The Rescue Artist
Page 30
Charley has a terrific memory. But the incessant questioning, like a mosquito’s whine, drove him wild. He wanted to make sure I saw the big picture—it’s not like Hollywood—and I kept nattering on about bow ties.
If we were together and I’d kept after him too long, Charley would retreat into glowering silence. This wasn’t good. We were based on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and when one of us had crossed the ocean, we had no time to waste. During the long stretches between visits we communicated almost exclusively by e-mail. I never knew what to expect. Charley might vanish for weeks at a time, or he might respond with half a sentence to a question I had hoped would keep us busy for a month.
“To write a book about someone you don’t know is to take a long journey with a stranger in a small and overheated car.”
Q: Tell me about your first art case.
A: A complete and utter cock-up.
On the other hand, he was more than capable of delivering long, detailed, out-of-the-blue answers to questions I’d given up on months before. The unpredictability of the whole process could drive you mad. Charley and I were slumped in his living room one evening, worn out and half-watching the news, when a story about problems in the London underground came on. The reporter did her stand-up near a station entrance. “That’s around the corner from where Grant-McVicar did the Picasso job,” Charley muttered.
The name of the crook, the very fact that there had been a Picasso stolen in downtown London, and Charley’s intimate knowledge of all the players in the case were all news to me. “Charley, when there are stories like this lying around, feig stories, you’ve got to let me know!” “Right. Yeah. Do you see where the damned remote has got to?”
“‘Charley, when there are stories like this lying around, big stories, you’ve got to let me know!’ ‘Right. Yeah. Do you see where the damned remote has got to?’”
Did Charley edit what you wrote?
No. Almost the first thing I did in my initial conversation with Charley was lay out ground rules. We were not coauthors; I’d write the book and give it to him to read before it was published as a courtesy. At that point he’d be free to make all the comments he wanted— factual, stylistic, grammatical. I promised I’d listen carefully to his suggestions, especially if he thought I’d made a factual error, but I didn’t promise to do more than listen. I emphasized there was always the risk that as I got deeply into the reporting I’d decide he was bad news, in which case I’d go ahead and write that. Finally, we agreed in that first conversation that Charley would have no share in money made from the book.
We never quarreled over any of those rules. When the time came, Charley read the book and marked it up. He resisted the impulse to suggest changes in things he found merely irritating; the few revisions he fought for had mostly to do with keeping secret identities secret or with softening criticisms he had directed at various rivals.
What did Charley think of the book?
He liked it, generally, although he didn’t like the way I’d characterized him—he felt I’d exaggerated the risks he ran and underplayed his love of art. His mother thought there was too much swearing. Despite his complaints about the book, its mere existence was a kick—not everyone has a book written about him. Charley handed out copies to the postman and the babysitter and the woman who cuts his hair. Characteristically, and to the utter dismay of business-minded friends who fret over his financial stability, he neglected to pass along copies to the art collecting lords and ladies of his acquaintance or to anyone else in a position to hire him.
I admired tremendously the way Charley responded to reading about himself. It’s seldom fun to see oneself through someone else’s eyes, but beyond a snarl or two Charley barely lobbied for changes in how he was portrayed. On the contrary. We got together late one night after I’d spent the day talking with some of his nonadmirers at Scotland Yard. Charley asked what I’d been up to. I told him where I’d been. He laughed.
“Well, Ed,” he said, “as Cromwell said to Peter Lely, ‘Paint it warts and all.’ “Both the thought itself and the footnote to the little-remembered Lely were pure Charley Hill.
“[Charley’s] mother thought there was too much swearing in the book.”
What’s next?
The next book deals with art crime again, but this time with art forgery rather than art theft. The book tells a true story, with a cast ranging from Johannes Vermeer to Hermann Goering. The story begins in Holland in the 1600s, skips ahead to the French Riviera in the 1930s and Occupied Holland in the 1940s, and culminates in a trial for treason in a Dutch courtroom lined with forged—or are they authentic?—Vermeers.
Read on
Author’s Picks: Best Heist Films, Best Art Crime Books
The Three Best Heist Films
THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (1999)
Everything about it is wrong—thieves don’t act like Pierce Brosnan, insurance agents don’t look like Rene Russo, and museums don’t seal themselves off like automated fortresses. But it’s fun.
“If you ever meet an art cop or an art crook and the conversation begins to flag, mention [The Thomas Crown Affair.]”
If you ever meet an art cop or an art crook and the conversation begins to flag, mention this movie. Then stand back. The good guys detest it because it glamorizes the thieves, but the baddies hate it too. Their problem with the film is wounded vanity—tuxedo-clad, art-loving Pierce Brosnan strikes them as a bit effete.
THE GENERAL (1998)
This brilliant, grim film tells the story of Martin Cahill, the Dublin gangster who pulled off what was at the time the biggest art theft ever. Cahill’s criminal career was so hectic that director John Boorman makes quick work of the art heist, but this portrayal of the brutal Cahill shows what a real art thief is like.
One brief scene is an inside joke. The real-life Cahill once broke into Boorman’s house and stole a gold record the director had been awarded for the score of Deliverance. In the course of a burglary in The General, Cahill grabs a gold LP from the wall and then throws it away in disgust when he realizes that it isn’t real gold.
DR.NO (1962)
Well, “best” is pushing it. The first James Bond movie is hard to sit through. But it’s worth seeing for two historic reasons: first, a young Sean Connery; second, Dr. No’s stolen Goya, which helped plant in every crook’s mind the fantasy that if he steals a masterpiece a crooked tycoon will surely want it.
Goya’s portrait of Wellington is now back in the National Gallery in London, where it belongs. The austere label next to the painting omits any mention of the screen credit.
Sean Connery’s more recent heist movie, Entrapment, is less painful though no more plausible.
The Three Best Art Crime Books
THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ADAM WORTH, MASTER THIEF by Ben Macintyre
This nonfiction account of one of the greatest Victorian criminals provides a gorgeous picture of a time when art thieves were truly glamorous. Or at least Adam Worth was. Charley Hill, a stickler for historical accuracy, always felt compelled to interrupt his diatribes about the thuggishness of art thieves to hail the elegant Mr. Worth as the lone counterexample.
“[The Napoleon of Crime] provides a gorgeous picture of a time when art thieves were truly glamorous.”
THE DAY THEY STOLE THE MONA LISA by Seymour Reit
On an August day in 1911 a workman named Vincenzo Perugia walked out of the Louvre with the world’s most famous painting tucked inside his coat. Reit crafts an elaborate story around that simple starting point. The reader will gulp it down with a delight marred only slightly by a single nagging question—is this a true story or a legend?
THE RAPHAEL AFFAIR by Iain Pears
An art historian by training and the author of that acclaimed doorstop of a book An Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears has also written half a dozen less earnest novels that he calls “art history mysteries.” This may be the best.
Several years ago, after a career
spent dreaming up art crimes, Pears nearly walked into a real one. On New Year’s Eve 1999 he and a houseful of guests had gathered to ring in the new millennium. Shortly before midnight the baby began to howl. Pears dutifully grabbed baby and stroller and ventured outdoors in the hope that a change of scene would prove soothing. At that moment a thief broke into Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum—only a few blocks from where Pears stood rocking the baby—and ran off into the night with a $4.8 million Cézanne.
THE RESCUE ARTIST. Copyright © 2005 by Edward Dolnick.
*Yet another Vermeer, The Astronomer, was confiscated by the Nazis for the personal collection of Adolf Hitler. The painting had belonged to a member of the Rothschild family. Today it hangs in the Louvre.
†Cellini made the saltcellar for King Francis I of France, in 1543. In his swashbuckling autobiography, the Florentine goldsmith tells of the king’s reaction to a wax model of the proposed sculpture (and to Cellini himself). “This is a hundred times more divine a thing than I had ever dreamed of,” the monarch stammers. “What a miracle of a man!”
The king asks Cellini to name his price, Cellini does so (1000 gold crowns), and the royal treasurer hands over the money. Four robbers brandishing swords attack Cellini on his way home, but he holds them off singlehandedly, displaying such “skill in using the sword,” he tells us, that the cowed thieves take him for a soldier.
*For clarity’s sake, I will refer to Hill by his real name throughout. The alternative—switching back and forth between “Hill” and “Roberts” depending on whether the speaker knows Hill’s true identity—is appealing in theory but unpalatable in print.
*A pseudonym
*The story linking Krakatoa and Munch’s evening stroll appeared in an article called “When the Sky Ran Red” in Sky & Telescope magazine in February 2004. The authors were physicists Don Olson and Russell Doescher and English professor Marilynn Olson, who also found the exact spot where Munch stood trembling against the rail. The newspaper stories cited in the text above were quoted in their essay.
*A pseudonym
*A pseudonym
*A pseudonym
*He had arranged to paint the cobbler’s wife. “Every time I thought the picture was finished and saw myself wearing the shoes,” Renoir lamented, “along came the aunt, the daughter, or even the old servant to criticize.”
*The National Gallery in London outbid the Getty and kept Raphael’s masterpiece in Britain. The seller, the Duke of Northumberland, pocketed $65 million ($40 million of it tax-free). In the 1980s, the painting had been attributed to a follower of Raphael and valued at $11,000.
*Almost everything written in Shakespeare’s hand has been lost, with the exception of six signatures (each spelled differently). With Shakespeare out of the running, the record price for a handwritten document currently stands at $30.8 million, paid by Bill Gates in 1994 for a seventy-two-page manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci. The so-called Codex Leicester is a collection of scientific observations studded with drawings that probe such mysteries as the brightness of the moon and the meandering of rivers.
*Trench police estimated Breitwieser’s haul at between $1.4 billion and $1.9 billion. Jonathan Sazonoff, a television producer and expert on art crime, suggests that a more accurate guess might be in the neighborhood of $150 million.
*Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, scholars say that the authenticity of the Louvre’s Mona Lisa is beyond question. The painting had been studied, photographed, and documented minutely before the theft, and a host of before-and-after comparisons—such as an examination of the tiny cracks in the varnish that covers the painting’s surface—establish its identity beyond a doubt.
*It should perhaps be stated explicitly that the amount of art stolen by modern-day gangsters is dwarfed by the amount stolen by the Nazis, gangsters backed by the full might of the state. All armies have looted, but the Nazis made the process organized and efficient. In France alone, according to Hector Feliciano’s The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, the Nazis seized one-third of all art in private hands. The best account of the Nazi assault on art is Lynn Nicholas’s Rape of Europa.
*The British journalist Peter Watson wrote The Caravaggio Conspiracy about the case, in 1984. Watson believes that the painting survived its theft only to be destroyed in an earthquake in 1980.
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Edward Dolnick
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