The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  “Now I am all yours, my darling,” Maria said cheerfully, taking a seat by a framed reproduction of the Klimt portrait of a woman surrounded by gold.

  “My aunt Adele,” she said, regarding the portrait thoughtfully.

  “She and my mother were so different. My mother had teas for a lot of ladies who would not have interested Adele at all. Adele wanted to go to the university. She wanted an intellectual job. But it was not done when she was a girl.”

  Maria’s voice rose and fell in a pleasant musical cadence as she spoke.

  She smiled. “I was a timid little girl next to her,” Maria said. “She seemed arrogant and not interested in a child. She blossomed when she was with people who were learned. All Adele cared about was knowledge, learning, improving your mind. She always smoked, which was not done at that time. She seemed elegant, and cold. But apparently Klimt saw a different woman.”

  Maria explained the twists and turns of the painting’s history. Composers. Austrian artists and playwrights. Famous Nazis. It sounded like something out of The Sound of Music. Maria’s eyebrows rose with disdain. “They say now Austria was a victim of the Nazis,” Maria said scornfully. “Believe me, there were no victims. The women were throwing flowers, the church bells were ringing. They welcomed them with open arms. They were jubilant.”

  The case faced huge obstacles, not least of them Maria’s age.

  The Austrians “delay, delay, delay, hoping I will die,” Maria was saying. “But I will do them the pleasure of staying alive.” She smiled conspiratorially, as if she knew something the Austrians didn’t.

  But what legal Houdini could overcome sovereignty, long-dead witnesses, evidence destroyed by Nazis? “Randy is representing me,” Maria said proudly. “I’ve known him since he was in diapers.”

  Randy?

  “Randy is like a grandson to me,” Maria said firmly. “His grandmother Trude, the wife of the composer Erich Zeisl, was my best friend. His mother, Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg, grew up with my children.”

  The next day I was in Randol Schoenberg’s tiny legal atelier on Bundy and Wilshire. I didn’t see a secretary or a receptionist. Finally a guy appeared who looked like he had just graduated from college. This was Randy?

  His desk floated in a sea of books, stacked on the floor, crammed into bookshelves, piled on his blotter. He cleared books off a chair so I could sit down.

  Randol didn’t explain the case so much as rant about it: the Nazi lawyer, Nazi art historians, Nazi museum directors. He flung “Nazi” around rather liberally. Were all these Austrians Nazis?

  Framed by the Santa Monica Mountains, Randol spread out a century of photographs, as if he were introducing the cast of a Russian novel. Here was Maria at the Opera Ball. Here was Ferdinand, standing regally over a downed stag with a huge rack of antlers at his Czech castle; and Gustav Ucicky, the “crazy Nazi propagandist” and son of Klimt. My head swam. Was all this stuff in the lawsuit?

  A FedEx man arrived. Randol signed for the package. Did the guy have any staff?

  The delivery was the Austrian appeal. It was the size of a phone book. “It’s all about jurisdiction,” Randol said, flipping through it dismissively. “How sad.” If cases like this could be won or lost on petty-sounding technicalities, he didn’t want to hear it.

  Alone in his office, twenty stories above Los Angeles, Randy was convinced he was absolutely right. I had met few people in my life so certain of this.

  Diplomacy

  A few weeks later, I was at a crowded diplomatic cocktail party when the new Austrian consul, Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, arrived. “He’s here to save the gold!” a popular European consul whispered. I stared blankly. “The Nazi gold!” the consul hissed loudly.

  To the dismay of Austria, the Klimt case was becoming a cause célèbre, a romantic story winding its way around Los Angeles living rooms and cocktail parties. Austria had its own attorney, Scott Cooper, from a major national law firm, Proskauer Rose. But it was hard for a hired gun to possess the cachet of the grandson of an exiled composer.

  The Austrian ambassador to the United States, Peter Moser, flew in from Washington. Moser was a portly man with a warm smile and a red-faced heartiness that made it easy to picture him tucking into a sausage and a mug of beer in the Vienna Woods. We were in more banal digs, a Los Angeles Times dining room, having tired roast beef.

  “The Jewish residents brought lots of art and architecture to Vienna, and played a role in elevating it as a cultural capital,” Moser was saying in the Austrian accent popularized by his compatriot Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  “After the war, our government did not have the urge to invite these people back,” he conceded delicately. “The deep wounds and humiliation of this group of collectors—the Jews—the society has neglected, largely,” Moser said in an empathetic tone. “The emotional wound has never been addressed properly. I realize restitution must take place before wounds can be healed. We focused on expanding pensions to deported Holocaust survivors.”

  But the Bloch-Bauer case, Moser was saying, “is not a Holocaust-related claim, though the claimants want to portray it like this. The ownership was with Adele Bloch-Bauer, who left a will saying that after her death her husband, Ferdinand, would leave the paintings to the Austrian Gallery.”

  I mused about what Adele might have decided, had she lived. If she had stayed in Austria, she would almost certainly have been deported to a concentration camp. Had she fled, would she still want her paintings in Vienna?

  The Austrian ambassador was not unsympathetic. Ferdinand “was forced to sell his house in 1941 because he was a Jew,” Ambassador Moser said. “He survived the war, but everything had been taken away. They didn’t rob it. He was forced to sell his home at a discount, a fire-sale price, to the German railroad. The Nazis wanted to get rid of the Jews. The properties they had to leave behind or sell. The rest were confiscated. It was sheer looting and robbing.

  “The Nazis took the paintings out of the home. They made use of the objects, they auctioned them off, whatever. What did the Nazis do with chinaware?” Moser asked in exasperation, evoking an image of Gestapo thugs holding up fine boneware like cavemen trying to make sense of a microwave oven. “They wanted money, money, money.

  “He loved his wife, apparently very much,” Moser said. “He put the Klimt paintings in her room. The paintings, by coincidence, ended up in the Belvedere, where the will said they should. The family lawyer stated after the war that the will was valid.”

  That would have been Gustav Rinesch, fresh from Stalag 17.

  “It’s very difficult to get victims’ family members to deal with it in a strictly rational legal manner,” Moser lamented. “You remember the atrocities, the brutality, and the humiliation, and it’s hard to see it in a strictly legal way. It’s sometimes difficult to separate this from a pure legal approach.”

  Moser sighed. “The Jews were some of the greatest minds of Vienna,” he said. “Look at Freud. Gustav Mahler belonged to Adele’s salon at a brilliant time when intermarriage was common between the Jewish and Christian bourgeoisie.

  “What we object to is the situation is portrayed as condoning the Aryanizations and the looting and robbing of Jews in 1938. It has nothing to do with it! At a time of intensified restitution efforts, it’s cast in a bad light. It’s not fair!”

  Ambassador Moser had a deeply pained expression. I didn’t have the heart to point out that restitution efforts appeared to have intensified because Austrian reporters had discovered the outrageous cover-ups of art thefts.

  Family History

  To Maria, her case had everything to do with 1938.

  “Oh, Peter Moser,” Maria said over a plate of her homemade Hungarian goulash. “I was a friend of his wife. We used to have dinner. Now he says all this.”

  “Tasteless,” Maria said, as if the dispute were a grotesquely prolonged family feud. “Even the Nazis didn’t believe it was a will,” she said hotly. “Did they wait for Ferdinand to die, like Adele as
ked? No!

  “Adele’s wishes were a request, not an obligation, to share her love of the Klimts with her beloved Viennese. After she died it was up to my uncle. What love could my uncle have for Austria after they robbed him of everything? He had no intention of giving the Klimts to those people!”

  Maria looked furious. Her memories of Vienna were often seductive, idyllic, like those of a long-ago love affair, conducted in waltz time in rustling silk dresses, against a backdrop of castles and mountainous clouds.

  Now she spoke with the ire of betrayed love.

  “This art was dragged out of the house by people who murdered their friends. Would Adele have wanted the things she treasured left there after that?”

  One morning, Maria sat in her gently sunlit living room, turning the fragile pages of old leather books filled with black-and-white photographs. Here was one of Maria Bloch-Bauer, a girl becoming a woman, at the opera, smiling behind the long red velvet curtains of a private balcony. In another, the year of her debutante ball, Maria is draped in an off-the-shoulder silk organza gown, with the provocative stare of a starlet. Like her mother, Maria was a bit of a flirt.

  “I was so spoiled,” Maria sighed, smiling.

  Her eyes lingered on another photograph, of herself in an ivory wedding gown, kneeling before a white marble fireplace with gilded Corinthian ornamentation, surrounded by roses.

  She had a photo of Fritz, a handsome man with bedroom eyes, taken when they returned from their honeymoon to the new apartment. They lived there as newlyweds for ten days, before Hitler arrived.

  “And then,” Maria said, “they took away my husband.”

  The darker images emerged from the shadows of Maria’s memory reluctantly, as if the events could be revoked by silence.

  One day she disappeared into the kitchen, emerging with a dish of little sausage links and a saucer of mustard. So sweet, yet so telling. No one ate this kind of food in Los Angeles.

  “Where were we?” Maria said. “I was telling you about my sister, Luise. Luise was the beauty of the family. I was just pretty. Everyone was in love with Luise. She was a baroness.”

  Maria turned the pages of the album, stopping at a photo of a woman who looked like the leading lady of a 1940s movie. This was Luise.

  Alongside Luise was a delicate-looking girl, about eleven or twelve, with long braids and enormous, wary eyes.

  “That’s Nelly,” Maria said, Luise’s daughter. “She married an Austrian prince. She’s a cancer expert.” Maybe I should speak to her? “Oh, no, don’t call Nelly!” Maria said in an alarmed tone, closing the album with a thump.

  She sighed. “Things were so terrible for them,” Maria said. “In 1943, they lined up the family to deport them: Luise, Viktor, Nelly, Franz. One of Luise’s friends ran to tell a Gestapo chief who was always in love with her.

  “My sister had to sleep with that horrible Nazi, to save her family,” Maria said. Her eyes grew distant. She picked up a glass paperweight of Adele’s portrait and rubbed it like a talisman.

  “So you see,” she said, “I haven’t lived through anything.”

  ——

  Maria and Randol didn’t have endlessly deep pockets to pursue a speculative case. They did have allies. In February 2002, Randol said the Commission for Art Recovery, which was chaired by Lauder, contributed $21,750 toward a $35,000 independent legal opinion by Rudolf Welser, a distinguished Austrian expert on inheritance law. Welser concluded that Ferdinand was the true owner of the Klimts, making Adele’s will irrelevant. “We [made the contribution] because Mr. Schoenberg correctly understood Austrian law and the Austrian government appeared not to understand,” said Charles Goldstein, counsel for the commission, who declined to specify the amount.

  But Randol had a family to think about. He told his wife, Pam, that if he lost a round, he would quit and go back to corporate law.

  To give up would have been difficult for Randol, who said that a friend had told him that in every second generation from the Holocaust, there was a “torchbearer” of the family legacy. This is how Randol saw himself: as the torchbearer of his generation.

  In 2000, he went to Washington, D.C., to be part of the negotiations for the creation of Austria’s multimillion-dollar General Settlement Fund, to grant restitution awards to Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families. One day Randol stood and began to speak about the lost world that had shaped Freud and Mahler, the world of his grandparents, and he choked up with tears.

  Like Czernin, Randol was a bit of a crusader.

  But Pam had grown up in Ohio listening to the stories of her Ukrainian grandmother, Rose. Rose grew up in a shtetl in the Kiev region where Sholem Aleichem set the stories on which Fiddler on the Roof is based. As a little girl, she was swept up in the pogroms. Her handsome brother Herschel was murdered trying to save a girl from a rapacious mob. Her parents hid jewelry and money in Rose’s thick red hair, and set off looking for a boat to America. Rose’s disabled sister, Goldie, was sent back from Ellis Island, to die in the Holocaust. Pam saw the Klimt case as a stark symbol of the unpunished and their ill-gotten gains. Keep going, Pam told him. I didn’t grow up with a lot of privileges. Don’t give this up for us.

  And Randol kept winning. In December 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Maria could sue in U.S. courts under an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act for property stolen in violation of international law. Randol had established jurisdiction by finding English-language guidebooks of the Austrian Gallery for sale in a Los Angeles bookstore, demonstrating commercial activity. The Los Angeles Times called it “the first time in Holocaust reparations that a federal appeals court has ruled that a foreign government can be held accountable in a U.S. court.”

  “I want those paintings to be in American and Canadian museums,” Maria told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s my dream.”

  This ruling worried the Austrians. They had ignored Randol, but he hadn’t gone away.

  There was only one final place to appeal the decision: the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Supreme Judgment

  The Supreme Court case seemed a long shot.

  The George W. Bush administration had warned the judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of the diplomatic consequences of allowing Maria’s lawsuit to go forward. Now it filed a brief with the Supreme Court, supporting Austria’s position. Leila Sadat, a Washington University expert on international criminal and human rights law, voiced a common view: “I think the plaintiffs are probably swimming upstream.”

  Randol and Maria figured they had nothing to lose.

  But the stakes were much higher now.

  Maria said Ron Lauder had told her that the Supreme Court argument should be made by a more experienced attorney, such as Robert Bork, a conservative warhorse whose embattled nomination as Supreme Court justice had gone down in defeat in 1987. “Lauder said, ‘You can’t just have Randy at the Supreme Court,’ ” Maria said. (Lauder declined to comment.) Legendary Los Angeles trial lawyer Bert Fields told Maria she should add an “experienced litigator” to her Supreme Court team.” “I would have been glad to help,” Fields recalled later.

  Maria mulled this over. Randol was living the case now. He didn’t have time for a lot of distractions: His wife was at the end of another difficult pregnancy. People who called him at home after hours would find him bathing his two youngest children, Dora and Nathan, or putting them to bed.

  Randol drove to Los Angeles hearings singing along with the powerful soprano Jessye Norman to “The Love Death” from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde to build his morale before preliminary hearings with the lawyer for Austria, Scott Cooper, of Proskauer Rose.

  In Los Angeles, Randol and Maria were a familiar sight, appearing together at small luncheons of legal associations and stolen art registries, where Randol would stand up and explain the technical minutiae of laws governing stolen art, and the complicated twists and turns of their case.

  Could anyone articulate their
arguments better than Randol? To Maria, Randol and the case seemed inseparable.

  In a pragmatic, drive-by world, Maria was loyal to the people she believed in. They would go to the Supreme Court together.

  On the eve of the February 2004 hearing, Maria went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and walked through the corridors. She studied the images of the concentration camps liberated by American soldiers, filled with dead prisoners and emaciated survivors. They could have been her. All of them. She was alive because she had escaped. If her father hadn’t died, she would have stayed in Vienna. They would have been doomed.

  When Randol walked into the vast court chamber the next morning, Maria was disconcerted. Randy looked so small, so incredibly young. She saw the judges look at him and exchange smiles. Would they take Randy seriously?

  Justice David Souter’s first question to Randol was long, unintelligible, incomprehensible. Randol froze. He had absolutely no idea what Souter was talking about.

  “Can you repeat the question?” Randol said finally. There were gasps in the audience. Randol felt like an Olympic figure skater who had fallen on the ice at his first jump.

  But the Supreme Court justices smiled. Randol would later hear that Souter sometimes threw out a convoluted first question.

  Randol began again. He felt himself gain momentum. For the rest of his argument, he felt like he was soaring.

  Scott Cooper, Austria’s lawyer, was arguing that the exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, enacted in 1976, could not be applied retroactively to events that had occurred fifty years ago. Cooper said he felt international law shielded Austria from these kinds of lawsuits. “The question is one of the expectations of one sovereign that it would be treated fairly by another,” he argued.