The Lady in Gold

by Anne-marie O'connor

  Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative, cut in. “I don’t know if we protect expectations of this sort,” he shot back.

  To Randol, this seemed a sign that things were going well for him.

  But the next morning, David Pike, a veteran Supreme Court reporter in his sixties, predicted in the Los Angeles Daily Journal that Randol would lose. Randol hated the headline: “Court Likely Will Reverse Art Case.” He called Pike. “Why did you write this?” he demanded tersely.

  Pike sighed. “I’ve been reporting on the Supreme Court for thirty years,” he said. “You don’t have a chance. The body language was against you.”

  For the next three months, Randol woke up every morning and booted up his computer to check the Supreme Court website. One morning, as he made breakfast for his kids, the phone rang.

  It was David Pike.

  This was a very bad omen.

  “Okay, give me the bad news,” Randol said. He was still ticked off at Pike.

  Pike paused.

  “You won,” he said.

  A few hours later, Maria was surrounded by reporters.

  “Because Mrs. Altmann is eighty-eight years old, we’re trying to get a trial date very soon,” Randol was telling a British journalist. “Slowly but surely, people are realizing paintings like these have to be returned.”

  “He spent six years on this!” Maria told another reporter, smiling at Randol with maternal affection.

  Would you be willing to settle with the Austrian government? a reporter was asking. “Well—” Maria began.

  Randol broke in. “You can’t be too eager to settle with them!” he said. “You shouldn’t even talk about it!

  “It’s up to Austria to decide how they will treat this issue,” Randol said. “Right now, it’s a big embarrassment to lose a case in a U.S. Supreme Court.” A documentary crew was hovering over Maria. “You’re famous,” Randol said.

  Maria looked fatigued. She headed for the kitchen.

  Randol followed. “Just be careful,” he told her. “Everybody wants to do a deal. Don’t send the wrong message.” Randol feared a settlement offer would give the Austrians an excuse to stall and hurt their effort to get a resolution on the case.

  Maria sat down wearily at the kitchen table. The phone and doorbell kept ringing. She sighed, reaching out to touch the pink asters on the table. “I’m not a kid anymore,” Maria said. “I get very tired.

  “I’m concerned about Nelly,” she said. “She has the idea that what we were doing was not correct.”

  She regarded a framed pen and ink drawing of her father, Gustav, playing his beloved Stradivarius.

  “I didn’t have any hope. Not this much,” Maria said, holding up her little finger, her face a mirror of mixed emotions.

  “The Austrians will still fight us tooth and nail.”

  In Vienna, Toman studied the U.S. Supreme Court decision with deep dismay. The ruling did not deal with the ownership of the paintings. It was highly technical. The Supreme Court concluded that the 1976 U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act could be retroactively applied. Justice John Paul Stevens said that while the act usually protects foreign governments from lawsuits in the United States, this case could proceed under the “expropriation exception.”

  The ruling did not deal with the merits of Maria’s lawsuit—but the details were aired anyway, in the summary of the allegations.

  “In 1946 Austria enacted a law declaring all transactions motivated by Nazi ideology null and void,” wrote Justice Stevens in the majority opinion. “This did not result in the immediate return of looted artwork to exiled Austrians, however, because a different provision of Austrian law proscribed export of ‘artworks . . . deemed to be important to the country’s cultural heritage’ and required anyone wishing to export art to obtain the permission of the Austrian Federal Monument agency. Seeking to profit from this requirement, the Gallery and the Federal Monument agency allegedly adopted a practice of ‘forcing Jews to donate or trade valuable artworks to the [Gallery] in exchange for export permits for other works.’ ”

  This ruling allowed the case to proceed in U.S. courts. The entire grievance had now been aired in a high-profile forum. This was a major setback for Austria. Now the country faced the daunting prospect of defending itself against a prominent Holocaust case in a U.S. court. Even its appeals would publicize Maria’s side of the case, all over the world.

  Austria was cornered.

  In April 2005, Maria and other heirs received a $21.8 million award from a Swiss restitution fund, for the surrender of Ferdinand’s sugar factory by the Swiss bank that had illegally handed it over for Aryanization.

  The tide was turning.

  Arbitration

  Randol, the seasoned chess player, thought long and hard. Then he proposed his next move.

  Randol told Maria he thought they should accept an Austrian offer to submit the case to binding arbitration with a panel of Austrian legal experts. Maria was visibly startled. “Maria, if you want this case decided in your lifetime, we have to take this chance,” Randol said.

  Maria stared at him. Trust the Austrians? “You’re crazy,” she said. Czernin also had his doubts. “Are you sure?” he kept asking Randol.

  Five Bloch-Bauer heirs agreed to take part in the arbitration in Austria. Four of them were represented by Randol: Maria; George Bentley, the son who had made the Yugoslavian escape aboard the Orient Express in the arms of Thea and Robert; Trevor Mantle, the nephew of Robert’s second wife; and Francis, Nelly’s younger brother Franz.

  Nelly herself took part, though she had her own lawyer, William Berardino of Vancouver. Nelly said she didn’t wish to stand in the way of her family. Randol wondered if she also doubted the Austrian arbitrators would ever give them the paintings.

  Randol appeared before the Austrian arbitration panel in Vienna in September 2005 to present his case, in German and English. Under the terms of the arbitration, Randol had chosen one of the arbitrators, Andreas Noedl, a charismatic barrister whose intensity and rangy physicality were more suggestive of a symphony conductor than a lawyer. Noedl had met Randol in 2000, during Austrian negotiations over Aryanized property. Noedl and his wife had invited Randol to dinner in Vienna, and Randol taught Noedl’s kids to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Austria chose its own expert, Walter Rechberger, the dean of the University of Vienna Law School.

  Noedl and Rechberger elected the third panelist, Peter Rummel. Rummel, born in 1940, was a dark horse. He had an impeccable reputation. He was a distinguished law professor and had served as the dean of the faculty of law in Linz, Hitler’s adopted hometown. He had written a highly influential two-volume work on Austrian civil law that was considered an obligatory reference. His son, Martin Rummel, was a concert cellist.

  But little else was known about his background or his sympathies, except that he was German-born. He acquired Austrian citizenship as an adult.

  Noedl told Randol they had selected Rummel. It was the same day Joseph Ratzinger was named the new pope.

  “I hope he wasn’t a member of Hitler Youth too,” Randol said of the enigmatic Rummel, apocryphally. Rummel was born in 1940.

  The panelists sat down and began a long walk through history. This was more than just law. This was a search for justice. Christmas came and still there was no decision.

  Randol had also maintained that Ferdinand had owned the Klimt portrait of his friend Amalie Zuckerkandl, but since some of her heirs also claimed the painting, it was set aside for a separate arbitration.

  Behind the scenes, the panelists had concluded that under the patriarchal property laws of Adele’s era, the owner of the Klimts was presumably Ferdinand, and Adele’s will was a “mere request.” They discarded as “far-fetched” Toman’s suggestion that Ferdinand might have claimed he owned the paintings to protect her from speculation about her relationship with Klimt.

  The panelists wrestled for weeks over one of the key issues: whether Austria had extorted the
paintings quid pro quo in exchange for exit permits for other property, a keystone of the 1998 restitution law.

  The Austrian government had long said the case had nothing to do with the Holocaust and was a simple case of Adele’s will. It was clear they had greatly miscalculated.

  During the Third Reich, the panelists noted, “the parties involved in acts of seizure often did everything they could to at least give the appearance of legally valid transactions,” leaving even acts of civil law open to question. Erich Führer didn’t seem to have adhered to Adele’s will anyway: he had handed her paintings over to the Belvedere while Ferdinand was still very much alive, and he “simply extorted” Klimt’s Schloss Kammer am Attersee, Ferdinand’s sole donation, which Randol did not claim. After the war, it appeared that Gustav Rinesch “used the paintings as weapons” to recover what he could from Austria for his old friends who had fled.

  Finally, on January 15, 2006, the three arbitrators made a decision. But instead of relief, they felt an even greater burden.

  Noedl was drained. A few hours later, he took his family to the Belvedere Palace for a silent look at the gold portrait of Adele, whose destiny would be sealed by the judgment.

  For Randol, the wait was agonizing. He nursed growing doubts about whether he should have trusted an Austrian panel. After all these years, had he finally made a fatal misstep?

  He distractedly attended children’s birthday parties one Sunday in mid-January with Pam and their three vivacious children.

  There was still no word.

  Randol second-guessed himself all day. Maybe he should have stuck with U.S. courts. Maybe Maria was right. Maybe he had been crazy to place his trust in an Austrian panel, after Austria had fought him every step of the way.

  That afternoon he played chess. His friend won easily with a pawn. That evening, Randol lost hand after hand of poker, leaving $60 on the table. It seemed a bad omen.

  It was well after midnight when Randol got home. His BlackBerry was on the table where he left it, its message light blinking as usual. Joey had a fever and Pam was asleep. Randol picked up the BlackBerry and scrolled through messages from family and work. He spotted one message from Austria, and with trepidation, he opened it.

  He stared at the message in disbelief. He had won. Unbelievably, he had won!

  He had to tell someone. He looked in on Pam, but she was sound asleep. It was too late to call anyone.

  Except Hubertus Czernin. He picked up the phone.

  The Viennese journalist was with his wife and three daughters, getting ready to celebrate his fiftieth birthday with the help of the morphine that kept his pain at bay. He and Randol laughed together at their unexpected shared victory.

  The next day, the phone rang nonstop at Randol’s office. He idly played his messages. “I let out a whopping yell in the bathroom when I heard this on NPR! I’m just bursting with pride! This will be with you for the rest of your life!” a friend of his, Art Gelber, said euphorically.

  “I have a possible buyer for some of the paintings,” began another caller.

  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.

  Ciao Adele

  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.