This customer review of Rogues’ Gallery was posted recently by marilynnewyork on barnesandnoble.com. “I heard this author speak at the Mid-Manhattan Library a few months ago. He was such a fabulous speaker, I recommend him to all history aficionados — especially Manhattan history — what a great dinner speaker he would make. If you live in NYC, you’re always curious about what makes Manhattan tick. Why are the lives of the rich and famous people who contribute to the Metropolitan Museum and to the New York Public Library … so protected from criticism by the media including the New York Times? This author tells all. More than once I wanted to go — ‘Aha! So that’s what happened. Wow!’ To a reader who just wants Art alone … that’s not the main feature of this book. The reader will get REALITY — the people whose lives are entwined with the founding and development of this great museum. And it ain’t all pretty. But it’s a wonderful story.”
Bob Dylan, Robert Caro, Clint Eastwood, Milton Glaser, Theodore Sorenson, Maya Lin and Metropolitan Museum of Art director emeritus Philippe de Montebello were among the twenty recipients of 2009 national medals of arts and humanities, bestowed by President Obama at the White House yesterday. Montebello was praised for revitalizing the museum. I hate to rain on his parade but I thought that happened under his predecessor, the late Tom Hoving. But what do I know. Kudos, Phil.
“Tapestry Tom” Campbell, latest director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has just announced the latest fruits of its antiquities loan agreement with the government of Italy–a display of twenty silver objects found near Pompeii. “The presentation of these splendid works in New York, where they will be viewed by millions of visitors over the next four years, will deepen the public’s knowledge and appreciation of ancient art, and will contribute immeasurably to their understanding of its significance,” Campbell said. As is usual with the museum, its head did not explain how they got here, or mention the agreement made under duress by his predecessor that brought this bounty to New York. For that, Gripebox respectfully refers you to Rogues Gallery, where the cultural crimes that underlay the collaboration are revealed. (Image of the Moregine Silver from artdaily.org)
Molly Fisher at the New York Observer’s Daily Transom has uncovered the new subtitle and a bit about the new jacket that’s going on Rogues’ Gallery for its paperback edition, out in May. She writes, “Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum has been recast as Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lust and betrayals! And should those prove inadequately intriguing, the cover image of the Met will be replaced with a celebrity photo collage featuring Anna Wintour, among others.”
Blogger Father Tony from Queer New York was at my talk at Books & Books in Bal Harbour last week, and just posted the video above, introducing it this way: “In the video snippet…he is talking about a lady of mysterious pedigree [Jane Mannheimer, the future Jane Engelhard] but listen through to the end for the stunning revelation and the reason why a certain prominent NYC couple did their best to block this book.” Love that. I also love his description of Rogues’ Gallery as “something sweet and packed with carbo-facts rather than protein-stats.” Thanks, Father Tony and Happy Valentine’s Day to you, too.
Janet M. Schrock, Ph.D., a docent at the John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, wrote to say her docents’ book club had read Rogues’ Gallery, and were concerned about a passage on page 54, that describes Ringling’s purchase of antiquities of questionable authenticity from the Luigi Palma di Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum decades ago. I described that as “fitting.” Why, Schrock wrote, “is it fitting that a circus owner (and one of the richest men in America during the 1920’s) should purchase Metropolitan mistakes? Is this a prejudice against circus owners, Floridians or people who start museums in the South?”
I replied (oddly enough, en route to Florida for several talks about the book there): “I considered Cesnola’s reign at the Met, indeed his entire career, something of a circus in the colloquial use of that term, with him as a ringmaster, and only meant to refer to that—nothing else. Indeed, as a lover, as well as an author, of social history, I am familiar with Mr. Ringling’s career, his fine taste, and your museum through the great book Twilight of Splendor, and would never, ever, seek to impugn him or his accomplishments. Ditto the circus, which I attended annually as a child, and still sometimes visit when the opportunity presents itself.” I neglected to say that I like Florida and Floridians, too, so am glad the Ringling book club asked me to post this item, which gives me the chance to amend it.
“The secret to a long and happy run on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees is MYOB,”–mind your own business–Staten Island’s outgoing borough representative on the cultural giant’s board, Allan Weissglass, told the Staten Island Advance last week in an astonishing but revealing burst of candor. “We try hard to not get in the way,” he was quoted as saying, explaining his belief that a trustee’s job is not to oversee operations. Weissglass, president of a New Jersey pigment-making company and a dairy that’s been in his family for generations, also seemed to reveal his motive for being a (sadly typical) see-nothing do-nothing trustee for a staggering fifteen years: “His favorite projects at the museum,” reported Michael Fressola, “are by-invitation, private, after-hours views, with receptions, refreshments and live music.” Yes, going to the museum when it’s closed to the public is a dirty job, especially when you’re the public’s representative, but someone has to do it. (I’m sending Weissglass a copy of Rogues’ Gallery gratis so he can learn about the blood, sweat and tears it took to force the museum board to accept public representatives.)
Gripebox will be back next week. Bon blizzard.
Shannon Donnelly, social columnist of The Palm Beach Daily News, aka the famous Shiny Sheet, heralded the Rogues’ Gallery tour’s coming circuit of south Florida in yesterday’s paper. “Certain PB folks with bones rattling in their closets are feeling skittish since hearing author Michael Gross is visiting,” she writes, before assuring them I’m not coming to report on them.
….to be director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas P. Campbell, the latest man in that job, tells the Wall Street Journal today, explaining that his toughest challenge has been starting work at 8 AM daily and not stopping until evening. Phew. The museum’s uphill PR campaign to make Campbell a compelling public presence continues, aided by the bedazzled local media, and for once, Campbell comes bearing some news, albeit not very new news, the appointment (last September) of Alejandro Santo Domingo, 32, to the museum’s board, and finally noting the obvious: “‘Going forward, a new generation of collectors and supporters will become a bigger part of boards, not only at the Met,’ Mr. Campbell predicted.” (If I were Wall Streeter Denis Kelleher, appointed to the board in November, I’d be a little put out by the omission of my name.) The Journal describes young Santo Domingo as a financier, but also fails to note that his experience is mostly confined to working for his father, the uber-wealthy Colombian industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo of 740 Park. Neither does the Journal challenge Campbell’s biggest whopper: “We have nothing to hide,” he says. Then why ban Rogues’ Gallery from the Met store, Tom? CORRECTION: A photo originally run with this item was of Santo Domingo’s brother Andres and his wife, not Alejandro Santo Domingo.
One of my favorite profile subjects, the eternally boyish, though now-retired, fashion designer Calvin Klein, may not be working but seems to have had some boyish-making work done, says Cityfile.
In its latest genuflection before the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Arts section of The New York Times has ignored the newspaper’s history as well as the museum’s. In today’s lead article on repairs to damaged art, reporter Randy Kennedy writes that such restorations are conducted in “a kind of seclusion unusual for the museum.” The italic emphasis is mine, for in truth, operating in seclusion is business as usual there–as any Times reporter or editor with access to its archives should know. The Met’s long history of willful obfuscation, opacity and disingenuousness verging on mendacity emerged as one of the key narrative threads in Rogues Gallery. Academics, authors, art historians and New York Times reporters alike have hit the brick wall of the Met’s fear of exposure. It only cooperates with those it can control, as its chief flack blithely admits. In that, at least, he, for one, is transparently honest.
Last night, I attended a Fifth Avenue book club that had read Rogues’ Gallery, and I was asked about the future leadership of the Metropolitan Museum. A good question. Jamie Houghton, the museum’s chairman, shed his second most important title last month when the 74-year old confirmed he would step down as the senior fellow and longest serving member of the governing board of the Harvard Corporation in June (a resident of Corning, New York, Houghton sold his apartment at the Majestic in February 2008 and no longer maintains a home in New York City). His vice chairmen are Henry B. Schact, also 74, a managing director of Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm (he used to run Lucent), S. Parker Gilbert, now about 77, who retired as chairman of Morgan Stanley in 1990, and the youngster of the bunch, Annette de la Renta, who turned a spry 70 on Christmas eve, shortly after getting a hip replacement. Each chairs one or more of the museum’s most powerful committees–Nominating, Acquisitions, Investment and Finance–and serves on the all-powerful executive committee, which has few other members with the stature to equal past museum chairmen like Robert Lehman, Arthur Houghton, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger and C. Douglas Dillon. Too bad Las Vegas doesn’t lay odds on such things. Gripebox will watch developments closely and hereby solicits any and all information about potential candidates, favorites and dark horses for the almost-sure-to-be-open-soon top job.
While Gripebox was taking its recent break, Judith Dobrzynski’s Real Clear Arts blog reported the likelihood that the Metropolitan Museum of Art will rank only fifth among the world’s top museums in total visitors in 2009 with 4.8 million art-lovers passing through its turnstiles compared to 8.5 million at the Louvre in Paris, 5.6 million at London’s British Musem, and about 4.9 million at both its great rival, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Tate Modern, also in London. With budget cuts limiting his options and ability to mount the blockbusters that draw crowds and revenue, this puts new Met director “Tapestry Tom” Campbell in a bind. Hopefully he can summon the spirit of his predecessor, the recently-departed Tom Hoving, and create more excitement than he did in his rookie year. Maybe it’s time he started licking paintings instead of letting visitors poke holes in them.
Last fall, I spoke at a literary lunch at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, where I was photographed (above) with a flamboyant bottle blonde character who called himself Mordan and ran a magazine and web site called SFR (for Social and Financial Responsibility) International that wrote up the event. This weekend, I learned that the not-so-responsible Mordan is in jail, revealed as an ex-convict and alleged to be a swindler. The D Magazine’s Sweet Charity philanthropy blog has been all over the story, noting the irony of this rogue’s appearance at a Rogues’ Gallery event. Blogger Jeanne Prejean was kind enough to say I looked uncomfortable in Mordan’s presence, kinder still to say that since that lunch, Rogues’ Gallery has become “a publication sensation….thanks to a word-of-mouth wave.” Nothing mordan(t) about that.
Gripebox is taking a week off.
Lisa Feldmann, the editor-in-chief of the German magazine Annabelle, which ran the review of Rogues’ Gallery mentioned below, tells me it reads as follows: “Brutally detailed…A very rare read about the impudent team mentality, the elbow manoeuvres and the impertinence of the American High Society which is at its most impressive when egomania and the will to unconditional power camouflages itself with cultural assiduousness. I am very much looking forward to my next trip to New York - and a visit to the museum. I will have a look now from a very different perspective!”
As predicted here, Anthony Marshall, the ailing 85-year-old only child of Brooke Astor, recently convicted of swindling his mother on her death-bed, isn’t going to prison so soon. An appeals court judge has ruled that the former Metropolitan Museum trustee, ambassador and war hero (and his co-defendent Francis X. Morrisey) can each stay free on a $5,000 bond pending appeals of their convictions, which could take years. The courts have thus shown Marshall–whose lawyers presented no defense at his trial (one was fired as a result)–more mercy than his mother and several fathers, his children, New York society or our local media ever did. Needless to say, the stories reporting this development were short and buried deep in the newspapers I (still) read every morning. But somewhere, Andrea Peyser is screaming.
On his blog today, the dyspeptic Michael Wolff calls out the New York Times for omitting his name and book title from an anecdote about Rupert Murdoch that appears to be about him in its recent front pager on Fox News honcho Roger Ailes. A clever one, that Wolff, he manages to get a column out of the contretemps. So I figure hey, why not me, too? Wolff is certainly right that the Times, its “who, me?” protests notwithstanding plays favorites–and hardball, too. But Wolff is also being more than a little disingenuous. Not only did the Times print a major, albeit negative, Sunday review of Wolff’s biography of Murdoch, it also made it and its author the subject of a gossipy pre-publication news story, several Times blog items, and a daily review by Janet Maslin. He’s hardly been disappeared. Compare that to Rogues Gallery, which received a small, albeit positive, notice in the Sunday Book Review, and a brief mention in a Home section party column (a daily review assigned to Maslin never appeared), and I’d guess Wolff is more upset that his book was panned (Maslin called it “supercilious yet star-struck” in her opening sentence) and didn’t sell very well, not that he was, as he complains, disappeared. Even a rave in the Times can’t save a book people don’t want to read. Oddly enough, the same thing Wolff is so peeved about happened to me not long ago, only with Murdoch’s Times of London which, in its obituary of the museum titan, ahem, borrowed a quote from the exclusive gripebox story that broke the news of the death of Tom Hoving and credited it to a “friend” of Hoving instead of to me or to gripebox or, for that matter, noting that the source of the quote which held the position of honor at the end of the obit was the author of a book about the Metropolitan Museum. My letter to the editor requesting a correction hasn’t even been acknowledged. That said, I’d rather be disappeared for writing a book that scares the willies out of the powers-that-be (some printing press owners and operators among them) than panned for writing one they didn’t like. (n.b. In the interest of full disclosure, Wolff and I went to college together and just over a decade ago, I brought him to the attention of my editors at New York magazine, who subsequently hired him, beginning his career as a media gadfly.)
Another German fashion magazine has weighed in on Rogues’ Gallery. And again, I don’t know what it says, though Google Translate makes me pretty sure it’s highly complimentary, indicating that the item calls the book “brutal in its attention to detail when it comes to exposing the bottomless machinations of the cultural temple. Seldom have you read so much about the brazen Movers’ mentality and their insolent elbowing maneuvers in the High Society of America.” Or words to that effect. So thank you to the blog Backstage at Annabelle magazine. All translations welcome.
