Chasing Aphrodite (11 page)

She was struggling professionally as well. Her MFA internship led to a full-time curatorial assistantship, but it paid precious little. With few museum jobs to be had, she abandoned her doctoral studies before completing her dissertation to look for work on the commercial side of the art world. True took an hourly job working for Steven Straw, a high-flying Newburyport art dealer with a gallery full of O'Keeffes and de Koonings and a growing national reputation. Impressed with True's meticulousness and fluent French, Straw hired her to research nineteenth-century American and European paintings. She quit a year before an art publication exposed Straw's business as an elaborate Ponzi scheme: he never owned much of the art he was selling. True said that she was ignorant of the scheme and testified in bankruptcy court that she was owed back pay by the disgraced dealer, who served twenty months in federal prison for fraud and eventually committed suicide.

True's next job was with Bruce and Ingrid McAlpine, two of London's most prominent antiquities dealers. But that arrangement also ended badly. Four months after hiring True to drum up business for a possible New York gallery, the couple canceled the deal, accusing True of frittering away her time on unworthy prospects. True complained that the dealers were being unreasonable, expecting too much, too soon. She refused to return her $900-a-month stipend. Livid, the McAlpines threatened to sue.

By 1981, the once promising graduate student found herself working as an executive assistant to Stanley Moss, a poet, art dealer, and occasional boyfriend. Her tasks ranged from checking galley proofs for his publishing house to painting his dining room.

Then, on a trip to Los Angeles, True was introduced to Jiri Frel. The curator promptly offered her a job doing menial clerical work in the antiquities department at the Getty. True accepted without a contract, hoping to start over in Malibu. She began working at the Getty in January 1982 and spent the first year secluded in J. Paul Getty's old ranch house, creating a central file for the burgeoning antiquities collection, including the thousands of shards that Frel was squirreling away for study. She put new labels on the vase collection, then rearranged shelves of Roman portraits. Before long, she began attracting favorable attention for her handling of the exhibit and catalogue of Athenian vases lent by textile mogul Walter Bareiss, a collection the Getty bought in 1984. Her annual performance reviews swelled with adjectives: dedicated, productive, articulate, creative. Frel believed that she had everything necessary to be a genuine connoisseur. After Frel left, Houghton, a Harvard classmate and friend of True's, promoted her to associate antiquities curator in 1985 and increased her responsibilities, sending her to meet European dealers and make acquisition pitches to the board of trustees.

Among her colleagues, True was known as a perfectly competent junior colleague who otherwise kept to herself. In the Getty's sexually charged atmosphere, where office affairs were common, True hid her buxom figure and kept her long hair swept back from her plain face in fashionable curls. She spoke so little about her private life that some thought she might be a lesbian. She volunteered little about her family and even less about her brief misfortunes in the commercial art market. There was good reason for the latter: many in the curatorial ranks considered work on the commercial side of the art world an ethical taint. Although her résumé included her time with the McAlpines, she mentioned nothing about how it ended, and she left the controversial Straw off her résumé altogether.

When True did speak up in the office, almost everyone noticed the quality of her voice. It often scaled into a Marilyn Monroe falsetto, a high-pitched trill reminiscent of someone cooing to a baby or a favorite pet. Some thought it gave her an air of unreality; others interpreted it as a sign of insincerity.

True won the antiquities curator position largely by default. After Frel's departure, Houghton was appointed interim curator, and the museum launched a worldwide search for a replacement. It dragged on for months as European scholars and museum officials dropped off the list one by one. Walsh flew to Athens to recruit Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum. But Delivorrias declined when his wife refused to move to California, still regarded as a cultural wasteland. By the time of Walsh's showdown with Houghton, True had emerged as an obvious candidate, having belatedly finished her doctoral dissertation with von Bothmer's help. Still, Walsh held out, much to the growing dismay of True. Shortly before Houghton's resignation, Walsh told her that she had been chosen for the job. The tide had gone out, he said, and True was what was left on the beach.

In the spring of 1986, during Houghton's final days at the Getty, he sent his successor a handwritten note about her dispute with the McAlpines. The London dealers were still considering a lawsuit, and True would no doubt have to do business with them at some point.

"I am more than ever convinced, after much reflection, that you have no alternative but to provide ... the fullest possible information on your relationship with the McAlpines" to the Getty leadership, Houghton wrote. "The issue can be as much appearance as substance, and my advice is that you guard yourself and the Museum against even the appearance of a past problem by signaling it to the Trust, now, as you begin."

True never did tell her bosses; she didn't see the need.

I
N AUGUST
1986, the Getty hurriedly revealed its purchase of the kouros, months before the statue was ready to be displayed. It was hailed as a major find, "arguably the most important art purchase made in this country in the past half-century," said the
Los Angeles Times.
But it proved to be an awkward debut for True.

She had a personal stake in the piece, even before being promoted to antiquities curator. True's paper defending the kouros was due out in a few months in the
Burlington Magazine,
a London-based art publication that was widely respected. But in the months since she had submitted the piece, new doubts had arisen about the object's authenticity.

Publicly, True revealed far less than she knew. She told reporters that the museum had conducted a "rigorous examination for authenticity" during the three years the statue had sat in the museum's conservation laboratory. The Getty Museum had sought the opinions of virtually every expert in the field, she added, and most thought the statue was authentic. In regard to its origins, True cited the very documents she had privately denounced as forgeries, stating flatly that the statue had been purchased from a Swiss family through a Swiss dealer. Nothing else was known. But True left some wiggle room, saying the field of ancient art was always murky. "We have to be especially careful and not even trust ourselves," she said.

When True's public statements filtered back to Houghton, now living on the East Coast, he was outraged. He had personally warned Walsh and True against publicly referring to the forgeries Frel had supplied. Now they had done so, blatantly lying about something that could easily be exposed. Houghton placed a call to Harold Williams.

"Harold, those documents that were provided with the kouros were forged, just junk, and the museum shouldn't be making statements which, with a little scruffing around, could be shown to be no more than a public lie," he said.

"I understand," Williams answered. "We shouldn't be digging a hole deeper than the one we're in."

Two months earlier, Walsh and True had convinced Williams that there was no need to dig deeper. Now that the statue had been purchased, asking questions about it would only lead to trouble, they had argued. True, in particular, had been concerned that word of their inquiries would leak out. There was no escaping the awkwardness of the Getty investigating the provenance of a piece it had already purchased and defended publicly as authentic. But now Williams believed that the museum needed to know whether the kouros documents had been forged, and if so, why. He asked Walsh and True to revisit the documents, a highly unusual step given the already intense scrutiny of the piece.

True reluctantly picked up where Houghton had left off. He had already tracked down an authentic copy of Langlotz's signature, which confirmed what he had suspected—both of the Langlotz signatures in the Getty's files were poor forgeries. There was only one other person alive who claimed to have seen the kouros in the basement of the Swiss family's home—Jacques Chamay, the curator of classical art at Geneva's Musées d'Art et d'Histoire. During the Getty's first review, attorney Bruce Bevan had been convinced that Chamay was beginning to waver on his story. Since then, no one had talked to the Swiss curator. Was Chamay still credible? Could he be trusted?

Before traveling to Switzerland to find out, True learned what she could in Los Angeles. Renate Dolin, Frel's former secretary, recalled that Frel had been especially distracted and secretive when it came to the kouros. He had shooed her away from the office so that he could have long phone conversations with Gianfranco Becchina, the dealer. At one point, he had had her pull documents from the Getty's files signed by Langlotz and another dealer and asked her to forge a letter to the museum from one of them. Dolin had refused—this was not just an appraisal for a small gift, but fraud involving the museum's most expensive acquisition. Frustrated, Frel had taken all the kouros files home, then reappeared with them the day they were to be presented to the board.

Faya Causey, the curator's ex-wife, told True that she had caught her husband trying to create fake letterhead, which she presumed was for the kouros. "I told him, 'You're crazy if you think a scheme like that would work,'" she said, adding that Becchina himself had complained to her that he didn't like "any of the provenance stories that Jiri had come up with."

Armed with these statements, True traveled to Geneva in November and met with Chamay. She noted that he was extremely nervous as he recalled his visit to the Swiss doctor's house outside the city, where he had seen "in the basement a large, partially opened crate with a piece of archaic sculpture inside." He said he believed it was the kouros, then quickly added that he wasn't an expert in Greek sculpture. When True probed further, Chamay faltered on the details of his visit.

Three days later, True met with Becchina and his wife, Rosie, at their Geneva apartment. If anyone could solve the mystery, it was Becchina. The Getty had already signed a sales contract for the kouros and had begun making payments on the $9.55 million purchase. But the dealer remained on the hook for the warranty until the object was fully paid off. He refused to say anything until the final payment was made and angrily expressed his displeasure about the Getty's continuing investigation.

"Look, I'm tired of this whole thing, too," True snapped. "This kouros mess has cost me an enormous amount of time—time that I would have preferred to use on research and more constructive activities for the collection. I did my best to defend the kouros in print, all without any help from the people who should have been able to help me—namely you. And Frel."

True's last hope was George Ortiz, a pixyish Bolivian tin magnate based in Switzerland. He was widely known as one of the antiquities world's richest collectors and an occasional dealer. He was also one of Becchina's loyal customers and closest friends. But when True showed up at Ortiz's Geneva mansion, the collector said that even he couldn't pry any details out of his friend. "It's omerta," Ortiz explained, referring to the Sicilian code of silence.

Back in Malibu, True drafted a confidential report to Bruce Bevan detailing her conclusions. "I believe Jiri was, in truth, behind the creation of at least some of these documents and Becchina accepted Frel's advice in order to facilitate the acquisition," she wrote.

She also complained that the investigation had led to unintended consequences. Many people now knew that the Getty was having second thoughts about the provenance of the piece. Word was bound to get out.

Sure enough, starting on Friday, February 13, 1987, Thomas Hoving began publishing a series of devastating investigative articles revealing the Getty's secrets. The first, whose headline "Huge Tax Fraud Uncovered at Getty Museum" was splashed across the front page of the
Times
of London, revealed Frel's donation scheme and the Getty's attempted cover-up. Hoving and his reporting partner,
Times
arts reporter Geraldine Norman, had used the Getty's tax records to piece together the decadelong fraud. The article called it "the biggest financial scandal in museum history." When the reporters tracked Frel down at his apartment in Rome, the curator said darkly, "It was bigger than they know." Indeed, a few months later, Hoving published an article in
Connoisseur
denouncing the kouros as a fake.

The Getty was forced to admit that Frel had been put on leave two years before he resigned in 1986. The trust would not comment on the donation scheme, other than to say there was no evidence that Frel had benefited personally. Getty officials went to great lengths to dismiss Hoving as a washed-up crank with a grudge against Walsh, his old rival from the Met. But the revelations triggered follow-up stories in the
New York Times
and
Los Angeles Times,
as well as outcries in the archaeological community. For months, the Getty was embroiled in a painful public scandal as its secrets spilled into public view.

For Getty CEO Harold Williams, the onslaught of negative press underscored his concerns about antiquities collecting at the museum. For True and Walsh, the museum's frustrated quest for the truth, which they had opposed from the start, now made them look silly and only exacerbated the Getty's dilemma.

I
N JUNE
1986, while Marion True was in Europe investigating the kouros, she paid a visit to the London boutique of Robin Symes, the world's premier dealer of ancient art.

Symes was a fair, round-faced Brit, reserved by nature but possessed of an exceptional ability to sell to high-end clients. His lover and business partner was Christo Michaelides, a lean, swarthy risk taker with a keen eye for quality antiquities, whose sister had married into a wealthy Greek shipping family. Symes and Michaelides had fallen in love years earlier after Michaelides had wandered into Symes's shop in Ormond Yard. Symes was married at the time but left his wife soon after. Their nickname in the trade was "the Dioskouroi," Greek for the constellation Gemini, the Twins. Together they changed the tenor of the antiquities business by catering to elite collectors. They sold ancient art but specialized in attitude, tooling around London in a maroon Bentley or a silver Rolls-Royce. Their London house—actually two residences joined to make one—featured an indoor swimming pool surrounded by backlighted alcoves framing columns topped with ancient busts. Their Manhattan townhouse had been converted by architect Philip Johnson in 1949 for the wife of John D. Rockefeller III. They also owned apartments in Athens and a summer compound on the Greek island of Schinoussa. Much of the energy between them came from putting other people down.