Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  The committee agreed that the documents raised uncomfortable questions that the Getty had long avoided answering. What if True had done something wrong? Erichsen thought the Italians were using the charges against the curator to shake the Getty down, but as Bernard noted during the conference call, "It's only blackmail if Marion True didn't do anything wrong."

  Kaplan, an expert on governance for the high-powered Manhattan law firm Skadden, Arps, went further. Obviously, True wasn't doing all this on her own, she pointed out. "How do John Walsh and Harold Williams fit into this?" she asked. "Vast sums were spent on the Fleischman collection. This had been going on for a long time. Their approval had to be there. What is our strategy to deal with this?" She wanted to know whether there was any link between the Getty's 1995 policy change and the 1996 acquisition of the Fleischman collection. Was the policy a way of justifying the acquisition? Why was the collection acquired if most people suspected it of being hot? It was Gardner who asked the clincher: what was the board's legal exposure?

  The questions kept coming, and there were far too few answers. The search of Getty files so far had turned up several troubling bits of information, but it wasn't a comprehensive investigation. Only a thorough inquiry—one that questioned Gribbon, True, and others directly—would get to the bottom of what had really happened at the Getty. The executive committee had considered the step but backed down each time, concerned about the public relations ramifications.

  "At what point must we give the board an honest appraisal?" Kaplan asked. She had doubts about the discretion of her fellow trustees and recommended that Erichsen's briefing paper be kept from the full board. Erichsen pushed back. The trust had a moral and legal duty to keep the board informed, he said. Withholding his briefing paper would look like a cover-up, and he and other members of Munitz's management team wanted to make sure all the board members were fully informed so that no one could plead ignorance later.

  In the end, the committee reached a compromise. There would be no deeper investigation. All the references to "troubling" documents and "arresting" Polaroids would be excised from Erichsen's briefing paper, but the trustees would be briefed orally on them. Even the sanitized document would be guarded closely, with numbered copies passed out at the beginning of the board's discussion and collected at the end. Faced with an opportunity to find the truth, the Getty leadership once again opted for only the appearance of due diligence.

  The precautions worked too well. During the board meeting, trustees had time only to scan the briefing paper, and none saw the photos. Erichsen's presentation dwelt on legalisms. He glossed over the Getty's own disturbing discoveries, emphasizing instead what he considered Italy's immoral conduct. "Our attempt to accommodate them has only drawn us deeper into a one-sided, even in some respects sordid, effort on their part," he said. "We may yet be able to negotiate with them successfully, but we believe that to do so we need to establish a credible position in the public debate over cultural patrimony."

  As Munitz sat through the discussion, he seemed to have other things on his mind. His primary concern was not Italy, but the next topic on the agenda: his raise. Munitz was already being paid more than $1 million a year in total compensation—more than any other museum director, university president, or foundation chief in the nation. His income was essentially tax-free. As part of his contract, the Getty reimbursed him for all the state and federal taxes he paid. He had an SUV at his disposal, a personal driver, and a pool of five secretaries. But that wasn't enough for Munitz. He had a copy of Harold Williams's final contract in a file, and he felt that his benefits paled by comparison. For the rest of his life, Williams was to receive more than 100 percent of his final Getty salary of $600,000, along with secretarial support and office space at the Getty Center. By contrast, the board had put a cap on Munitz's generous retirement package. And whereas Williams had received a completion bonus for bringing the Getty Center in over budget and behind schedule, Munitz would receive nothing for accelerating the completion of the Getty Villa. It was simply unfair.

  Munitz had been lobbying Bernard, who as head of the board's compensation committee was responsible for recommending the CEO's annual raise. Bernard was concerned that giving Munitz a large raise in the midst of other, wide-sweeping cuts would send the wrong message to Getty employees and the public. Munitz countered that the tough times had made his job more demanding and therefore more deserving of a reward.

  In the end, the board decided that Munitz's performance had been "very strong" but voted to give him only a 4.5 percent increase, on the low end of the range. Although he was the only person at the Getty to get a performance raise for the year, he was furious. Over the next year, he would make it his mission to see that he was fairly compensated.

  OF ALL THE uncomfortable information facing the Getty during the escalating Italian investigation, one of the most agonizing was sitting at the board table: Barbara Fleischman.

  Fleischman sensed that board members were wavering over what to do about their embattled curator and became stridently defensive of True. She urged the Getty to launch a public relations campaign on behalf of True, touting her role as a reformer in the antiquities trade. She called on colleagues to approach their powerful friends—former secretaries of state James Baker and Warren Christopher, or even National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice—to broker a diplomatic solution with Italy. This was, after all, not just a Getty issue, but an issue that affected all American museums. Fleischman accused the Italians of "raping and pillaging" the Getty. At one point, she said that True was taking the fall for Walsh and Williams, much like the Nazi generals who were prosecuted for following the orders of their superiors. "It's just like Nuremberg," she cried.

  The board was reluctant to act. With the Italians increasingly focused on how Fleischman and her husband had built their own collection, it was evident that she might soon be a target as well. At the behest of board leadership, Erichsen and Martin had already visited Fleischman in her Manhattan apartment to offer some awkward advice: she should retain her own legal counsel. And since the matter involved her actions before she became a board member, she would have to pay for her own attorney. Fleischman had already racked up $30,000 in legal fees consulting with her attorney about how she might defend herself while also helping True. She was adamant that the Getty should pay the bill and threatened to go over Erichsen's head by raising the issue with Munitz and Gardner. Erichsen warned the board's executive committee that paying Fleischman's legal expenses would be a violation of the U.S. tax code, which would consider it illegal compensation for a board member. Erichsen got the reaction he wanted.

  "I agree ... completely," Helene Kaplan told Erichsen in a voice mail delivered from outside a board meeting of the Carnegie Corporation, which she chaired. "I think we would be jeopardizing our potential tax exemption ... and I think that's the way it has to be presented.

  "But truthfully, secondly, I think it equally important for the Getty to keep our distance. I don't want us to be implicated any more than we have to."

  MUNITZ'S FEARS OF a whispering campaign, it turned out, were well-founded. He just had the wrong suspects.

  Gribbon had become increasingly angry at Munitz and Murphy, and they with her. The relationship ruptured over the Getty's purchase of Titian's Portrait of Alfonso dAvalos for $70 million. Relying on Gribbon's word, Munitz assured reluctant board members that the masterpiece had been cleared for export from France, only to discover later that the paperwork hadn't been completed, creating a potentially embarrassing complication. Murphy, feeling betrayed, stopped talking to Gribbon. By then, Gribbon had begun looking for support from her former boss and mentor, Walsh, who had retired but remained close to her and others at the Getty. Munitz was turning his back on the commitment he had made to build the museum's collection, Gribbon complained. The institution was headed in the wrong direction. Gribbon and Walsh concluded that they had to act before Munitz destroyed the museum they had worked so hard to build
. Perhaps if a number of key board members could be briefed, they might be able to do something before it was too late. The CEO served at the pleasure of the trustees, who were the trust's ultimate authority. It was time to go over Munitz's head.

  In the fall of 2003, Walsh approached Agnes Gund, one of the few Getty trustees who came from a museum background and a member of the Getty task force that had recommended the $1 billion for new acquisitions. As president of the Museum of Modern Art, Gund had been hearing troubling rumors about Munitz and Murphy. Despite a $1 million Getty grant that Munitz had arranged for MoMA, endowing a curatorial position in her name, Gund had become disillusioned with him. Gribbon, meanwhile, sought out Lewis Bernard, complaining that Munitz and Murphy were destroying the institution by reneging on promises to build the collection. The board needed to do something and had a perfect opportunity when Munitz's contract expired in January 2004.

  By November 2003, the whispering had become a murmur. Bernard and Kaplan pulled Gardner aside at a conference in New York to express their concerns again. Despite the previous warning, Munitz hadn't changed. He was still away too much. He was disengaged. There were no regular staff meetings. Munitz had strained relations with Gribbon and True. The Itali an issue was complicating everything. Bernard began asking whether the board should give Munitz a six-month or one-year contract extension and reevaluate the situation at the end of that time.

  Gardner was stunned by the suggestion and pushed back hard. Anything short of a three-year contract would be tantamount to a vote of no confidence, he argued. "Look, I understand Munitz has some outspoken critics," Gardner told Bernard. "But my job as chairman is to represent the consensus, and I think the consensus of the board agrees with extending the contract. Keep that in mind."

  Bernard relented, agreeing to let the full board decide what to do at its meeting in January. Gardner immediately made an appointment to talk with Munitz. "Your job is at risk, Barry," he warned.

  With two months until the meeting, Munitz kicked his personal PR campaign into overdrive. He set up a meeting with his four program directors and promised to resume regular meetings. No more going through Jill Murphy, he told them, adding that he knew some of them had gone behind his back to board members. "You should have come to me directly," he said. "But here we are. Let's make this work." Gribbon wept through much of the meeting.

  Munitz then threw himself into his specialty, what he called "board-touching." He had already deduced that Gund and Bernard were lost causes. He concentrated on the other trustees. He and his wife flew to Hawaii, where they spent a weekend with Lloyd Cotsen, former CEO of the Neutrogena cosmetics firm and an avid archaeology buff. UCLA had named its archaeology institute for Cotsen after he donated $7 million, the largest gift ever to a social science program at the school. Among Getty trustees, he was the most openly sympathetic to the Italians. If the Getty had anything that was even suspect, the museum should give it back, he urged. He had also been after Munitz to forget about buying new art altogether, suggesting that the museum focus instead on seeking loans. In Hawaii, Munitz agreed to abandon the acquisition plan—and with it the $1 billion commitment he had made to the museum.

  The next weekend, Munitz was in New York, attending church services with board member John Biggs, the recently retired chairman and CEO of the gigantic TIAA-CREF retirement investment company. Biggs, a bespectacled St. Louis native with a straightforward midwestern approach, had commanded national attention during the Enron scandal when he'd testified before Congress against the kind of chummy accounting practices that had led to the spectacular collapse of the energy firm. His testimony had earned him a torrent of protests from the profession and derailed his candidacy to head a new federal accounting oversight board established under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. On the Getty board, Biggs chaired the audit committee, and Munitz was lobbying for him to replace Gardner as chairman of the board.

  After attending church with Biggs, Munitz had lunch with the disgruntled Fleischman. He promised to redouble his efforts to support True during her travails.

  Gardner, meanwhile, was lobbying other board members, urging them to back the CEO.

  The payoff came on January 16, 2004, when the board gathered at the Getty Center for its annual meeting. Before the board retired to closed session to consider Munitz's contract, he delivered an impassioned and carefully prepared defense, one that cleverly turned the tables on his detractors. What was considered by some to be a management problem, he argued, was in fact the board's failure to settle on a governance philosophy. At the board's direction, Munitz said, he had been focused outward, playing the hands-off visionary. Now he laid out several other options, saying it was up to the board to decide what it wanted its CEO to do.

  After placing the issue squarely on the trustees' shoulders, Munitz left the room. Bernard proposed waiting to see if Munitz's performance improved before renewing his contract. Gardner countered that Munitz was making progress and that the board had its CEO's attention. During the discussion, Fleischman received a call on her cell phone from a dealer who had heard about the contract dispute and wanted to urge her to vote against Munitz. But Munitz's boardtouching had secured him a solid majority. By the time the votes were counted, Bernard had caved in to the pressure, casting his vote with ten others to give Munitz a new contract. Instead of the three-year contract he was expecting, however, they upped it to five years. The vote was 11–0. Gund abstained.

  The coup had failed. By defeating the old guard led by Gribbon and Walsh, Munitz had finally wrested control of the Getty from the ghost of Harold Williams. Or so he thought.

  ONCE AGAIN, THE other major item on the board's agenda was Italy. Peter Erichsen and Richard Martin reported that the news was grim. A month earlier, as the Getty was preoccupied with the attempted mutiny, the trial of Giacomo Medici had begun in Rome. Paolo Ferri was publicly introducing evidence that directly implicated True. The prosecutor seemed to be laying the groundwork to formally indict the curator.

  Erichsen's briefing papers for the day's discussion had again been cleansed by Kaplan of references to the Getty's possible institutional culpability. But the troubling facts had not disappeared, and as Erichsen explained in his presentation, many new ones had emerged. The Getty had learned that dealer Frieda Tchakos had said in a deposition that the Fleischmans had been a "front" to launder looted antiquities bound for the Getty. Letters unearthed in the Getty's own files showed that True had urged Tchakos to sell certain objects to the Fleischmans.

  The worst piece of correspondence, however, was the one that senior staff had begun referring to as the "smoking gun": Houghton's 1985 memo to Gribbon, which detailed a discussion with Medici about the illicit origins of three of the museum's most prized objects—the Apollo, marble basin, and griffins from the Tempelsman collection. Nearly twenty years later, Houghton's breezy connecting of the dots from an ancient Italian tomb to the shelves of the Getty was met with silence when projected on a screen.

  If the memo were to fall into the Italians' hands, Martin delicately explained, it "could hurt Marion True at trial." The larger message was left unsaid. Problems in the antiquities department predated True and implicated her superiors, including the museum's current director.

  Gribbon, clearly pained, shifted in her seat. "Do you want me to leave the room for this?" she asked. No, board members murmured. You did nothing wrong.

  MUNITZ WASTED NO time turning the screws on Gribbon. Having been criticized for being aloof and disengaged, he was determined to show Gribbon just how engaged he could be. In the weeks following the failed coup, Munitz began a barrage of e-mails, memos, voice mails, and meeting requests. He questioned Gribbon's leadership, noting each of her shortcomings, which he described as "pending Museum leadership questions." He met with Gribbon and her staff to analyze the museum's management structure, then stripped away key people. As he had promised Fleischman, Munitz took True's side in the turf war over the Getty Villa renovation, having the curator report dire
ctly to him on the project rather than going through Gribbon. And as he had promised Cotsen, he began backing away from his commitment to spend $1 billion in acquiring new art. The acquisition fund, he informed Gribbon, needed to be pared down because of the trust's economic issues.

  The unrelenting pressure had its desired effect. Gribbon could barely keep her composure, often leaving meetings in tears. In a last-ditch attempt to undermine Munitz, she once again broke with protocol and committed the institutionally treasonous act of complaining directly to the trustees during their April 2004 meeting about Munitz's new centralized procurement program. In private conversations, Gribbon's fellow directors had seemed just as dismayed as she was. But when she turned to them for support during the board meeting, they remained silent. Munitz had carefully cultivated them over the past couple of months, further isolating Gribbon, who had stumbled fatally while making a desperate lunge at Munitz.

  Within two weeks, the CEO brought things to a head in Gribbon's annual review. Obsessively prepared, he flogged the tearful museum director with a cat-o'-nine-tails of items she had failed to complete to his satisfaction. Then, noting that she often appeared unhappy, Munitz asked—twice—whether she was truly committed to staying at the Getty. Wouldn't she be happier at a museum that she could run as her own? As if to give her additional motivation, he continued his litany. Gribbon's relationship with True was "dysfunctional," caused by a power struggle between the two women. Gribbon was unreasonably hostile to Murphy. He offered at least half a dozen examples from recent months in which Gribbon had exhibited an "unfortunate pattern" of emotional outbursts. In fact, the trustees themselves had fretted over Gribbon's performance at their last meeting, Munitz said. "Several people subsequently remarked that if they were your colleagues, they would have murdered you," he remarked.