Rogues' Gallery Part 8

The Untermyers lived on West End Avenue in a cultured, German-Jewish neighborhood, but in the late 1920s, as he pa.s.sed age forty, Untermyer began to widen his circle of acquaintance, approaching collectors like Jules Bache and befriending t.i.tled Europeans. Simultaneously, his collections threatened to take over his home, even though he'd already bought a second floor in his building so he could install two oak-paneled Tudor rooms and gla.s.s display cases-his own private museum. His children, something of an afterthought, shared that floor. His distance from his family was profound. "Everything was about buying things for the museum," says Carmel.

Untermyer bought English furnishings after World War I, when England's great estates were broken up, switched to porcelain in the 1930s, when Jews escaping Hitler were selling the stuff for ready cash, and moved on to silver in 1939 and 1940, his interest piqued by the Hearst auctions. His life changed dramatically after his father's death in the latter year. His judgment of Samuel's taste was vindicated when the state of New York refused his dying offer of his Yonkers estate. Irwin and his sibling sold their father's art and belongings shortly afterward. a.s.suming his own collections would meet the same fate from similarly disinterested offspring, Untermyer promised them to the Metropolitan Museum in December 1941 and in explanation urged his children to read a Balzac novel, Cousin Pons Cousin Pons, about a man who feels no one can love his collection as much as he does. His disdain for children was palpable. "He made us anxious when we were in the apartment," says Carmel. "It was like living in a museum." Untermyer's son Frank pointed out that Irwin's greatest complaint about museums was that they catered to children.41 Just after he offered his things to the museum, Untermyer moved his family to an apartment a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, closer to the auction galleries and art dealerships he now haunted daily. The apartment's interiors were designed to store and display his treasures. The windows were shaded so sunlight couldn't damage the delicate rarities. The rooms were so crowded his children were forced to eat off TV trays when they visited. His wife hated the new apartment. She likely hated him, too. "He cheated all the time," says Nina Untermyer. "He didn't pay any attention to his wife." Adds Lake, "She was miserable in her marriage and suffered in silence." Finally, she fell into a deep depression and killed herself in March 1944. One of his daughters, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson would later kill themselves as well.42 Untermyer's gifts to the Metropolitan began in the late 1930s. In order to equal and surpa.s.s his father, he'd decided to create and donate a collection to guarantee his immortality, choosing to buy objects the museum needed to fill out its collections. As he grew more sophisticated, the donations continued, carefully structured to produce the highest tax deductions possible under the law while allowing Untermyer to retain possession of the objects until his death. These practices, his son Frank said, were encouraged by the museum, which lobbied for the creation and protection of such tax breaks.43 Collecting, preparing the collection for the museum, and giving it became Untermyer's occupation for the rest of his days. A year after his wife's death, he retired from the bench to devote himself to it full-time, and four years after that he hired a private curator, Yvonne Hackenbroch. She'd found out about the job from James Rorimer; Untermyer's gifts had attracted the museum's attention, and Rorimer wanted somebody to influence his buying. Two years after hiring the museum-sanctioned curator, Untermyer was elected a trustee.

Hackenbroch would be Irwin's closest companion until his death in 1973. Unlike his late wife, she shared his enthusiasm and knowledge. Together, they visited New York and London dealers on a regular basis. "She devoted her life to him," says Carmel. "It's unclear what their relationship was." Frank Untermyer thought he knew, though; he told Lake she was "a complex, difficult woman in love with my father."

At her apartment in London, Hackenbroch, a tiny, perfectly coiffed ninety-six-year-old in tinted gla.s.ses, lives up to that description. She begins by confirming that Untermyer drove several women in his life to suicide. "He tried it on me, too," she says. "He made you so miserable; it seemed the only way out." Asked how he made her miserable, though, her response is blunt: "You will hear nothing else."

Years later, Tom Hoving would paint their relationship as resembling that between a master and a slave, with Untermyer forcing his curator, on threat of dismissal, to cut his toenails weekly. Relatives of the judge confirm that; Hackenbroch will not discuss it. "His intelligence impressed me," she says. "I didn't stay for the pay; it was miserable. I suffered every day, but to be with such an intelligent man, winning his confidence, that kept me there. I stayed for his knowledge of English literature. And the wonderful chance to touch every object. That's how one learns. In a private collection, you can take it and turn it and know it. That, too, was a great attraction. The human qualities you can just leave out." just leave out."

Together, they collaborated on seven scholarly catalogs, beginning with one on Untermyer's Meissen porcelain in 1956. The books cemented his reputation. "My publication and the judge's enormous intellect caused interest," Hackenbroch says. "The prices went so high, and people begged to see it." She agrees with his family that he was canny about finances. "He always inquired about the deductions," she says. "If one gave desirable objects, the deductions were enormous." Asked if they had a love affair, she smiles. "That would have been too expensive for him."

As time went on, they grew even closer as Untermyer became more estranged from everyone else in his life. "He was frightfully mean," says Hackenbroch. "n.o.body liked him. n.o.body wanted him. He was extremely useful to Rorimer. Rorimer came every weekend. Hoving didn't like him. He came rarely. Rorimer was a far greater museum person. Think of the Cloisters and how he got on with the wealthiest family in America. That's not easy. So he came every weekend to Irwin Untermyer because that was part of the game."

Hoving visited Untermyer after he replaced Rorimer as director because he knew that there was nothing binding about the judge's pledge to give the Met his collections. But Untermyer had already written his will, and shortly after Hoving got the top job, he also wrote a letter addressed to "My dear children" to explain it to them. Under New York state law, they were ent.i.tled to half his estate, but he'd already pledged more than that to the museum, he explained in the letter dated May 17, 1967, which paved the way for a later request that they sign waivers agreeing to relinquish their rights to his estate.44 Untermyer's greatest gift-of 192 gold and silver objects and 35 bronzes-came in 1968. He died five years later, in October 1973. His decline was rapid after he fell out of bed one night and Hackenbroch was summoned by his cook; his doctor had refused to make a house call. She took him to the hospital, where he had a stroke, and finally, two weeks later, he went home to die. "I sat with him," Hackenbroch says. "The children wouldn't come, which is what he deserved." After his death, the museum contacted his children, who had agreed to his terms, even though, as his son Frank said, it meant their lifestyle "changed very much"-and not for the better.45 His cousin Nina Untermyer offers an apt epitaph for the judge. "Proximity to treasure breeds certain forms of cruelty," she says. His cousin Nina Untermyer offers an apt epitaph for the judge. "Proximity to treasure breeds certain forms of cruelty," she says.

THROUGHOUT THE 1950S, THE W WRIGHTSMANS' TREASURE h.o.a.rD grew-Jayne picking things out, Charlie negotiating their purchase. By 1966, an inventory of their possessions, their makers, and their previous owners would have boasted such names as Louis XV and XVI, Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry, Marie Antoinette, the d.u.c.h.ess Marie Feodorovna, Meissen, Tiepolo, Vermeer, La Tour, Ca.n.a.letto, Poussin, Lotto, El Greco, David, Renoir, and Houdon. Acquisitions didn't equal respect, though, and the Wrightsmans remained slightly suspect. When they first opened the doors of their redone Palm Beach house, it wasn't the Florida colony's snooty in crowd that pa.s.sed through them so much as imports like the Windsors, the Shah of Iran, and the flotsam and jetsam of international society, among them Roland Redmond, whose 1957 marriage to Princess Lydia di San Faustino (celebrated with a luncheon chez Wrightsman) gave him entree into that dubious social circle. But the Wrightsmans had one other advantage that would change their social fortunes forever. It is summed up in that old real estate adage, location, location, location. Among their Palm Beach neighbors were Joseph and Rose Kennedy. grew-Jayne picking things out, Charlie negotiating their purchase. By 1966, an inventory of their possessions, their makers, and their previous owners would have boasted such names as Louis XV and XVI, Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barry, Marie Antoinette, the d.u.c.h.ess Marie Feodorovna, Meissen, Tiepolo, Vermeer, La Tour, Ca.n.a.letto, Poussin, Lotto, El Greco, David, Renoir, and Houdon. Acquisitions didn't equal respect, though, and the Wrightsmans remained slightly suspect. When they first opened the doors of their redone Palm Beach house, it wasn't the Florida colony's snooty in crowd that pa.s.sed through them so much as imports like the Windsors, the Shah of Iran, and the flotsam and jetsam of international society, among them Roland Redmond, whose 1957 marriage to Princess Lydia di San Faustino (celebrated with a luncheon chez Wrightsman) gave him entree into that dubious social circle. But the Wrightsmans had one other advantage that would change their social fortunes forever. It is summed up in that old real estate adage, location, location, location. Among their Palm Beach neighbors were Joseph and Rose Kennedy.

Though Charlie was a Republican, proximity, money (he by then had $100 million), and dinners that started with a pound of caviar helped them bond. The Wrightsmans entertained all the Kennedys and invited them to their annual New Year's Eve parties and on their regular summer cruises in the Mediterranean. In 1958, Charlie sent a letter to the interior designer Boudin to introduce him to Jacqueline Kennedy, who'd married Jack five years before. Though he said she was unlikely to be a major customer, Charlie added a postscript: "But who knows-she may some day be First Lady."46 As Jayne and Charlie ascended in society, they risked running into his first wife, who'd taken to calling herself Mrs. Stafford Wrightsman. Irene had a full social life in New York, attending benefits, serving on charity committees, and seeing her daughters. But in November 1960, she died. Though the official account is that she suffered an aneurism after falling off a ladder while changing a lightbulb, it's generally believed in her family that she drank herself to death, her alcoholism worsening as a result of Charlie's cruelty to her during and after their divorce.

Irene's death didn't slow Charlie down, though; thanks to John F. Kennedy, he and Jayne were moving into the first circle. "Each could help the other," says Kennedy's White House social secretary, Let.i.tia Baldridge. "Charlie was a source of money for Jack's campaign." In return, the Kennedys gave the Wrightsmans an aura of "glamour and excitement," she continues. "Jackie was a bridge" to real society, and "Jayne was thrilled" to walk over it.

Just after Kennedy's election in November 1960, Jayne joined a committee to restore and redecorate the White House and would shortly donate $500,000 worth of tapestries and furniture to the effort. The Wrightsmans' relationship with the Kennedys became broadly known in May 1961, when the president and Jackie were their houseguests in Palm Beach. In June, Kennedy, suffering from the back pain that had plagued him since he'd almost been killed in World War II, returned to the Wrightsmans', saying he needed to swim in Charlie's heated salt.w.a.ter pool for therapy.

Their friendship notwithstanding, in 1963 Wrightsman sued the Internal Revenue Service for a $34,000 tax refund, saying their $5.5 million worth of art and furniture was an investment, and expenses for the collection should be deductible. They even wrote off flowers sent to curators.47 And the Wrightsman-Kennedy romance withered when scandal hit Ghighi Ca.s.sini, Charlene's husband. In February 1963, he was indicted on federal charges that he'd worked as an agent for the Dominican Republic's corrupt leader, Rafael Trujillo-a public relations firm he co-owned had attracted the attention of Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department by taking $200,000 to improve Trujillo's image. Charlene was shocked to discover that she and her husband were immediately dropped, not only by the Kennedys, but by her father as well. She took an overdose of sleeping pills and died that April. And the Wrightsman-Kennedy romance withered when scandal hit Ghighi Ca.s.sini, Charlene's husband. In February 1963, he was indicted on federal charges that he'd worked as an agent for the Dominican Republic's corrupt leader, Rafael Trujillo-a public relations firm he co-owned had attracted the attention of Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department by taking $200,000 to improve Trujillo's image. Charlene was shocked to discover that she and her husband were immediately dropped, not only by the Kennedys, but by her father as well. She took an overdose of sleeping pills and died that April.

Marina Ca.s.sini, Igor's daughter by an earlier wife, never liked the Wrightsmans, even though she was flown to Palm Beach on private planes for holidays with them. She found Charlie "extremely cold," she says. "He'd flip silver dollars in the pool and we'd dive and get them." Jayne struck her as bizarre. "Very affected and always very subservient to Charlie, but also very poised and very controlled, very distant, very smooth. She never showed emotion, but then neither did he. They were cold, calculating, creepy people." At Charlene's funeral, Marina continues, neither Charlie nor Jayne spoke to or acknowledged Ghighi and his children.

The Wrightsmans ducked for cover after that and remained below the media's radar in November of that year, when the president was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. The following summer, though, the Wrightsmans were back in the spotlight when, in rapid succession, it was reported that Jayne had helped the president's widow find a new home at 1040 Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks from the Metropolitan, and that Jackie planned to emerge from seclusion to join them on an August cruise of the Adriatic on-board a 188-foot, 690-ton yacht, Radiant II Radiant II, rented from the Greek shipping tyc.o.o.n Basil Mavroleon. Though it flew a British flag, the Stars and Stripes were raised when Mrs. Kennedy, clad in a black dress, boarded in Venice. The other pa.s.sengers included her sister, Lee Radziwill; the British amba.s.sador to the United States, Lord Harlech, and his wife; and James, Kay, and little Louis Rorimer, who'd been invited along to keep Charlene's son Dana company.

"When Kennedy was shot, she nearly died of anguish," Kay Rorimer said of Jackie. "After the funeral, she couldn't face the world for six months. Jayne and Charles said, 'Stop this, come with us.' She would come up on deck and sit with Louis, and then she'd disappear." After the visit to Dubrovnik, where they were mobbed, she didn't leave the boat again.

Tom Hoving, who would take Rorimer's place on the yacht in years to come, described its luxury in his memoir. "To cruise with the Wrightsmans was to live in a floating, high-tech Versailles," he wrote. "One was surrounded by modern technology but expected to play at an eighteenth-century pace, sedate and dreamy ... There were so many maids that I'd leave a sport shirt on my bed for a fifteen-minute swim and by the time I returned, it would be laundered and ironed."48 Life was not so easily ordered. A year later, in October 1965, Charlie Wrightsman's surviving daughter died, although this time, instead of scandalous headlines, there was only silence and a small paid death notice in the New York Times New York Times. Her last days were spent in her New York apartment, where, her lover Kirk Douglas wrote, "she graduated from alcohol to dope."49 "She was tougher than Charlene, but eventually Charlie broke them both," says a close friend. Even as she lay dying, she drank scotch and milk "to fool her nurses." Finally, "her liver collapsed." Charles and Jayne "were completely dry-eyed, cool as a cuc.u.mber" at her memorial service, says an attendee.

THOUGH HE WAS A R REPUBLICAN AND A MAN DEFINED BY PREJUDICE, Charlie Wrightsman, friend of the New Frontier, was a harbinger of things to come at the Met. A slow but steady turn toward more socially liberal, less outrageously patrician, results-oriented management types had begun. As the New York Times New York Times would note, "The city's arts patrons, once a tight little body bounded by social position and great wealth, are being transformed into an expanding group that would have surprised, and perhaps even shocked, grandmother." The new Medici were mostly businessmen, "new faces, new money and new ideas," and "a segment of the establishment that is not obsessed with personal publicity and, in fact, prefers to stay in the background." would note, "The city's arts patrons, once a tight little body bounded by social position and great wealth, are being transformed into an expanding group that would have surprised, and perhaps even shocked, grandmother." The new Medici were mostly businessmen, "new faces, new money and new ideas," and "a segment of the establishment that is not obsessed with personal publicity and, in fact, prefers to stay in the background."50 Or at least were still en route to the foreground. Or at least were still en route to the foreground.

The September 1964 board meeting was a turning point at the Met; the next generation of ruling trustees emerged that night and would soon shake the museum to its core. Roland Redmond also stepped down as president; he later claimed that at seventy-two, he felt he would be too old to train Rorimer's successor when the director would have to retire eleven years hence. Though he was still social, "he didn't have any money," says Nancy Hoving, which made him odd man out among the new trustees. So he was "forced out," recalled Tom Hoving, by "exasperated peers," but maintained some of his power as he'd "somehow wheedled his successor," Arthur Houghton, into letting him remain on the board.51 Houghton, born in 1906, was a bridge between the past and the future. Like Redmond, he was an American aristocrat: a descendant of a Revolutionary War general and the great-grandson of Amory Houghton, who founded Corning Gla.s.s in 1851. Katharine Houghton Hepburn, the movie star, was a distant relation. His education followed the well-worn path of American Episcopal aristocrats from St. Bernard's to St. Paul's to Harvard. His uncle Alanson was the U.S. amba.s.sador to Germany and England in the 1920s.

But Arthur was also a hard-nosed new-breed manager. In 1933, he'd taken over Steuben Gla.s.s, and reinvented the company after personally destroying its entire inventory of twenty thousand "blinding-colored gla.s.s monstrosities" with lead pipes and going full steam into modernist design.52 After divorcing his first wife in the mid-1930s, he married Ellen Crenshaw Gates, a descendant of a seventeenth-century royal governor of Virginia and a Dutch patroon, in 1939. More significantly, she had been the wife of his partner and managing director at Steuben, John Gates, who'd destroyed all that inventory with him. Though Gates continued working there, his family bore Houghton ill will; one Gates relation calls him "a dedicated, cruel son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h." After divorcing his first wife in the mid-1930s, he married Ellen Crenshaw Gates, a descendant of a seventeenth-century royal governor of Virginia and a Dutch patroon, in 1939. More significantly, she had been the wife of his partner and managing director at Steuben, John Gates, who'd destroyed all that inventory with him. Though Gates continued working there, his family bore Houghton ill will; one Gates relation calls him "a dedicated, cruel son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h."

The marriage didn't last long; Houghton and Ellen were divorced in Reno in 1944 while he was in the army air force. She charged him with desertion, and a week later he married a woman he'd met on a train. They, too, would divorce, in the 1970s. A serial marrier whose new wife was always younger than his last, he was philanthropically promiscuous, too, a member of more than a hundred organizations in education and the arts, and a crusader for racial equality. Not long after graduating from Harvard, he paid for the Houghton Library there, a repository of rare books and ma.n.u.scripts, which were also his collecting enthusiasm.

Frances Mason, Houghton's longtime a.s.sistant, thinks his philanthropic endeavors, like those of Irwin Untermyer, were motivated by family compet.i.tion. A great Anglophile and fan of English literature, he thirsted for what his uncle already had. "He would have loved in his bones to be amba.s.sador to Great Britain," Mason says. "He wanted to be the big cheese in the cultural life of New York." His generous and public philanthropy paid off when he was elected, at age fifty-seven, as the Met's new president.

Like Houghton, the other new faces at board meetings were both more of the same and something new, or at least younger. In 1961, J. Richardson Dilworth, forty-five, the nephew of a former mayor of Philadelphia but more pertinently the senior financial adviser to the Rockefeller family and former managing partner in the "Our Crowd" investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and a collector of English decorative arts, took what might be called the Rockefeller board seat, immediately donated $2,000, and soon replaced Dev Josephs atop the finance committee. In 1962, Arthur K. Watson of IBM, forty-three, took his father's seat. In 1963, Robert de Forest's descendant Sherman Baldwin, a lawyer, joined, too.

In 1964, new members included two young bankers, Richard Perkins, fifty-four, of First National City, and the thirty-eight-year-old Daniel Pomeroy Davison of Morgan Guaranty Trust; the latter qualified as fresh and and blue blood: his grandfathers were the Reverend Endicott Peabody, founder of the Groton School, and Henry P. Davison, the J. P. Morgan partner. His father, F. Trubee Davison, had been an aviator in World War I, an a.s.sistant secretary of war, president of the American Museum of Natural History, and the first director of personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency. If Jack Morgan's son Henry symbolized the family's past status at the museum, Davison was the museum's future. blue blood: his grandfathers were the Reverend Endicott Peabody, founder of the Groton School, and Henry P. Davison, the J. P. Morgan partner. His father, F. Trubee Davison, had been an aviator in World War I, an a.s.sistant secretary of war, president of the American Museum of Natural History, and the first director of personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency. If Jack Morgan's son Henry symbolized the family's past status at the museum, Davison was the museum's future.

The self-made Roswell Gilpatric, fifty-eight, a former head of the Cravath, Swaine & Moore law firm, Rockefeller aide, deputy defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Pentagon critic, and a key figure in defusing the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, was elected at the same time. Gilpatric had grown up lower-middle-cla.s.s near John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s summer compound in Maine and "would just walk up to Mrs. Rockefeller and start a conversation," according to a daughter, Betsey Lewis. Pushed by a grandmother who'd married a lawyer, he went to Hotchkiss and Yale on scholarships, then rose to the top of the establishment. He was said to have had "more connections than an IBM computer."53 One of them was Houghton, a longtime friend. A serial womanizer, too-he would be married five times and was romantically linked to Jackie Kennedy before her marriage to Aristotle Ona.s.sis-Gilpatric wasn't particularly wealthy; he wasn't natural trustee material. But the qualities sought in a trustee were clearly changing. One of them was Houghton, a longtime friend. A serial womanizer, too-he would be married five times and was romantically linked to Jackie Kennedy before her marriage to Aristotle Ona.s.sis-Gilpatric wasn't particularly wealthy; he wasn't natural trustee material. But the qualities sought in a trustee were clearly changing.

Though there was no clean break with the Hudson River valley crowd so ably represented by Redmond, no threat to the established order, the new trustees were the leading edge of a new cla.s.s of civic leaders. "I will not recommend a person to be a board member solely because he has money," Houghton explained, "but I won't hold it against him ... There is an increasing realization that business and industry are a part of society and have a responsibility to society ... You have a type in this city and other cities, the trustee type. You put them on a board of any inst.i.tution and it will be well-run ... You do not pick them because of a special knowledge of the field ... They know where to turn to get the answers."54 A year later, the new inner circle would be complete when C. Douglas Dillon returned as an active trustee. The banker, Rockefeller intimate, and Impressionist collector had left the board in 1953 to serve as Dwight Eisenhower's amba.s.sador to France and undersecretary of state, and then as secretary of the Treasury in the Kennedy White House. A year later, the new inner circle would be complete when C. Douglas Dillon returned as an active trustee. The banker, Rockefeller intimate, and Impressionist collector had left the board in 1953 to serve as Dwight Eisenhower's amba.s.sador to France and undersecretary of state, and then as secretary of the Treasury in the Kennedy White House.

Unfortunately, Houghton's election served to alienate another powerful trustee, and almost lost the museum the greatest art collection still in private hands in America. For reasons then unstated, in the spring of 1961 Bobbie Lehman, sixty-nine, decided to remove his paintings from the museum and install them permanently in what had once been his father's home, a five-story Beaux Arts house Philip had built in 1900, just across the street from John D. Rockefeller's town house. The decision followed a loan of three hundred pieces of the collection to the Louvre in 1956, where they caused a sensation at the Orangerie. In the first two weeks, over seventeen thousand people came to see them. Lehman was similarly hailed in 1959 when a selection of the paintings left the Met again and joined hundreds more objects from his collection in Cincinnati.

The removal of Lehman's art was finally revealed months after it happened, in January 1962. Some went into his eighteen-room Park Avenue apartment, some into his office, but most (estimates of the collection varied from one thousand to three thousand art objects and antiques) were installed in twelve rooms of the old house, which had been redecorated and repurposed as a private museum. They were shown publicly only once a year, at benefits for the Inst.i.tute of Fine Arts and other charities. After that, the Lehman collection was rarely seen at all. Sometimes, Bobbie would entertain there, sometimes he would admit scholars, and sometimes, Stephen Birmingham wrote, he would prowl "the great, silent rooms like a solitary Croesus contemplating all that he has ama.s.sed."55 The art critic Emily Genauer later called it the only American counterpart to Europe's private-palace museums and bemoaned that it was "hidden and virtually unknown, behind the locked doors on 54th Street." The art critic Emily Genauer later called it the only American counterpart to Europe's private-palace museums and bemoaned that it was "hidden and virtually unknown, behind the locked doors on 54th Street."56 Lehman denied any unhappiness with the Metropolitan ("I miss the pictures" is all he said57), and the board pa.s.sed a unanimous and fulsome resolution of grat.i.tude for his loan, but his action spoke louder than words. Privately, he would admit that at his very first museum board meeting, the main topic of conversation had been the dispersal of J. P. Morgan's collection. "It all got broken up," says Lehman's son, Robin. "That was the example that really upset him ...the basis of his adamancy that [his collection] be kept intact." But the immediate cause of his unhappiness was Redmond.

It began when Redmond refused Lehman an even better deal than the ones given to Benjamin Altman and Jules Bache, whom Lehman had known: essentially a Lehman wing within the Metropolitan. "Redmond was a real p.r.i.c.k, a heavy-handed SOB," says a family friend. "It wasn't Rorimer. He was too good a museum man and had already run what was in essence a Rockefeller branch of the museum." So even as he teased other museums with the possibility they might get it, Lehman still talked to Rorimer almost daily, remained on the Met's board, and even ran its executive committee meetings when Redmond couldn't.

Rorimer didn't push the matter. "Jim knew very well that Lehman loved his collection and didn't want to think about having to die and not be with it," said Kay Rorimer.58 So it is unlikely he spoke up in 1964 when Redmond handed the presidency to Houghton, pa.s.sing over Lehman. "He felt slighted" is all that Robin Lehman will say. "No Jew was going to run Redmond's museum," says the Lehman intimate. "Bobbie never felt an iota of animus toward Houghton. He just thought he should have had the job." So it is unlikely he spoke up in 1964 when Redmond handed the presidency to Houghton, pa.s.sing over Lehman. "He felt slighted" is all that Robin Lehman will say. "No Jew was going to run Redmond's museum," says the Lehman intimate. "Bobbie never felt an iota of animus toward Houghton. He just thought he should have had the job."

But it was easy enough to ignore the ill feelings; the museum was doing fabulously well. In its annual studies in the mid-1960s, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund found that the Met's financial condition was "rather healthy, perhaps even robust," with its a.s.sets approaching $100 million and attendance soaring to new heights thanks to popular exhibits, the most popular of those being a visit in 1963 from Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa Mona Lisa, on loan from the government of France.59 Jacqueline Kennedy, much beloved in France for her style and beauty, had cooked up the loan with Andre Malraux the previous spring. At first, Mona Mona was to travel only to the National Gallery, but the Met was added to its itinerary, and after a month in Washington it "opened" in New York on February 7 in the Medieval Sculpture Hall, where it was mounted on red velvet in a red brocade niche in the center of the ma.s.sive Valladolid screen, protected by bulletproof gla.s.s, two Secret Service men, museum guards, and the police. The installation, overtime, and a celebratory gala for trustees and swells cost $32,000. A line began forming at 4:30 on opening morning, 16,000 people saw it that day, and after twenty-seven days in the building was to travel only to the National Gallery, but the Met was added to its itinerary, and after a month in Washington it "opened" in New York on February 7 in the Medieval Sculpture Hall, where it was mounted on red velvet in a red brocade niche in the center of the ma.s.sive Valladolid screen, protected by bulletproof gla.s.s, two Secret Service men, museum guards, and the police. The installation, overtime, and a celebratory gala for trustees and swells cost $32,000. A line began forming at 4:30 on opening morning, 16,000 people saw it that day, and after twenty-seven days in the building Mona Lisa Mona Lisa was said to have attracted 1,077,521 visitors, far more than in Washington. Another 810,000 people pa.s.sed through the turnstiles that month but pa.s.sed up the chance to see it. Or so the Met said. was said to have attracted 1,077,521 visitors, far more than in Washington. Another 810,000 people pa.s.sed through the turnstiles that month but pa.s.sed up the chance to see it. Or so the Met said.

Hoving claims he later found that Rorimer systematically inflated attendance figures. "They had a thumb clicker," he says, "and they'd always do three to one. And we figured out that they had over-clicked to please Jim Rorimer." Rorimer used those attendance figures to justify ever-increasing demands on the public purse. To a reporter questioning the value of the Mona Lisa's Mona Lisa's visit, he was blunt about the importance of blockbusters: "The public will be more interested in voting for state aid to museums, cities will more willingly support cultural undertakings." visit, he was blunt about the importance of blockbusters: "The public will be more interested in voting for state aid to museums, cities will more willingly support cultural undertakings."

ON JULY 4, 1965, R 4, 1965, RORIMER NAMED H HOVING, THEN THIRTY-FOUR, curator of medieval art and the Cloisters. But the Cloisters was no longer the red-hot center of the museum, so Tom's eye was already wandering. "I was being interviewed by the Wadsworth Atheneum to become the director," he says, "and I was toying with that, because I'd become rather bored at the Cloisters. I'd been there six years, and it was kind of routine. I'd gotten over the thrill of collecting because I'd pretty much gone through the money."

Throughout the early months of 1965, John V. Lindsay, a handsome, popular patrician who represented Manhattan's Upper East Side in the U.S. Congress, flirted with the idea of running for mayor. That May, after Governor Nelson Rockefeller urged him to run, he decided to do it. Not long after the Hovings, who'd met Lindsay while giving out leaflets for his 1960 congressional run, volunteered for the campaign, a Lindsay aide who'd gone to Princeton with Tom called to ask the young curator to write a position paper for the mayoral hopeful on the subject of cultural affairs. Hoving suggested he write a paper on parks and recreation instead. The parks were a mess, and morale among Parks Department workers was terrible.

His proposal, developed after he toured the city on his Jawa motorcycle, speaking to artists, community activists, architects, and park users, was that the city's dangerous and run-down parks could easily be improved enough to fulfill their mission to teach, enrich, relax, and inspire, to be, in other words, works of art, just as Frederick Law Olmsted had intended when he laid out Central Park. His big idea was to make noise, attract crowds, make the parks welcoming again. Lindsay loved it, and Tom was awed by him. So in September, having used up all his accrued vacation days, he asked Rorimer for a leave of absence without pay to continue campaigning. "I'll give give you the pay, but you're killing yourself," Rorimer replied. "You're going to destroy your whole life, going to work for someone who may not even win." you the pay, but you're killing yourself," Rorimer replied. "You're going to destroy your whole life, going to work for someone who may not even win."

But win Lindsay did on November 2, and seven days later Hoving was summoned to the mayor-elect's office and offered the job once held by Robert Moses, commissioner of parks. Walking out into the maelstrom of rush hour afterward, Hoving looked up at the skyline as every light in New York City-indeed, every light in the entire Northeast-went out in the largest power failure in history. "It was a sign from G.o.d Almighty," he thought, but still he didn't say yes for days-and then only after another Lindsay aide called to demand a decision, adding that if he said yes, he'd get a city car and driver.

"My mother always said Dad was devastated when Hoving left," says Anne Rorimer. "He'd put a lot of faith and time into him." But Hoving was impatient with both Rorimer's deliberate managerial style and the slow pace of the museum world. He was certain Rorimer, who was only sixty, wouldn't retire for at least five years, and having tasted glory when he acquired the Bury St. Edmunds Cross, he wanted more. The Cloisters was a backwater compared to the a.r.s.enal, the Parks Department headquarters twenty blocks south of the museum and just across the street from the Wrightsmans' apartment building. And as parks commissioner, Hoving would, in a vital way, be getting a museum promotion; though he wouldn't have a vote, as an ex officio trustee he would be Rorimer's boss. Hoving appreciated the role reversal. "I was a junior curator who overnight became the landlord."

Hoving started at the Parks Department on January 1, and almost immediately sought to expand his turf to include the arts, asking to bring the city's cultural affairs office under the Parks umbrella and proposing more art in parks, mobile museums, and longer hours at the museums before his first month in office was out. "Times have changed," he said. "We're going to open it up and have a little bit of-how shall we call it-Central Park a Go Go."60 In 1966, of course, everything was a-go-go. New York was Fun City. Life was a party, and everyone wanted in. In an attempt to get things done with more alacrity, Arthur Houghton had changed the composition of the museum's executive committee. No longer would city officials like Hoving be welcome in its meetings. And it was much smaller than it had been in 1964, with only nine members (including Gilpatric, Wrightsman, and Lehman), instead of the thirteen who'd served under Redmond. It was that smaller group that decided, in 1965, to begin planning a celebration of the museum's hundredth birthday five years hence.

Late that October, Houghton, Rorimer, Hoving, Rousseau, Bothmer, Geldzahler, and Harry Parker, Rorimer's new a.s.sistant, met to discuss the centennial. "I vividly recall that the atmosphere seemed tense between Rorimer and Houghton," Hoving wrote in an early draft of his museum memoir. "Houghton found free-wheeling discussion sessions exciting." Rorimer preferred structure. After dispensing with wild ideas like official U.S. stamps and gold coins, Hollywood movies, and a new model car called the Sarc, short for "sarcophagus" (Geldzahler's suggested slogan: "The family that drives together dies together"), they proposed that the birthday incorporate major exhibitions and new scholarship, several books (a coffee-table tome by Vogue's Vogue's Leo Lerman and Calvin Tomkins's history), and community outreach. "It was decided that the princ.i.p.al goal," Hoving wrote, "should be the Leo Lerman and Calvin Tomkins's history), and community outreach. "It was decided that the princ.i.p.al goal," Hoving wrote, "should be the next next hundred years, the creation of a truly international art education ent.i.ty." hundred years, the creation of a truly international art education ent.i.ty."61 Ros Gilpatric was named the head of an ad hoc committee to start planning the event. A core group of trustees-including Daniel Davison, Dillon, Dilworth, Lehman, Watson, and Houghton-and five outsiders-the adman David Ogilvy, the CBS chairman Frank Stanton, Marietta Tree, Jayne Wrightsman, and Frederick Adams Jr., director of the Morgan Library-filled out the committee. Seven months later, tragedy gave them the chance to turn the centennial into a crucible for revolution.

There is no record in Parks Department files that Tom Hoving attended meetings of the Metropolitan board in his first months in office. But he was there on May 10, 1966, when the trustees met at the museum at 4:00 p.m. In his memoir he tells a story about that meeting that no one else will confirm, as it comes close to accusing Roland Redmond of killing James Rorimer. At the meeting, he wrote, Redmond laced into the director for accepting a small gift-an enameled Christmas card-from a German auctioneer. Rorimer wanted "to give it to the Medieval Department," Hoving says, "so young people coming up through the ranks could see a modern enamel in the style of the late twelfth century as part of the forgery measuring stick. Redmond went into a tirade about, one, accepting gifts from dealers, and, two, trying to palm it off on the Met. Totally outrageous! But d.i.c.k Dilworth stepped in, cut Redmond off in the middle of his tirade, and said, 'Moot! I move acceptance!' And Redmond was shut up."

After the meeting adjourned at 5:30, several trustees lingered to see the new French period rooms paid for by the Wrightsmans, which had just opened. Rorimer asked Hoving to wait until the trustees left and then launched into a tirade of his own. "That's been happening to me for years!" Hoving quotes him saying, his face turning purple, veins popping. "Chipping away at me, chipping away at me. I can't take it anymore. I can't stand this." He concluded by accusing Redmond of anti-Semitism, then, turning pale, ran out of steam. Finally, Hoving says, he went home and died of a heart attack, the latest in the line of directors felled by the job of running the Metropolitan.

No one will confirm the specifics of Hoving's story. The official version of Rorimer's death has him in rare form that day, laughing and joking at a friendly board meeting. Dietrich von Bothmer said that Joe n.o.ble walked Rorimer to his Cadillac that night and that nothing was bothering him except, perhaps, Hoving's presence as an ex officio trustee at the meeting.

Kay Rorimer bore no ill will toward Redmond, who she felt shared her husband's devotion to the museum, and never mentioned that the two had fought that day. But some fresh insight is provided by the young man Rorimer had hired two years previously, Harry S. Parker III. A student at the Inst.i.tute of Fine Arts, or IFA, when he took a course taught by the director, Bothmer, Hoving, and other curators, Parker became Rorimer's a.s.sistant in 1964 and quickly bonded with his boss. Among his jobs were coordinating the presentations of curators seeking permission from the trustees to acquire art, ensuring that scientific tests were run, and compiling whatever else Rorimer needed to know to make a case for purchase. Parker, who helped Hoving overcome Rorimer's profound skepticism about the Bury St. Edmunds Cross, came to admire both men, though he considered them opposites, Rorimer methodical, Hoving spontaneous and inspirational.

During that 1965 blackout, which started just after a board meeting, Rorimer and Parker had helped Redmond get Mary Whitehouse, a trustee, out of a stuck elevator. Then Rorimer nudged the trustees out of the museum and into cabs, got his loaded gun from a locker behind his desk, and walked the galleries all night with Joseph n.o.ble until the power came back on. "You couldn't rule out that it was a plot to steal," Parker explains. "He was a housekeeper extraordinaire with a feeling of personal responsibility for everything."

A few days later, when Hoving announced he was quitting, "it was a real blow to Rorimer," Parker says. "There was a deep sense of betrayal." And it was exacerbated when Hoving joined the board. "Tom's treachery, the disappointment, was a truly disturbing thing," says Parker. "Another was Roland Redmond. He shadowed Jim" on his summer travels around Europe, demanding to see anything Rorimer wanted to acquire. "Redmond had no right to vet," says Parker. "He was an amateur meddling in the world of professionals." So Rorimer worked out a charade with his secretaries, who would send false cables to ensure that Redmond would only hear about a potential purchase in, for instance, Rome after he'd left for the next city on his itinerary. "Redmond way overstepped and really p.i.s.sed Jim off. Jim had been diplomatic his whole life, he'd coped with Rockefeller, he'd suppressed his own ego. Roland had no business s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around and telling him what to do." Many museum employees agree.

Rorimer suffered from labile, or wildly varying, blood pressure. So being dressed down again by Redmond-in front of Hoving!-may have been more than his heart could take. Jessie McNab Dennis, then a young curator, believes that Hoving's behavior and betrayal (by leaving the museum) may have contributed to Rorimer's heart attack.

Whatever or whoever the cause, the facts are that Rorimer came home, had dinner, and went to bed as usual, then, during the night, Kay Rorimer "heard a noise and he was gone," their daughter says. Kay called Parker at six the next morning to tell him her husband had died and summoned him to a meeting in their apartment with Rorimer's secretary and Houghton, who saw the director's death as his chance to complete his takeover of the museum. "Houghton hadn't a.s.serted himself yet, but once Jim died, he really stepped up," says Parker. "He said, 'There are many, many, things we have to take care of.' I'm thinking, undertaker. He sits down and drafts telegrams to all the directors of the world's museums."

"It is with profound sorrow that we inform you that our director and friend James J. Rorimer died in his sleep in the early hours of this morning," said the telegram sent to Tom Hoving at the a.r.s.enal later that day. Two days later, another cable invited him to a special board meeting on May 19, where Houghton named a search committee of Young Turk trustees including himself, Danny Davison, Doug Dillon, d.i.c.k Dilworth, and Ros Gilpatric to find a successor for Rorimer. Nominally, the architect Francis Day Rogers was in charge, but Davison actually ran the search, nodding at continuity while setting a course for radical change.

Houghton would later say that he sought a man like Francis Henry Taylor, burning with the "fire of genius," to replace the "sound housekeeper" Rorimer. Though he was actually a composite of both, a showman and big-picture dreamer like Taylor and and an object-loving scholar like Rorimer, Hoving isn't even willing to give Rorimer much credit. "The place was sinking, going down the drain," he says. "Maintenance was deferred. It was dark, it was dingy, it was gloomy, it was not s.e.xy. They knew the place was dying." an object-loving scholar like Rorimer, Hoving isn't even willing to give Rorimer much credit. "The place was sinking, going down the drain," he says. "Maintenance was deferred. It was dark, it was dingy, it was gloomy, it was not s.e.xy. They knew the place was dying."

Houghton also named a four-man administrative committee to run the museum during the search, consisting of the vice director Joseph n.o.ble as chairman, J. Kenneth Loughry, the treasurer, and two curators, Ted Rousseau and John G. Phillips, who ran the Western European Arts Department. Then he asked Parker to spy on them for him. He also asked Parker, then twenty-six, to recruit and head a group of curator-ushers for Rorimer's memorial service to be held in his beloved Spanish apse at the Cloisters three weeks hence.

A crowd of one thousand filled the Cloisters for Rorimer's send-off, which featured speeches by Houghton, Rousseau, and Rorimer's friendly compet.i.tor Sherman Lee of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Recalling Rorimer's unique combination of sensitivity, connoisseurship, patience, discretion, sacrifice, wile, diplomacy, and charm, Rousseau suggested that the Cloisters, filled with his presence, should be Rorimer's memorial. In his memoirs, John Pope-Hennessy wrote a different sort of epitaph, noting the "widespread regret that a man of such capacity and distinction had been impaled on museum administration."62 Two of the four interim administrators were in the running for the job. But Ted Rousseau turned it down, having seen what it had done to Taylor and Rorimer. Joe n.o.ble, on the other hand, wanted the job, even though he knew that he lacked the necessary scholarly credentials. "He wanted to be somebody," says his a.s.sistant, Carolyn Aller. And he was. He was the hero who'd unmasked the Etruscan warriors; he had the backing of Bothmer, whose stock had risen two weeks after Rorimer died when he married a Humble Oil heiress (Joyce Blaffer, the ex-wife of Marquis Jacques de la Bega.s.siere, who would soon begin making big donations to the museum). n.o.ble also had a good relationship with Houghton, who appreciated his discretion.

"He tried to keep things out of the news and the museum looking squeaky-clean," says n.o.ble's granddaughter Katie Gamble. When a disturbed visitor stabbed herself in the jugular with an ice pick in a bathroom in the early 1960s, n.o.ble kept it quiet. "The board felt I was honest and trustworthy and always backed me," n.o.ble said before his death in 2007, denying he wanted the job. Harry Parker says differently, recalling a meeting with Houghton in Rorimer's empty office, when he heard a noise in a side room where Rorimer kept books and a cot for catnaps-and yanked open its door. "We found n.o.ble in there, listening," he says. The vice director claimed he was looking for a book.

The search committee first looked outside, researching Evan Turner, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, approaching Sherman Lee, who wanted to stay in Cleveland, and actually offering the job to a more conservative candidate, from the board's Morgan camp, Frederick B. Adams Jr., the longtime director of the Morgan Library. He also said no.

Other trustees made informal overtures. The Wrightsmans had lunch at Pope-Hennessy's home, where Charlie asked to make "the Pope" his candidate. But feeling unsure of "the legal and social context in which the Metropolitan Museum operated," he demurred, even though Wrightsman offered the added inducement of a professorship at the IFA if things went awry. Pope-Hennessy later wrote that he was one of a "vast number" of people consulted and offered the directorship, but believed the "appropriate" choice was the "compulsive, highly articulate ...confident, overconfident indeed" Hoving.63 Hoving certainly needed no introduction to either the museum staff or the public. Within days of a.s.suming his Parks job, he'd become a superstar, in constant motion across the city, injecting new life into a tired department by hiring outsiders and grabbing the spotlight by swimming in public pools, biking in Central Park and banning cars on weekends to make it safer, clowning around in playgrounds, redesigning old parks, opening a cafe that made Bethesda Fountain one of Manhattan's great pickup scenes, staging what were dubbed Hoving Happenings, where people painted, played, and partied in the parks, and raising money from neighborhood groups, local businesses, and the wealthy to pay for it all. "He brought joy into the parks again," the columnist Pete Hamill would say.64 If Hoving is to be believed, he knew he was in the running for the job the day of his mentor's funeral, when Brooke Astor gave him a ride to the Cloisters in her limousine. He'd known her since he was a teenager visiting the Berkshires. The daughter of a career military officer, Astor had suffered through an unhappy first marriage to a wealthy but brutal man who surrounded her with luxury but also beat her. Her second husband and the love of her life was Charles "Buddie" Marshall, who died in 1952, leaving her without an inheritance.

Six months after Buddie's death, she was seated across from Vincent Astor at a springtime dinner party, caught his eye, and afterward accepted a ride home with him and his second wife, Minnie. During the short drive, they induced her to visit them the following weekend at their home on the Hudson River. According to a niece, Minnie wanted out of the marriage and was looking for her replacement. Brooke fit the bill. By the end of the weekend, Astor had proposed to Brooke and all through that summer peppered her with love letters to convince her to accept. In September, Minnie got a divorce (and later married an artist, James Fosburgh). Around that time, says Nancy Hoving, Tom watched Brooke "dancing alone in her living room because she'd captured this Astor guy." He'd inherited $87 million when his father, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the t.i.tanic t.i.tanic and by the time Brooke met him had nearly doubled it. and by the time Brooke met him had nearly doubled it.65 Astor's lawyer, Redmond, arranged not only the secret wedding but also, at the groom's insistence, for Brooke to be tested for syphilis. Astor's lawyer, Redmond, arranged not only the secret wedding but also, at the groom's insistence, for Brooke to be tested for syphilis.66 The marriage that followed was, to be kind, a trial, but there was a pot of gold at the end of it, and luckily for Brooke it came soon; Astor died in 1959, leaving her the sole heir to an estate worth $134 million ($900 million today), half of it in trust for Brooke and the rest earmarked for the Vincent Astor Foundation, which she promptly decided to run herself. On getting married, she'd joined the boards of several local inst.i.tutions, but avoided those where her predecessor, Minnie Fosburgh, served. But after Vincent's death, advised by Nelson and John D. Rockefeller III, she decided to get personally involved with any causes she supported, and within a few years was considered a catch by every major philanthropic inst.i.tution in the city. In 1963, she was asked to join the board of the Met; her money far outweighed the awkwardness of two Mrs. Astors on one board.

One of the foundation's first projects under Brooke's leadership was what she called outdoor living rooms, small parks in housing projects. The first, designed by the architect and community activist Arthur Rosenblatt and the landscape architect Paul Friedberg, opened in 1963, and a second in 1966, with both first lady Lady Bird Johnson and Mayor Lindsay in attendance. "Tommy" Hoving, as she called him, gave Brooke credit as "the absolute leader" of the latest trend in recreation design.67 "She was funding tons of stuff, and she gave me a huge amount of money to build play-grounds," he says. "We were quite friendly, and she was very amused about the fact that I was parks commissioner. She said she never would have imagined that I would attain such a lofty role." "She was funding tons of stuff, and she gave me a huge amount of money to build play-grounds," he says. "We were quite friendly, and she was very amused about the fact that I was parks commissioner. She said she never would have imagined that I would attain such a lofty role."

Astor told Hoving he was resented by Lindsay and his staff for being too public, too popular-and that since Lindsay's fortunes were bound to change, he should jump ship before they did and return to his real career in art. She was backing him to become the youngest director in the museum's history (Taylor had been a year older when he got the job). At first, Hoving claims, he didn't want it, but he changed his mind when his name disappeared from published lists of potential successors and he felt a chill from Houghton at board meetings. "I was so egotistical, I thought, why the h.e.l.l aren't I even being considered?"

Rousseau summoned him to lunch, demanding to know whether he wanted the job. In a second meeting, Rousseau told him that the curators had formed an informal group to lobby for his appointment. Typically, Hoving makes himself central to a story that was considerably larger than he was. Shortly after Rorimer's death and over Houghton's very vocal objections, a committee had been formed called the Curators' Meeting. Led by the head of the American Wing, James Biddle, himself a candidate for the directorship, it included Rousseau, Bothmer, and ten others. Its purpose was to force the trustees to first hire the sort of director they wanted and then create and empower a staff committee to advise him. At their lunch, Hoving says, "Ted all but begged me to accept the directorship if asked." It was only then that Hoving decided to campaign. He kept meeting with Rousseau, discussing what he might do if he got the job. And Rousseau lobbied trustees like Wrightsman. His argument was likely simple: Hoving fit the clubby, patrician museum profile but was a man of the future, not more of the same.

After a summer slowdown, the search picked up again. Davison called Hoving in October "and asked would I come up and give them a little advice on who to look for," Hoving says. In the ten days before that meeting, "I had my chief hatchet man, Henry Stern, who would become parks commissioner twice, dig up everything on the Met. Everything. And he did an incredible job. So I knew every G.o.dd.a.m.n thing about it."

Entering that meeting, Hoving told the committee he'd made some notes while driving uptown from City Hall. "Of course I'd prepared for days," he says, and his pitch "totally flattened them." His big idea was to do for the museum what he'd done for the parks: modernize, popularize, and evangelize, bringing the museum to the public. But he also addressed some immediate concerns. Ever since Redmond had put down a staff revolt in 1962, dissatisfaction had grown. "The word was that the head of the Human Rights Division of New York State was about to go after us, penalize us for paying women distinguishably less than men," Hoving says. "I went after the trustees, accused them of being b.u.m second-raters with no idea how to run a modern inst.i.tution! The building was deteriorating. The entire inst.i.tution had stopped. They were completely flabbergasted."

A few days later, Hoving continues, he was summoned to Houghton's neo-Georgian mansion on Sutton Place-bought from J. P. Morgan's daughter Anne-and offered not just the $50,000-a-year job as the museum's seventh director but also a duplex apartment loaded with art, rentfree, that the museum had just bought at 1172 Fifth Avenue as well as a car and chauffeur. Hoving said yes so fast he surprised himself. "I was inflated-bloated is a better word-with pleasure," he wrote. "I wanted to be accepted into the prestige and power of the Metropolitan far more than I really cared about the inst.i.tution."68 They agreed he would take up the post the following April, in 1967. They agreed he would take up the post the following April, in 1967.

In the lull between Tom's acceptance and its announcement, the Hovings sat down and "a.s.sessed who we were and what we wanted," Nancy says. Though she initially resolved to become "a museum wife," they quickly decided the apartment "would const.i.tute golden shackles, and with it I would never be able to stand up to the trustees," Hoving says. Houghton was first furious, but then managed to sell the apartment for a profit. "The one good thing I did for the Met!" chortles Nancy, who never did become a good museum wife.

"She had a full-time life of her own, which was unusual then," says Michael Botwinick. "But that was part of Tom being part of a new age. His wife wouldn't be like Kay Rorimer."

IN THE MEANTIME, LIFE IN THE PARKS WENT ON. ON H HALLOWEEN, Hoving presided over a party for twenty thousand children in the Central Park Sheep Meadow. And in November, reports of his unhappiness with Hoving notwithstanding, Lindsay, who knew he'd accepted Houghton's offer, gave him a promotion in a reorganization of city government, making him head of a new department that merged parks, recreation, and cultural affairs, with a raise to $35,000 a year. Part of his new duties involved carefully studying all the cultural inst.i.tutions that got money from the city, a situation that might have chilled the board had it not already known he was theirs. But Lindsay had to show his annoyance at having his Parks boss poached; three weeks later, in mid-December, after the museum let it be known that a new director would be named at the next trustees' meeting, Lindsay preempted them and leaked word that Hoving already had the job.

So the announcement on December 20 in the Velez Blanco patio was an anticlimax. But it included a surprise for Hoving. Joe n.o.ble was simultaneously named his vice director for administration. Hoving had been annoyed by him ever since 1959, when he'd admonished the young curator for sloppiness. Hoving soon began plotting to get rid of him.

"I feel like I have lost one of my arms," Mayor Lindsay moaned at the press conference. Asked his plans, Hoving replied carefully, "I hope to communicate in a greater way the excitement one finds in a museum." In an editorial the next day, the Times Times predicted "a noticeable shift in the Cultural Scene ... it is likely that the treasure house will be considerably shook up." predicted "a noticeable shift in the Cultural Scene ... it is likely that the treasure house will be considerably shook up."69 Truer words had rarely been written. The combination of "the hipness of Hoving and the hauteur of the Metropolitan" promised a reign as colorful and controversial as that of Luigi di Cesnola. Truer words had rarely been written. The combination of "the hipness of Hoving and the hauteur of the Metropolitan" promised a reign as colorful and controversial as that of Luigi di Cesnola.70 Controversy seemed to come naturally to all the new leaders of the Metropolitan. On February 16, a month before he started at the Met, Hoving was woken by a 6:30 a.m. call from Houghton: "Tom, please forgive me for what you'll be reading in the New York Times New York Times this morning. Bye." this morning. Bye." Ramparts Ramparts, a radical leftist magazine, had published an expose of covert CIA funding of an anti-Communist student organization. Houghton ran a private foundation that served as a CIA front and subsidized the group. Houghton was shocked to discover that Hoving the populist didn't care.

Through the winter and spring, Hoving did both jobs, even though it was certainly improper and probably illegal. After Lindsay named August Heckscher the new Parks chief in February, Hoving's start date was advanced by a month, but he was already considered the director-elect, not an ex officio trustee. He'd grabbed the reins and started whipping his new horse to see what it could do. He wanted to increase showmanship, scholarship, and cooperation with other museums, reach out to the community, make the museum more relevant, and expand into multimedia. He asked each head curator to write a report on his department. And even before they were through, he announced his first blockbuster, a conceptual exhibition of treasures with royal a.s.sociations to open almost immediately. The museum was calling it In the Presence of Kings. Putting the Hoving spin on it, he called it "Things for Kings."

Stuart Silver, a graphic artist who had joined the Metropolitan at age twenty-five as a poster designer in 1962, had ascended the ranks quickly to become an exhibition designer and was put in charge of the Kings exhibit. For him, Hoving's arrival changed everything. "The place instantly went on high alert," Silver says. "He insisted on the Presence of Kings show to celebrate his arrival." Normally such a show would take years to prepare, but Hoving demanded that it open in a month. "It covered eighteen departments," says Silver. It would have been impossible had it not been for Hoving, who was "absolutely crazy and brilliant, the quickest absorber of impressions and information I've ever come across," Silver says. "He was like lightning, and he gave me the opportunity, which I profoundly appreciated, to be who I am," a set designer using the museum as a stage.

The show was a huge hit and introduced other innovations. Hoving hung banners touting it over the front steps of the museum-the first since Francis Henry Taylor was stopped from hanging them. He recorded a walking tour of the exhibit himself-the first time a director had done that since Acoustiguides were introduced four years before. And to Silver's knowledge, it was the first time a museum exhibition designer ever got credit in reviews of a show.

Silver was a Rorimer-era employee who emerged as a star under Hoving. Others preferred to work behind the curtains. First among those was George Trescher, who'd been recruited to coordinate planning for the centennial just before Rorimer died. Just as Hoving inspired Silver to create a new style of museum show, Trescher inspired Hoving's reinvention of the museum, developed new ways to pay for parties and improvements, and let Hoving take credit for many o