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

by Mark Forgy

  Elmyr exhibited his art at a London art gallery in the early 1970s, and at that time we became acquainted with Sandra de Laszlo and her husband, who is the artist’s grandson. They purchased a number of works by Elmyr from his show. We later dined together at a London hotel. It was a lively, engaged evening. Elmyr was in rapture while the conversation percolated about art, social connectivity, and exchanging thoughts with those who knew his world, and he knew theirs. In January 2010, I contacted Sandra and refreshed her memory of our meeting. I told her about the de Laszlo portrait of Elmyr and asked if she would be kind enough to examine an enlarged photo I would e-mail her. She wrote back that she thought it strange that Elmyr didn’t mention it, and this curious omission was supported by her husband’s recollection. My memory was somewhat different, that Elmyr did mention the portrait, but in a throwaway nonchalance that invited no follow-up discussion. That itself seemed odd, given this nexus of common legacy and substantial reason for cultivating this noteworthy Hungarian connection.

  purported P. A. de Laszlo portrait of Elmyr and his older brother, Istvan

  I remember the day the portrait arrived, shipped to his villa on Ibiza. It was rolled in a cardboard tube. Another small oil painting on a stretcher, a portrait of his mother, signed hory in the upper right-hand corner, arrived at the same time, along with a cache of family photos from—a cousin, Elmyr said. How a cousin came to possess these items garnered a glancing question mark, only to be quickly displaced by some other momentary distraction requiring less thought, I’m sure. At twenty-one, it was not my habit of exercising any critical thinking about what Elmyr told me. I was wholly under his influence. My life was akin to a lottery winner’s metamorphosis, abandoning my working-class roots altogether and adopting the virtues of the newly rich. I was fully invested in the world he created around me, the perfect acolyte in this new world order, dedicated and versed in the Gospel according to Elmyr.

  I watched Elmyr remove the painting from its container, attentive, like working an archeological site. He knelt on the white wool rug in the foyer, leaned over, and unrolled the canvas on the floor. He asked me to hold one end that wanted to recoil from years of maintaining its curl. Holding the bottom edge, we could see through brownish, cracked varnish a young Elmyr, about four to six years old, leaning into his seated brother, a few years older. Both bore slight smiles and wore identical sailor suits. Although the almost-life-size double portrait conveyed an image of insular class wealth, a reprise of those early twentieth-century films documenting the similarly dressed children of Czar Nicolas and Czarina at the close of an age of innocence, the picture appeared ravaged by time, the surface paint missing along asymmetrical folds, identifying a derelict past. The paint-free areas revealed an underlying fabric, dark as though soaked in black tea.

  After examining the photo, Sandra asked if there were any distinguishing markings or gallery labels on the stretcher that could provide specific information tying it to de Laszlo. Then she asked what year it might have been painted. Approximating Elmyr’s age would put it around 1910 to 1912. Sandra replied that was a timeframe when he was painting the Spanish royal family in Madrid and other important commissions. Without making her doubt explicit, the improbability of the double-portrait being a product of the great painter was the implication. A friend of Colette’s, Alexandra Tice, a Washington, DC, area restorer, had done restoration work on some de Laszlos. After examining a photo, she said the Elmyr portrait’s likelihood of being authentic was “not even close.” This epitaph opens another door. If the de Laszlo portrait is a fake, then who painted it? Despite its fuzzy origin, it remains a high-caliber painting. When the picture arrived in Ibiza, it wasn’t long before Elmyr initiated some cleaning of the canvas and some superficial over-painting in spots in need of restoring. Its authorship presents an intriguing mystery, and while it would be easy for me to say “I can see his brushwork in it.” that would be premature. However, if Elmyr actually created it, it would add years, maybe another decade onto his illicit twenty-year career, stretching it to thirty years (although his longevity would not earn him a gold watch and testimonial dinner). Until the painting can undergo a more thorough analysis, this will remain an inviting uncertainty.

  Inching my way along this path of discovery of who Elmyr really was felt oddly surreal and something I never imagined doing—like looking for a toehold on an ice-glazed cliff face while wearing red six-inch stiletto pumps. Well, that image might not be sufficiently bizarre in conveying how strange this reevaluation process seemed. In a way, it was like asking a Christian fundamentalist to burn a Bible. The notion of pulling out by the roots things I held to be true was exactly the prospect I faced. That I bought Elmyr’s version of the truth may smack of the delusional mother of a serial killer insisting “He was always a good boy!”—suggesting a kaleidoscopic perception that fractures reality, especially in defense of what we elect to believe. Still, the nature of Elmyr’s deceit is something I understand, and that his lies never harmed me, nor eroded the emotional bond between us. His storytelling may well have been the product of wish fulfillment, burnishing his self-image, rewriting a personal history to salve flaws or failures that only wounded his self-esteem and tethered him to secrets in his past and whose revelations served no beneficial purpose. The fictionalized account of his life, however, intertwines with elements that awe and amaze, and are, incidentally, true. I witnessed astonishing things, met astounding people through him, and my life with him corroborates what Peter Schults said to me: “Anywhere Elmyr went, he knew everyone worth knowing.” He was a “connector” that Malcolm Gladwell describes in The Tipping Point (Little Brown and Company, 2000); a networker by disposition, and it was this natural inclination that allowed him to collect friends and acquaintances in abundance.

  In March of 2011, I traveled to Budapest to lecture on Elmyr and hoped to uncover the longstanding mystery of his true identity. Among the boxes of his personal effects, the most remarkable may be the letter from Edith Tenner written to Elmyr in the mid 1970s. She married Elmyr’s first cousin, and to my surprise was alive and residing in Germany. We used the postal address to find her, and luckily for us, she hadn’t moved in thirty-five years. Colette and two friends from Budapest—Dr. Jeff Taylor, an expert on art and the Hungarian art market, and his wife Andrea Megyes went to interview her in April 2011. She could provide new insight into Elmyr’s background. Did he come from a family of means, minor aristocracy? She would know these things. Andrea described her as a slight woman with well-coiffed gray hair, wearing a simple sweater with beaded embroidery, a strand of pearls, and pants with matching jacket. Her misgivings over the purpose of their visit dissipated over afternoon tea and recapitulated memories of her life, husband, and hardships. Jeff characterized her initial suspicions as a by-product of living in a communist police state where it was safer not to ask questions “and keep one’s eyes on the ground.” She and Fritzy married after the war, after her harrowing survival at Auschwitz, after the loss of her entire family in the Jewish extermination camps. On her small apartment wall, she pointed out a rare and unique souvenir, a childhood pastel landscape done by Elmyr, one from Fritzy and Elmyr’s grandparent’s home in Billéd, Hungary. It was one of the early works Elmyr reminisced about in the 1970 BBC documentary. Here was proof of that story.

  I possessed a draft of a letter to Fritzy and Edith; it bore the hotel letterhead from San Sabastián in northern Spain, where Elmyr and I stayed during the film festival in 1973 for the debut of Orson Welles’s film F for Fake. Elmyr wrote of the glamour that surrounded the event, a world far removed from his cousin and his wife. They both knew Fritzy’s recent diagnosis of cancer was bleak without access to western hospitals. Elmyr promised he’d help them and arranged for Fritzy to be treated in Vienna. He later flew to Vienna to meet his cousin for the first time in over thirty years. This was also the first and only time he met Edith. According to her, Elmyr paid for all Fritzy’s medical care, and when he died months later, Elmyr als
o paid the funeral expenses. In recounting this painful episode in 2011, Andrea said Edith was near tears. I was used to Elmyr acting in this way, always keen to serve the needy when he was in a position to do so. Never mind that his bank account could show a negative balance a few weeks hence. Forethought or caution never trumped impulse when he heard a cry for help.

  What makes this encounter with Edith Tenner more than extraordinary, beyond her longevity and good fortune to have survived the Holocaust, is the meager size of Elmyr’s family. Contrary to turn-ofthe-century customs of having large families, it turns out that Elmyr’s mother had just one brother, who had just one son, Fritzy, Elmyr’s only cousin on his mother’s side. We’re unsure of the genealogy of Elmyr’s father. However, the roots of this family tree began to look certain for us when we found marriage and birth records at the Association of Jewish Communities in Budapest. Colette Marvin and Andrea Megyes entered through a metal detector, then a series of locked, tall wooden doors led by a matron, admitted into this inner sanctum by special permission of Rabbi Zoltan Radnoti. They asked their guide if anyone had ever asked to see the records regarding the infamous painter. “No, never,” she said. She then brought out a coffee-table-size book dated 1906. They leafed through pages, big like sails, until they found an entry opposite April 14, 1906. There was Elmyr’s family name. He was born Elemér Albert Hoffmann. Colette Marvin and Andrea Megyes finally cracked the code after more than forty years of uncertainty that surrounded his true identity. Not Clifford Irving, not the Norwegian documentary crew, no one before had found the elusive truth of who Elmyr really was—until now. It was that flesh-tingling moment that gives researchers a natural high few other things can replicate.

  The leather-bound tome also indicated that his father, Adolf Hofmann, contrary to Elmyr’s insistence that he was Catholic, we now know for certain was Jewish, as was his mother, Irene Tenner. His father’s occupation was listed as “wholesaler of handcrafted goods.” He was not a diplomat, as Elmyr claimed. His brother, Istvan’s, birth was duly noted in 1901, a five-year difference in age, but perhaps a world apart in temperaments.

  In 1975 I met his brother Istvan when he came to visit Elmyr in Ibiza, although he was also assigned a role to play in Elmyr’s charade. I was told years before that he was Elmyr’s cousin. I discovered their true relationship only after Elmyr died. Elmyr had been sending him money regularly through a Hungarian banker friend who had a house on the island, and he phoned Istvan, informing him of Elmyr’s suicide, saying he was sorry to have to tell him of his cousin’s death. Istvan replied, “He wasn’t my cousin, he was my brother.” This was the first revelation that began unraveling Elmyr’s fabric of lies, but also left more questions than answers.

  Istvan was slightly taller than Elmyr, quieter, subdued by ill heath, and with eyes that suggested a melancholy lurking behind them. From what little Elmyr allowed me to know, Istvan endured the postwar deprivations like all other victims of a totalitarian regime that robbed its citizens of basic freedoms, while extolling the virtues of life free from western excess and depravity. Elmyr may not have been a rabid democrat, but his hatred of the communists was clear, so I was curious and wanted to learn more about him, his life in an “iron curtain” country. Unfortunately, I couldn’t speak Hungarian or his second language, German, so I became the deaf mute at the table during their exchanges in Hungarian, an audible mime deciphered by their tone and body language only. They hadn’t seen each other in at least thirty years too, perhaps longer. One translated letter from Istvan mentioned how their mother kept a photo of Elmyr when he was sixteen, and how much she desired to see him again. When I began living with Elmyr, he told me he had no living family members left, that they perished before or during the war, that his brother died in motor racing accident in Tripoli (in a Bugatti), his father in Auschwitz, his mother shot by a Russian soldier for not surrendering her fur coat to him in the depth of winter. Every reference to family and descriptive detail dripped with pathos meant to tear the listener’s eyes, but it was just effective sentimental subterfuge. None of this was true. The tenor of the letter where Istvan mentions their mother’s longing to see Elmyr again, however, strongly suggests her desire to reconnect with her son, yet nothing pointed to Elmyr’s preexisting awareness of her overture or anything that would explain why he had rewritten his personal history that expunged any connection to family members who were still living long after the war, especially his mother.

  During Istvan’s week-long visit, I sensed a tension between them, at least evident in Elmyr’s face, on which no emotion or thought could hide. I never asked the reason for this impression, although I knew Elmyr had taken on more of the financial burden of caring for his aging brother, and having helped his cousin Fritzy. Besides the collusion between them in cooking up Elmyr’s phony birth certificates, Istvan’s letters revealed a destitute existence in Budapest, not having enough money to buy a sorely needed winter coat, and having to still work at a low-paying government job despite being well past retirement age. At the same time, Elmyr constantly juggled his own finances with predictable disregard for future planning that prevented him from becoming the polished schemer that Legros was, and who was once more on the warpath concocting an extradition demand for Elmyr. All these stress factors were probably dancing through his mind. Or, perhaps Istvan reminded Elmyr of the mythology he’d constructed about himself, and his brother’s presence in some way threatened the self-deception he’d grown comfortable with. Edith Tenner provided a provocative glimpse into Elmyr’s past, a possible foreshadowing of a life and legend that was preordained.

  Elmyr with his brother Istvan on the Left-1975

  Her husband Fritzy knew Elmyr from childhood on and spent time with him as their families vacationed together. His recollections, according to Edith, portrayed a young boy who was “deferred to” in the small town where their grandfather lived, the owner of a brick factory who was respected and viewed as an important figure in the community. Fritzy thought his grandfather’s prestige may have fostered Elmyr’s sense of self-importance, or an inclination to put on airs. Furthermore, he depicted young Elmyr as a spinner of yarns, the product of a precocious imagination. While the etiology of this adolescent behavior is intriguing, its exact origin is open to conjecture and may never be known in Elmyr’s case. What we do know for certain is that the manufacture of his stories preceded his criminal career but was integral to his mastery at deception and role-playing. It was a skill he honed early in his life, and I can only believe it yielded what he wanted, an image that suited his needs. Dr. Charles V. Ford says: “The results of this type of behavior are not particularly malignant, especially when compared to the wide spectrum of human misconduct…Patterns in the types of lies told and the circumstances in which each person is inclined to lie point to the use of lying and self-deception as coping mechanisms. The lies are responses made to deal with the stresses produced by both the external and internal worlds.” Psychoanalyst and theorist Otto Fenichel opined, “If it is possible to make someone believe that untrue things are true, then it is also possible that true things, the memory of which threatens me, are untrue.” These insights may come closest to explaining the workings of Elmyr’s mind, the self-deluding, lacey arabesques of deceit he constructed that made legend a far more appealing alternative to the truth. My attempt to examine the invention that has become knotted with his story may not fill all the voids. Efforts to get a clear picture of Elmyr’s psyche is a challenge still and might well remain open to speculation among experts, although we have some facts now that update our knowledge base.

  It would be hard for anyone with a shred of empathy not to succumb to Elmyr’s stories of personal tragedy that left him without family. I suspect he well understood the seduction of heartrending tales that instantly makes one sympathize with someone hurt or harmed. It at once earned him converts of those who might otherwise be more suspicious and probably prevented any further unwelcome shaking of his family tree.

 
When Elmyr sold his fakes to buyers, I know for a fact that they were not limited to professionals or the cognoscenti, as he always insisted. In some cases they were friends or acquaintances who may not have been knowledgeable enough to detect the scam he was running. What I believe is accurate is that his offerings were often made in moments of financial desperation, a demonstrable plea for help. Neuroeconomist Dr. Paul Zak explains the psychology of a con man’s strategy to earn one’s confidence this way: “Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable. Because of oxytocin and its effect on other parts of the brain, we feel good when we help others—this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers. ‘I need your help’ is a potent stimulus for action.”

  While friends may have responded sympathetically, Elmyr likely looked like prey to his target audience, art merchants. His standard ploy was to explain that he was a refugee who had escaped Hungary before the Russians arrived, managing to flee with a few family treasures, and was reluctantly willing to sell his artwork at an attractive price because he needed the money. It is unsurprising if his buyers saw their opportunism as charitable acts. Their profiteering from someone else’s position of weakness may have seemed too insignificant to thwart their altruism in most instances.

  Elmyr’s oft-repeated mantra is key to understanding his view that he was the one being exploited by others, which thereby justified what he did: “What I sold, I sold very miserably, and the big money was not made by me but the dealers and the people who resold them.” I also know that he thought this explanation somehow mollified his life of crime, so his subsequent self-forgiveness was a medicinal remedy for a sense of remorse attached to his actions. While his rationalization was psychologically soothing, it was essential to allaying the feelings of guilt that I suspect lurked in his subconscious. Nevertheless, how others viewed him, what they thought of him, was hugely important to Elmyr. Why this was the case begs clarity, although the answers to this may be lost with the passage of time. However, the fact that this external validation defined his self-image suggests an absence of a sociopathic lack of conscience and disregard of others’ opinions. So, he knew precisely the difference between right and wrong, ethical and unethical behavior, and only the exigencies he thought threatened his survival permitted changing the rules of the game. It was only these moments of selfpreservation, as he perceived his crimes to be, that emancipated him from the normally high standards of integrity and honesty he thought he upheld and expected of others. He’d placed the bar higher for me than for himself, but then, he saw only a life ahead of me full of potential and expectations, that his tutelage might spare me the missteps in his own life. It was unabashedly a parental instinct he never tried to hide and showed his misplaced trust in the notion that we can learn vicariously.