Archive for the 'GripeBox' Category
A reader speaks
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.”
A Medal for Montebello
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.
What’s So Funny About Art, Knowledge and Understanding?
“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)
Moguls in Lust, Wintour in Spring
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.”
Me (and my big mouth)
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.
A note of explanation
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.
Un-trust-worthy, perhaps (but refreshingly honest , too)
“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.)
Snow Days
Gripebox will be back next week. Bon blizzard.
Shiny Happy People
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.
You’ve got to get up early….
….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.
Those eyes! Those lips!
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.
Bad Times
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.
Who’s Next?
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.
Fifth on Fifth
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.
A Vrai Rogue
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.
Gotta Getaway
Gripebox is taking a week off.
“Brutally detailed…a very rare read.”
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!”
Some Mercy for Marshall
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.
Wolff in the Doghouse?
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.)
Sprechen sie deutsche?
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.
Mohammed’s Radio Silence
In a story titled “Jihad Jitters” today, The New York Post reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is likely to keep artwork that it owns depicting the Islamic Prophet Mohammed locked in its capacious basement when its new Islamic galleries open next year. This would be only the latest of many attempts by the museum to avoid geo-political controversy. In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch threatened the end the museum’s public funding when it cancelled a planned show of archaeological artifacts from the West Bank on the advice of trustee Henry Kissinger. Then-museum director Philippe de Montebello cited fears of a “security risk from radical elements” in explaining the about-face. After Koch countered that the museum was suffering from “speculative fears and political hallucinations,” the museum restored the show to its schedule. Something tells me freedom of expression will not prevail this time. The museum’s Islamic Galleries have already been renamed as the Galleries for the Arts of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia, reports the Post’s Isabel Vincent, who writes that “the Met has a history of dodging criticism and likely wants to escape the kind of outcry that Danish cartoons of Mohammed caused in 2006.” UPDATE: All sixteen comments on the Post web site are highly critical of the musem.
All the News That’s Fit to Paper Over
It took two members of the eminent art journalism squad at the New York Times to write today’s story on the sudden and as-yet-unexplained resignation of Getty museum director Michael Brand. Toward the end, they veer into a brief review of power struggles at museums like the Getty where leadership is split between directors (in charge of art) and administrators (in charge of everything else). That veers quite close to inaccuracy–or to be more polite, a typical Times gloss on the true history of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, which the paper’s culture editors apparently find too messy to be fit to print. In an awkward passage, the paper reports that former Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello “was said” to have been uncomfortable in just such a position in the 1980s and 1990s until the museum’s president, William Luers, retired in 1999. Typically, the real story, unreported by the Times, is much, much better. To summarize the fascinating tale, which is told in great depth in Rogues’ Gallery, Montebello was outraged by the diminution of his job from the moment he won it in 1977, refused to speak to or attend meetings with the first president he worked with, the late William Macomber, got along only marginally better with Luers, got some of the director’s traditional power back in 1998 when Luers was replaced by David McKinney, and was only given full charge of the museum, with the president reporting to him, when the current occupant of that post, Emily Rafferty, got it in 2005. An irony: back in the day, it was largely the unfettered and fiercely independent reporting on the museum by the Times (then run by A.M. Rosenthal), which led the museum’s board to cut down the director’s job. But those were different…times. UPDATE: Judith Dobrzynski of Real Clear Arts points out that she wrote a far more candid Times story about Montebello and Luers eleven years ago. Different times, too.
Rogues’ Gallery is in Vogue
But alas…it’s in German. Wish I knew what I said.
Reality TV, Russian-Style
RT, the English-language Russian television-and-Internet network, began broadcasting this interview today.
A Special Providence
Sunday’s Providence Journal will name Rogues’ Gallery one of the “best reads” of 2009.
Patience and Fortitude
Over 150 people, only one a friend, came to the mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library the other night to hear the story of Rogues’ Gallery–so many that doors had to be opened to a second conference room to fit them all in. Readers of this blog will understand why it was a deeply satisfying way to end the seven roller-coaster months since the book was published and the four years since I began researching it. Walking to the library, I passed its main building (read Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York on the subject of the research library’s name here) with its two couchant lions out front, Patience and Fortitude. Words to live by, you might say. Happy holidays to all the readers of gripebox. Now, bring on 2010.
Happy Birthday, Annette de la Renta!
Seventy years ago today, Anne France Mannheimer later Anne Engelhard, then Annette Reed and today better known as Metropolitan Museum of Art Vice Chairman Annette de la Renta, was born in the south of France. Joyeux anniversaire et Joyeux Noël from Rogues’ Gallery, Mrs. de la! (photo of Annette, her first husband Samuel Pryor Reed and their daughter Beatrice Reed is from thepeakofchic blog. Though uncredited there, it is by Horst. P. Horst.)
“Riveting,” says the New York Press
In “Who’s Been Naughty and Nice in 2009,” the staff of The New York Press calls Rogues’ Gallery “riveting” on the subject of the “unusual decisions” and “dubious intentions” of generations of museum directors. In related news, Florida’s Naples News says that the museum’s just-retired director Philippe do Montebello will be speaking there in February on the subject of “The Hidden Met.” Sounds like a don’t miss…exhibition.
Trial by Tabloid
Yesterday’s sentencing of former Metropolitan Museum trustee Anthony Marshall to one to three years in prison (which I am told will likely mean eight months with time off for good behavior) for plundering his mother Brooke Astor’s estate is likely still not the end of the saga; there will be an appeal and Marshall may not go to jail until it’s been decided. But today’s tabloids had their predictable fun and the New York Times belatedly ran a story allowing that there was another side to the whole saga–the way Astor treated her son, a subject few have dared broach in public before. One of those few is David Patrick Columbia, whose singularly brave and lonely coverage of the affair has stood out from the beginning, and still does in his latest New York Social Diary entry today. Today’s piece was heralded by an email quoting an anonymous letter Columbia received earlier today. It said: “Try caring for a dementia victim and doing anything right in his/her eyes! Sure the looky-loos on the sidelines will criticise: THEY are not doing the heavy lifting. And this is all besides all those insults of a lifetime of being her son. He felt she owed him, and so do I. How much? none of our beeswax. He was tried and convicted in the press. Is he a danger to society? No. Did he do everything right? No. But jail is ridiculous.” So, too, most of the coverage of this altogether tragic affair.
Mourning Becomes Montebello
Phillipe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has outdone himself in this Sunday Arts featurette from Public Television’s Channel Thirteen website. Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate defines hypocrisy as the act of playing a part on a stage, feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not, and as this column has predicted he would, Montebello hits all three out of the park with this broadcast tribute to the late Tom Hoving, his predecessor, sponsor and mentor at the Metropolitan. More on this subject will be included in a new update chapter for the paperback edition of Rogues’ Gallery, to be published next spring. For now, I’ll offer only a corrective quote from the hardcover. A day after an encounter with Montebello in the early 1990s, the late architect and museum executive Arthur Rosenblatt taped an official museum Oral History (currently locked up, unseen and unread, in the museum’s archives): “He chatted about Tom Hoving [and] used language that is inappropriate and…rough,” Rosenblatt reported. “He’s a shmuck,” the uncensored Montebello said. “A schmuck.” To Hoving’s eternal credit, he said far worse about himself. But his successor’s posthumous embrace is as disingenuous as it was expected.
Campbell in the Soup III
Judith Dobrzynski’s Real Clear Arts, the new (and IMHO journalistically best) arts journal blog, comments on newish Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Campbell’s appearance last week at what sounds like a pretty bland Alliance for the Arts forum. “Mostly, Campbell repeated things he has said before: the Met will have fewer exhibitions, more drawn from the permanent collection, more ‘dossier’ shows like that built around ‘The Milkmaid,’ a redesigned website, better signage and interpretive materials to ‘enliven, inform and invigorate’ the ‘visitor experience,’ and so on,” she reports. Campbell’s rookie year runs out in ten days with nary a misstep…but (having come to office in the brutal January of 2009) nary an accomplishment of note, either. Unfortunately for the British tapestries expert, you only get one shot at being rookie of the year. But look at it this way, with his spotless first-year record, he’s unlikely to suffer from a sophomore slump.
Beasty Fest
The Daily Beast has just named Rogues Gallery one of the best art books of the year. Writer Rachel Wolff calls it “a compelling tale of the money, greed, egotism, and less than kosher acquisitions that have made the Met the megainstitution that it is today. It’s high culture meets lowlife behavior. And Gross has certainly dug up the goods—from Met-sanctioned tomb raiding in Cyprus to the classless antics of power-hungry trustees.” What a lovely way to end the week (for me, if not those trustees).
Chicago Rules
Chicagoan Claire Zulkey’s Zulkey.com (”kind of a humor site, kind of a blog, kind of a repository for my writings, kind of an after-dinner mint for the brain”) has just added a chat with me about Rogues’ Gallery and more to her impressive collection of author interviews. I must have been in quite a mood when I did it; it’s a take-no-prisoners Chicago-rules kind of thing.
Museum on Museum II
Further proof that you can’t keep a good book down (and that some museums have both guts and good taste). A new history book club at The Fairfield Museum and History Center at 370 Beach Road in Fairfield, CT. will be reading and discussing Rogues’ Gallery in its third session on March 24, 2010. For more information and to reserve a spot, call 203-259-1598.
Tom Terrific
David Patrick Columbia remembers Tom Hoving today on New York Social Diary as “an outspoken showman connoisseur [who] had the common touch for those things which brought out the king in all of us.” Having read much of the coverage of Hoving’s life in recent days, it seems that he was best-appreciated by the non-art types he spent his life luring into a once-cloistered world he knew as well as any (he was a Princeton PhD, after all) by demanding it be–and proving it could be–accessible to all. UPDATE: Columbia has run another great item on Hoving. “I last saw him at Georgette Mosbacher’s book party for Michael Gross and his Rogues Gallery biography of the Metropolitan Museum,” Columbia writes. “He was tall man, with a bright yet bemused personality. I asked him what he thought of the book. He said he thought Michael had pretty much got it right. I asked him what he thought of his portrait in the book. He said, ‘Well, I come off like an asshole, but then I am an asshole.’ And he laughed. And I laughed. I vote for him.”
I, A Contest. I, A Fashion Spread.
Curbed, the essential New York real estate blog, has just launched a holiday contest with signed copies of 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery as the prize. You’ve got to be in it to win it. And 20/20, the eyeglass fashion magazine, has just published an online slide show that includes me in some fancy frames and touts Rogues’ Gallery for its “spectacular investigative reporting and a little bit of tittle-tattle,” according to editor James Spina. “Gross always gets to the heart of the story.”
Tom Hoving, RIP
Tom Hoving, the outsized, ebullient, always controversial leader of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who revolutionized museums around the world in the decade from 1966 to 1976, died this morning after a short bout with cancer first diagnosed late this spring. Hoving, who was also a scholar, curator, commissioner of parks in New York City, bestselling author, magazine editor, raconteur, and perennial thorn in the side of the museum mafia, described his condition with typical candor. “I’m a goner,” he told me in July. “But I have no regrets. I’ve had a terrific life.”
In the days just before his death, his long-time antagonists in the administration of the museum “buried the hatchet” with him, says his friend and colleague Daniel Herrick, the Met’s former chief financial officer. Philippe de Montebello, who Hoving chose and groomed as his successor, later became an open and bitter enemy. But he “stepped up to the plate” and wrote his former boss a conciliatory letter. And the museum may be the site of a future memorial, Herrick said as Hoving approached death at home in New York, his wife Nancy (above with her husband and me at the Rogues’ Gallery launch party in May) at his side. Even his enemies can agree that Hoving was never, ever boring. It will be fascinating to see how he is mourned after decades as the target of “official” disdain. It could be a spectacle worthy of the great showman himself.
Hoving wrote to me last spring, defending his reputation against an Amazon customer reviewer of Rogues’ Gallery–and summed up his career succinctly. “I may have ‘floundered badly’ (while running the Met and afterward) but being the editor-in-chief of Connoisseur magazine, arts editor of 20/20, writing fifteen books of which two were national bestsellers and now a TV personality on artnet.com (’My Eye’ every two weeks in the Magazine) is a helluva way to flounder.” The city of New York and the museum world will be far less fun without him.
UPDATE: News of Hoving’s death quickly spread across the web. And my inbox filled with touching tributes to him. Some of my favorites: “He was a remarkable guy, full of life and humor, a little crazy like the very best of us,” said a child of a former Met president. Added a former Met curator: “What sad news. Tom’s fingerprints are on every aspect of the Met that is progressive and admirable. What PdM [Philippe de Montebello] conserved, Tom largely created.” And finally (for now) this, from a relative of Hoving’s: “He leaves a gaping hole… his energy was so expansive.”
Rogues’ Library
Talk about an amazing “turn” of events: I’ll be speaking about Rogues’ Gallery for the last time this year at the Midtown Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library at 455 Fifth Avenue on Tuesday December 22nd at 6:30 PM. Who says there’s no Santa Claus?
Not Dunne Yet
The late Dominick Dunne’s touching last novel, the new roman a clef, Too Much Money, revisits characters from his earlier People Like Us, many of them familiar to followers of New York society in the last three decades, but the book is still full of surprises. Page Six has already revealed the biggest–Dunne’s admission (via his fictional stand-in, Gus Bailey) to being, as he puts it, a celibate gay man. But media-watchers may be more interested in the not-so-veiled portrait Dunne paints of his relations with Vanity Fair magazine (which excerpts the book in its new issue) and its owner, Conde Nast, in the last years of his life. Vanity Fair becomes Park Avenue in the novel, Conde Nast, a wing of the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications is transparently portrayed as Forward, VF editor Graydon Carter as Stokes Bishop, and Conde Nast’s head, S.I. “Si” Newhouse, Jr., as Hy Vietor. Insiders knew at the time that Dunne’s long, career-making real-life relationship with VF grew shaky–and almost ended–after he was sued by the congressman Gary Condit (Kyle Cramden in the novel) for repeating unchecked gossip about him on a broadcast unrelated to his work for Vanity Fair. In his fictional rendering, Dunne indicates that Conde Nast, though then still flush with bubbly-economy funds, did not quite live up to its initial promise to stand foursquare behind him. True or not, Dunne’s regretful telling of this fraught and devastating period in his life is a cautionary tale for journalists, particularly now, when once mighty media giants are being cut down to size. Dunne’s generous spirit pervades the account, but doesn’t blunt its edge.
“A definite must-read.”
On my speaking tour of Southern California last month, I met more than a dozen museum directors, trustees and donors, some of whose names would not be out of place on the plaques lining the grand stairs of the Metropolitan Musuem, many of whom had kind words to say about Rogues’ Gallery–a pleasant change from the wrinkled-nose disdain of the Met’s hierarchy, which has been chronicled in this column. But private conversations should stay private, so much as I’ve savored it, I won’t repeat their praise. But now, the Director of the Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas, Texas, Amy L. Hofland, has become the latest brave soul to risk the Met’s wrath by praising the book publicly on D Magazine’s Reading Room blog. She calls it an “unofficial, juicy and probably very true history…a definite must read for anyone with an interest in art and museums.” That’s worth crowing about.
“His book is hushed-up…” …but not in Germany.
Unlike many American newspapers and magazines, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung isn’t afraid of the great and powerful trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So despite the fact that Rogues’ Gallery is not available in German translation, the paper gave it feature treatment last week in an article by Claudia Steinberg, who says that the book “reads like an adventure novel.” If you can read German, you can read the article in pdf form here.
Whose Times?
In a defense in today’s community newspaper of the potent argument that wealthy countries with wealthy, well-staffed museums should hang onto antiquities taken illegally from less powerful and less caring nations because they are better-equipped to preserve, protect, study and expose them, John Tierney undercut his argument by misrepresenting the role played in just such a case by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That this happened in the New York Times isn’t entirely surprising, granted the Sulzberger family’s conflicting roles in the two institutions, but Tierney’s Met-centric description of the Lydian Hoard affair is a perfect argument for the case made previously in Gripebox that the Times has come perilously close to operating as the Met’s publicity organ. Tierney says the Met was pressured into returning the golden treasures to Turkey from whence they came–and clearly considers that a loss to all mankind. He neglects to mention that they were crudely looted, smuggled away and sold to a knowing Met after just such things were declared totally unacceptable by the United Nations. Tierney also neglects to mention that the “pressure” was a lawsuit prosecuted by Turkey that turned on the telling detail that the Met had known the stuff was looted and so had hidden it in its basement. When that came out in discovery, the museum caved in and returned the loot. It’s a shame you wouldn’t know that from reading the museum’s family newspaper.
Campbell in the Soup, Pt.2
The still new-ish director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Campbell, made a seemingly pointless—no exhibitions were touted, no news revealed—five minute appearance on The Colbert Report last night (caveat spectator: it starts at the sixteenth minute, after several no-skip commercials). Despite Stephen Colbert’s valiant attempts to engage the rumpled, weary-looking Brit in humor (”Ever lick a painting?”), Campbell resisted, making the segment rather pallid. But several of his remarks (”We’re in the business of showing five thousand years of what people have done,” he said of the museum he touted as “the whole world history in four city blocks”) were laughable, coming as they did from the head of an institution that claims to be dedicated to communicating history, yet goes to astonishing lengths to suppress its own. (And for those of you keeping track, the museum’s flacks have yet to back up its claim that Rogues Gallery is inaccurate. Though also not funny, that, at least, speaks volumes.)
Wintour Warming
Biographer Jerry Oppenheimer profiled the Vogue editor and Metropolitan Musem honorary trustee Anna Wintour in yesterday’s New York Post in a story pegged to her 60th Brithday and quoted me saying that though her pedestal has grown “perilously small,” Wintour remains “a looming figure in the world of image.” But Oppenheimer also claimed that I “skewer” her in Rogues’ Gallery. Is it really all that wounding to say that her effect on the museum’s image and marketing has been incalculable? Something tells me the Queen of Fashion is tough enough to take it.
Juice!
UnBeige, the design web site, calls Rogues’ Gallery a “wonderfully juicy tell-all about the Metropolitan Museum…highly recommended if you like reading about how major museums and/or rich people operate.” The book-that-must-not-be-mentioned aka the book-that-won’t-go-away also returned to the Bestseller List at Book Soup in LA this week at #9, so apparently some people do like that (the author noted gratefully).
Mehle Culpa
The Metropolitan Museum has still not come forward with a response to my request that they identify alleged misinformation in Rogues’ Gallery, but last night at a party, the legendary gossip-and-society columnist Aileen “Suzy” Mehle pointed an error out to me–so again, I’m correcting it (here and in subsequent editions of the book). On page 402, I inadvertently identified a husband of the late supermodel Dorian Leigh as Suzy’s son. In fact, Dorian Leigh married Admiral Roger W. Mehle after he and Suzy were divorced and the model became the stepmother of Roger W. Mehle Jr. “You mixed up your Roger Mehles,” Suzy said. I stand corrected.
Rogues’ Gallery LIVE at NYPL
Sometimes, things change for the better. This is one of them times. I will be speaking about Rogues’ Gallery at 5PM tomorrow (Wednesday) at the new Grand Central branch of the New York Public Library–yes, the New York Public Library. Howzabout that? It’s at 135 East 46th St. (between Third and Lex) on the second floor. There will be a special screened-off area for Metropolitan Museum staff and trustees. (Just kidding.) Annette de la Renta, Tom Campbelland Emily Rafferty will also attend. (Kidding, again. But they’re welcome to come and take up my challenge to point out any errors in what they’ve derided as a “sloppy” and “misleading” book. Seriously.)
See You On The Radio
Travel Detective Peter Greenberg’s SSI Radio show Worldwide just broadcast an interview about what Greenberg calls “the really controversial, must-read” Rogues’ Gallery. Author Michael Gross “is legendary for being the author who peels back all the layers of society and tells you what really goes on behind closed doors,” Greenberg says. Listen to it here.
Liz Smith: The Last(?) Last Word on the Last Mrs. Astor
It’s too bad Liz Smith’s column no longer appears in a New York newspaper. Her pillar in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune was a direct hit on the last nail in Brooke Astor’s coffin. “Mrs. Astor would have given up all she owned not to have had this blot on her escutcheon,” Smith says. “It’s true, Brooke disapproved of Tony [Marshall]’s wife, Charlene; still, I think she’d have moved heaven and earth to keep this sordid story out of the courts and the newspapers. Brooke indeed might have been offended had she known of accusations against her only son; but she’d never have wanted this end result. Brooke was a vivacious, flirtatious, charmer of good will and philanthropy. She was nobody’s ideal mother and didn’t much want to be. But no matter the good intentions of those who helped restore her in her final days, she’d have given that rescue up if she’d realized the ultimate consequences. This is a true tragedy all the way around.” Smith has her critics and she has been critical of Rogues’ Gallery (even referring to its focus on one central figure in the Astor tragedy–Annette de la Renta–as “beyond the pale”). But she calls it as she sees it and has the courage to say it out loud–qualities increasingly lacking in the press these days.
R.I.P. Dietrich von Bothmer
Dietrich von Bothmer, the curator emeritus of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rhodes scholar and Bronze Star recipient for bravery in the South Pacific in World War II, died on Monday at Lenox Hill Hospital. He was 91 years old and had been in failing health for some time. Bothmer was responsible for some the most controversial acqusitions in the Museum’s recent history, including the famous Hot Pot aka the Sarpedon or Eupheronios krater, the Morgantina Silver and the Lydian hoard–all of which were later returned to the countries they’d been taken from. Though those tarnished finds will no doubt be highlighted in his obituaries, they were but one aspect of a fascinating career and full life. For more on Bothmer, his life and times, see Rogues’ Gallery and a brief online biography here. He is survived by his wife, the former Joyce Blaffer, widow of Marquis Jacques de la Begassiere and daughter of a founder of Humble Oil, and their children. UPDATE (October 14): Though the news of Bothmer’s death was revealed well before yesterday’s print-newspaper deadlines, the only obituaries for him in today’s papers are paid ones–a rather striking omission, granted that back in the days when the media actually covered the Metropolitan, rather than blindly promoting its interests, Bothmer often made front-page news. But that, as they say, was then….UPDATE2 (October 15): A New York Times obituary for Bothmer has finally appeared–online only, but at least it’s been published–here. Oddly, though it discusses the affair at some length, it doesn’t mention that it was the Abe Rosenthal-era New York Times that exposed the truth about the Euphronios krater. You’d think they’d be proud of that.
