The Mansions of Limbo (23 page)

“ODed?”

“Hmm, dead,” he said. He walked into another room.

“This is my favorite picture,” he said, peering as if for the first time at a Ghirlandaio portrait of Giovanna
Tornabuoni, a Florentine noblewoman, painted in 1488. “She died very young, in childbirth. We have never known if the picture was painted before or after her death. It was in the Morgan Library in New York. They had to buy some books, so they sold it.” He continued to make comments as he passed from one painting to the next: “A Titian, very late. He was almost ninety when he painted that … Who was that man who gave the big ball in Venice after the war? Beistegui, wasn’t it? That pair of Tintorettos comes from him … Everything in this room was bought by me and not by my father. I call it the Rothschild room. All the pictures in this room I bought from different members of the Rothschild family … My father bought this Hans Holbein of Henry VIII from the grandfather of Princess Di, the Earl of Spencer. The Earl bought a Bugatti with the money. When the picture was shown in England, Princess Margaret said to me, ‘Harry is one up on you.’ She was talking about his six wives, and my five. I said, ‘He didn’t have to go through all these tedious legal proceedings I do.’ ”

Of course, only a fraction of the baron’s pictures were on view. Several of his Degas were in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of his old masters had been lent to the U.S.S.R. and were at that moment in Siberia. Still others were on loan to exhibitions around the world. He shook his head at the complexity of owning such a large collection.

The baron unlocked a door, and we entered a part of his private museum called the Reserve. It is here that pictures for which there is no room in the galleries hang on both sides of movable floor-to-ceiling racks twenty to twenty-five feet high. In one room a restorer with a broken arm, on loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, was cleaning a fifteenth-century Italian portrait. “We have no
room for this Edward Hopper,” the baron said of a picture of a naked woman sitting on a bed, “and there’s no place for that Monet.” He rolled the racks back. There was also no place for a Georgia O’Keeffe and an Andrew Wyeth and what seemed like several hundred others.

“That’s a fake Mondrian there,” he said, approaching it and squinting at it. “I bought it by mistake. An expert told me he saw Mondrian paint it, and I believed him.”

“Why do you keep it?”

“I prefer to keep a small fake to a big fake,” he said, smiling.

Behind a door, almost out of sight, hung a picture of the baron himself. He made no comment about the portrait until I mentioned it. “That’s me by Lucian Freud,” he said. The picture, which I had seen at the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, is chilling; it suggests that there is a dark side to this billionaire. “I was getting a divorce at the time,” he said, as if explaining Freud’s unflattering rendition. People who know the baron well say that it is an extraordinarily accurate portrait. “That is Heini totally,” said an American woman who had apparently known the baron extremely well for a short time between marriages and asked not to be identified. “He went into unbelievable mood swings.”

Helmut Newton asked the baron to pose next to the Lucian Freud portrait. He did. “Your chin up a bit,” said Newton. The baron raised his chin. “Maybe that’s how I will look someday, but it’s not how I look now.” As we were leaving the room, he said, “There’s another Greco.”

Once the Spanish government agreed to put up the necessary capital to house the paintings, and figured out what compensation should be made to the heirs of Baron Thyssen
for renouncing their claim to his pictures, the deal was more or less in order. The baron has five children, starting with Georg-Heinrich from his first marriage. He has two children by his third wife, the former Fiona Campbell-Walter: Francesca, known as Chessy, who is an actress, and Lorne, an aspiring actor. After their divorce, Fiona, a beautiful English model, fell madly in love with Alexander Onassis, Aristotle’s son by his first wife, Tina Livanos. Although Fiona was acknowledged to be a positive influence on Alexander, who was younger than she, Aristotle Onassis despised her. In 1973, Alexander Onassis was killed in a plane crash. Thyssen also has a child, Alexander, by his fourth wife, Denise, as well as his adopted son, Borja, brought by Tita to the fifth marriage.

“All the paintings legally belong to a Bermuda foundation, a trust, made by Baron Thyssen,” the Duke de Badajoz explained to me in his office in Madrid. “After all the proposals from all the countries were together, the Bermuda foundation met and decided the ideal solution would be to make a temporary arrangement and, if it worked out, to make the final solution.”

The Spanish government will provide a palace known as the Villahermosa to house the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. When the old Duchess of Villahermosa died almost sixteen years ago, the time of block-long palaces for private living was at an end, and her daughters, two duchesses and a
marquesa
, sought to sell it. The enormous pink brick palace was first offered to the Spanish government for a relatively modest amount of money. For whatever reasons, the government turned down the offer, and a bank purchased the palace. In order to make the building work as a commercial institution, the inside was stripped, so all architectural details of the once-elegant structure have been obliterated, including what many people told me was one
of the most beautiful staircases in Madrid. Then the bank went bankrupt, and the palace was bought by the Ministry of Culture, for more than five times what the government would originally have had to pay.

The palace is huge. There are two floors below ground level which will be made over for restaurants, an auditorium for lectures, and parking space. There will be three complete floors of galleries, and the top floor will be used for offices. Several hundred of the A and B pictures from the Thyssen collection will hang in the Villahermosa Palace. A convent in Barcelona is being refitted to hang seventy-five of the religious paintings in the collection. The rest will continue to hang in the private galleries of the Villa Favorita in Lugano.

The estimated time for the reconstruction of the palace is between eighteen months and two years. The ten-year loan period for the collection will not begin until the pictures are actually hung in the Villahermosa. In bottom-line terms, the loan of the pictures is in reality a rental for a ten-year period. “There is an annual fee of $5 million paid as a rent to the Bermuda foundation,” said the Duke de Badajoz. Spain also has to provide insurance and security.

Critics of what has come to be known as the baron’s Spanish decision say that he coyly received proposals from a host of suitors, playing one off against the other, when all the time he knew he was going to defer to his wife’s wishes and send the collection to Spain, at least for a decade. Prince Charles flew to Lugano to lunch at the Villa Favorita in an effort to get the collection for England, and Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of West Germany, made a similar foray, offering a Baroque palace or a brand-new museum to house the collection. It is not out of the question that one or the other of these countries will be so favored when the baron’s permanent decision is made. A London newspaper
stated at the time of his last divorce that he had a tendency to ask for his gifts back, although the journalist was referring to jewels and not paintings. An interesting observation made to me by a prominent woman in Madrid was that, whatever decision is made, the Spanish pictures in the collection—the Velázquezes, the Goyas, the El Grecos—will never be allowed to leave the country. All the reports over the last year about the agreement have included the added attraction of Tita Thyssen getting the title of duchess. “It has never been part of the negotiation,” said the Duke de Badajoz. “It is the king’s privilege to grant such a thing.” In fact, Baron Thyssen will be offered a dukedom, which would elevate the baroness to duchess. “Of course, you cannot make a duke for ten years,” said the Duke de Badajoz, which means, in practical terms, that the baron and baroness would not be elevated to duke and duchess if at the end of the ten-year loan period they decided to remove the pictures to England, or France, or West Germany, or Japan, or the United States. In the meantime, the Spanish government has already decorated Baron Thyssen with the Grand Cross of Carlos III, one of Spain’s highest honors, for outstanding service to the Spanish government, and has decorated the baroness with an Isabel la Católica medal, for outstanding civil merit.

For the present, Baron and Baroness Thyssen will be spending more and more time in Madrid to be near the Villahermosa during the reconstruction period and to take part in deciding how the collection will be hung. Their new house on the outskirts of Madrid, in an area that is reminiscent of the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, is the kind of house that Californians talk about in terms of square feet. It is immense, with an indoor swimming pool next to the gymnasium, and an outdoor pool which may be one of the largest private swimming pools in the world.
The décor is pure movie star: beige marble, beige terrazzo, beige travertine, indoor waterfalls, plate glass in all directions, and a security system that defies unwanted entry. “I want to get rid of all this,” said the baroness after her first night there, waving her hands with a sweeping gesture at the custom-made beige leather sofa and chairs. “And all that in there,” she continued, waving at the furniture in another of the many rooms, shaking her head at its lack of beauty. They bought the almost new house furnished. She said that she would give all this “modern furniture” to a benefit for the poor that the aristocratic ladies of Madrid were putting on and that she would furnish the new house with the antique furniture from Daylesford, which has been in storage since that estate was sold.

The Thyssens were scheduled to leave the following morning in their private plane for Barcelona, where the baroness and the Spanish opera singer José Carreras were to receive awards from the city of Barcelona. “It will be nice to settle down and decorate this new house. We are having the gardens all done over too. We’ve also bought the lot next door so there will be privacy. And there’s the new house in Paris that I have to do over. All this traveling. It gets so tiring.”

As we walked through her new gardens, she said, “When I die, I am going to leave all my jewelry to a museum. I hate auctions, when it says that the jewelry belonged to the late Mrs. So-and-so.”

January 1989

R
emember, I’ve been in this business fifty-four years. I made eighty-six pictures and 350 television shows. I have not been idle.” As she spoke, she leaned forward and her forefinger tapped the table to emphasize her accomplishment. The speaker was Jane Wyman, a no-nonsense star in her mid-seventies, who is one of the highest-paid ladies in show business. Her immensely successful television series for Lorimar, “Falcon Crest,” is in its ninth year, and it is she, everyone agrees, in the centerpiece role of Angela Channing, that the public tunes in to see. She got an Academy Award in 1948 for
Johnny Belinda
, in which she played a deaf-mute who gets raped. She was nominated for Oscars on four other occasions, and she has also been nominated twice for Emmys. She has behind her what can well be called a distinguished career.

We met in a perfectly nice but certainly not fashionable restaurant called Bob Burns, at Second Street and Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, not far from where she lives. Bob Burns is her favorite restaurant, where she has her regular table, a tufted-leather booth. It is one of
those fifties-style California restaurants that are so dark inside that when you step in from the blazing sunlight you are momentarily blinded and pause in the entrance, not sure which way to go. When she arrived, I was already at the table. My eyes had become accustomed to the dark, and I was able to watch her getting her bearings in the doorway. It was twelve noon on the dot, and we were the first two customers in the restaurant. Even to an empty house, though, she played it like a star. She is taller than I had expected. Her posture is superb. Her back is ramrod-straight. She is rail-thin, too thin, giving credence to the speculation that she is not in good health. She walks slowly and carefully. Some people say she is seventy-two, some say seventy-five, others say older. What’s the difference? She looks great. Her hairdo, bangs over her forehead, is the trademark style she has worn for years. “Is that you?” she asked, peering.

“Yes.” I rose and walked toward her.

She held out her hand, strong and positive. The darkness of the restaurant was flattering to a handsome woman of a certain age, but that is not her reason for liking the place. “The three people who own it went to school with my kids,” she said. The words “my kids” were said in the easy manner any parent uses when talking about his or her children. She happens not to be close to either of hers, but we didn’t talk about that.

She is private in the extreme, almost mysterious in her privacy, a rich recluse who chooses to live alone, without servants even, in an apartment in Santa Monica overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She is a woman in control at all times. There is not a moment off guard. What you see is the persona she wants you to see, and she reveals nothing further. Any aspect of her career is available for discussion, but don’t tread beyond. And for God’s sake, I was told,
don’t mention you-know-who or she’ll get up and walk out. Simply put, it pains her that a marriage that ended forty-one years ago seems to interest the press and public more than her career.