’t count for much in the drive-thru at a fast-food joint. No one I knew would appreciate puns in French. On those occasions when I encountered Europeans, I went back into the fake hand-kissing mode. Not with men, of course. These customs had their place in Elmyr’s world, but that behavior, I began to realize, mostly vanished with the British Empire. To everyone around me it must have looked like an embarrassing ritual of a fraternity hazing. How could I feel so out of place in my own culture, my own country? It reminded me of the saucer-eyed wonderment of my lifelong friends that greeted my first return visit to Minnesota. They patiently waited for this cultured hangover to pass. Slowly, I dropped those affectations that made me, I thought, a sideshow oddity. In many ways, I felt like a monarch who had just abdicated his throne. In my solitude, I reflected on the extraordinary opportunities I had and a love I might never have known, which time can never steal from me.

  I know one principal reason why Elmyr and I bonded so strongly. We were both caregivers and generous. That symbiosis worked for us both. Elmyr had no reason to suspect an ordinary gesture of offering Legros his sofa to sleep on would eventually lead to his death. How could he? Even when Legros’s psychopathic nature was clear to him, Elmyr’s impulse to help others was part of who he was. Those with predatory natures saw this trait as lunch. There seems to be some natural magnetism at work, how givers wed takers. It took me decades to recognize the unhealthy pattern of my inclination to redeem needy people. Until the destructiveness of this do-good inclination was obvious, I had already worked through two failed marriages and other terminal relationships. I believe it mirrored Elmyr’s personal life in many respects, and, unfortunately, it was something I could not learn vicariously from his emotional missteps. How strange it is that others’ quirky behavior is often immediately evident, while self-awareness is frequently a lifelong quest.

  I didn’t return to Ibiza for twenty-eight years, until 2005. By that time, I was ready to get some closure around the painful memories associated with Elmyr’s death. My wife, Alice, helped me work through these emotional issues and achieve the psychic peace I needed. For years, I felt guilt for not preventing his suicide, even though I could not have deterred him. I also felt I let him down, not living up to his expectations of me. While writing this book, however, I’ve felt Elmyr’s presence and see in my mind’s eye his inimitable smile, sense the warmth of his love, and somehow know he approves of what I’ve done.

  Part Three

  MY SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH

  Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

  T. S. Elliot

  I often thought that one day I would get a phone call beginning with the words “You don’t know me, but…,” girding myself for some haunting reminder of things I’d done or said, evidence of past behavior that makes one cringe in shame and would be better left buried under a pile of excuses—like the twin girls I had fathered when I was eighteen and never knew. I left California before I found out my girlfriend was pregnant, and all I knew was that they were put up for adoption after their birth.

  That breathtaking declaration of another sort came one morning in March 2010. It was a man’s sonorous, radio-quality voice. He said he’d read a newspaper article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about the exhibition at the Hillstrom Museum of Art. The works on display mostly came from my collection, about seventy pieces by Elmyr, the first major showing of his art in almost thirty-five years and largest ever in North America. The initial grip of guilt vanished as he explained the purpose of his call. “…I knew Elmyr in California,” he told me. I asked him when that was. “Sixty-four, sixty-five,” he said. That time frame didn’t gel with the story familiar to me. As f
ar as I knew, Elmyr never returned to the States after going back to Europe in 1959. He had to have his dates wrong. The caller was Jerry Czulewicz, an artist, appraiser, collector, and dealer of fine art, collectibles, books, wines, and maker of friends. “I understand completely the relationship you had with Elmyr,” he continued. Jerry was referring to Elmyr’s being gay; he was not, but circulated with ease within the gay community, that lifestyle that was unavoidable in Hollywood and particularly the film and art world that brought them together.

  “We used to meet at a restaurant called the Matador,” Jerry said. “One night I was there with Sasha Brastoff and Howard Shoop. They had a gallery called the Esplanade, with Lee Liberace as a partner. Over dinner one evening, Elmyr asked if they wanted to arrange an exhibition of his work there. Sasha then brought up the rumors of Elmyr’s name being connected to art forgery. I could see that he was crushed by this unpleasant news. It caught me by surprise, as this was the first I ever heard anything like that.” I’d seen that futureless look in Elmyr’s eyes before, his hope exhausted like those awaiting sad but predictable news in hospital lounges. It was not just his rejection but the notion of his illicit past becoming public knowledge that must have alarmed him. He was a marked man with diminishing avenues of escape and means of selling his art to make a living.

  Jerry went on to say he thought Elmyr’s good friend Count André Esterhazy had helped him reenter the country through Mexico. This would have required a new passport, as the fake Canadian passport Legros had helped procure for his return to Europe had likely expired. The sense of his flight as a fugitive desperate to survive assumed a new reality for me as Jerry’s tale unfolded.

  All that had fit neatly in place before was now ajar. The tidy facts I’d amassed throughout this chapter in my life just suffered a seismic jolt, toppling some longstanding assumptions, the biggest of which was that I knew everything or nearly everything about Elmyr’s life. Jerry and I spoke for about an hour and a half. When our conversation ended I was reeling, my world shaken and leaving me with no doubt about the story Jerry just shared with me.