All the “children” were very involved with their own families and their work — I felt blessed when they could take time out for a dinner or an outing. Every summer, until 1990, we spent time in the Adirondacks together, refreshing times of renewal and fun, of getting to know each other all over again. Grandchildren arrived, and these weeks became even more precious, as I watched the next generation swimming, canoeing, and fishing in the same places as had I, my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. We’d breakfast on Duncan’s flap-jacks, made from a recipe from Louis Duane. We’d talk about old times, and make our plans for the day — for fishing, sailing, hikes. One day, my granddaughter Emily glimpsed a bear and shrieked with terror and joy — and I remembered the evening my son-in-law Bill Evans had answered a knock on the door, thinking some poor fisherman was lost in the dark and looking for help. But no, there was a huge bear, up on his hind legs, pushing on the screen door, only inches from Bill’s ashen face! At eight, Emily’s brother Michael caught his first bass in Plumley Pond, and I showed him a picture of myself, also at eight, with my first bass. My oldest grandchild, Anthony Evans, learned to water-ski when he was only nine. I’d sit on the deck watching him, drifting into reveries — was that my brother and sister, having their famous mile-long swimming race, or was it Miche and Dunc out there competing in Forked Lake? Was that my father trying out his new bamboo rod, rowing slowly in the varnished guideboat, or was it his namesake, my son Cully, practicing his casts before heading off to Bog Stream to lure elusive trout from their deep pools and feed us all our dinner? As I watched Fiona and her British beau preparing for a picnic outing, I remembered as if it were yesterday doing the same with my first love, the nephew of “Doc” Bergamini, the doctor who’d spent summers across the lake, at Squirrel Point, and who’d removed my appendix when I was eight. How shy I’d felt with his nephew David, lying in a canoe while the northern lights streamed across the sky above us, gorgeous, almost as dizzying as the first stirrings of passion.
Twenty-two
The third theme Tom and I outlined as a goal, attracting supporters, was inseparable from the other two. Mostly, our searches were joyous. In my memory, we were always dancing!
My friend Anne Zinsser had introduced me to the Ganzes in Connecticut, and in 1980, during another dinner with the Zinssers, Victor Ganz took me aside. I’d totally changed, over the last year or two, he said. I obviously had the Museum job in hand, I was clear and confident. He couldn’t get over the difference. After an evening discussing art and artists — including Victor’s reasoned, eloquent defense of Richard Tuttle’s genius — I lay awake wondering how to capitalize on this new-found strength. One way, I realized, was to persuade Victor to join the board of trustees, but that would take quite a while. Art was all-important to him, he was always interested in new ideas, but didn’t make a connection between furthering the art he loved and serving on a board he saw as a fund-raising and social body. Tom and I, on the other hand, strongly felt that his conviction about the importance of art could inspire trustees to believe in our plans.
Tom persuaded him to join the drawings acquisitions committee led by Paul Cummings, with a membership of articulate connoisseurs. Discussions were long, informed, animated. Members backed up their strong opinions with intelligence and wit. No one left meetings early. Many members were from out of town, but they almost always showed up: Steven Paine, a wonderful collector from Boston who had MS and was in a wheelchair; Nancy O’Boyle, a close friend with a connoisseur’s eye for art, flew in from Texas; Ed Bergman, a trustee with an astounding collection of Surrealist art, came from Chicago; Walter Fillin, whose collection was more conservative than that of the others, but of equally high quality, drove in from Long Island; Jules Prown, the chairman, who ran the best meetings ever, took the train from New Haven. Hanging drawings of the highest quality alongside others of slightly lesser worth for members to chew over and ultimately to vote on, Paul would challenge the group to select the best. Only quality mattered — and indeed, in 1987 the National Gallery in Washington validated the committee’s discrimination by showing, as their very first American drawings exhibition, selections from the Whitney’s drawings collection.
Perhaps my favorite social evening of all those years was the small, perfect dinner at their home to which Sally and Victor Ganz invited me on November 18, 1980. Sally was an equal partner with Victor in their understanding and appreciation of art, and Sally had an additional warmth. Jasper Johns, Calvin Tomkins, Susan Cheever, Philip Johnson, and David Whitney were the guests that evening, and conversation was relaxed, as it is among good friends. I was delighted to be seated next to Jasper. After dinner, Victor told the story of acquiring Picasso’s “Algerian Women” series (1954–55), five of which hung on the red walls of the Ganzes’ sitting room. He’d been in Paris on business when he had first seen them, and had immediately called Sally. “They’re Picasso’s finest works yet,” he said — only for sale as a whole series of fifteen paintings — “of course, I couldn’t buy them, it would mean pulling the children out of their schools, no college for them, God knows what else.” Of course he wouldn’t, said Sally.
But of course, he did! He eventually sold most of them, but he’d been unable to resist the extraordinary innovation he believed they represented in the history of painting — the leap to a fourth dimension, the possibility of seeing all around the object. Victor, I realized, was on an entirely different level than most collectors, in his intellectual and emotional response to painting.
As the evening ended, we descended sixteen floors to the basement, originally connected to a marina so tenants could leave their yachts and enter the building directly from the East River. (In the ’40s, during World War II, that space was turned into an air-raid shelter.) The Ganzes had appropriated this huge space for the overflow of their collection — large works by Frank Stella, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, and, of course, Jasper Johns.
One day, Victor invited me to his office to discuss the Whitney. Walking through the door of the costume jewelry business his grandfather had founded, which Victor was now running, I was dazzled by cases of glittering faux diamonds, rubies, pearls set in extravagant bracelets, necklaces, rings, brooches. Above and around them, prints by Jasper Johns literally papered the walls, outshining the baubles, drawing the eye and the mind beyond the world they inhabited so calmly. An astonishing mélange, a wonderful extension of Victor’s vision.
Finally, in 1981, my opportunity arrived after dinner with the artists in the Biennial. Punk was the current fad, and I remember Alexis Smith, a wonderful artist who later had a retrospective at the Whitney, wearing white bobby socks with one green shoe and one purple shoe. In a corner of the trustees’ room with Victor Ganz, each of us with glass in hand, I decided it was the moment to propose. Knowing how strongly he supported it, I felt our expansion hung on Victor’s answer: on his speaking for us, articulating the importance of the Whitney and its project, as an insider. Victor looked pensive for quite a while. I waited.
“All right, I will.”
I leaped into the air, I hugged him.
Victor looked a bit glum. “I’ve lost my virginity,” he said, with his inimitable puckish smile.
Tom and I put Victor on every possible trustee committee — in the areas of both art and business, because he was equally able in each. Hours before a budget and operations committee meeting he’d come to the Museum and go over all the figures and their background with the financial officer, and be more fully prepared at the meeting than anyone. Before an acquisitions committee meeting, he’d read, he’d go to galleries to see other work by the upcoming artists, he’d talk to their collectors — and he’d have a proper perspective to make a judgment.
Oh, how I miss Victor, still.
Money, money, money — an unending need, constantly impelling us to think of new people and new ways to get it. Increasing our expectations of the board, we soon counted on most members — especially new ones — to support the Museu
m’s Annual Giving campaign with at least fifty thousand dollars a year, and to give money for their committees only after fulfilling that obligation. I learned not to be shy about asking. Trustees helped me in this.
In the still recent old days, my grandmother and mother had literally “given ’til it hurt.” In their wake, the first nonfamily trustees, without being asked, had also been as generous as they felt they could be. Now, more money was available than ever before from new, richer trustees who expected some form of recognition — publicly expressed gratitude; social or business contacts; a say in programming; a more “successful” Museum in terms of attendance or public relations; one or more of these, to bring them credit — as a “successful” child does for ambitious parents.
I finally gained the courage to ask a reluctant trustee to increase his gift, and he did. After that, with Charlie Simon’s coaching and even a practice session with him, I visited Larry Tisch and asked him for a substantial contribution. Despite his dismay at the current deficit, he promised to help, surprising me by saying he thought I was “terrific” and doing a good job. He sent $5,000, twice the amount of his last gift four years earlier. Not much for him, but the big jump boded well. In a welcome turnaround, David Solinger sent Tom a check for $5,000, with a note also saying he was doing a great job.
For programs, we tried to find donors other than trustees. Collectors of contemporary art were multiplying rapidly, and we had a bigger pool to fish in every year.
Early on, in 1978, we met with Jane and Bob Meyerhoff, of Baltimore, top-notch horse breeders and racers with an outstanding collection of work by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. Direct, delightful, they were more at home with art and artists than anyone I’d met except the Ganzes. Learning of their disagreement with their local museum, I immediately proposed that they build us a wing instead. Bob laughed, and said I was learning fast — but that they planned to build their own museum.
Assembled over many years, the Meyerhoffs’ collection unquestionably has a specific character, and its owners, loyal to this concept, rather than to an institution, were eager to keep the paintings and sculptures together and on view. We were alarmed by the increasing number of intelligent patrons who were moving away from giving major works to public museums. Bad for the public, we thought, since most private museums are not easily accessible to large numbers, and our focus was on making the Whitney more so. Worse still, in the ’80s, as prices for contemporary art skyrocketed, some collectors couldn’t resist the lure of big money and sold their collections at auction, scattering them, nullifying the ideas that had made them distinctive, and betraying the trust of the artists and dealers who’d often sold them rare and special works. Most museums didn’t have enough money to compete with private buyers. The Whitney certainly didn’t.
The Meyerhoffs became personal friends of mine, and generous friends to the Whitney as well.
I remember a “fishing” trip to Florida in 1979, when Tom and I drove by an enormous house Richard Meier was building for Alfred Taubman, a real estate developer from Detroit, and we determined to find a way to meet its owner. The next year, on a visit to my mother in Hobe Sound, Tom met me in Palm Beach and we visited Alfred, who invited us along with Mum to lunch. His house intrigued her. She was especially impressed by the TV at the foot of his bed that appeared and disappeared at the touch of a button, also by the rows of clothes in his closet. He never packed anything, all he needed was in each place he lived. Two hundred shirts lined up on white hangers! Fifty pairs of shoes! It was a shiny white ocean-liner-of-the-thirties house, with catwalks, glass bricks, and classical sculpture and modern paintings by Rothko, Moore, de Kooning. Curved glass walls like huge portholes in a house of gleaming white porcelain, with crisp geometric lines and curves constantly changing as we walked, a brilliant green croquet crease, a boat like a shark tied to the dock, and the telephone a constant background. Food, drinks, towels, wrappers, appeared effortlessly; instant gratification. Can we deal with it? Tom and I wondered.
In my photograph album, Alfred stands with a croquet mallet in a teeny bathing suit and a big scarlet T-shirt, on his emerald lawn, right by Willem de Kooning’s bronze Clamdigger.
Alfred himself was a rotund, ebullient man with small observant eyes and a quick mind. He seemed so friendly and warm, but everything surrounding him was so exquisite, so expensive — so inhuman? Even his guest, Anna Marks, looked perfect, a blonde woman with an impeccable figure. Our desire for some of his riches, so needed by the Museum, engulfed any warning signals, and we persevered in our quest for Alfred.
The following spring, I lunched with Alfred Taubman, Tom, and Joel at the Knick. “Hard sell,” I noted in my journal, “urged on by Joel, re past, present and future of the WM — Joel helped a lot to get us talking. At end of lunch Alfred said ‘Well, the Whitney is my favorite Museum,’ and will consider joining acquisitions committee — $25,000 no problem. Joel then told us just one of his real estate companies has made about 100 million over the last 2 years. I like him — but think he’s tough, might give us grief.”
The next time Alfred invited Tom and me for dinner in that Palm Beach house, we planned to ask him to become a trustee and to help us build our new building. We’d become friends. I remember, after the hour-long drive from my mother’s rented house in Hobe Sound, changing into my linen pants in the car outside his driveway, so I’d arrive un-mussed! Luckily I did. Because it was a very elegant dinner for fourteen, including Alfred’s friend from Paris, Anna Marks, in a gorgeous veil of gold and flowers within which she floated; and — most significantly — Alfred’s friend, partner, and chief advisor from Detroit, Max Fisher, and his wife. We knew right away we were on trial. Seated on Alfred’s right, I admired the extravagant flower arrangements (he’d fixed them himself), the food (he’d planned it with the new chef), and the house (we had no idea of all the trouble he’d gone through)!
With Max on my other side, I was cautious. But he knew how to draw me out, and I found myself telling him all about Sydney, soon to be my husband, whom he already knew about — but how? — and the Museum, describing the reasons for our space needs, our big hopes of becoming the place where people from all over the world would come to see American art. He seemed interested, and told me a bit about Detroit, its problems and its potential. I imagined he had much to do with the likelihood of achieving that potential.
After dinner, a three-piece orchestra appeared, and we danced on the terrace, by the light of a full moon, around the sapphire pool. Alfred had great rhythm and was light on his feet; dancing with him was delightful. Staggered by the opulence of the whole evening, wondering what was to come, we finally departed in a moonlit haze, after inviting Alfred and Anna for lunch with Mum in Hobe Sound the next day.
They came, along with Douglas and Mary Dillon and Mum’s old friend, Harlan Miller. Mum shone. The strange mix of people really worked. Surely, Douglas foresaw big bucks for the Met, whose chairman he was. Just like us, only better at it, I feared.
The next day, we went back to Alfred’s and, in between phone calls from people we’d have liked for the Whitney, such as Charles Allen and Henry Ford, we tried to have a serious talk. Alfred asked for a month to decide. (Was he hoping for a bid from a more prestigious institution?)
And the result?
Alfred joined the board. Joined the building committee. Was involved in our choice of architect, which he applauded, even hiring Michael Graves to design many of his own most cherished projects. Came to every building committee meeting, staying for hours, keeping an impatient secretary outside the boardroom trying to remind him how late he was for his other appointments. Trained as an architect himself, glorying in his expertise, loving this role, confident, glowing with pleasure, Alfred engaged our architects in lengthy confabs about details only he and they understood.
We assumed that his intense interest in the building ensured a major gift toward its becoming a reality. But he had a new ambitio
n: to buy Sotheby-Parke Bernet, currently looking for a “white knight” to prevent an unwelcome takeover. Would this aristocratic, elite, very British institution accept America’s rough diamond? The question was eagerly addressed by the press of two continents. We watched and waited, until one day Alfred asked Tom to write one of the two letters of recommendation Sotheby’s had requested. Of course Tom agreed. The letter must have been effective, because soon after Alfred became the owner of Sotheby’s, to his delight, as he never failed to tell us. And he spent more and more time on it, traveling from one end of the world to another, charming, persuading this one or that one to sell through him their precious gems, objets d’art, paintings, or castles. Shooting parties in Spain, country weekends in Sussex, or parties in the new apartment he’d moved to with his new wife, Judy, a beautiful young woman and the perfect hostess for all the entertaining now necessary. Alfred was at the peak of his career. Perhaps of his life?
In New York, I later approached him for a major gift to our campaign, sure he would respond generously, but he danced as lightly around my request as he had around that Florida pool. He didn’t know. What was Leonard giving? It was a bad time. His real home was in Detroit. He was chairman of the museum’s fund drive there, a huge responsibility.
A big challenge gift from Alfred would have done wonders for our project. I was terribly disappointed, but I should have known. It was always traumatic to pry from Alfred his promised annual trustee gift and committee dues, involving numerous phone calls, usually from me, to his secretaries, assistants, and finally to Alfred himself. Strange how the very wealthy often seem obstinately reluctant to part with what is for them the smallest amount of money.
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 36
