The Lady in Gold (44 page)

Randol laughed. “
You don't know how many calls I get like that,” he said.

At home, an aromatic smell filled the peaceful kitchen as the Schoenberg kids waited for Randol. “
My
daddy won a big case,” announced Dora, a self-possessed little girl with long brown hair and bangs, wearing a multicolored skirt and blue-top tennis shoes.

Randol walked in with his bulging briefcase. The kids scrambled to greet him. Little Joey sang an Elmo song at the top of his lungs. Nathan tugged at his hand. “Daddy! My friends say they saw you on TV!” Nathan shouted.

Randol sat down in his everyday navy blue suit. He seemed shell-shocked. Had he really won? “Maria was afraid, until the last minute, that we would lose,” Randol said.

Now, after fighting with Austrian officials for years, Randol had to open discussions with them on the logistics of the removal of the paintings.

“
There's not going to be any donations or any loans” to Austria, Randol said adamantly. “If an Austrian museum wants to buy them, that's perfectly fine. I don't know if that's going to be possible. There's a lot of debate in Austria. There's a lot of recrimination at the government for letting it get this far. They're being criticized for a tactical blunder. They were acting on principle. The principle was wrong.

“I think they owe us an apology, but I'm not holding my breath,” he said. “There's no honor in fighting to the death and holding out for a bad cause. It's like Hitler's soldiers fighting to the death. There's no honor in that.

“The options are open,” Randol said. “Maybe we'll put them in a museum. It's like when you win the lottery: what do you do with the money? It's a great position to be in. We took a huge leap. Maria and I have an understanding. If money comes we'll both be doing well.”

When Maria was asked about the future of the paintings, she said they belonged on public view. “
I would not want any private person to buy these paintings,” she told the
Los Angeles Times.
“It's very meaningful to me that they are seen by anybody who wants to see them, because that would have been the wish of my aunt.”

——

At a celebratory dinner at Spago, Maria's son, Peter, delivered a toast for Randol and Maria's “David and Goliath battle.”

“
This is a fairy-tale story, because Maria did find her Prince,” Peter read. “And her Prince is rescuing the Klimts, but as Randy cautions, the ship is not yet here.”

But the art market already saw its ship coming in.
Stephen Lash of Christie's flew to Los Angeles. “
The availability of the Bloch-Bauer Klimts is the most significant event in the art market since the World War itself,” Lash wrote Randol that February. “The objects are of such astonishing beauty and the story of the struggle for their restitution so compelling that their sale—privately or at public auction—will continue to capture the world's imagination.”

The
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
I
“will be the most expensive work of art ever sold,” Lash predicted.

Now Austrians faced letting go of the treasured Klimts. Lines stretched around the block at the Belvedere as people crowded in for a last look at Adele.
After a man threatened to deface the Klimts rather than see them go, the paintings were abruptly moved to the bunker.

Randol and I flew to Austria in a small, aging passenger plane. He focused studiously on the sheaf of documents on his lap, even as the dramatic peaks of the Alps, floating in the clouds like islands of snow, rose up to the Matterhorn. He was preoccupied. He had a biopsied lesion on his lip that would turn out to be basal cell carcinoma.

I idly mentioned that the new Austrian consul in Los Angeles,
Martin Weiss, had said many Austrians had gone along with the Nazis because they feared for their families.

“
They weren't afraid to be killed!” Randol scoffed. “Maybe they wouldn't get invited to parties or elected to the village council. But being ostracized
is not life threatening. They would have been like a Malibu kid who decides to stay home and study math, while the other kids are out surfing. So they think he's a nerd.”

Vienna newspapers were filled with the legal travails of
David Irving, the accused
Holocaust denier, arrested in Austria in November.

The airport was a mall of Klimt reproductions. As we swept past tourist shops, Randol glared. Here was a postcard of
Lady with a Feather Boa,
now returned to its rightful owners. Here was a mouse pad with the sinuous, stolen
Water Snakes,
last seen in the dining room of
Gustav Ucicky's widow. Here was the seductive Adele Bloch-Bauer—on a tea tin.

“
This stuff is everywhere!” Randol said angrily. “Half of these paintings were stolen! It's disgusting!”

At the Belvedere, all that remained of Adele was an empty case of bulletproof glass. Magically, she was everywhere else in Vienna.

Posters of the gold portrait of Adele had appeared overnight, staring out from bus stops and kiosks, with bold black letters: “Ciao Adele.”

Goodbye, Adele. As snowflakes fell, Adele gazed out, calm, self-possessed, sophisticated.

A group of intellectuals, including the head of the Schoenberg Center, were less happy to bid Adele farewell.
They called for Austria to raise the money to buy the paintings. Austrian officials sputtered that they couldn't possibly afford such an expense.

When Randol reached the Schoenberg Center, there was a crush of Viennese reporters and television cameras. What would the heirs do with the paintings? Would they loan or donate any of them to Austria?

Just as Randol's spectacular victory disconcerted museums around the world, it also aroused hopes. After his interviews, we braved freezing wind and icy cobblestones to reach a former medieval tavern with glowing hardwood walls, inlaid with rustic Tyrolean intaglio and painted with floral folk art motifs.

Marina Mahler, a handsome older woman in black cashmere and elegant silver jewelry, rose from a little wooden table and smiled radiantly. Marina was the granddaughter of Alma and
Gustav Mahler.

“
You've been a
huge
inspiration,” Marina told Randol.

The painting Marina claimed was an Edvard Munch painting,
Summer Night on the Beach,
that had belonged to Alma. It was now hanging in the Belvedere. Years ago, Alma had received the painting as a gift after the birth of her daughter, Manon, the beautiful girl who stole the show at Maria Altmann's debut. After Manon died of polio, Alma couldn't bear to look at it. She loaned the painting to the Belvedere, along with three paintings by her late father,
Jakob Emil Schindler.

After the
Anschluss, Alma fled, and
Carl Moll asked the Belvedere to give him the Munch and the Schindlers.

“
Ridiculous! How dare he? She
hated
her stepfather,” Marina said, disdainfully. “He betrayed all his friends! Remember in Ferdinand's letter to Kokoschka, he said Moll had become an ‘über-Nazi'?”

Moll had also helped himself to Alma's house, and sold the Munch painting back to the Belvedere.

When the Russians marched into Vienna, Moll's son-in-law—a Nazi named
Richard Eberstaller—shot his wife, then Moll, and then himself in a suicide pact. Or at least this was the chronology Austrian officials had insisted upon years ago, when they ruled that since Moll died a few minutes sooner, Eberstaller had been his legitimate heir. Since Eberstaller had willed his art to the Belvedere, the Schindlers came to the Belvedere as an inheritance from Eberstaller.

Austria insisted the Belvedere bought the Munch painting in “good faith”—a viable shield in Europe, though not in U.S. courts. Even in Europe, this protection was being eroded by the morality plays of restitution.

The case seemed unpromising—until Randol's victory.

“
I think the climate is extraordinary!” Marina said fervently. “I believe it is an opening, for many things. I believe I will get my painting back!”

The next morning, a gray sky glowered overhead.
Randol announced he was heading off for a private lunch with Ron Lauder, who was apparently in Vienna. Randol offered no explanation.

“Why don't you look up Maria's friend
Hans Mühlbacher?” Randol suggested. “He's her last childhood friend left alive in Vienna.”

Ah yes, the legendary Hans, who had played his violin at the Stubenbastei the day of the
Anschluss.

The clouds over the Schellinggasse were so low they seemed to touch the stone angels on the rooftops. Hans lived across the street from the grand old Coburg Palace, where well-endowed goddesses lounged on the roof in Grecian robes, creating the impression they were lingering in pajamas after a rough night.

The Bloch-Bauers' Stubenbastei apartment could be seen from Hans's doorstep. His building had a seashell staircase that climbed upward in a spiral. A heavy wooden door opened and Hans appeared, in a hand-tailored brown tweed suit with a rather twee pocket handkerchief.

Hans took both my hands. “How is my Maria?” he asked, in a tone that was a sigh of both joy and lament. He led me into a warm apartment that was like a museum of cozy Viennese
Gemütlichkeit.
The foyer was filled with mounted antlers, like a Tyrolean hunting lodge. There were blue-painted wardrobes with East European floral folk art designs. The herringbone geometry of the parquet floor contrasted with a tall chest carved with arabesques that might have been abducted from a sultan's seraglio. Above it was a painting of people around a bountiful kitchen table that looked like the work of a Flemish master, and a more run-of-the-mill portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph in his imperial uniform, radiating the confidence of the glorious empire. Gold silk curtains fell from long windows, and empire-style chairs were covered with crimson and gold silk upholstery. Sconces held leaded crystal shaped like grape arbors. I sat in a moss-green Hungarian chair with carved clamshells, and Hans settled into a Biedermeier settee.

How beautiful life was in Vienna, Hans was saying. It was another world! Friendships lasted a lifetime. Hans smiled with nostalgia.

Then came the Anschluss. His father died, very suddenly, a month later. His Jewish-born mother had to vacate the family chalet. His sister's Catholic fiancé jilted her. His cousin became an ardent Nazi.

“
I was drafted, after Maria left,” Hans continued. “I had to do it, to save the lives of my mother and sister. I wrote a memoir about this time,” Hans said, pulling a book from the shelf.

The memoir didn't give much away. Hans spent the summer of 1940 occupying Villemeux-sur-Eure, France, with “
many pretty girls we stared at and admired, without success,” Hans wrote. Hans could not be
promoted because his mother was Jewish, “but I could, despite my lower rank, lead an interesting life in the still-quiet West, with all the comforts of the higher-ranked military staff.”

Hans was stationed in Poland in 1941, in Rzeszow, a pretty Galician town where Jews were corralled into a ghetto. “
Some of the soldiers were sorry there were Nuremberg racial laws, for the Jewish women were much better dressed than the rest of the people,” Hans wrote. “Walking through the ghetto made me very depressed. I have never seen so much poverty.”

Back in St. Wolfgang, his hometown, his mother's friends were deported, one by one. His mother and his sister, Lisl, once escaped deportation through intervention of his cousin, then a decorated Nazi.

At nearby Ebensee, the SS worked Jewish laborers to death building tunnels for armaments.

Hans flipped through the book and pointed to a photograph of himself, handsome and well-built, in his German army uniform.

No one should have had to make the choices he did.

Just then, a strong-faced matron in her sixties came into the room with sherry and apple strudel. She was Brigitte Wagner, and she seemed to be Hans's girlfriend. “Brigitte's husband saved my life,” Hans said.

Brigitte regarded me warily.

“Dr. Wagner was the most famous German scientist in war technology,” Brigitte said, in a guttural accent, entirely unlike the musical Viennese of Maria and Hans. “My husband invented missiles. He employed Hansl, so he was protected.”

Her husband,
Herbert Wagner, designed missiles. In 1943, Hans was kicked out of the German army for being a Jew, and Wagner hired him. Brigitte married Dr. Wagner after the war.

Hans flipped through his memoir and found a picture of Dr. Wagner at the height of Nazi Germany. The photo showed a heavily shadowed face and deep-set dark eyes, like a Hollywood version of a Nazi Dr. No.

Hans didn't work for just any Nazi scientist. Wagner had played a key role in the Nazi war machine, a serious charge at the Nuremberg trials.
He was an SS officer. He surrendered to Americans hunting Nazi scientists in Bavaria.
He and his two assistants were the first Nazi scientists to be secretly airlifted to the United States after the war.

“After the war, my husband was taken into prison,” Brigitte was saying. “He was forced to work for the Americans. He worked on guided missiles for them.”

It was a secret that Americans were working with former Nazis. Some of
the scientists had performed abominable experiments on Jewish victims at concentration camps. U.S. officials said they worried Nazi scientists would fall into the hands of the Russians in the
Cold War arms race. They recruited
Werner von Braun, another member of the SS, to help jump-start NASA, though he had overseen slave labor operations where thousands of Jews died. Dr. Wagner's FBI handlers helpfully repeated his contention that he only joined the SS for professional reasons and never went to the meetings.

“They needed my husband's invention to bomb Japan, late in the war,” Brigitte was saying.

The clock ticked. The room was oppressively warm, the sherry sweet as syrup, the
Apfelstrudel
leaden. The wallpaper, a busy geometry of gold silk jacquard bouquets, made me claustrophobic. I must have had a bad poker face, because Brigitte was glaring at me. “You have no right to judge!” she said fiercely. “You can only judge when you yourself have survived such a conflict! It was life and death! Nobody knows what they would do in a similar situation!