The Wrong Kind of Money (22 page)

“I persuaded Alphonse to share distribution rights with Mr. Moran,” he said. “At least for the time being, until things settle down a bit.”

The perpetrators of the St. Valentine's Day massacre were never apprehended. In fact, the government was never able to get any of its charges against Mr. Capone to stick. Finally, in 1931, they got him for a white-collar crime, income-tax evasion, which could have happened to anybody, and which Mr. Capone regarded as an insult. He was given a light prison sentence and a fine of $50,000. Which he promptly paid, in cash. Hannah used to have a box of her cook's brownies sent to him once a month in his prison cell, and he always wrote her a charming thank-you note. To Hannah, no matter what terrible things they said and wrote about him, Mr. Alphonse Capone was always a true gentleman of the old school.

By 1933, of course, Prohibition was a thing of the past. That wonderful Age of Innocence was over.

7

“Uncovered Treasures”

When Carol Liebling first began to fall in love with the work she was doing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was already a little bit sick of it. The year was 1988, one of the most uneventful years in the history of the American republic. After taking a scary 500-point tumble the year before, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had begun gliding comfortably upward again—past 3,000, then 3,500, and finally flirting with the seemingly impossible 4,000 mark, while Carol could remember a day when the magic goal to overtake had been a mere 1,000. The twinkly smile and ruddy complexion of Ronald Reagan seemed to reassure the country that all was well, or at least that nothing was really amiss, as the rich got richer and the poor went elsewhere, where they were probably better off. The president's way of dismissing unwelcome news was comforting. He would simply cock his head, grin, shrug, and say, “W-e-e-ll …” And Carol was restless.

Working at the Met could be a lot of fun. It certainly had its rewarding moments. And, a not unimportant consideration, it was the kind of work that pleased her mother-in-law to see her do, and that pleased Noah. “It's just the kind of community service work you
should
be doing as Noah's wife,” Hannah often said to her approvingly, even though it had sometimes seemed to Carol like the kind of community work that used to be endorsed by her mother's
Ladies' Home Journal.

She had started her museum work not long after Anne was born, as a lowly volunteer, selling art books, gifts, and postcards in the museum's shop two afternoons a week. But having minored in art history at college, she soon found herself being given tasks with greater responsibilities. By 1986 Anne had successfully weathered the transition to Brearley's Middle School, and didn't seem to require that much mothering anymore. Noah was still expecting his mother to turn over the reins to the company at any moment, and was working very hard with that in mind, and Carol had been given the official title of the Met's head of volunteers. She had also been given the unofficial title of museum archivist.

Being head of volunteers for the museum was not without its moments of frustration. A good deal of paperwork was entailed, arranging and rearranging schedules for her volunteer staff, most of whom were well-to-do women who really didn't want to work very hard. She began to see herself as a kind of glorified dispatcher for a radio cab company. And Carol—feeling young, impatient, overqualified, and underused—had already begun mentally casting about for something else to do. She had no idea what. But she decided before quitting her job at the Met, and moving on to whatever it was that might lie ahead for her, she was going to make some sort of contribution to the museum that would be significant enough for Carol Dugan Liebling to be remembered for it. When she quit, it was going to be on a note of triumph, not defeat. And it was in her secondary capacity as archivist that she felt she had found what she was looking for.

For two years prior to that forgettable year of 1988, she had been spending most of her time on a project she had named “Uncovered Treasures.”

It had all started when, poking around in the museum's basement storage rooms, and in various warehouses around the city where the Met stored items from its collections, Carol turned over a canvas which she immediately recognized as an early Velazquez painting of St. John in the Wilderness. Looking through catalogues of early exhibitions, she could find no evidence that this painting had ever been shown. This Velazquez did not appear anywhere in the museum's inventories. Her only conclusion was that this was an important piece that the museum did not even know it owned.

Wondering whether “her” Velazquez was simply an isolated oversight, she rummaged in the museum's vaults some more. She soon discovered that it was not. Within months she had compiled a list of twenty-six works that had never been catalogued, inventoried, or exhibited, including a Delacroix, an El Greco, two Matisses, a Picasso mother and child, and a second Velazquez. With help from her volunteer staff, she was certain that she would discover even more. That was when she took her idea for “Uncovered Treasures” to the museum's director.

“Think of it,” she said. “A special exhibit of pieces from the museum's treasury that the museum didn't even know were there!”

He responded with his usual quick enthusiasm. “Go for it!” he told her.

Soon her list grew to sixty works of art, then to seventy-three, then eighty. In all, Carol spent eighteen months working on her presentation for “Uncovered Treasures—Secrets from Our Lost Archives,” as she subtitled it. When it was finished, it ran to more than two hundred pages. It included a complete index of the works themselves, a chronology of their discovery, and a bibliography of textbook sources. Carol drew up a detailed blueprint of how the exhibition could be arranged and hung and lighted. She compiled a budget of the show's probable costs, and appended a list of possible corporate sponsors who might be expected to underwrite the show, at least in part. Needless to say, she did not include the Ingraham Corporation on this list. She even composed an outline and a table of contents for the show's catalogue, and wrote a proposed introduction for it. When she was finished, she sent all her material to a printer and had it bound in blue leather with gold lettering. Then she presented this to the director, who promised to submit copies of her proposal to the board of trustees for consideration at their next meeting.

But when, a week or so later, the director summoned her into his office, his face was long. “Everyone agreed that you'd put a lot of hard work into this,” he said, tapping a copy of “Treasures” with his fingertip. “But I'm afraid there wasn't much enthusiasm for the idea among the members of the board, Carol.”

“I wonder why not,” she said, trying to conceal her profound disappointment.

“There was a general feeling that the timing isn't quite right for this sort of thing,” he said.

“Timing?” she said. “What's timing got to do with it? These are works of art that have never before been seen by the New York public. The timing could be anytime.”

“It doesn't quite seem to fit in with our regular schedule of upcoming exhibits,” he said.

“It's a show that could be mounted this year—or next year—or five years from now.”

“But it's a show that doesn't seem to have any clear focus. It doesn't focus on any particular time period, or artist, or event.”

“The focus is on the museum
itself,”
she said. “It's a show that says that, like everybody else, the Metropolitan Museum has an attic in which valuable things get lost, or misplaced, and then turn up later. My idea was that this show would humanize the museum—make it seem more personal, less like an institution.”

“I'm sorry, Carol.”

“What else did the trustees say?” she asked him.

“Well, of course I can't quote you verbatim each trustee's individual comments,” he said rather crisply. “But there was a general feeling that this show wouldn't have legs.”

“Legs?”

“That it wouldn't be a big box office draw.”

“You sound as if we're in show biz,” she said.

“Well, in a sense we
are,”
he said with a small, pained smile.

“Funny,” she said. “But I thought the museum was in the business of education, not entertainment.”

He threw up his hands. “But what's the point of mounting a big, expensive exhibition if nobody comes to see it?” he said. “I'm sorry, Carol. If it's any comfort to you, I personally thought you had a hell of a good idea there.”

And all at once she knew that he was lying, or at least that he was not telling her the whole truth. There was more to it than that, but there was nothing she could do. “Well, thank you, Roger,” she said, and rose to go, and he turned to paperwork on his desk.

And so that was the end of it. The board of trustees was all powerful, and the director was their highly paid minion. She was a mere unsalaried volunteer. But she could not help but think that if she herself had been able to make her presentation to the board, she could have sold them “Treasures.” But that was not the way Things Were Done at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For the next few days her thoughts centered mostly around the big antique silver coffee urn that stood on the Boulé sideboard in the Trustees Meeting Room, and the little array of Limoges demitasse cups arranged around it. If she could only figure out a way to lace that coffee with arsenic …

It was only the coldest sort of comfort to her when she noticed, some weeks later, that Velazquez's
St. John in the Wilderness
had been hung in a position of some prominence in a room devoted to seventeenth-century Spanish painters.

She also knew that she could not quit her job now. The challenge to somehow leave her stamp on the museum had become even greater.

One night she came home to River House to find Noah and her mother-in-law in the library with huge sheafs of architectural drawings spread out on the carpet between them.

“Plans for the new Ingraham Building,” Hannah explained. “We've decided to build our own building.”

“We've outgrown our space in the Chrysler Building,” Noah said. “We've had some cost studies done. This turns out to be the most economical way to solve the problem.”

Carol studied the plans, which called for a huge square box, thirty-eight stories tall, made of shiny pressed aluminum, dotted with hundreds and hundreds of little windows, row upon row of them. Over the top of the building the architect had indicated a tall illuminated sign, reading
INGRAHAM—THE TRUSTED NAME IN SPIRITS
. The floor plans showed a maze of tiny offices.

At first Carol didn't know what to say. Finally she said, “Does Ingraham really need this much space now?”

“Of course not,” Hannah said. “That's the point. What we don't need, we'll lease out. As we need more space, we can take over the leases. This is going to be a real moneymaker for us, Carol.”

“Who are the architects, Nana?”

“Frankel and Steiner—tops in the business. They deliver the lowest cost per square foot in town.”

“And you want—pressed aluminum?”

“It turns out to be the cheapest way to sheathe a building this size,” Hannah said.

“And it's extremely durable,” Noah added helpfully. “Keeps the heat in winter and reflects the sun in summer, making it more economical to air-condition.”

Hannah Liebling tapped the plans approvingly with her forefinger. “I like the sign best,” she said. She turned to Carol. “Well, what do you think?” she said.

“What do
I
think?” Carol said.

“Yes. What do you think? Pretty impressive, isn't it? Particularly with that sign up there on the roof. The architect says you'll be able to see that sign from the George Washington Bridge.”

“You really want to know what I think?” Carol asked her.

“Of course!”

“If you really want to know what I think, Nana, I think it's the ugliest design for a building I've ever seen in my life,” Carol said. “And I think that sign is—absolutely vulgar.” She looked quickly at Noah, who was merely smiling. His smile said,
I've been trying to tell her that all along.

“Well!” Hannah said, tossing aside the plans. “Who asked you your opinion about it, anyway?”

“You did,” Carol said. “You asked me what I thought of it, Nana. And I just told you.”

“Well, maybe I did,” she conceded. “But—ugly? What's so ugly about it? It seems like a perfectly nice building to me.”

“I'm not sure you really want my opinion, Nana,” Carol said.

“Of course I do. I just asked you, didn't I?”

“Well, then let's start at the top. That sign—”

Noah cleared his throat. “That sign was Mother's idea,” he said. “It was an afterthought. Actually, the architect wasn't entirely sure—”

“They'll be able to see it from New Jersey!”

“Let me just say one thing, Nana,” Carol said. “If you're going to build your own building and attach your corporate name to it, I think you have to be terribly careful about what sort of a statement this building makes, because whatever it is, it's going to be a statement about your company. And it's going to be a statement that will be there for a good long time. I wouldn't worry about New Jersey. It's going to be a building that will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people who pass by it every year, people from all over the world. We're going to have to assume that people will see that building on the New York City skyline long after all of us are in our graves. That means that it should be an important building, a building that will register in people's minds, not just a building that's energy-efficient and was cheap to put up.”

“Huh!” Hannah said. “You're saying that a building should be a work of art?”