Part 6 (1/2)

Rappetti kept saying over and over, ”They're after me. They want me dead. If anyone asks for me, say I am not here.” In the next hour, he tried several times to telephone someone in Switzerland, but he could not get through. There were also several calls for him, supposedly from Paris, but Sclauzero sensed that they were local calls and said that he was not there. Rappetti had left his watch in Paris, and asked to borrow one of Tucci's watches and a T-s.h.i.+rt. He used the bathroom and went into one of the two bedrooms of the apartment to rest. Mariarosa remained in the living room, reading. When the police knocked on her door, after leaving Rossellini's apartment, and asked if she had a guest, she followed Rappetti's instructions and said no. Realizing, however, that something was wrong, she went into the bedroom and found the window wide open. Franco Rappetti was not there. On a table by the window were the watch he had borrowed and the T-s.h.i.+rt, folded. She admits it was a mistake to lie to the police. Later she was grilled for six hours.

”Franco Rappetti was pushed, but not physically,” Sclauzero told me as we sat in Apartment 11-J of the Meurice. ”Other people brought him to this despair. What he never said was who or why.” She said that Rappetti was convinced that he was being poisoned by a servant in Rome, who was being paid by ”other people,” and that he was being pursued. She denied reports that he had money problems, arguing that he was worth about $5 million in art at the time of his death. She also said that after his death all the paintings in his apartment in Rome disappeared overnight.

The death was declared a suicide. Several well-heeled friends who were approached to lend their private planes to fly Rappetti's body back to Italy refused, on the ground that it would be unlucky to fly the body of a suicide. The day following the death, Heini Thyssen arrived at the Waldorf Towers. An oft-repeated story in these circles is that, on his arrival, Heini asked, ”Does Denise blame me?” It is generally acknowledged that he arranged for the broken corpse to be s.h.i.+pped back to Genoa, Rappetti's birthplace, in a chartered plane. The body was accompanied by the grief-stricken Denise Thyssen and her sister Penny, who is married to Jamie Granger, the son of film star Stewart Granger. There are those who say the body was s.h.i.+pped before an autopsy could be performed. There are others who believe that Rappetti was already dead when he was thrown from the window. The man who made the arrangements to s.h.i.+p the body for Thyssen was another art dealer he did business with. His name was Andrew Crispo.

Many people who once moved in the orbit of this charismatic art dealer now seek to distance themselves as widely as possible from him. To the baron's great distress, his name has frequently been a.s.sociated in recent times with that of Crispo, who figured prominently and salaciously in the 1985 sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic murder of a Norwegian fas.h.i.+on student named Eigil Vesti. Crispo was a prime suspect in the murder, but his young a.s.sistant Bernard LeGeros was tried and sentenced for the crime. This past October, Crispo, who is currently in prison for tax evasion, was tried on a forcible-sodomy charge and acquitted.

Thyssen and Crispo originally met at Crispo's gallery during an exhibition called ”Pioneers of American Abstraction.” Thyssen had lent one of his pictures, a watercolor by Charles Demuth, for the show. He complained that on the loan card beneath the picture the name Thyssen-Bornemisza had been misspelled. ”How do you know?” asked Crispo. ”Because I am Baron Thyssen,” was the reply. Thereafter, Thyssen began buying pictures from Crispo.

Franco Rappetti, trying to hold on to his business relations.h.i.+p with Thyssen at the same time that he was conducting an affair with Thyssen's wife, had once told Crispo that he would have to pay him a commission on any pictures he sold to the baron. Crispo had refused. After Rappetti's death, Cris...o...b..came firmly entrenched as Baron Thyssen's New York art dealer. In one month Thyssen spent $3 million on paintings, and the two men developed a close bond that has been the subject of endless speculation. Some people believe that the immensely rich baron financed Andrew Crispo's Fifty-seventh Street gallery. Others believe that there was a deep friends.h.i.+p between Crispo and the baron's oldest son, Georg-Heinrich, now thirty-seven. Georg-Heinrich, also called Heini, is the baron's child by his first wife, a German Princess of Lippe, who is now the Princess Teresa von Frstenberg. ”Teresa and Heini should have stayed married,” said a grand European lady recently while lunching at Le Cirque. ”She wouldn't have cared about his peccadilloes. Ridiculous, all those divorces.” Young Heini lives in Monte Carlo and runs the vast family empire so that his father can devote himself entirely to the art collection. The Thyssen fortune, no longer connected with the original iron-and-steel business in Germany, is now derived from s.h.i.+pbuilding in Holland, sheep farms in Australia, gla.s.s, plastics, and automobile parts in America, and a.s.sorted interests in Canada and j.a.pan. Whatever relations.h.i.+p or relations.h.i.+ps once existed among father, son, and Andrew Crispo no longer do.

t.i.ta Thyssen told a curious story about an American magazine which sent a crew to photograph her and her husband at their house in Jamaica and then used only a small picture of them, ”Like a snapshot.” ”There was something funny about it,” she said, shaking her head at the memory. ”They stayed too long for a photography shoot-five days. I felt they were after something. Then we found out that the photographer was the boyfriend of Crispo's boyfriend.”

The baron now joined the conversation. ”Crispo sold pictures to other people and then declared on the books that I had bought them so his buyers could avoid paying the New York City tax. Two-thirds of the pictures he said that I bought he actually sold to other people.”

The baroness nodded her head in agreement.

”What do you call those films where people are killed?” he asked.

”Snuff?” I said. A snuff film is one in which a person is murdered, usually ritualistically, on-camera.

”Snuff, yes. One of the newspapers in New York tried to say that I financed snuff films for Andrew Crispo.” He shuddered in disgust.

”Why didn't you sue?” I asked.

He waved my question away with a dismissive gesture. ”This is such bad coffee,” he said, putting his cup on the table and standing. ”These people do not know how to make coffee. You can get better coffee in an airplane.” The conversation was over. Neither Rappetti nor Crispo was mentioned again. Back to art.

”The baron is a man in love with his collection. Everything for him is his collection. He loves it. He is in love with it,” said the Duke de Badajoz, who is not only the great good friend of both the baron and baroness but also the man who has been, after t.i.ta, the prime influence in guiding the baron's decision to allow the collection to go to Spain. ”After all the effort of his father and him to collect and ama.s.s 1,400 pictures, half of which are quite unique, it was more than natural that he was worried for a long time as to what would happen to the collection when he dies. He did not want it dispersed and auctioned. He has been looking around for some years for what could be a solution for the princ.i.p.al part of his collection, the A pictures.”

Clearly, the pictures are the focus of the baron's life. ”I'm a lucky fellow. These pictures of my father's I have known for fifty years, and I've been collecting for thirty-five years so I know them all.” Walking through the graceful galleries that his father built to house the early part of the collection and that he opened to the public after his father's death in 1947, Thyssen was drawing more interest from the browsing tourists and art lovers than the paintings themselves. He moved with the a.s.surance of a celebrity, knowing he was being looked at and talked about. When people came up to ask him to autograph their Thyssen-Bornemisza catalogs, he was completely charming. As he signed the books, he would say a few words or make a joke. He was dressed, as he almost always is, in a blue blazer with double vents, which his London tailor makes for him a dozen at a time, gray flannels, and a striped tie. In his hand he carried a large, old-fas.h.i.+oned key ring, unlocking certain rooms as we entered them and then locking them again as we left.

”I bought this yesterday,” the baron said, looking at a Brueghel painting of animals. ”I bought it from my sister. It's not in the catalog. It belonged to my father, and my sister inherited it.” He moved on. ”Now, this picture I bought from my other sister.” Although the baron inherited the major part of the collection when his father died, he has spent years buying back the pictures that his two sisters inherited. It is for this reason that he is determined that his collection be kept intact when he dies. Thyssen also had an older brother, whose story remains somewhat vague. ”He lived in Cuba,” said the baron. ”Then he moved to New York and lived at the Plaza Hotel. He lived completely on vitamins. He ODed on vitamins.”

”ODed?”

”Hmm, dead,” he said. He walked into another room.

”This is my favorite picture,” he said, peering as if for the first time at a Ghirlandaio portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni, a Florentine n.o.blewoman, painted in 1488. ”She died very young, in childbirth. We have never known if the picture was painted before or after her death. It was in the Morgan Library in New York. They had to buy some books, so they sold it.” He continued to make comments as he pa.s.sed from one painting to the next: ”A t.i.tian, very late. He was almost ninety when he painted that ... Who was that man who gave the big ball in Venice after the war? Beistegui, wasn't it? That pair of Tintorettos comes from him ... Everything in this room was bought by me and not by my father. I call it the Rothschild room. All the pictures in this room I bought from different members of the Rothschild family ... My father bought this Hans Holbein of Henry VIII from the grandfather of Princess Di, the Earl of Spencer. The Earl bought a Bugatti with the money. When the picture was shown in England, Princess Margaret said to me, 'Harry is one up on you.' She was talking about his six wives, and my five. I said, 'He didn't have to go through all these tedious legal proceedings I do.' ”

Of course, only a fraction of the baron's pictures were on view. Several of his Degas were in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of his old masters had been lent to the U.S.S.R. and were at that moment in Siberia. Still others were on loan to exhibitions around the world. He shook his head at the complexity of owning such a large collection.

The baron unlocked a door, and we entered a part of his private museum called the Reserve. It is here that pictures for which there is no room in the galleries hang on both sides of movable floor-to-ceiling racks twenty to twenty-five feet high. In one room a restorer with a broken arm, on loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, was cleaning a fifteenth-century Italian portrait. ”We have no room for this Edward Hopper,” the baron said of a picture of a naked woman sitting on a bed, ”and there's no place for that Monet.” He rolled the racks back. There was also no place for a Georgia O'Keeffe and an Andrew Wyeth and what seemed like several hundred others.

”That's a fake Mondrian there,” he said, approaching it and squinting at it. ”I bought it by mistake. An expert told me he saw Mondrian paint it, and I believed him.”

”Why do you keep it?”

”I prefer to keep a small fake to a big fake,” he said, smiling.

Behind a door, almost out of sight, hung a picture of the baron himself. He made no comment about the portrait until I mentioned it. ”That's me by Lucian Freud,” he said. The picture, which I had seen at the Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Gallery in Was.h.i.+ngton, is chilling; it suggests that there is a dark side to this billionaire. ”I was getting a divorce at the time,” he said, as if explaining Freud's unflattering rendition. People who know the baron well say that it is an extraordinarily accurate portrait. ”That is Heini totally,” said an American woman who had apparently known the baron extremely well for a short time between marriages and asked not to be identified. ”He went into unbelievable mood swings.”

Helmut Newton asked the baron to pose next to the Lucian Freud portrait. He did. ”Your chin up a bit,” said Newton. The baron raised his chin. ”Maybe that's how I will look someday, but it's not how I look now.” As we were leaving the room, he said, ”There's another Greco.”

Once the Spanish government agreed to put up the necessary capital to house the paintings, and figured out what compensation should be made to the heirs of Baron Thyssen for renouncing their claim to his pictures, the deal was more or less in order. The baron has five children, starting with Georg-Heinrich from his first marriage. He has two children by his third wife, the former Fiona Campbell-Walter: Francesca, known as Chessy, who is an actress, and Lorne, an aspiring actor. After their divorce, Fiona, a beautiful English model, fell madly in love with Alexander Ona.s.sis, Aristotle's son by his first wife, Tina Livanos. Although Fiona was acknowledged to be a positive influence on Alexander, who was younger than she, Aristotle Ona.s.sis despised her. In 1973, Alexander Ona.s.sis was killed in a plane crash. Thyssen also has a child, Alexander, by his fourth wife, Denise, as well as his adopted son, Borja, brought by t.i.ta to the fifth marriage.

”All the paintings legally belong to a Bermuda foundation, a trust, made by Baron Thyssen,” the Duke de Badajoz explained to me in his office in Madrid. ”After all the proposals from all the countries were together, the Bermuda foundation met and decided the ideal solution would be to make a temporary arrangement and, if it worked out, to make the final solution.”

The Spanish government will provide a palace known as the Villahermosa to house the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. When the old d.u.c.h.ess of Villahermosa died almost sixteen years ago, the time of block-long palaces for private living was at an end, and her daughters, two d.u.c.h.esses and a marquesa, sought to sell it. The enormous pink brick palace was first offered to the Spanish government for a relatively modest amount of money. For whatever reasons, the government turned down the offer, and a bank purchased the palace. In order to make the building work as a commercial inst.i.tution, the inside was stripped, so all architectural details of the once-elegant structure have been obliterated, including what many people told me was one of the most beautiful staircases in Madrid. Then the bank went bankrupt, and the palace was bought by the Ministry of Culture, for more than five times what the government would originally have had to pay.

The palace is huge. There are two floors below ground level which will be made over for restaurants, an auditorium for lectures, and parking s.p.a.ce. There will be three complete floors of galleries, and the top floor will be used for offices. Several hundred of the A and B pictures from the Thyssen collection will hang in the Villahermosa Palace. A convent in Barcelona is being refitted to hang seventy-five of the religious paintings in the collection. The rest will continue to hang in the private galleries of the Villa Favorita in Lugano.

The estimated time for the reconstruction of the palace is between eighteen months and two years. The ten-year loan period for the collection will not begin until the pictures are actually hung in the Villahermosa. In bottom-line terms, the loan of the pictures is in reality a rental for a ten-year period. ”There is an annual fee of $5 million paid as a rent to the Bermuda foundation,” said the Duke de Badajoz. Spain also has to provide insurance and security.

Critics of what has come to be known as the baron's Spanish decision say that he coyly received proposals from a host of suitors, playing one off against the other, when all the time he knew he was going to defer to his wife's wishes and send the collection to Spain, at least for a decade. Prince Charles flew to Lugano to lunch at the Villa Favorita in an effort to get the collection for England, and Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of West Germany, made a similar foray, offering a Baroque palace or a brand-new museum to house the collection. It is not out of the question that one or the other of these countries will be so favored when the baron's permanent decision is made. A London newspaper stated at the time of his last divorce that he had a tendency to ask for his gifts back, although the journalist was referring to jewels and not paintings. An interesting observation made to me by a prominent woman in Madrid was that, whatever decision is made, the Spanish pictures in the collection-the Velzquezes, the Goyas, the El Grecos-will never be allowed to leave the country. All the reports over the last year about the agreement have included the added attraction of t.i.ta Thyssen getting the t.i.tle of d.u.c.h.ess. ”It has never been part of the negotiation,” said the Duke de Badajoz. ”It is the king's privilege to grant such a thing.” In fact, Baron Thyssen will be offered a dukedom, which would elevate the baroness to d.u.c.h.ess. ”Of course, you cannot make a duke for ten years,” said the Duke de Badajoz, which means, in practical terms, that the baron and baroness would not be elevated to duke and d.u.c.h.ess if at the end of the ten-year loan period they decided to remove the pictures to England, or France, or West Germany, or j.a.pan, or the United States. In the meantime, the Spanish government has already decorated Baron Thyssen with the Grand Cross of Carlos III, one of Spain's highest honors, for outstanding service to the Spanish government, and has decorated the baroness with an Isabel la Catlica medal, for outstanding civil merit.

For the present, Baron and Baroness Thyssen will be spending more and more time in Madrid to be near the Villahermosa during the reconstruction period and to take part in deciding how the collection will be hung. Their new house on the outskirts of Madrid, in an area that is reminiscent of the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, is the kind of house that Californians talk about in terms of square feet. It is immense, with an indoor swimming pool next to the gymnasium, and an outdoor pool which may be one of the largest private swimming pools in the world. The decor is pure movie star: beige marble, beige terrazzo, beige travertine, indoor waterfalls, plate gla.s.s in all directions, and a security system that defies unwanted entry. ”I want to get rid of all this,” said the baroness after her first night there, waving her hands with a sweeping gesture at the custom-made beige leather sofa and chairs. ”And all that in there,” she continued, waving at the furniture in another of the many rooms, shaking her head at its lack of beauty. They bought the almost new house furnished. She said that she would give all this ”modern furniture” to a benefit for the poor that the aristocratic ladies of Madrid were putting on and that she would furnish the new house with the antique furniture from Daylesford, which has been in storage since that estate was sold.

The Thyssens were scheduled to leave the following morning in their private plane for Barcelona, where the baroness and the Spanish opera singer Jose Carreras were to receive awards from the city of Barcelona. ”It will be nice to settle down and decorate this new house. We are having the gardens all done over too. We've also bought the lot next door so there will be privacy. And there's the new house in Paris that I have to do over. All this traveling. It gets so tiring.”

As we walked through her new gardens, she said, ”When I die, I am going to leave all my jewelry to a museum. I hate auctions, when it says that the jewelry belonged to the late Mrs. So-and-so.”

January 1989

JANE'S TURN

Remember, I've been in this business fifty-four years. I made eighty-six pictures and 350 television shows. I have not been idle.” As she spoke, she leaned forward and her forefinger tapped the table to emphasize her accomplishment. The speaker was Jane Wyman, a no-nonsense star in her mid-seventies, who is one of the highest-paid ladies in show business. Her immensely successful television series for Lorimar, ”Falcon Crest,” is in its ninth year, and it is she, everyone agrees, in the centerpiece role of Angela Channing, that the public tunes in to see. She got an Academy Award in 1948 for Johnny Belinda, in which she played a deaf-mute who gets raped. She was nominated for Oscars on four other occasions, and she has also been nominated twice for Emmys. She has behind her what can well be called a distinguished career.

We met in a perfectly nice but certainly not fas.h.i.+onable restaurant called Bob Burns, at Second Street and Wils.h.i.+re Boulevard in Santa Monica, California, not far from where she lives. Bob Burns is her favorite restaurant, where she has her regular table, a tufted-leather booth. It is one of those fifties-style California restaurants that are so dark inside that when you step in from the blazing sunlight you are momentarily blinded and pause in the entrance, not sure which way to go. When she arrived, I was already at the table. My eyes had become accustomed to the dark, and I was able to watch her getting her bearings in the doorway. It was twelve noon on the dot, and we were the first two customers in the restaurant. Even to an empty house, though, she played it like a star. She is taller than I had expected. Her posture is superb. Her back is ramrod-straight. She is rail-thin, too thin, giving credence to the speculation that she is not in good health. She walks slowly and carefully. Some people say she is seventy-two, some say seventy-five, others say older. What's the difference? She looks great. Her hairdo, bangs over her forehead, is the trademark style she has worn for years. ”Is that you?” she asked, peering.

”Yes.” I rose and walked toward her.

She held out her hand, strong and positive. The darkness of the restaurant was flattering to a handsome woman of a certain age, but that is not her reason for liking the place. ”The three people who own it went to school with my kids,” she said. The words ”my kids” were said in the easy manner any parent uses when talking about his or her children. She happens not to be close to either of hers, but we didn't talk about that.

She is private in the extreme, almost mysterious in her privacy, a rich recluse who chooses to live alone, without servants even, in an apartment in Santa Monica overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She is a woman in control at all times. There is not a moment off guard. What you see is the persona she wants you to see, and she reveals nothing further. Any aspect of her career is available for discussion, but don't tread beyond. And for G.o.d's sake, I was told, don't mention you-know-who or she'll get up and walk out. Simply put, it pains her that a marriage that ended forty-one years ago seems to interest the press and public more than her career.

”The reason I enjoy TV more than pictures now is that I like the pace better. You've got so many hours to do so much, and you have to get it done. I was on The Yearling for eleven and a half months! Sometimes we only did two pages of dialogue in four days,” she said. She shook her head in wonderment at the difference in the two media. She was ready to order lunch. ”Are the sand dabs breaded?” she asked the waitress. ”Why don't we have a Caesar salad first?” she suggested.

For several years before ”Falcon Crest” went on the air, she was in a state of semiretirement, spending most of her time painting. Although I have not seen any of her pictures, I have heard from her friends that she is an extremely talented landscape artist. In 1979 her work was exhibited in a gallery in Carmel, California, and so many of the pictures were sold that she now has none of her own work in her apartment. During those years, she said, she was always being sent film and television scripts, ”like Baby Jane, or playing a lesbian, and I didn't want to do that. But when I was sent the pilot script for 'Falcon Crest,' I could see so many facets to the character of Angela Channing. I said, 'I'll give it two years.' It's now nine.”

”People say that you control 'Falcon Crest',” I said.

”I am a creative consultant only. They run things by me, or I run things by them. I just want to keep up the quality of the show,” she replied. ”I usually have my chair at an odd place on the set where no one can bother me. And I do help the young actors on the show. I hold a riding crop out, saying 'Don't do that!' ”