The Genius (7 page)

This conversation took place many years later, in a drawing room richly furnished, in a home a hundred feet high. By then, Solomon Mueller was Solomon Muller, and Mueller Dry Goods had grown into Muller Bros. Manufacturing, Maker of Finest Machine Parts; Muller Bros., Importers of Exotic Wares; Muller Bros. Railroad and Mining; Muller Bros. Textiles; Ada Muller Bakeries; Muller Bros. Land Development Corporation; and Muller Bros. Savings and Loan.

“How so?” Solomon asked.

“You always sounded like him,” said Isaac Singer. “His name was Reisinger, you know. Did you know that?”

Solomon shook his head.

“Saxony! He spoke German to me until I was five. By God! Uncanny, I tell you, man.” Singer smiled. “The first time I heard you I said to myself, ‘Well, now, Singer, that fellow is the very
ghost
of your father!’ Ha! Like Hamlet’s father, yes? Yes. Well what’s the matter, Muller, you look like I shot and ate your dog.”

Solomon explained that he had thought his accent gone by the time they met.

“My friend, you
still
sound like my father.”

Solomon, chagrined, said, “I do?”

“Of course you do, man. Every time we speak I yearn to see the old bastard again… Ha! Well, now. Don’t look so sad, Muller, that voice of yours contributes a large part of your charm.”

Solomon Muller
ne
Mueller said, “I would prefer to sound like the American that I am.”

Isaac Merritt Singer, he of the libido and the fortune and the belly and the laugh, that laugh like a bellowing shiphorn, the siren song of America—he laughed and hammered his friend on the shoulder and said, “Not to worry, old man. Round here, you are what you say you are.”

These days, the idea of an “opening” has become something of a farce; usually all the work on display has been presold. I decided to buck the trend by refusing to allow any previews or advance sales, and by midsummer I had begun receiving anxious phone calls from collectors and consultants, all of whom I put at ease with assurances that
nobody
was getting preferential treatment. They’d all have to come discover Victor Cracke for themselves.

Marilyn thought I was making a terrible mistake. She told me so at lunch, the week before I opened.

“You want to
sell
them, don’t you?”

“Of course,” I said. And I did, not for the money so much as for the legitimacy: by convincing other people to literally invest in my vision of genius, I made my act of creativity a matter of public record. A closely related part of me, however, wanted to keep the drawings all to myself. I always felt pangs letting go of a favored piece, but I’d never felt the possessive impulse as strongly as I did toward Victor—largely because I considered myself his collaborator rather than his sales representative.

I said, “Whether I sell them now or after the show, they’re sold.”

“Sell them now,” Marilyn said, “and they’re sold
now
.”

People had a hard time understanding my relationship with Marilyn. To begin with, there was the question of age: she is twenty-one years older than I am. Come to think of it, that part might not be so hard for women in their fifties to understand.

My less discreet friends, though, tended, when drunk, to point out the peculiarity of my situation.

Newsflash!

She’s old enough to be your mother.

Not quite. Were my mother still around, she would be four years older than Marilyn. But thank you; thanks very much. I hadn’t noticed that similarity at all, not until you brought it to my attention. I appreciate you keeping me in the loop.

These same friends were usually careful to add (I guess as a means of breaking the hard news to me more gently)
She looks good. I’ll grant you that
.

Thanks again. I hadn’t noticed that, either.

Marilyn
does
look good, and not just for her age: objectively, she is a beautiful woman and always has been. True, she’s had work done. Who around here hasn’t? At least she comes by her beauty honestly: Ironton High School Homecoming Queen, 1969. What you see is the result of maintenance rather than a complete fiction.

The southernmost city in Ohio, Ironton bequeathed to its fairest daughter a ferocious ambition and, when she is annoyed, a hint of northern Kentucky drawl, useful both for feigning innocence and for dropping the sledgehammer of Southern condescension. You do not want to make Marilyn mad.

Today her haircuts cost as much as her first car. She has phone numbers for people who don’t have phone numbers. I strongly suspect that when she walks into Barneys they press a special button to mobilize the sales force. But any true New Yorker knows that the real measure of success is real estate and what you do with it. Marilyn has succeeded. In the dining room of her West Village town house hangs a de Kooning worth ten times as much as her parents made, cumulatively, in fifty years of honest labor. Her uptown apartment on Fifth and Seventy-fifth affords a generous view of Central Park; and when the sun sets across the island, silhouetting the Dakota and the San Remo, flooding the living room with sweet orange light, you feel as though you are floating on the surface of a star.

You can’t take the Ironton out of the girl. She still gets up at four thirty A.M. to exercise.

Her rise on the scene is the stuff of legend. The family of eleven; the arrival in New York, literally on a Greyhound bus; the handbag counter at Saks; the banker buying a birthday present for his wife, leaving also with Marilyn’s phone number; the affair; the divorce; the remarriage; the charity balls; the museum boards; the swelling collection; Warhol and Basquiat and disco and cocaine; the second divorce, rancorous as a Balkan blood feud; the jaw-dropping settlement; and the Marilyn Wooten Gallery, opening night, July 9, 1979. I was seven years old.

However random or fortuitous this chain of events might seem, I have always envisioned her planning it all out—on the Greyhound, perhaps, rocketing eastward, perhaps written down in a little Gatsbyesque composition book. MY VERY OWN TEN-STEP PLAN FOR SELF-BETTERMENT, FAME, AND FORTUNE.

She found the similarities between selling art and selling handbags to far exceed the differences. And she could sell. The house in the Hamptons, the flats in Rome and London—those she bought with her own money, alimony be damned.

Everyone knows her; she has run with or over everyone in her path. She called Clement Greenberg, the most prominent American critic of the twentieth century, an insufferable asshole to his face. She was the first to show Matthew Barney, whom she still refers to as “the Boy.” She has capitalized on our culture’s penchant for recycling, buying up unfashionable work and then creating, through sheer force of will and charisma, a revival whose profits accrue largely to her. She sells artwork that she does not own, on the assurance that she will own it sooner or later—a practice that got her banned from the auction houses for a time. Again and again people pronounce her dead. Always she ascends, phoenix triumphant in her tailored suit, gimlet in hand, to say
Not quite yit, honey
.

We met at an opening. At the time, I was working the floor for the woman who would leave her gallery to me. I had moved in the art world for a few years by that point, and though I certainly knew who Marilyn was, I had never spoken to her before. I saw her eyeing me through the bottom of her wineglass, and then, in defiance of her own tipsiness, making a beeline for me, wearing her Acquisition Smile.

“You’re the only straight man in this room I haven’t fucked or fired.”

An auspicious beginning.

People used to describe me as having tamed her, which was ludicrous. We simply met at the right time, and the connection proved so expedient, pleasant, and intellectually invigorating that neither of us had any reason to call it off. She is a talker; I am a nodder. We both sold, albeit in very different ways; and though we were both control freaks, we maintained our own private lives, which prevented us from clashing. And although she would never admit it, I think the Muller name plucked a chord of awe inside her. In the pantheon of Old American Money, I might not rate very high, but to Marilyn “My Father was an Industrial Mechanic” Wooten, I must have looked like John Jacob Astor.

It also helped that we had no expectations of fidelity. That was the unspoken rule. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

“LEAVE IT TO YOU,” she said, forking her roasted-pepper-and-goat-cheese napoleon, “to find the one who can actually
draw
. I thought that was the whole point of outsider art, that it looked like shit.”

“Who said it was outsider art.”

“You have to call it something.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because people like their hands held.”

“I think I’ll let them dangle a bit.”

“You’re really lousing this up, you know that?”

“I’m not doing it for the money.”

“ ‘I’m not doing it for the money.’ ” She sat back, wiping her mouth. Marilyn eats like an ex-convict: hunched over, in perpetual fear that her food will be taken away, and when she pauses it’s not with satiety but with relief. Eight siblings and you learn to protect yourself. “You’ll never get over your love of pretty things, Ethan. That’s your problem.”

“I don’t see why that’s such a problem. And they’re not pretty. Have you even seen them?”

“I’ve seen them.”

“They’re not pretty.”

“They’re like something Francis Bacon would draw in detention. Don’t listen to me, darlin. I’m just jealous of your margins. Mine, please?”

I handed her the rest of my salad.

“Thank you.” She dug in. “I hear Kristjana is on the warpath.”

“I had to cut her loose. I felt bad about it, but—”

“Don’t. I don’t blame you. I had her for a time, did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“I discovered her,” she said.

This I knew to be a lie. “Is that a fact.”

She shrugged. “In a way. I discovered her at Geoffrey Mann’s. He wasn’t doing anything for her. So I rediscovered her.”

“Stole her, you mean.”

“Is it stealing if you want to give it back?”

“I offered to reschedule her show, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“She’ll live. Someone’ll pick her up, they always do. She called me, you know.”

“Did she.”

“
Mm
. Thank you,” she said, accepting her duck from the waiter. “She pitched her project to me. With the ice? I told her no thank you. I’m not turning off the air-conditioning in my gallery so she can stroke herself off about the environment.
Please
. Make me something I can sell.”

“She used to be a good painter.”

“They all start out that way,” she said. “Hungry. Then they get a couple of suck-up reviews and next thing they start thinking if they shit in a can it’ll be brilliant.”

I pointed out that Piero Manzoni had, in fact, sold cans of his own shit.

“It was original then,” she said. “Forty years ago. Now it just smells bad.”

I DID CONCEDE MARILYN’S BASIC POINT: Victor Cracke’s art didn’t fit into any clear category, which made my role in its success—or failure— that much stronger. Part of a dealer’s skill, his creativity, lies in surrounding a piece with the correct context. Everybody likes to be able to talk about their art to their friends, to be knowledgeable. In this way one can rationalize spending half a million dollars on crayon and string.

In theory, I had the easiest job imaginable: I could make up whatever I wanted. Nobody would contradict me if I decided to make Victor a dishwasher, a professional gymnast, a retired assassin. Ultimately, though, I decided that the most compelling narrative was none at all: Victor Cracke, cipher. Let people write the story themselves, and they will insert whatever hopes, dreams, fears, and lusts they want. The piece becomes a Rorschach test. All art of value achieves this to a certain extent, but I suspected that the scale of Victor’s piece, its hallucinogenic totality, would make for a lot of audience countertransference. That, or a boatload of confusion.

I thus found myself answering a lot of opening-night questions the same way.

“I don’t know.”

“We don’t really know.”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know if I know that.”

Or:

“What do
you
think?”

At an opening, you can identify the novice by his interest in the work. Gallery people don’t bother to look at all. They’re there for the wine and crackers, and to talk about who’s up or down this week.

“Smashing,” Marilyn said, tipping back her plastic cup.

“Thank you.”

“I brought you a present. Did you notice?”

"Where.”

"There, silly.” She nosed at a tall, handsome man in a slim-cut suit.

I looked at her with surprise. Kevin Hollister was a good friend of Marilyn’s, her ex-husband’s Groton roommate. Quarterbacking Harvard to three Ivy League titles earned him a spectacularly cushy banking job right out of school, and ever since then he’s been on the rise. He lives, you might say, comfortably. His hedge fund is named Downfield.

Recently he had turned his attention from shorting Eastern European currencies to art, a typical Culture Climber, to whom a canvas was little more than an expensive ticket to an exclusive party. I am forever astonished at how men with money and brains—men who control world markets, run major corporations, have the ear of politicians—become dribbling imbeciles in front of a painting. Not knowing where to begin, they run to the nearest source of guidance, no matter how biased or mercenary.

In a spectacular display of poor judgment, Hollister had hired Marilyn as a consultant, giving her what amounted to a private tap on his bank account. Needless to say, she had sold him work exclusively by artists she represented, barking at anyone who tried to step onto her territory. Earlier she had told me, “He doesn’t appreciate that a world-class collection is the product of thought and patience, and cannot be created in one fell swoop. But I’m happy to help him try.”

I’d met him once or twice, but we’d never spoken for more than a few minutes, and never about art. That Marilyn had brought him tonight meant one of two things: she thought Victor Cracke was good, or she considered me and my art no threat at all to her monopoly.