Chasing Aphrodite (6 page)

The Getty board had little idea of what to do with the impending windfall. Most of the great masterpieces had already been snapped up since World War II, and spending millions on lesser pieces could dangerously inflate the art market, casting the Getty in the role of international spoiler. Otto Wittmann, former director of the Toledo Museum of Art, who had joined the museum board in 1979, suggested a bolder plan: establishing an umbrella institution—a trust—that would not only fund the museum but also funnel the institution's riches into a series of other arts-related institutes.

To carry out this vision, the Getty board needed a new kind of chief executive, someone with a knack for managing huge sums of money, someone with far broader authority and vision than a simple museum director. The board heartily agreed with Wittmann's idea and started a search that ended, suddenly, with a man who seemed to fit the description perfectly.

Harold M. Williams had just stepped down as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a ride atop the corporate world that ended with President Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980. In February 1981, shortly after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, Williams resigned. That night, at 10
P.M.,
he came home to find a message on his answering machine. It was from Harold Berg, wondering if he'd be interested in running the Getty.

It was exactly the kind of challenge Williams was looking for—an institution-building job—and it meant coming home to Los Angeles, where he had once worked as the trusted adviser to industrialist Norton Simon, running a division of Hunt-Wesson Foods before becoming dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Management. The Getty offer also appealed to his interest in art. While serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, Williams began to buy Asian paintings. He learned more about art at the side of Simon, one of the world's foremost collectors of painters such as van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne. On their business trips together through Simon's far-flung food and publications empire, Simon included Williams in private excursions to hunt for art.

Williams accepted the Getty job, convinced that he had an extraordinary opportunity to build something lasting. He moved into a small suite of offices at One Wilshire Boulevard, Getty Oil's corporate headquarters, taking over the desk that had belonged to Norris Bramlett, J. Paul Getty's most trusted aide. After his first week on the job, Williams announced that he would take a year to travel the world, talk to the leading cultural thinkers, and come up with a concrete plan. To help him map the Getty's future, he hired two talented young women. One was Leilani Duke, who chaired the California Confederation of the Arts and worked at the National Endowment for the Arts. The other was Nancy Englander, an assistant director in the NEA's museums and historical organizations program. Englander was smart and attractive, and she spoke several European languages.

"I don't care what you think," he told Duke and Englander. "I don't care what I think. I want to know what the field thinks."

Duke and Englander identified the leading thinkers in the arts across the United States and Europe—museum directors, conservators, librarians, academics, curators, historians. Williams and Englander picked their brains for ideas about how the Getty could make a difference and kept asking questions until they didn't hear anything new. At times, people were suspicious. The Getty was largely unknown, and many saw its sudden wealth as a threat. At other times, people viewed it as an opportunity—to get money. More than anything else, Williams was struck by how many in the art world lacked a big vision, but then again, most didn't have the kind of money that allowed the Getty to dream such big dreams.

At the end of the year, Williams laid out a plan that built on Wittmann's original suggestion. The new Getty Trust would not just collect art like a conventional museum; it would sponsor a conservation institute that would take in damaged objects and send experts throughout the world to save cultural monuments that were deteriorating from the elements or tourism. The trust would launch an educational institute to strengthen the arts in public schools. It would create an information institute to build a common database for art historians. And to unite these various programs, to give the Getty some cohesion, the trust would build a new public campus, the Getty Center. Once it opened, the original Malibu museum would be transformed into a new home for the museum's growing antiquities collection.

The board unanimously approved Williams's plan. With his vision in place, Williams turned his attention to remaking the administration. As Getty's cronies left the board, the former SEC chairman recruited businessmen with art experience. He also began to clean house at the museum. The first to go was Stephen Garrett, the architect turned museum director. Although Williams's plans extended beyond the museum, he realized that the museum was still at the core of the institution. And the museum needed a real museum director if it was going to be taken seriously.

T
HE ARRIVAL OF
Williams and the departure of Garrett sent a clear message to Frel. The changes at the Getty presented a threat to the comfortable situation the antiquities curator had carved out for himself, where virtually no one had the courage to tell him what to do. He decided he needed a buffer between himself and the new leadership, so he hired a new deputy who seemed perfect for the job.

Arthur Houghton III was everything Frel was not—an injection of superego into Frel's id-driven world. Whereas Frel was erratic and outrageous and loathed bureaucracy, Hought on was diplomatic, a devotee of process and protocol. Frel was a refugee from Europe who spoke with a heavy Slavic accent. Houghton was a scion of East Coast blue bloods who spoke with a yacht club accent.

Houghton was the great-great-grandson of the man who started a small industrial glass company in Corning, New York. His father, Arthur Houghton Jr., inherited Corning Glass but left his job as its president to combine his passions for glass and art in a subsidiary of Corning, Steuben. Arthur Jr. chaired the boards of more than a dozen New York cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he served for twenty years, and the New York Philharmonic, where he helped create Lincoln Center. Harvard University's Houghton Library was named in his honor, a thank-you for the donation of his rare-book collection. In short, the Houghtons were no strangers to wealth, power, or the arts.

While young Arthur's cousins went to work in the family glass business, he inherited his father's interest in the arts. He began collecting Greek and Aramaic coins at age fourteen and continued to do so through his college years at Harvard and during a career in the State Department. As he bounced from post to post in the Middle East, Houghton found the antique dealers in each city and grew fascinated by the spectrum of cultures that had passed through the region. Digging through a basket in Damascus, he could find Seleucid, Alexandrian, and Ptolemaic coins in a single handful. It was in the medinas and antique stalls of the Middle East that Houghton became friends with Robert Hecht. The two had dinner every three or four months, whenever Hecht came through town on a buying trip. Houghton soon became a client.

He never thought of the arts as a vocation, but at thirty-nine he tired of the diplomatic life and returned to Harvard to pursue an academic career. It was in 1981, while he was still pursuing a doctorate, that he dropped by the Getty Museum and first met Frel. The men discovered that they had many friends in common, including Hecht. Frel was impressed by Houghton's familiarity with the market and his ability to pass easily from the wood-paneled halls of academia to the back alleys of Beirut's bazaars. Frel was looking to build his staff. He had already hired one of Houghton's Harvard classmates, a serious-minded Ph.D. candidate named Marion True, to whom Frel had assigned the curatorial grunt work of cataloguing the antiquities collection.

Most of the job candidates who came through were graduate students who'd spent their lives in the library and had little clue about the real world. Houghton was older and, more important, knew who he was. Frel offered him a job the next time they met, emphasizing the Getty's immense wealth and need to build the collection. Between the two options facing Houghton—a life in academia talking about objects or a life as a curator buying them for the world's richest museum—the choice was easy. He started as the assistant antiquities curator in September 1982. It would not take long for his differences with Frel to surface.

A
BOUT THREE MONTHS
after Houghton started his job, he wandered into Frel's office on the main floor of the Getty Villa to ask a question. Frel's desk was in mild disarray, covered with academic papers, letters from dealers, object files, and photographs. Frel was out, but his attractive young German secretary, Renate Dolin, was at her desk, typing. As Houghton walked past to leave a note on Frel's desk, the stationery she was using caught his eye. Instead of Getty letterhead, it bore the name of "Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Ph.D.," the New York antiquities dealer.

"Can I ask what you're doing?" he asked.

"Just typing up some appraisal forms for a new group of donations," said Dolin, nodding toward a stack of blank Eisenberg stationery.

"Really. Can I take a quick look?"

Museum curators don't do appraisals, Houghton knew, particularly not for objects they were hoping to acquire. It created a clear conflict of interest. Glancing at the list, Houghton saw several objects whose values looked grossly inflated.

"Who asked you to do that?" Houghton asked.

"Jiri did."

Dolin explained that Frel routinely gave her a list of objects being donated and a value for each. She in turn typed them up on Eisenberg's appraisal forms and signed the dealer's name. She believed that Dr. Eisenberg got paid for each appraisal, she added.

Houghton thanked her for being helpful and left. When he saw Frel later, he asked about the "procedure" for appraisals.

"Procedure?" Frel replied. "There's no procedure. Jerry gave me a bunch of his appraisal forms, and I have Renate fill them out when necessary. The form is just a formality for the files. If anyone were to question it, Jerry could always say the signature was not his."

"Yes, but why not have Eisenberg actually do an appraisal and sign his own forms?"

Frel saw Houghton's surprised look. "Arthur, I've been doing this for ten years. Trust me, you'll understand when you have to do it yourself later."

"I will not do it later," Houghton replied with a thin smile and walked out.

"You're too moral!" Frel shouted at his back.

***

H
OUGHTON RETURNED TO
his desk and jotted down some notes. It was a habit he had acquired during his years in the State Department. Diplomats, Houghton had learned, were essentially glorified reporters, and writing detailed accounts of his activities had become second nature. Taking notes helped him think through a matter and had the added benefit of creating a paper trail if push came to shove.

Houghton knew that he'd been hired to moderate some of Frel's excesses, but he had not expected this type of behavior to emerge in his first months on the job. It suggested that his boss not only had a corruptible spirit but also showed a certain shamelessness about it. And this was no isolated incident. Over the next few months, Houghton's discreet inquiries brought to light more of Frel's troubling activities.

The curator was routinely having the Getty overpay for antiquities and "banking" the excess money with various dealers. Frel admitted to Houghton, for example, that the Greek vase with masks of Dionysus, a purchase recently approved by the trustees for $90,000, actually cost $50,000. Frel had used the difference to buy things of scholarly interest—vase fragments, broken statuary, votive objects—that the board would never have approved. These items showed up on Getty records as donations. The scope of the problem was apparent to Houghton from the amount of new material flowing into the department outside the museum's careful accessioning process.

Houghton also learned that Frel had recruited dozens of people to participate in the donation scheme, including several Getty staff members, who were paid cash for the use of their names on donations. Even a board member was among the donors. Assistant antiquities curator Marit Jentoft-Nilsen admitted that she, too, had been coerced by Frel to forge appraisals in the past.

Frel was also benefiting personally from his business relationships. He mentioned in passing that one of the museum's trusted antiquities dealers had given Frel's wife, Faya, a beautiful silver necklace, the type of gift expressly forbidden by the Getty's ethics policy. Staff members told Houghton that Frel regularly stayed as a guest at the homes of dealers while abroad or let them pay his hotel bills. On a recent visit to New York, for example, Frel and his wife stayed at the posh Carlyle courtesy of a major dealer, who picked up the bill.

That type of behavior would have made most American museum professionals queasy and was clearly prohibited by the Getty. But it was just the beginning. During a visit to the museum, Margaret Mayo, a former employee of Bruce McNall's gallery, told Houghton that she was "personally aware" that McNall had made "massive cash payments" to Frel.

Houghton found that he was scribbling notes to himself after almost every interaction with Frel. Overpaying for art. Unauthorized acquisitions. Inflated and forged appraisals. None-too-subtle bribes. Frel did little to hide his activities. It was as if the curator was bent on getting caught or, more likely, grooming Houghton as an accomplice, teaching him the ways of the antiquities trade.

If that was the case, Houghton felt that Frel had misjudged him. He wanted nothing to do with those activities and felt obliged to stop them. But even Houghton's years in the State Department couldn't help him figure out how to handle his growing mountain of incriminating information diplomatically. He was uncomfortable going over Frel's head and decided to try to guide his boss's behavior in the right direction. That, after all, was most likely why he had been hired.