by John McEnroe
18
“Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”
Bob Seger
I finally won a long-running battle of my own in 2013—one that had nothing to do with tennis. I guess you could call this insanely complicated saga a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks they know their way around the art world. It certainly was for me, and it also taught me a few things about human nature that I’m probably better off knowing, but would rather I didn’t.
Larry Salander, the man at the center of the story, was the high-profile art dealer I’d interned with back in the 1990s. I’d become so close to him and his wife that I was godfather to one of his kids, and I’d bought and sold paintings very successfully through him. Even though I like to think I’m pretty streetwise and I certainly don’t trust people that easily, I trusted Larry. He had a crazy energy about him, but in a good way (or so I thought at the time) and he was totally passionate and knew a lot about art.
Back in 2004, I was going to Europe to play some exhibitions when Larry said, “Look, I’m in Europe, and there are these two Arshile Gorkys for sale at auction in Paris.” So I agreed to go and have a look at them.
Now Gorky was probably as big as De Kooning in the 1940s, but subsequently he ending up becoming a bit of an artist’s artist—more Larry David than Jerry Seinfeld—which in some ways I liked because it could make his work more affordable. These two paintings were named Pirate I and Pirate II and they look almost like little owls—abstract owls, but you can sort of make them out. I was told by Larry that these paintings were a turning point in art in the early 1940s—certain technical things about how they were painted made them historically important in terms of the evolution of abstract expressionism.
I agreed with Larry that we should go into partnership and try to bid for them, and we ended up getting both. It was a lot of money—more than I’d ever paid for a piece of art in my life. I was thinking the initial plan would be to take one each and put them away for a while—you can’t just try and flip them right away, because that’s not the way the art business works. And the art world was then and still is to a degree too small to get away with that type of move. Besides, I’d like to enjoy the painting—live with it for three to five years, then see what happens.
Larry agreed to that at first, but a couple of months later he decided he wanted to put them up for sale at the Armory Show—this was in February of 2005. I asked him why so soon and he said, “Oh, they’re worth $10 million each.” I said, “But people are going to know what we paid.” He replied, “That’s what they do all the time in business—rip people off.” To a certain extent, obviously that’s true—he was probably thinking about what they get away with on Wall Street, and thinking, “Why can’t we do that too?”—but the reason I probably wasn’t born to be an art dealer is that I don’t like to do that to people.
Anyway, Larry put the paintings up for sale at some crazy price like $15 million each. Dealers liked the pieces but were pissed off at him about the mark-up, because what we’d paid for them was on public record. After the show ended, I said, “Hey, let’s take a step back here,” and Larry reluctantly agreed. So I kept one at my house and he kept the other, but the deal was that we both owned half of each.
Meanwhile, Larry suddenly seemed to be flying around in Gulfstream jets, trying to corner the market in Old Masters, throwing lavish parties for his wife Julie and generally living high on the hog. I asked him how the hell he could suddenly afford a private jet and he said, “I don’t have to pay—I have this deal where I get it for nothing.” I remember saying, “Hey, let me know what that deal is, I’d like that deal too.” In retrospect, this should’ve been a warning sign, especially as around the same time Larry also leased a huge building on 71st Street—ironically it was the old IMG building where the people who represent me had their offices. But for some reason he was still staying in his old premises on 79th Street. So he had two galleries on Madison Avenue—with massive overheads. That should’ve been another red flag.
We kept it low key for a while, but every now and then Larry would try to persuade someone to buy one of the paintings without getting anywhere, and I was starting to get nervous. So since the auction market was very hot at that time, I said, “Why don’t we put one of them up for what we paid for both? If they’re worth God knows how much, then we can certainly get our money back, and then the other one’s house money, so we could hang onto it and maybe make a killing in five years’ time.”
Larry said, “Give me until the end of the year to see if I can sell it, and if not you can call Sotheby’s or Christie’s.” I said, “OK,” and a couple more months passed. During that time he came to me a few times with strange ideas—“Look, I’ve just sold this Marsden Hartley painting for $600,000. I only paid $300,000, but the guy’s not going to pay me for six months, so if you lend me $150,000, I’ll double your money.” I thought this sounded amazing, so I consulted with my accountant and money manager, who said, “Well, if all the paperwork’s in order, I suppose it’s OK.” But we should’ve been thinking, “This is too good to be true.”
Larry and I went out to look at this place in Long Island City, because he wanted to do something for kids—to give something back—and I was still trying to find a place for the tennis academy. It was an old abandoned factory and they were asking $15 million for it. Larry was going, “This’ll be great—we can build a great sports facility with baseball fields, tennis courts, etc.” But I’m saying, “Larry, it’s $15 million! And it’s going to be another five, minimum, to get it up and running—where the hell are we going to get that kind of money?” He said, “Oh, it’s OK, you’ve only got to put 10 percent down,” because that was the time when everyone in Wall Street was leveraging everything—and look how well that turned out!
It all sounded crazy to me, so in January 2007 I called him and said, “Larry, listen, people are coming over from Sotheby’s and Christie’s tomorrow, let me grab the painting to show them.” At that point, out of nowhere, he said, “I’ve sold it.” I asked him how much for and he said, “For the amount we paid for both of them—to a museum in Canada.” That sounded pretty good, but then he added, “Listen, there’s one formality that needs to be taken care of: it has to go through the museum’s management committee to get their blessing, but they have to meet first.” I said, “OK, when is that meeting?” and he said, “December fifteenth.”
Bearing in mind that it’s around January 5 at this point, I was a little surprised, so I just echoed back to him “December fifteenth?” I didn’t actually say “you cannot be serious,” but he could probably hear it in my voice. I’d seen Larry go nuts on people, but this was the only time he did it on me. He’s shouting down the phone, “What the fuck? Are you questioning my integrity?” And I’m going, “Um, well, um… I don’t know, maybe I was.” At that point he hung up on me, and I was thinking, “Uh-oh.”
The next day he called me, all apologetic—“Hey, I’m sorry about what happened, man, I over-reacted, I mean, we’re friends. I’ve got the museum to agree to pay in installments.” I was taken aback by this, too, so I said I’d think about it, and the next day a private art dealer by the name of Josh Baer called me. I guess you’d call him my art consultant, or one of them—Lord knows, you need expert advice when buying and selling art. He said, “I know where that painting is.” I asked him what he meant, and he told me: “That painting—Pirate II—was sold in New York recently. I know who bought it, and it wasn’t a museum in Canada.”
Now I’m thinking, “I want to speak to this person.” At that point an intermediary stepped in—a guy named Asher Edelman, who presents himself on his emails as “the Gordon Gecko of art,” or words to that effect. He called me up and said, “I know who bought your painting,” so I asked him to give me the guy’s name and number, because I still owned 50 percent of the painting and I wanted answers. But he told me he couldn’t do that. “Really, you can’t tell me the person?” And he wouldn’t.
/> A day or so later, I was at a Rangers ice-hockey game with one of my kids when I got a call from some guy who announced himself in a strangely formal way: “I’m the Honorable Joseph Carroll and I’m the person who owns this painting.” I said, “Really? How much did you pay for it?” And he refused to tell me. At that point I was starting to get pissed—“You’re not telling me? I don’t know if you know this, but I own 50 percent of that painting, and you’re definitely going to tell me how much you paid for it.” His response? Words to the effect of, “Don’t treat me like an umpire.” Classic!
This guy was convinced he owned the painting free and clear, but I knew I could prove half of it was mine. Neither of us was backing down, but after a few weeks of thinking about it—and very expensive legal discussions—the best way forward seemed to be for me to sign over my half of the painting he had already bought from Larry, in return for Larry signing over to me the one I still had at my house. Obviously I was taking more of a risk because I was left with the one unsold painting, relying on what Larry had said about its value, but it was worth it not to have to deal with the Honorable Joseph Carroll—although I did end up having to sue him, but we won’t go into that right now.
So in February 2007, I went over to Larry’s with my lawyer, Chuck Googe (a great lawyer from my father’s firm, Paul Weiss), to get him to sign a piece of paper confirming I owned 100 percent of Pirate I. He asked me, “What can I do to have this not happen?” And I said, “Well, pay me the money for half the sale, that’s one thing you could do. Help me out here.” But he couldn’t or wouldn’t do that, so I told him “OK, sign here,” and he did (although that signature ultimately turned out not to be worth a whole lot). He said he was hoping we could still be friends, but I was shaking my head by then. “Larry, man, you need to get your shit together. I don’t know what’s going on, but this is fucked up.” I walked out, disillusioned, but life goes on, and at least I got the painting.
Another year or so later, a gallery that was an offshoot of Christie’s asked to borrow my painting for a big abstract expressionist show they were doing, and I thought that would help get it better known and easier to sell, so I let them have it. At the end of the show I got a call from Christie’s refusing to return the painting to me because—you guessed it—someone else claimed they owned it.
I was like “Holy shit!” It turned out Larry had done a The Producers type of thing, where he’d gone 50/50 with another guy as well, who’d ended up paying twice as much as I did while Larry hadn’t contributed a cent. No wonder he was flying around in his own private jet!
To cut a very long story slightly shorter, me and this other guy—who turned out to live in Washington DC and be the kind of very rich, grouchy eighty-year-old who loves suing people—had to become reluctant partners to sue Joseph Carroll and try to retrieve the painting he owned, at the same time as establishing that we owned Pirate I free and clear. The whole set-up was basically a Steve Martin film waiting to happen, because needless to say the two of us didn’t hit it off. And as the investigation proceeded, it turned out Larry had embezzled something in the order of $125 million worth of art. Lots of other people were involved, including Robert De Niro and his father’s estate—Robert and I have had many conversations where we try to laugh rather than cry about this—and also the great American artist Stuart Davis’s estate, which Stuart’s son had spent his life trying to protect.
By this time Larry’s whole operation had been shut down—they put locks on his gallery, arrested him, he had to go to court. There was fraud, tax evasion, forged checks—it turned out he’d been making the whole thing up as he went along.
In 2009, I had to make my first appearance before the Grand Jury in New York (tough crowd!). But not before Larry’s wife had come to plead with me that she’d known nothing of what he was up to and had no idea that their lavish lifestyle had been funded illegally. She suggested I should contact the press and tell them we were still friends and still doing business together! I believed her when she said she was busy looking after their four kids and the three from his previous marriage, so she was in over her head with her husband’s business affairs. It was horrible to see her there in front of us, crying and saying, “John, you’ve gotta fix this.” But there was nothing I could do.
The next year, Larry Salander was jailed for six to eighteen years for grand larceny and fraud after running an operation that the Assistant District Attorney said “would make Bernie Madoff proud.” It’s cost us God knows how much money, but I can tell you it’s broken seven figures to get legal title for both paintings. After numerous court appearances (hey, I was a regular before the bench now) over the better part of a decade, the judges at Manhattan’s civil court finally ruled that both the paintings were ours.
Of course there were a couple of appeals—heaven forbid that the legal profession should miss out on another payday—but when the last one was thrown out in 2016, the whole sad story was finally over. In financial terms, there was something of a happy ending, in that we came out ahead after selling one of the paintings to a foundation and doing well out of it, but I’d much rather not have lost a friendship. What happened made me question my judgment about people, which was an unpleasant feeling, as I thought I had a pretty good bullshit detector. And I take no satisfaction from my share of the remaining painting. To be honest, I can’t stand to look at it, and even the fact that it’s called Pirate II seems like a bad joke—“Hey, dumb-ass, turned out the clue was in the name.”
19
“I wrote a letter to my dear friend John making him the offer”
Donald Trump
Now that I have four grown-up daughters of my own, what happens in women’s sports—and especially in tennis—matters much more to me than it did when I was winning my own Grand Slams. The French Open women’s final of 2013 was won by Serena Williams against Maria Sharapova. Those two athletes have managed that very rare thing in female sports: they have crossed into mainstream public awareness. Their faces are known beyond their sport, something that doesn’t happen too often. Thanks to my daughters in large part, I now realize how important it is for young girls to have the same opportunities as boys to take part in physical activity. One of my daughters, Anna, is always on at me about equality and feminism, but all of them have changed my view of the world for the better. Yes, Anna, I am proud to be a feminist.
I’m often asked about equal prize money and whether women “deserve” it. These days my usual response is to make a comparison with movies: just because a film goes on for three and a half hours doesn’t automatically mean it’s better than the one that lasts ninety minutes. Just because the guys play best of five doesn’t mean we should get 40 percent more money or whatever. Women’s tennis is as close to being equal with the men’s game as any sport, which I think sends out a good message. I see it with my own girls. They want to play sports and don’t want to feel like it’s a stigma, or that it’ll give you big legs or that it means they’re jocks or they have to act like boys. This is part of the challenge that women have long been faced with.
Serena Williams is an unbelievable athlete, first and foremost, as is her sister Venus. It’s what they’ve achieved in terms of breaking into what remains a white, middle-class sport that is most impressive as far as I’m concerned. They had to cope with the murder of their sister, serious illnesses, as well as the fact that since childhood their dad went around telling the world to watch out because he had two daughters who were going to be number one tennis players. Richard used to say that Serena was going to be even better than Venus—which at the time was a potentially crazy thing to say because Venus was already an incredible player by then. So most people thought he was totally nuts and waited for those girls to bomb out. I’d be ready to bet that his daughters have fulfilled his expectations more than even he could possibly have imagined. Either that, or he really is smarter than anybody ever gave him credit for.
The fact that Richard Williams has backed off these days, th
at you don’t see him at tournaments anymore, or only rarely, is something that I respect. Not all tennis parents do that. The temptation to remain a part of the tennis world that you’ve pushed your kids so hard to get into is too great for most of them. But he’s allowed his daughters to mature and to fly free. And maybe the sisters’ mom Oracene was the real power behind the throne, because she’s the only one that seems to be around now.
My relationship with Venus and Serena is pretty decent, compared to a lot of people’s. It’s not like I ever had dinner with either of them, but generally speaking they’ve always been friendly to me, and maybe—not that I understand what they’ve been through—they appreciate the fact that I’m honest in my opinions and that, as a player, I had somewhat of a controversial anti-establishment image so I can sympathize with some of the situations they’ve been in (at least as far as a white male in America can, compared to two black women from Compton!).