They fashioned the clumsy looking figures in clay and mixed in manganese dioxide (unknown in the sixth century BC) to simulate a type of old glaze called Greek black. There was one problem, however. Their kiln was too small to accommodate the large statues. The solution was to break the hardened clay and fire the pieces separately. The fragments were then sold to an acquiring agent for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, complete with a fictitious provenance.
Armed with this information, Parson wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that the museum been displaying fake Etruscan statuary since early in the century. He offered simple proof if anyone doubted it. One of the statues was missing a thumb. When the museum’s curator of Greek and Roman art went to Italy with a cast of the hand, he was dismayed to find that the thumb Fioravanti had snapped off decades before fit perfectly. Not only that, it was also revealed that the fake statues had been modeled on an Etruscan figure from the British Museum that the forgers had seen in a photograph. It too was a fake.
“So on Valentine’s Day of 1961,” wrote Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “the world learned that the three Etruscans, so admired for so long, published hundreds of times, taught in schools as exemplars of the spirited and bellicose Etruscan civilization, were really prime examples of modern Italian sculpture of the 1910s and 1920s.”
4
French Fraud
Vrain-Denis Lucas was among the most audacious forgers of historic documents during the nineteenth century. With a client as spectacularly gullible as the illustrious mathematician Michel Chasles, he could afford to be. Chasles was a member of France’s prestigious Academy of Sciences, so he couldn’t have been completely stupid. Nevertheless, he snatched up virtually every fake Lucas presented him, twenty-seven thousand in all, many of them patently absurd, and all very expensive.
The first batch of forgeries Lucas sold to Chasles was letters from French literary heroes like Molière and Racine, part of a collection the seller claimed to have inherited from his prominent forebears. Lucas produced the fakes on paper ripped out of antique books, using ink appropriate for the period. Chasles was so thoroughly duped that Lucas got a little bolder. He produced some rarer items, like a letter said to have been written by Charlemagne some one thousand years earlier. Chasles happily paid the price for such a valuable piece of French history.
The forger, apparently convinced by now that he was dealing with a complete dolt, started to produce thousands of items too outrageous to believe. There were letters from Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and Cleopatra to her “dearly beloved” Julius Caesar—all written in French! One letter, again in French, was supposedly written by Judas just before he hanged himself, and another from Pontius Pilate to the Roman emperor Tiberius expressed regret for the crucifixion of Jesus. Chasles was delighted with them all. Here’s an excerpt from a letter penned by Mary Magdalene, while on vacation in France, to her brother Lazarus (wrong Mary, by the way; Mary of Bethany was Lazarus’s sister):
My dearly beloved brother, that which you have sent me regarding Peter the apostle of our gentle Jesus gives me hope that soon he will appear here and I am prepared to receive him well, our sister Martha rejoices at the prospect also. Her health is failing badly and I fear her death, that is why I recommend her to your good prayers. . . . It is as you say my dearly beloved brother that we are very fond of our sojourn in these provinces of Gaul, that we have no desire to leave it, just as some of our friends suggest to us. Do you not find that these Gauls, who we were told are barbarous peoples, are not at all that way. . . . I will say nothing more except that I have a great desire to see you and pray our Lord to hold you in grace this tenth day of June 46.
Magdalene
Lucas knew Chasles believed that it had been a Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, who had first formulated the laws of gravity, not Sir Isaac Newton. Therefore, he presented his favorite customer with a batch of fake letters between Pascal and Newton that seemed to validate his point of view. Chasles excitedly announced the discovery to the French Academy of Sciences in 1867; his enthusiasm was unhampered by the fact that Newton was still a teenager when Pascal died.
The relationship between Lucas and Chasles ended not with the humiliating episode at the Academy, but with the forger’s failure to produce more documents, paid for in advance. Chasles sued. At the trial that followed, Lucas’s fraud was finally exposed—as was Chasles’s astonishing credulity.
5
A Thin Vermeer
The great Dutch artist Jan Vermeer of Delft was not known for his religious themed paintings, but his forger was. Beginning in 1936, Hans van Meegeren, another Dutchman, painted six Biblical scenes in the style of the master and passed them off as original. The art world trembled with excitement. Museums snatched up the newly discovered “Vermeers,” and van Meegeren got rich. It all backfired, though, when a Nazi art aficionado obtained his own “lost” work.
Van Meegeren was an ornery sort of fellow, a drug-addled artist with a point to prove and little to lose. Frustrated by years of dismissive reviews, he set out to humiliate his critics in the most spectacular way possible. What resulted was a meticulously produced forgery he called Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus. Van Meegeren took an original seventeenth-century painting and stripped it to the canvas. He recreated Vermeer’s colors with materials the master used, like white lead, lapis lazuli, and crushed insect shells. Then, with a special mix of chemicals added, he baked the work to give it the appearance of age. Finally he concocted a fake provenance for the painting and foisted it onto the unsuspecting art world.
The critics were awed. “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art,” enthused renowned expert Abraham Bredius, whom van Meegeren particularly despised, “when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio! And what a picture!”
The forger no doubt relished Bredius and other critics blathering on breathlessly about the Italian influence on the picture and other empty analyses. But the temptation he must have felt to reveal the hoax, and thus embarrass his enemies, was tempered somewhat by an unexpected windfall. Bredius and a group of investors actually raised money to buy the fake Vermeer, for a fortune. Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus went on display at the Boymans Museum in the Netherlands and stayed there for seven years. Van Meegeren quickly graduated from proving a point to the far more lucrative business of minting other imitation Vermeers. Works like The Last Supper, with the figure of John copied rather amateurishly from the original Girl with the Pearl Earring, made lots of money for van Meegeren. But when Nazi field marshal Hermann Göring got his hands on another fake, Christ and the Adulteress, the deception turned dangerous.
At the end of World War II, the painting was discovered among the thousands of art works Göring had looted from German-occupied territories across Europe, and traced back to van Meegeren. He was arrested and charged by the Dutch government with the capital crime of collaboration with the enemy. To save himself, van Meegeren admitted he had forged Göring’s “Vermeer,” and the others as well—spurred, he said, “by the disappointment of receiving no acknowledgments from artists and critics. . . . I determined to prove my worth as a painter by making a perfect seventeenth-century canvas.” Furthermore, he argued that he had actually done his nation a great service by trading the fake with Göring for more than two hundred genuine Dutch paintings that had been stolen by the Nazis.
The presiding judge was skeptical, but allowed the prisoner the opportunity to prove himself. With the court closely watching, van Meegeren created The Young Christ Teaching in the Temple using the same techniques he had applied to his other forgeries. The result was incontrovertible, and the charges of collaboration were dropped. Van Meegeren was instead convicted of forgery and sentenced to a year in prison. He died soon after, while the experts still reeled. “It is unbelievable that it fooled me,” rem
arked one. “A psychologist could explain it better than I can.”
6
Not Quite the Surreal Deal
Van Meegeren’s fakes had all the right ingredients, but they still lacked something essential, like Vermeer’s talent. A truly great forgery requires the soul of a master. Or, in the case of Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, the sold soul of a master.
The production of fakes by great artists was nothing new. Michelangelo, for example, churned out a few phony ancient sculptures in his day. But Dalí was different. He copied himself, and he did it with crappy, mass-produced prints that made millions. “Dalí sleep best after receiving tremendous quantity of checks,” he used to say. In his later years, a sad coda to a once brilliant career, the eccentric artist found it was easier, and a lot more lucrative, to sign thousands of blank sheets. A machine would do the rest. The result was a glut of worthless Dalí “lithographs” and “original prints” that circulated around the world.
The artist was unapologetic for his participation in the gigantic fraud. “If people want to produce poor representations of my work and other people want to buy them,” he said shortly before his death in 1989, “they deserve each other.”
7
“Con Man of the Year”
Clifford Irving may have been a bit of a hack when it came to his own prose, but as a literary hoaxer he bordered on brilliant. He managed to convince two publishing powerhouses, McGraw-Hill and Time-Life, to hand over a small fortune in 1971 for what would have been a major literary coup, had it been real: The Autobiography of Howard Hughes.
The reclusive billionaire had not been photographed or interviewed for more than a decade, and rumors about him were rampant. In the minds of many, the aviation pioneer and onetime Hollywood mogul had devolved into an insane old man with wild hair and six-inch fingernails. Some even said he was dead. Intense public interest made Hughes irresistible to journalists, but he was unapproachable, hidden away in an impenetrable cocoon. Even his closest associates never saw him. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor reporter to enter into the kingdom of Howard,” quipped one New York Times writer. And anyone who even thought about writing a book on Hughes was subject to lawsuits and other forms of intimidation. So, the opportunity to have him on the record for a sanctioned book was enough to prompt a publishing feeding frenzy. Clifford Irving set out the chum.
A second-rate writer with less than stellar sales on a number of previous books—including one, ironically enough, on the great art forger Elmyr de Hory called Fake!—Irving had little to recommend him. He did, however, seem to have the cooperation of Howard Hughes himself. He told Beverly Loo, executive editor at McGraw-Hill, which had published a number of his other books, that he had sent the latest, Fake!, to Hughes and had received an enthusiastic reply. A correspondence between the two had ensued, Irving said, during which he broached the idea of writing Hughes’s biography. And, surprisingly enough, the publicity-averse hermit appeared intrigued by the idea. Irving showed McGraw-Hill executives letters that he said were from Hughes, but that he had actually forged himself.
“I am not entirely insensitive to what journalists have written about me,” Hughes supposedly wrote in one letter, “and for that reason I have the deepest respect for your treatment of de Hory, however much I may disapprove of his morals. I do not question your integrity and I would not expect you to question mine.” The next few paragraphs indicated the very real possibility of a book, which the gathered executives knew could bring their company enormous profits: “It would not suit me to die without having certain misconceptions cleared up and without having stated the truth about my life. . . . I believe in obligations. I regret many things in my past, but I have little feelings of shame about them. I would be grateful if you would let me know when and how you would wish to undertake the writing of the biography you proposed.”
Irving made a show of involving the McGraw-Hill people in secret and sensitive negotiations with Hughes. He took Beverly Loo with him to the American Express office where he said Hughes had left him a plane ticket to Mexico to discuss the proposed book. She had no idea that Irving had purchased the ticket himself and would use it for a Mexican romp with his mistress, not to meet Howard Hughes, who was actually holed up in the Bahamas at the time. After the trip, Irving returned to New York with a copious diary of his supposed meetings with Hughes, as well as the authoritative pronouncement that the famed capitalist expected to be well compensated for his cooperation. McGraw-Hill obliged with a fantastic offer of $500,000. Irving then went to Puerto Rico, ostensibly to present the offer to Hughes. He came back with his forged signature on a bogus contract.
The conditions set forth in the contract were most unusual. For example, McGraw-Hill was required to keep the agreement secret until after the complete manuscript had been accepted. This, of course, gave Irving plenty of room to maneuver without any interference. The contract also stipulated that all checks were to be made out to H. R. Hughes. When it was later discovered that a blonde woman named Helga R. Hughes had been depositing and cashing the checks in a Swiss bank, a media frenzy over her identity ensued. The London Daily Express dubbed Helga “the most wanted woman in the world,” and Henry Kissinger joked to the press about his keen desire to meet her. As it turned out, Helga was actually Irving’s wife, Edith, who used a forged passport.
Long before the Helga episode erupted, though, Irving’s scam was still unfolding. The folks at McGraw-Hill were overjoyed with the prize they believed they had won. Beverly Loo set up a secret meeting with Life magazine’s managing editor Ralph Graves, who agreed to buy world magazine and newspaper serialization rights to the Hughes book for $250,000. That covered half the money McGraw-Hill had committed, and the sale of book club and paperback rights later added hundreds of thousands more. It looked like a bonanza for the publisher, until Irving threw them an unexpected curve.
Hughes, he said, demanded more money, never mind that a contract had already been signed. To emphasize the point, Irving presented the executives with a note he said was from Hughes that authorized him to renegotiate with another publisher if McGraw-Hill failed to meet his new demands. He also showed them a bogus check from H. R. Hughes made out to them for the $100,000 the company had already paid in advance. It was a bold move on Irving’s part, but he sold the executives with his assurance that the interviews with Hughes were going so well that the book was evolving from an ordinary biography to an astonishing autobiography. Plus, he said he was able to talk Hughes down from his new demand of one million dollars to $850,000. In what they thought was hard-nosed bargaining, McGraw-Hill got the price down to $750,000, which was still a good price for the prize property they believed they were to receive. Furthermore, they had been treated to an early version of the manuscript and were delighted with what they read.
“It was outspoken,” Ralph Graves later wrote in Life, “full of rich and outrageous anecdotes, as well as detailed accounts of Hughes’s youth, his moviemaking, his career in aviation, his business affairs, his private life, his opinions and crotchets.” It was also lifted almost entirely from an unpublished manuscript by veteran journalist Jim Phelan based on interviews he had conducted with Noah Dietrich, a member of Howard Hughes’s inner circle.10 Irving peppered the manuscript he gave the publishers with marginal notes he said were from Hughes, which gave it an added sense of authenticity. For some executives at McGraw-Hill, the quality of the work alone was enough to convince them that Clifford Irving hadn’t fabricated anything. “He’s not a good enough writer to have made it up,” pronounced one.
Still, a few doubts lingered. Life’s Ralph Graves sought to reassure himself with a professional handwriting analysis of one of the notes Hughes had purportedly sent to Irving. The expert he retained, Alfred Kanfer, compared the note to writing known to be Hughes’s. “It can be stated that the two handwriting specimens were written by the same person,” Kanfer declared in his report. “The chances that another person c
ould copy this handwriting even in a similar way are less than one in a million.” Irving, perhaps inspired by his onetime biographical subject Elmyr de Hory, had proved himself. (De Hory later dismissed the idea that Irving could be behind the Hughes hoax. “He would have to be a genius,” the great forger sniffed, “and Cliff, dear boy, is no genius at anything.”)
On December 7, 1971, Pearl Harbor Day, McGraw-Hill announced that one of the world’s most enigmatic characters, a man once described as “a dozen personalities rolled into one,” was finally going to tell his story in a book to be published the following March. The news release quoted what was said to be an extract from Hughes’s preface to the book:
“I believe that more lies have been printed and told about me than about any living man—therefore it was my purpose to write a book which would set the record straight and restore the balance. . . . I have lived a full and, perhaps, what may seem like a strange life—even to myself. I refuse to apologize, although I am willing now to explain as best I can. Call this autobiography. Call it my memoirs. Call it what you please. It is the story of my life in my own words.” And lest Clifford Irving be overlooked in this great enterprise, he concocted a glowing acknowledgment from Hughes that was included in the press release: Irving had been chosen for the project “because of his sympathy, discernment, discretion and, as I learned, his integrity as a human being.” Indeed.
A Treasury of Deception Page 13
