Rogues' Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals That Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art Paperback - 2010 - 1st Edition

On a chilly winter day, early in 2006, I sat in the office of Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (he would announce his retirement two years later). Montebello is generally considered, even by his most fervent admirers, a little arrogant, a touch on the pompous side, and his mid-Atlantic Voice of God (well-known from his Acoustiguide tours of exhibitions) does nothing to dispel the impression of a healthy self-regard. So I was nervous; I was there to discuss my plan to write an unauthorized book about the museum and to ask for his support, or, at least, his neutrality.

He wasn’t happy to see me.

Ever since its founding, the Metropolitan has bred arrogance, hauteur, hubris, vanity and even madness in those who live in proximity to its multitude of treasures and who have come to feel not just protective but possessive of them. “Being involved with it made you special to the outside world,” says Stuart Silver, for years the museum’s chief exhibition designer. “It was a narcotic. You were high all the time.”
The Metropolitan is more than a mere drug, though. It is a huge alchemical experiment, turning the worst of man’s attributes—extravagance, lust, gluttony, acquisitiveness, envy, avarice, greed, egotism and pride—into the very best, transmuting deadly sins into priceless treasure. So the museum must be seen as something separate from the often imperfect individuals who created it, who sustained it and who run it today, something greater than the sum of their myriad flaws.

Without taking anything away from The Louvre or the Orsay in Paris, Madrid’s Prado, St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, The British Museum (which has no pictures), Britain’s National Gallery (which has only pictures and sculpture), the Vatican in Rome, the Uffizi in Florence, Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Berlin’s Pergamon, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian Institute and its National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Getty in Malibu or other vital New York museums like the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan is simply (and at the same time not at all simply) the most encyclopedic, universal art museum in the world.

In Montebello’s office that day, he’d been slumped sullenly in his chair as I made my pitch, but straightened up as I finished. “You are laboring under a misimpression,” he told me. “The museum has no secrets.”
 
From its inception, oversized personalities have dominated the Metropolitan; many loom large in American history, too. John Jay, grandson of the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, first conceived of it. William Cullen Bryant, the orator, poet, journalist, publisher and club man was one of the most eloquent advocates of the museum’s creation. In recent times, its board heads have been some of America’s most powerful men: in the 1930s, George Blumenthal, who headed Lazard Frères; in the 1960s, C. Douglas Dillon, John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Treasury; in the 1970s, Robert Lehman, the head of Lehman Brothers and in the 1980s, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, the chairman of The New York Times.

Some of these characters defined distinct eras in the museum’s colorful history. Luigi Palma di Cesnola, named the first director by the mostly self-made founders, was an Italian count, a Civil War veteran given to inflating his rank, an American diplomat and an amateur archaeologist, some of whose finds from Cyprus remain treasures in the museum’s collections today; his excesses mark it still. J. Pierpont Morgan is credited with turning the Met from a semi-private clubhouse for the trustees into a professional operation.

Following Morgan and dominating throughout the mid-20th century, though never serving as a trustee or officer, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was quietly its greatest benefactor and his relationship with James Rorimer, the sixth director, was a model for the symbiosis between the rich and the scholarly that made the Met blossom even more after Morgan. Hoving, a scholar but also a showman like Cesnola, was appointed by a board of trustees led by a group of gun-slinging veterans of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier administration; he re-invented the Met, and in the process redefined all museums during his mere ten years as director, beginning in 1966.

Ever since the beginning, the Met has been a political, cultural and social spectacle, especially when all three come together in the cauldron of fundraising. Then the fun really begins. You can get a seat on the board by wielding power (like Henry Kissinger, who was recruited to lend geopolitical savvy), or waving your family bloodline or corporate flag (among the Met’s brand-name trustee dynasties have been Morgans, Astors, Whitneys, Rockefellers, Annenbergs, Houghtons and various representatives of the Lazard Frères investment bank) or possessing a useful skill (like any number of financiers, developers and the media titans Reid, Luce, and Sulzberger). But money counts most of all: a commitment to donate six figure sums every year, or to twist the arms of other potential givers. “Give, get, or get out,” is the rule.
 
Back in Philippe de Montebello’s office, I wound up my pitch for the museum’s cooperation… and left the room shortly after with the distinct feeling that I was on my own. For I already knew that a curtain of secrecy had been hung over the museum long before Montebello’s time. With the stakes so high and the money and egos involved so big, the Met has always had to operate in the shade, whether it was acquiring art under questionable circumstances, dealing with donors hoping to launder very sketchy reputations, or merely trying to appear above reproach in a world where behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that, a sin or a crime. The Metropolitan Museum is a storehouse of human memory. But it appeared, that day at least, it would just as soon its own be erased.

Praise for Rogues' Gallery

“Gross demonstrates he knows his stuff. It's a terrific tale, with all the elements of a gossipy, color-rich, fact-packed Vanity Fair-style takedown.” –Maria Puente, USA Today

“Provocative.” –Reid Pillifant, New York Observer

“Any and all facts that I knew of personally, the author gets absolutely right, which makes me trust much else in the book–and there's a great deal else, indeed an entire history of the museum beginning from its gradual birth in the 1870s, told as a kind of extended gossip dish, a dense and exhaustively factual one, about the powerful egos that drove it into prominence and kept it there. I am not particularly sympathetic to any view of the world as a gossipy chronicle. I didn't expect to like the book's tone, but I found a good 100 pages had gone by before I could even put it down. . . . The book is important, and what's more, splendidly readable.” –Melik Kaylan, Forbes.com

"Highly entertaining." –Manuela Hoelterhoff, Bloomberg  
 
"Gross’ s coup is not only in the vast amounts of information he has obtained but also in his ability to tell a story about the rich and powerful people of New York nearly effortlessly and without disdain." –Jillian Steinhauer, ArtInfo.com

". . . a pageturner that unravels like an elite whodunit, and is reaping encomiums from advance readers. Destined to be the talk of art circles in the U.S. and abroad. . . . Not only by art connoisseurs but by culturati hungry for a captivating, tattle-tale yarn, Rogues’ Gallery will spark a furor." –George Christy, The Beverly Hills Courier

"Gross relishes every nefarious or audacious episode as he marches through the museum’s fascinating history of curatorial excellence, social climbing, and skulduggery. It’ s a tale of elitists versus populists, of spectacular gifts and scandals, trustees refusing to consider art made by living artists and formidable innovators, especially Robert Moses and Thomas Hoving. Whether he is portraying the museum’s first director, the scoundrel Luigi Palma di Cesnola, John D. Rockefeller (the museum’s “greatest benefactor”), curator Henry Geldzahler, Diana Vreeland of the Costume Institute, or, in the most sordid chapter, vice chairman Annette de la Renta, Gross zestfully mixes factual reportage with piquantly entertaining anecdotes." –Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Gross is a good reporter, ever-digging, fanatical about details and without cooperation from the Met, he has produced a fascinating history of the museum, its place in the world, its place in the New York social firmament and its ups, downs, ins, outs, plus the trajectories of its various directors. . . . a fabulous, realistic, well-researched book " –Liz Smith

"Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum, has all of New York talking." –Style.com

". . . a must-read." –Rush & Molloy, New York Daily News

". . . destined to be a must-read amongst the cognescenti, not to mention the art world." –David Patrick Columbia, New York Social Diary

“Michael Gross hangs the eccentric and dazzlingly rich characters behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” –Vanity Fair

“Sharp and well-constructed, the readers will marvel at how the institution transcended the bickering and backhanded power plays to become one of the largest and most prestigious museums in the world. A deft rendering of the down-and-dirty politics of the art world.” –Kirkus Reviews

“For more than a century, the coupling of art with commerce has made New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art the world’s most glamorous whore, according to this sprawling history. . . . Behind-the-scenes dirt and an intriguing look at the symbiosis of culture and cash.” –Publishers Weekly

“Michael Gross has proven once again that he is a premier chronicler of the rich. Rogues’ Gallery is an insightful, entertaining look at a great institution—with all its flaws and all its greatness.” —Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life

“The title alone tantalizes but once you pick up this book and start reading about the good and the great and the hijinks of high society, it becomes un-put-downable!!!” —Kitty Kelley, author of The Family: The Real Story of The Bush Dynasty

Praise for 740 Park
“Tantalizing, intimate, engrossing, intriguing. A deeply researched book that deserves a prominent place among the social histories of 20th-century Manhattan.” —Washington Post

“One building as [a] microcosm of life on a silver platter. The voyeurism is so giddy that 740 Park sometimes feels like an extended feat of free-association. . . . Outside the work of Edith Wharton or Jane Austen, it’s rare to find such brazen speculation about exactly what people are worth. Changing demographic and economic realities have made 740 Park a mirror of its times.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times

“[A] great read . . . gossipy . . . revealing.” —People

“This is social history at its finest.” —Dominick Dunne

“740 Park is the home of some of the world’s wealthiest people. Gross takes readers inside its doorman-protected walls, exposing the shocking and sometimes tragic secrets the building has been guarding for nearly a century.” —Star

“It took a reporter and storyteller like Michael Gross to lay out the epic tale—truly, the story of American capitalism and 20th-century New York society—that is 740 Park Ave. . . . This is the kind of heady terrain Gross knows well.” —Hartford Courant

Provocative cultural journalist and New York Times bestselling author Michael Gross is currently a contributing editor at Travel & Leisure. He has previously held positions at the New York Times, New York, Radar, George, and Esquire. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Interview, Details, Elle, Architectural Digest, American Photo,
Town & Country, and Cosmopolitan, and he has also written for the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. He has profiled subjects from John F. Kennedy Jr. to Greta Garbo, from Richard Gere to Ivana Trump, and he has written on subjects such as divorce, plastic surgery, Greenwich Village, and sex in the nineties. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (1995), which was published in eight countries; My Generation (2000), a biography of the Baby Boom generation; Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren (2003); and 740 Park (2005). He currently lives in New York City.