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The Nassau County Museum of Art
It took me close to a year to actually enjoy working at the NCMA. I was hired as the Operations Manager, although no one expected me to live up to the title and perform that type of job. They just got to the point that they had to get rid of the last guy, Nicky, who was essentially a grounds supervisor and someone to help move crates around during show changes. Since he had been fired Nicky decided to stay around for three months, hoping to get his job back. The house that came with the job, a 2-story brick caretaker?s home that was part of the original estate, was near the front gate of the 141-acre grounds. I had to commute from Hoboken until he vacated the place, which meant I had to drive through Manhattan and then 25 miles of the rush hour clogged Long Island Expressway to get there and back. One of the contractors I had worked with in New Jersey had left a pack of cigarettes in the ashtray of my car. I started smoking in the traffic jams after 15 years of being free of the disgusting habit. It?s been over ten years since and I still can?t quit.
The building that housed the museum was named Clayton, built by the Fricks as a wedding gift for their son, Childs. At one time there were quite a lot of other buildings on the property. Childs Frick was a Princeton educated vertebrate paleontologist and son of the Pittsburgh steel mogul Carl Frick. Childs kept an extensive collection of animal bones in what became the Educational Center of the museum when the bones were donated to the Museum of Natural History in NYC.
He kept quite a lot of live animals there as well. There had been a tiger in a pit somewhere, and a bear that used to escape and pillage the beehives across Northern Blvd. The police would shut down the road while a handler lured the bear back with a fistful of honey. The locals remembered the bear escaping as a regular occurrence but it reportedly only happened once. There were also a number of other structures for servants and animals that no longer existed.
The history of the grounds went back even farther. William Cullen Bryant owned Cedarmere, a house down the hill on Roslyn Harbor, and had purchased what would become the Frick estate as an idyllic retreat to walk around and inspire his writings. He eventually built a guesthouse for his friend, Jershua Dewey, and a couple of presidents had stayed there as well. Originally the guesthouse was a single story but was raised to add a floor. The grounds surrounding the museum are now the William Cullen Bryant Preserve. Nassau County acquired the property in the 60?s, and sold off some areas for residential housing
My original contact with the museum concerned the Dewey Cottage. It was owned by the Nassau County Historical Society and had been empty and falling down for years. They were looking for a caretaker to come in, restore the place, and live there. I had some credentials in the area and I had a good relationship with the Carriage House Museum in Stonybrook, making non-invasive support structures for some of the larger pieces they wanted to display. It is the top Carriage Museum in the country and one of the finest in the world.
They eventually selected me for the job as caretaker/restorer. I was expected me to come up with $25k up front to prove my commitment, and my friend Ricky offered to loan me the money. He was running his father?s home construction business and thought it was a good project and an upscale association for his business. When I questioned the Historical Society about setting up a shop there to do the work I was told that I couldn?t. They expected me to get a work area somewhere else and I passed on the whole project. It stands empty to this day.
Since it was on the grounds of the preserve I was introduced to some of the people at the museum. The friend of mine that had referred me to the Historical Society, Gary Krampf, had worked at the museum as an intern before moving on to Sotheby?s. He mentioned me when the museum was looking to replace Nicky, so it was pretty easy for me to get the job.
The museum office was on the third floor of the building, and might as well have been a yard full of headless chickens. Everyone was always fighting and working at cross-purposes. By the third week I had every one pretty well quieted down and acting civilly. Staff and volunteers were constantly coming up to me and thanking me for the calm that had descended on the facility. A lot of it was the tension left over from Nicky?s troublemaking, and the rest of it was just a clash of egos. I had to step on a few toes to do it. The woman that ran the education department, Jean Henning, and Monica Reichmann, head of the events department, were constantly trying to get me fired. I?m used to that kind of crap from the Defense field so I just ignored it.
Within a month I was asked to accompany Robert, a decorator/designer, around with Jean and one of the more active volunteers, Jolanta, to tell me how they wanted the museum to look. Jean and Jolanta stayed in the background, but the decorator was full of ideas for sprucing up the place. We had one maintenance guy that worked like a dog part time but got a lot of OT during show changes. Ray had a real laundry list of things he needed to do every day, and even though he was my employee he really answered to my boss, Fernanda Bennett. She wanted me to go easy on Ray, who was a refugee from El Salvador with terrible English. Nicky had made his life miserable so I did what I could to make it easy for him to do his job. I wasn?t going to push him any more than I had to and he remained Fernanda?s employee.
The decorator was really starting to annoy me and began to realize I was just blowing him off. He got insistent that I keep the brass polished around the front door every day. I replied like I did before, telling him I wasn?t going to make any major changes to the look of the museum, and they were only polished before a show opening. He went on about how all of the trustees had the brass polished around their house every day and that if you had brass it had to be kept polished. I had been over to the Pennoyer?s a few times and I told him they never polished their brass. Paul and Cecily Pennoyer were some of the more important trustees, and they were a wonderful old couple. Paul was a grandson of J. P. Morgan and had been an advisor to J. F. K. They were both childhood friends with the Fricks, and the families were business partners in the steel industry. The Pennoyer?s traced its family heritage to the Arbella, and I learned that the Mayflower brought over the servants who were to set up living accommodations for the gentry that would follow on the Arbella. Paul?s 40? sailboat was still called the Arbella. They were very kind and civil people and we got along very well. When they were kids they used to play with the Frick children around the estate and I considered them an important part of the historical continuity of the facility. They were also the custodians of the faith for the Frick museum in NYC and were still very active there at the time.
I went back and fourth with the decorator for a little while longer until I said I had to get back to work and I thanked him for his input. We were at the front desk and he went out to get his briefcase to give me his business card. He came back in with a beautiful old oak case and I complemented him on it. Then I pointed out all of the brass fittings and asked, ?I notice that you don?t polish the brass on your case. Is that intentional?? That shut him up and he went out to his car, muttering to himself and looking down at the case.
I hadn?t ticked anyone off in a while and it felt pretty good. I knew I wasn?t going to have to deal with him much more in the future. As I bounded up the stairs Jolanta heard me laugh and say to myself, ?I?ve really pissed someone off!? I got an evil look from her and I could tell she thought we were a couple of children that had just soiled each other. I went up to Fernanda to tell her what had happened and ask I had gone too far. She told me that it was all right, and he was a bit of a pretentious jerk, but was also her boyfriend at the time. She said he was trying to worm his way into being a person of importance around the museum but no one took him seriously.
Fernanda was a very energetic and could talk a blue streak. Anytime I needed to kill some time I just walked into her office and kept nodding for an hour. She was one of the people I had been introduced to for the Jershua Dewey gig, and I had run into her at the big Vermeer show in Washington, D.C.
I still think of Fernanda as a force of nature. She really cared about the museum and appreciated what I was trying to do. She took on an incredible workload for the show changes and never seemed to tire. She would get frazzled and I?d so what I could to keep her on track. We really had a lot of fun in the madness, and we?d break out into song in tense moments. People say that opera is unrealistic, but it?s not, at least from our experience. It must have been quite a sight, I?m tall and thin and she?s short and zaftig. While she didn?t express it she thought she was in line for the director?s job if Constance ?Connie? Schwartz ever left.
Connie had been involved with the Office of Cultural Development before the museum went into the private hands of the trustees. She knew how to work the angles, and considered herself a painter. She had done mostly decorative work that was more a vanity then an exploration of art. I tend to make a distinction between decorative and fine artists. To me an artist should be pushing the envelope and contributing to the expansion of the language of art. Decorative arts are essentially a high-end craft. Another artist had developed the style, or language, and the crafter is simply re-stating it. There is a demand this type of work or most galleries, and for that matter, most art schools, simply wouldn?t exist. Of course you need to learn the fundamentals, but very few take the next step and break the rules they?ve been taught. Connie wasn?t breaking any rules, and when she asked me to come over to her home to help her husband replace some window frames in the back of the house. I saw she was firmly stuck in the 50?s decorative style, with an over emphasis on gold highlights that bordered on crass. He house was a real mish-mash and the theme that predominated was clutter. That wasn?t a surprise to me, judging from the way she assembled the shows at the museum. I liked her husband Barry, and was surprised to find out that he had graduate from MIT. He had been doing some leading edge work but was a terrible businessman, and they really needed her income to stay afloat. I found out that all of their neighbors hated them and wanted them out of Woodmere. Woodmere is a staid, middle-class area of the Five Towns, a predominantly Jewish area on Long Island. The neighbors were aghast when the Schwartz?s had a party for Barry?s business partners, Don King and Company. Barry was doing some innovative work in satellite communications. When Muhammad Ali was barred from boxing in the US after becoming a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam, Barry engineered the satellite broadcast of the ?Thrilla in Manila.? There was an HBO special of the event, and the ?white guy? in the production was Barry. He coordinated everything from the electronics to the construction of the arena. When they had a celebration party at the Schwartz?s house all of the players were there, along with a swarm of Black Panthers as attendees and security. It was quite a shock to the neighbors, and the Schwartz?s were getting threats and vandalism for years but refused to move out.
Connie held he reins pretty tight. She had a curator on staff, Franklin Hill Perrell, but made all the decisions herself, stuffing the shows with the works in the trustees collections. They were constantly getting hammered by the reviewer in the times, Helen Harrison, but were able to spin it that Helen was resentful at not getting the Directors job while Connie did.
The museum didn?t have good atmosphere controls and couldn?t borrow works from the major museums that insisted on stringent control over temperature and humidity lest the works get damaged. They were still able to put on some major shows, and I had the privilege of handling some very important paintings.
A gallery or a private dealer would sponsor any of the large shows that weren?t an accumulation of the trustee?s collections. They wanted to keep the work in the public eye and sell some pieces. The most blatant example was the Mort Kunstler show that went up not long after I started. It was a zoo from start to finish. Sponsored and promoted by Hammer Galleries, it became the most heavily attended show the museum ever had. The crowds were huge, and there were over 5,000 people on the grounds when there was a Civil War re-enactment on the main lawn next to the museum on a frigid February day. The people that came into the museum during the show were different than any other crowd they had seen. They weren?t art patrons; they were Civil War buffs. Even the gift shop and bookstore were in seventh heaven. Not only were they doing a bust out business, it was all cash and the bookkeeper had to make multiple runs to the bank each day to made deposits. Anyone that was serious about art thought work stunk, and you could see how Mort patched the study together with Xerox copies and then filled in the painting by numbers. All the soldiers were clean-shaven and well shod, but the civil war buffs ate it up. Six major paintings sold off the walls and most of the prints sold as well. Mort was a laid back guy but his wife and daughter were frantic and unreasonable business people, constantly calling the museum to complain about stupid things and asking about the crowds and bookshop sales. They even cracked the whip on Mort to keep him working.
Nicky, or Nicholas Horst Doering, distant relative of the photographer Horst P. Horst, would have liked the show, and was friends with the Kunstler family. I was put on charge of getting him out of the house I was going to occupy. He had been rebuilding a house in Oyster Bay, mostly on museum time, and he needed to turn it into a two family before he moved in himself. I went over to the cottage a couple of times before I was able to roust his girlfriend to let them know I was moving in. He had been going out with Fernanda for a few years, and their loud yearlong beak-up had set the museum staff on edge. Tantrums, F words in the lobby during visiting hours and hurled objects were a weekly occurrence. It wasn?t until he scared the crap out of Jolanta during a Garden Event that things came to a head. When the Board President, Arthur S. Levine, ran into a crying Jolanta and heard that he had threatened her that he was fired. Nicky was always casually threatening violence but she took it seriously.
It was a bit of an eye-opener for Nicky when I talked to his girlfriend, and he called me at my office. I had beeped him number of times but he knew his old number and never responded. We met and talked things over and I got a firm date from him and left it at that. When I told Connie she was ready to jump into action and start a legal eviction process. I had to fight her on that, knowing it would unnecessarily piss him off and make matters worse. I got an agreement from him and that was good enough for me.
He wouldn?t tell me where anything was around the property. Which circuit breakers did what, where the water main controls were, things like that. After a month I had to work a weekend event and he had pity on me. He let me stay in the guestroom rather than commute from Hoboken each day. There were guns all over the house and he loaded his own shells in the basement. I was threatened with either being shot or vehicular homicide if I ever let his cat out. He liked animals more than he liked people and he did nothing when a community of feral cats began to occupy a dank storage area in the back under the portico except feed them. There was talk of trapping them so they could be neutered and I tried to get that worked out without much luck.
Nicky and I never had any problems getting along, and a few weeks later I got a frantic phone call from my friend Ricky and his girlfriend Bonnie, who were taking care of my dogs, telling me that I had to come and get them immediately. Nicky agreed to let me set up a pen for them outside, but threatened me with a violent death if they did anything to his cat. That did worry me, because Rootie, the brother of the pair, was a confirmed cat killer, which was why my friends had to have me pick them up. He had just killed the cat of Ricky?s sister and brother-in-law, who were his next-door neighbors and they insisted the dogs go. They?d break out of the pen I made once in a while, but Nicky?s cat was a pure house cat. The only tense moments were when I would bring them in at night to sleep in my room and then outside again the next morning.
Connie was a little concerned because she was terrified of dogs. When I finally got the OK to walk them around the property after hours they proved invaluable in clearing out the Canadian geese that infested the property and shit everywhere, occasionally attacking people when they were nesting and laying eggs. Eventually the dogs learned to stay near the house until I took then around at night to chase the geese away while I checked out the property.
Along with his interest in anthropology, Childs Frick planted specimen trees through out the property, and in the pinetum was the biggest sequoia on the East Coast. It was a neat place to walk through at twilight, very magical. The first month I was asked to walk the property with Richard Weir, part of the Cornell Co-operative Extension and one of the most respected horticulturists on LI. I was told he was difficult but we got along very well as we toured the estate. I?ve got a basic understanding of plants and he gave me some great tips and tricks. When we got back to the museum he gave me an unqualified OK to Connie, something that really upset Jean Henning. She didn?t like to be upstaged, and considered herself the expert. I really pissed off Jean when I cleaned up the extensive and popular Rose Garden and drastically pruned the overgrown roses. Jean was up in arms trying to get me fired, bringing in her ?experts? that had let the place get in that shape in the first place. Richard stood behind me, saying it was the best thing for the garden. Contrary to Jean?s predictions of doom, the plants thrived and flowered freely.
Things like that made it simpler to get a groundskeeper to help me to get because they felt he would be easier to control. Doing the show changes as well as manicuring the grounds before the openings was killing me, and Craig had worked for the Westbury Gardens for years before he got fed up with the politics.
I?m still proud of what I had been able to do with the property and a year or so later John Russell wrote an article for the NY Times about the NCMA. He opened it praising the grounds before trashing the museum show. All of the lawns were maintained by the County, as was the major structure of the museum. I was a serious shock to them because when they screwed up I knew they screwed up and immediately complained to them and their supervisors about inept work, banning some from working at the facility when they gave me crap.
Mike, who was our on-site county guy for cutting the extensive lawns and carting away the trash, was stuck with a real bozo. Destructively lazy, the guy was an insufferable nut case. He?d yak your ear off with the most inane drivel, and was always annoying visitors. He?d also make up personas for himself, telling unsuspecting people that he was a Frick or something equally ridiculous. People would come to me asking if he was insane. Mike was a saint to put up with him for over a year before he was able to get him transferred. Just when he was a week away from being rid of him, Mike, in his mid thirties, died during the night of sleep apnea. I don?t know if I have any basis for it, but I still blame the kid for his death.
Mike was just as amazed as everyone else that Nicky and I got along so well, and there was a real sigh of relief and attendant disbelief when he moved out on time. They were also a little weirded out that I had done it without a confrontation.
I quickly handled a brewing turf war between the woman that had become the day-to-day coordinator of the volunteers and the head of out security guards, who were contracted by the County. She was accusing him of taking money from the till and wanted him fired. None of the volunteers that worked at the front desk were under 70, and they were constantly making mistakes. She also accused him of fishing quarters out of the fountain basin on the patio. All piddling stuff and Gabe was a good guy I didn?t want to lose. He really kept his eyes open and was always helping out. I knew if she got her was she?d become a dragon lady. I went to bat for Gabe and things settled down for a while until he was hospitalized and passed away. The guy that replaced him was a jerk, and the coordinator had even more complaints.
The first major event I handled was the Family Fun Festival. Everyone at the museum hated it, but it was fully sponsored by the wife of one of the richest men on LI. and one of the trustees. People told me she was a whack-job, but that she was a major benefactor for the children?s events at the museum.
Merry-go-rounds, pony rides and a ton of other stuff descended on us for the weekend, with roving clowns and face painters everywhere. I saw a cute little clown dressed up as Raggedy Ann, pushing a baby stroller filled with candy to hand out to the kids. She had a nice d?colletage for a rag doll and I went over to hit on her. She stayed in character but was acting strange. When I was speaking with Fernanda later I pointed her out. Fernanda laughed and told me that was Susan Kadish, the woman sponsoring the event, and yes, she was a weirdo.
That was the weekend Nicky took pity on me and let me sleep in the guestroom. He knew what a nightmare the show was and got a good laugh out of my run-in with Suzy, as her friends called her.
I wasn?t to refer to the trustees by their first names unless they let me know otherwise, or so I found out after my first meeting with Claire and Connie. I got a tongue-lashing from Connie after the meeting, but she was the only trustee that ended up being a stiff with me.
When Christmas came around I was asked to work with Jolanta on decorating the museum for the holidays. She was a little cold with me at first, a holdover from my pissing contest with Robert the decorator, but we worked together well and it passed. She was born and raised in Poland and had immigrated with her husband, a doctor, when they were in their Late 20?s. She was now in her 40?s, about my age and her English was impeccable. Comparisons to Martha Stewart were natural; she had the same look and decorative sensibilities. She let me know how many people were trying to get me fired, and had come to respect by contribution to the museum. We worked on a number of projects together and were asked to start planning the installation of a room that mirrored the living room of Stanford White?s house in Cold Spring Harbor. He was a famous, and infamous, architect and close friends with Louis Comfort Tiffany, who was the other part of the show.
We were given a photo of the room we were going to simulate. There was a large credenza in the background that I needed to reproduce for the display of some Tiffany glasses, and a pool with a fountain for the middle of the floor. I offered to construct the pool and have one of the art handlers who helped set up the shows faux paint it with a marble look. Jolanta said that she could get a fountain on loan from the company they had gotten the fountain for the outside patio from and it was left to her.
My original instructions for the credenza were to make the shelves out of glass, but when I started to put it together I opted for three sets of wooden shelves per niche that got smaller as they got higher. I cut the front corners off and routed a molding pattern around the edges with the same pattern for their supports. I was worried about the glass reflecting the light, or breaking and destroying the pieces. Someone got word to Connie that I had changed her idea and all of the ladies co-coordinating the event trouped down to my shop with Connie in a huff. I explained my reasoning and that I had gotten the OK from Fernanda, whose main concern was the safety of the pieces on loan. They loved the shelves, which I was in the middle of making and they gave me a free hand.
Christine Standridge, Connie?s secretary may have been the one that set me up. Nicky told me I could trust her, and that had proven not to be the case. She liked to stir up trouble but acted friendly enough that he just couldn?t spot it. She was in charge of the masthead of the catalog that went with every show, and it took me quite a while to get my proper title listed, Operations Manager rather than Groundskeeper. After that I had an occasional run-in about the hierarchy on the list. Piddling stuff really, but annoying when you find an intern receptionist listed above you. When I asked, she?d lie and say, ?The list is being done alphabetically now.? I?d point out that her name would follow mine if that were the case, so she was just trying to cause trouble.
There were a couple of very competent people at the museum. Ann Gelles was the bookkeeper and she was tough as mails. She was in her late seventies and moved faster than most people I?ve ever met. Blunt and directed, you didn?t want to get in her way, especially when she was behind the wheel of a car. Raised in Danzig, she still had a thick accent, was as thin as a rail and just as though. I really liked Ann and Arlene Soifer, who wrote the grant proposals. Arlene was another tough, smart cookie. She spoke her mind, which I always appreciate, and she didn?t make many other friends around the museum. Being smarter than anyone else that worked up there didn?t help either. She was fired after I left and Jolanta was gleeful that they were so foolish to let go someone that competent. Jolanta was going to leave it at that but I urged her to get Arlene hired at the Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center of Nassau County in Glen Cove, where Jolanta was a trustee. I had to explain my reasons before she understood. First, Arlene was incredibly competent, and that should have been enough. Second, after the embarrassment of being fired she?d work like hell to prove herself, and finally, which was the real clincher Jolanta, it would piss Connie off to no end. When Jolanta approached the board of the Center they knew how good she was and were shocked she was fired. They hired her immediately, considering it a major coup. Arlene fulfilled all of my reasoning, becoming dedicated to Jolanta and credited her for bringing her on board.
Two weeks before the Tiffany/White Show was to be installed Jolanta informed everyone that she couldn?t get the fountain, and it was going to be dropped from the installation. I really wanted it to be a part of the room and again offered to construct a pool. The only difficulty would be the fountain element, a tall glass vase that had water flowing from the top. I contacted a friend in Williamsburg to get a line on a glassblower and faxed him a sketch of the design I wanted. It needed to be made ASAP and he agreed, as long as he got an immediate deposit. I asked my friend to give him the money that day and handed it over to Jolanta to take care of the final arrangements.
The final installation was frantic, and Jolanta and I worked together to arrange all of the Stanford White artifacts that were going into the room. The fountain turned into a real stunner, with water lilies and goldfish in the pool and the fountain making a gentle gurgling sound.
There were also quite a lot of Tiffany windows to install in the main gallery that needed to be backlit. Most of the smaller ones came with a light box, but the huge multiple section window was that to face the entranceway hadn?t been displayed with all it?s elements together in over 50 years. The main section was of a mermaid, and pane had last been shown in Japan. Taken as a whole it was over eight feet wide and 14 feet tall. Most of the sections were still in storage and I had only a general idea of the sizes. Rather than backlight it with straight fluorescent tubes I opted for a bank of circulars. Incandescent bulbs were out of the question as they generated too much heat. My only fear at the time was that one of the fixtures would crap out because getting in to fix it would have been a nightmare. When it was finished the owner was ecstatic. He had never seen it assembled, and he was able to get Steve Wynn interested enough to come for a visit and eventually buy the entire window for his casino in Las Vegas.
As we were finishing setting up the show Jolanta and I got into two major disagreements. She wanted to put some copy on the wall crediting the two of us with curating the room, something I adamantly opposed. I didn?t think it proper for any museum space in the first place, and I also knew it would piss Connie off. Connie liked, or insisted, on taking all the credit for herself, which was her right as Director. I also thought that anyone that understood what the museum usually presented would know that this was something different and would ask who was responsible. There was no need to broadcast it. It occurs to me now that if the room were left with no attribution I would have gotten the bulk of the credit when people asked, and Jolanta wanted to be recognized for her contribution, which amounted to little more than moving things around. Jolanta was relentless and I finally gave up, also knowing that everyone in the offices had heard I was opposed to it and not hold it against me.
The room was a huge success. There was over two million dollars of Tiffany glass in the credenza, and the woman that had lent the pieces told Connie she was so impressed that she was going to donate the work to the museum when she died.
My other argument with Jolanta was much more private. Her language skills were truly superb, and I was always coming up with a twist of a phrase or an arcane word usage that really kept her on her toes. This fight went on for three months, and it got very heated at times. I truly loved talking with her, and she was the only one at the museum I considered a friend.
She wanted me to be her boyfriend and I was dead set against it. Besides her present state of marriage I had a firm rule by then of not seeing anyone I was working with.
After three months she finally said, ?Just sex, I just want to sleep with you.? She was on her way to a week?s vacation in the Bahamas and we set a date for when she got back. I was hoping she would have second thoughts.
I knew better, but I hadn?t gotten laid in years. Within a week she was telling me she wanted to marry me, and a week later was threatening to commit suicide if I ever left her. I got screwed all right. One word and I?d lose my job, and I was starting to think she was nuts enough to go to someone on the board and tell them I had made an ?inappropriate advance?. Besides, she really was attractive and I could envision spending the rest of my life with her. The suicide thing disturbed me though. I didn?t think she?d do it, but just saying it was a little freaky.
She told me she was sleeping in a separate bedroom at home and was going to divorce her husband. Even before our affair I was a little weirded out talking with her husband at the reception for the Tiffany-White show. He was a nice enough guy and I felt bad for him, thinking that his wife was even planning on cheating on him. He had a thick accent and his English wasn?t nearly as good as hers. Hell, most American?s English wasn?t as good as hers.
Fortunately I had other things to worry about. I hadn?t spoken with my parents for years and I had called to invite them to the reception. They were pretty impressed with the whole deal, and were amazed at how many people came up to tell them what a wonderful son they had.
Each of the show changes posed their own set of problems that I'd rise to the occasion of. When we installed the Calder/Miro show I had to find a secure way of attaching the Calder mobiles to the ceilings and safely handling them. We had a regular group of art installers that came for each show change, but they were terrified of handling the mobiles, most of which came from major museum collections. The curators from MOMA came by to see the show and their Calders and word got back to me that they were very impressed with my installation of the work.
It was the big opening of the year, and coincided with the museums Annual Fundraising Ball, a huge event that drew most of the major players on LI. The Ball Committee asked me to create a Calderesque mobile for the entrance tent, to span over 14 feet and use balls of roses at the ends as the elements.
I went back and forth with the floral arrangers to get an idea of the eventual weight of the rose balls to no avail. I had to wing it and leave enough wiggle room to make all the adjustments at the last minute so I kept it simple. The floral people started freaking out in the last few days and insisted on taking the structure I had made back to their shop to test out. When they finally brought it in for installation they had messed up the crossbars and weren?t able get the mobile to work at all, and started telling everyone that it was a mistake. I straightened the rods out and got it in place, and it was quite a sight. My only complaint was that Susan Kadish, or Suzy, as I was now allowed to call her since I was a friend of Jolanta, insisted that all of the roses be red. I thought there should be a white element somewhere, but she was sponsoring the Ball and that was that.
One of the funniest scenes during the set-up was seeing her sitting and watching her chauffeur/bodyguard, an incredibly tolerant ex-navy SEAL, spray painting a tall aluminum stepladder red (Suzy had a thing for red). When someone asked her what she was doing she replied, ?I?m painting the ladder red.? We were so tired at that point it was hilarious.
After the event a painter who was working on the building, a drunken old Swiss named Fritz who was on loan from Arthur Levine, came to me looking for his ladder. I really started laughing when I realized Suzy had grabbed his ladder to paint. I brought him over to it, still laughing too hard to tell him what had happened. He went into a fit and spent the rest of the day getting as much of the red off with mineral spirits as he could, and cursing all the way.
The Fernand Leger Show was a massive undertaking, mostly due to a huge installation of ceramic blocks that reproduced one of his paintings. Ledger?s widow had quite a lot of things produced posthumously and this piece was composed of over 80 2?x2?x10? hollow blocks that needed to be wired up to a metal grate that filled the back wall of the main gallery. As a whole it was much too big for the wall in the museum or the prior installation, by five tiles across. It had been displayed in sections before, which is where the grate had come from. Each piece had two numbers on it so it took a while to figure out what was what. I ended up carrying each section up the ladder and holding it in place while two art handlers wired it in from behind. Leger was a pretty big name in his time, though most people now have never heard of him. People would see some of the promotional material that read F. Leger, especially the County people and ask, ?Who?s this Fleger guy??
Good art handlers are incredibly careful people, which my groundskeeper Craig learned a few months later. For a large sculpture show we were about to do I had a welding shop fabricate a display grid to display the rest of the Leger ceramic outdoors. As we were unpacking the pieces indoors he lightly shifted a block to line it up with another one. The pieces bumped and a chip popped off of one of the faces. I didn?t make a big deal over it, but we needed to get a conservator in to make the repair. He felt terrible and stuck with the gardening after that.
There were sculptures all around the property, and the grounds were quite an attraction on their own. Many of the pieces were on loan from MOMA, for lack of a place to store them. Some were junk left over from an earlier incarnation of the premises as the Fine Arts Museum of Nassau County and the Office of Cultural Development. They had downsized and moved over to the Chelsea House/Muttontown Preserve on Old Brookville, where I had gotten the large pieces of Cherry wood for my Chelsea Series of sculptures. The only big name work from that era is a massive Richard Serra that was composed of three pieces of Cor-Ten set on a plot of land in the back. You can fit a football field between each section; each piece is 2? thick steel, 16? high and almost as wide as a football field. Kids had graffitied it at one time and Serra had been contacted about the best way to clean them but he couldn?t give a shit. Nicky was tasked to pressure clean them and he made the mistake of using a horizontal motion rather then an up and down stroke. Years later you could still see the pattern of the pressure washing.
There was the 40? tall Barnett Newman ?Broken Obelisk? near the museum entrance that we were always being asked to move for the ball tents. Even if someone offered to pay an exorbitant amount, MOMA always said no. There were also a couple of Mark De Suveros on loan from the artist. He was pissed that we had so many sculptures by Tony Smith, who he hated, and I met De Suvero on a few installations, another cranky old bastard.
It frustrated Connie to no end that we weren?t able to charge to get on to the property. I had to keep my eye out for kids vandalizing stuff or climbing on the sculptures and golfers that wanted to practice their swings, but for the most part people respected the place.
After the first year I was able to start sculpting again and made Chelsea Series #8. Not many people around the museum knew I was a sculptor in my own right, and it was a bit of a surprise for them to see it pictured in the NY Times when I first showed it. Connie had promised to ?Do something for me? to help me out but I knew enough not to hold my breath. Having a good operations manager was more important than promoting an artist, and the trustees were constantly surprised when I told them I was a sculptor.
All the stone I had left behind in Huntington was glommed by the landscapers when I moved to Hoboken and I had another ton shipped out to me. Between the museum and Jolanta I didn?t have a lot of time to work on sculpture, but it felt good to have some stone back. I had sworn off making anything new in Hoboken, and I wasn?t going to live with the stone dust. I wanted to spend the time concentrating on finding a gallery in the city to represent me. I had gotten a nice computer set up with a printer and scanner to start making some promotional material and digitize the photographs I had taken of my sculptures. That lasted about six months before I found a tree branch lying in the street screaming ?Carve Me? while I was walking back to the studio. It became on of my few wall pieces. Musical Offering III is an insanely delicate piece that I still love. One of the galleries in Soho I was trying to get involved with was M13. Howard Scott liked my work for its minimalism, but wanted polychrome surfaces. In the next few pieces of work I tried different surfaces and the pieces became anything but minimalist; Fractal Sprite and Towards a New Architecture were done with casein (milk paint) and Dangerous Curve with encaustic (wax). I love color, which I why I?m so attracted to the stone, but I wasn?t ready to do a whole series of wood pieces.
An event that Nicky had warned me about was the yearly Garden Show in August. Another true nightmare, it was the only time that an admission was charged to get on the property.
Ten of LI?s leading landscape decorators were invited to take an area on the main lawn to show their designs. It opened on a Friday and lasted for ten days. When started I had wondered what the barren areas on the main lawn were, and found out that?s how it was left after the event. There was no topsoil or sod, only some sparse seed thrown down and a kiss goodbye.
The event was the brainstorm of Arthur S. Levine, who spent more trine rebuilding the gardens around his estate then he spent running his company into the ground. He was in his glory during the event, riding around on his golf cart and orchestrating the madness. He was the only trustee that I had a nickname for; I was sure the S. stood for shithead. I always had major problems with anyone he sent by to ?fix? things. They may have ended up with a good coat of paint on them, but other than that he had the most pompous and inept people working for him. They were used to him tearing everything out every few years to redecorate, so they didn?t build anything to last. I?d complain about obvious poor quality and they?d threaten to walk off the job half done. Even his painter backed me up for the little good it did. Fritz may have been a drunk, but he knew when he was painting over shit work that would rot out in a few years.
I had to sit in on the planning sessions for the Garden Event. A really brainless bunch, their coordinator was even more clueless and everyone?s stooge. They just wanted to make money and could give a damn about how they left the grounds when they were done. On our side Julie Harris was in charge of the event. He was a nice guy, had retired from Bell Telephone and on the weekends ran the volunteers, and for that matter, the whole museum. This was his big job for the year but he was a pushover and the landscapers always got their way. I was just a bump on the log at the meetings; my only concern was that they didn?t trash the place, which was an exercise in futility.
We were finally able to get rid of the Family Fun Festival but picked up a high-end craft event that was staged yearly in Lincoln Center for the fall. Connie was so enamored of the money these events brought in the organizers did what they wanted. Monica, the event director was useless. She could barely turn on her computer, and the departments? database program was cobbled together in the worst kind of kluge. If you?re the head of the department these days you?ve got to have a handle on information management. Her management style was to complain endlessly and do nothing. I ended up playing the bad cop with the event organizers to get them to run things smoothly, and she hated me for it, even though it made her job a lot easier and I?d give her the credit for a successful event.
During the planning sessions for the Pop Art Show and attendant Annual Ball there was talk of bringing in a famous artist do portraits of the attendees as a fundraiser for the Ball. Someone knew Ronnie Cutrone, who had been part of Andy Warhol?s Factory, and had examples of some of his recent work. I saw the pieces and said I had a friend that could do pictures a la Warhol on as computer and then have them ink jetted on to a canvas backing, what?s now referred to as giclee (on clay) prints.
Frank had never done anything like it before, but he had become a whiz at PhotoShop and hadn?t had a job in awhile. He liked the idea as I laid it out and came over to the museum with a digital camera. We loaded a copy of PhotoShop in a Mac upstairs (he was a Mac snob and wouldn?t use my PC set-up downstairs). We took a couple of photos of the staff and an hour and a half later he had three images good enough to give the green light to the project. When Franklin saw his image on some ink-jet canvas I had squirreled away he was amazed, and asked if we were going to charge $2~2.5k for the finished work. I wanted to make as many pieces as possible and when I told him we?d charge $500 and he was shocked. They didn?t take longer than a half an hour each to do, and I had printed the samples with my computer for less than $10 each. There was plenty of room for profit for both Frank and the museum. It would be good promotion for Frank, who started thinking of doing something like it full time.
I found a local photo studio that was switching over to digital so we could get a couple of pro?s set up at the Ball to take the shots. We put together enough images of recognizable trustees for display and Frank started nosing around some of the printing houses in NYC to spray the images on canvas. What began as an easily do-able project soon became a nightmare for me that would last a year and a half.
Frank didn?t like the way the print houses were reproducing his colors and they all wanted to charge an arm and a leg for a 20x24 image. I called the photo studio we were going to use and asked them whom they used for printing. They referred me to a shop they used farther out on Long Island. Frank and I went out to talk with them and run a test print. He was happy with the color and got along great with the tech. The owners knew it could bring in some business and were willing to give us an image on canvas, mounted on a stretcher, at $35 a piece for the standard size of 20x24?.
We planned out the booth for the Ball, making checklists for background color (easier to match the couch), image styles suggested by the samples, single or multiple images a la Warhol, and final size, charging more for larger canvases and multiples. The patrons could see their photos immediately and select from the shots. Digital was still very new and everyone was fascinated by how quickly the images appeared on the computer.
The Ball went off well, and the booth was packed. Even with two photographers, three people taking orders and Frank yakking it up there wasn?t enough time before dinner to help all of the people that wanted to make their order.
Everyone was ecstatic. Frank got to work and after a few images decided that he didn?t want to do Warhol?s, he wanted to Super Glam the photos. Rather than the twenty or thirty minutes he?d taken while we were setting up, or even hours, he started taking weeks on each shot, essentially doing extensive plastic surgery with PhotoShop on each person and agonizing the whole way. I lay back as long as I could but after six months I had to start saying something. The museum wanted to know where the finished work was and Frank was taking longer and longer to do a job he should have knocked off in two weeks and pocketed a good amount of money, but he had a vision. He wanted to make it his own work, not the Warhols we had agreed to, and he ended up shooting himself in the foot. If he wasn?t such a long-term friend I would have taken over the whole thing and done it myself, but I wanted to give him the chance. He had a tough time keeping work in the advertising business, and after the Ball a lot of other fundraising organizations were talking to him about doing the same thing for them. It could have been a good little business, but dealing with him became as pleasant as oral surgery. Fortunately almost everyone loved the final product, but he got almost no follow up business after it was all over. I got my first ulcer.
Jolanta wasn?t making my life any easier. She was constantly bitching about the museum and the way Connie ran things. I?d have to spend hours on the phone at night as she went on and on. I really didn?t want, or need, to hear it. Long before I started working there I knew what the score was. There were plenty of articles in the papers describing the place as a playground for the trustees that had no intention of reaching out to the LI artists. It was only about showing off their collections. Really serious collectors don?t display their pieces for any number of reasons. Some know that the piece had gotten more valuable than when they had their last insurance assessment but don?t want to pay the extra fee for the present value of the work. If work like that that gets damaged they receive the amount stated on the insurance form, the insurance company has it conserved and sells it back on the market for the going rate, making an amazing profit at times. Some collectors don?t want it known that they possess the work, lest they get constant inquires about selling it. One dealer and his wife were being hammered by a major museum to show a Wassily Kandinsky from their personal collection and kept refusing until they got tired and agreed. When the show went up their clients inundated them to sell the piece. They refused for as long as they could until so much bad blood developed that they had to let it go. The couple had spent years trying to get it and loved the piece. Their clients couldn?t understand that it?s not always about the money. A lot of top dealers really care about the art and finding the perfect work for their collection is like finding lost family member. Some artworks really sing, and become a universe onto themselves. Isamu Noguchi, one of the top artists of the 20th century, felt that only one in ten of his pieces were really good. Works like that are rarely seen in public, and only when the piece becomes just too valuable to insure does it get donated to a public collection for tax and insurance purposes.
Most pieces are treated like trading cards. They?re kept in storage as they pass from hand to hand and are never seen except to by conservators to check on them before they?re re-sold.
At the museum I?d see some of the same pieces over and over. There's one Picasso I?d seen at least three times in various shows.
A Picasso show is a big deal. I had seen the NCMA?s Picasso Show before I started working there, and it had their largest attendance until the Mort Kunstler show broke all the records.
All in all the NCMA was the biggest deal on Long Island and brought people in from all over. Other than going into NYC it was the only place to see work of that scope. When they had the Pop Art Show they had the iconic Andy Warhol image of Marilyn Monroe. Parking was free and admission prices were low. The public doesn?t care about the internal politics and got to see some historically important work. Since it?s a high profile place there was an incredible amount of in fighting and Jolanta pulled me farther and farther into it. She had sided with the Kadishes and thought she could be the next director if they could orchestrate a coup.
Lawrence ?Lorrie? Kadish had a lot of power in Nassau County and managed to get Jolanta appointed to the Board of Trustees as the County?s representative. That caused a lot of friction among the members. Board members were expected to make a large ($10,000) donation to be appointed and then continue to make yearly financial contributions. Most didn?t make a large yearly contribution, feeling that buying a table at the Annual Fundraising Ball was enough.
When Jolanta got a free pass the knives came out. Even though the County appointed her everyone knew she was a tool of the Kadishes.
Lawrence Kadish was a real heavy hitter. He had an incredible amount of money and political connections. He was a major contributor to the Republican Party and was the third largest contributor to the RNC for George W. Bush?s first election. He had a huge estate in Old Westbury, large enough that the racetrack in the back was just a small portion of the grounds. They?d stock the property with 300 pheasants each year. Not to hunt, just for them to flock around. Most would eventually escape to the surrounding properties during the year, necessitating their re-stocking.
They were planning a coup of the museum Board. I don?t think Lorrie really cared, but Suzy had a bug up her ass and usually got her way.
Jolanta saw it as her ticket to the director?s chair and signed on for the ride. Besides listening to the crap about the museum I had to hear, ad nauseam, about how great Bush was. I told her she was nuts, and that he?d be the worst President we could ever have. It was like talking to a wall. When he finally got elected I had to laugh. Lorrie?s contact with the RNC was with its chairman, Jim Nicholson. After the election a Bush crony replaced him, cutting off any of Lorrie?s influence. ?Thanks for the money, now get out, we have our own agenda?. Jolanta turned on Bush pretty quickly. Then I had to hear over and over what a jerk he was. I get tired of saying; ?I told you so?.
I did plenty of that when they did a 20th Century Sculpture Show at the Museum. Connie was looking for a way to make her look bad to get her out of the way. She asked Jolanta to arrange the room of the 50?s era sculpture, and I told her not to do it. Jolanta may have been good with decorating but knew nothing about modern art other than what I had taught her. She didn?t even like it until I explained how to approach the work, but she caught on pretty quickly. After over a month of asking Jolanta she agreed to do it, and Connie asked me to help her. Kill two birds with one stone. I had wanted to stay in the background but Jolanta kept dragging me into projects.
The reviews I had been getting in the NY Times for my sculpture weren?t helping much either. One week they?d slam the museum and the next there?d be a big picture of one of my pieces and praise from the same reviewer.
There was usually too much work displayed in the museum shows, and the room we were to do was even more stuffed than usual. We got a list of the work, but only about half the pictures. Just that half would have been enough for the room. There were a ton of small pieces and we talked about building a multi-tiered riser in the middle of the floor. I?ve had some pieces of my own knocked over in the past and didn?t like the idea. When it started getting time to install, Jolanta began freaking out. There was a lot of important work and the pressure was getting too much for her. I finally got it through to her that she had to look at them as pieces of furniture. That calmed her down and we were able to get to work.
There were so many small pieces that shelves were the only option. We did build a tier system to put against the back wall, and with numerous shelves around it made a nice installation. It had enough space to breathe and allowed the viewer?s eye to float and make visual connections without focusing on a specific work.
Our big problem was going to be a large John Chamberlain sculpture. We only had dimensions and the piece was going to arrive very late, so it was a big question mark. We made space for it in our minds, but when it arrived it didn?t fit the room at all. Most of the pieces were in either steel of bronze, with a few notes of color from the un-patinaed brass sculptures of Ibram Lassaw. At the time I had no idea who he was. So many decorative artists copied his style that he lost his artistic individuality. He constructed his work by puddling brass into wire-like structures with an oxy-acetylene torch. A simple and effective style, it was duplicated so often that every beginning decorative sculptor mass-produced them in the sixties, relegating him to relative obscurity.
Jolanta and I were asked to work on the 60?s room upstairs, where a large Nikki de St. Phalle chair dominated the room. Connie and Franklin were having problems with it since the works were so diverse they clashed. Over minor objections we moved the Chamberlain up there and got everything to work together. That opened up more air in the downstairs room where the crushed auto-body parts Chamberlain didn?t work at all. We might have been barred from making the move except we were told we had to put an early Christo in the 50?s room. Following the time line it should have gone into the 60?s room, but he and his wife, Jean Claude were coming to the museum to give a talk and it needed to be downstairs. The important work was always on the ground floor. Some visitors never went upstairs. There was an old service elevator that could bring people from floor to floor, but it was small and creaky. It was crowded with even four people and would break down on a regular basis.
The Christo was a large coin-operated public phone that he had wrapped in packing paper and tied with twine. It couldn?t be integrated into the room, and I placed it near the door leading from the main gallery. It was a natural place for a phone and didn?t intrude at all. In fact it could be easily missed if you weren?t paying attention, and if you noticed it the positioning was very ironic. When he came for the talk he loved the placement.
The room looked great. The main gallery fell into the unfortunate quality of a series of headstones lined up against the wall. The center of the room needed to remain clear for the occasional talk when the room was filled with chairs. There were some nice pieces there but they were all bronzes with an English brown patina and it seemed like a mausoleum taken as a whole.
Jolanta was in her glory. We fought again about putting a note on the wall crediting us with curating the room. We didn?t select the sculptures so we had no right to the claim. I was also concerned that the NY Times reviewer would finally realize I as working there. I didn?t know which way it would go, but I didn?t want her associating me with the museum or advertising my involvement in a crass way. I lost my argument with Jolanta. She really wanted to stick it to Connie since the arrangement in the room was head over shoulders better than any of the other rooms in the show.
Connie wanted me to stop associating with Jolanta, and I pointed out that Connie kept directing me to work with her on these projects. I was really getting sick of the whole pressure cooker.
A new girl started working in the events department. Michelle was a bossy, brassy NY type, and was ready to run the whole museum. I had to have a couple of fights with her when she started meddling with the staff at the front desk and the security people. I had to point out that she had never worked in a museum before and her job was in another department. If she had anything to say she should say it to me and not get involved. I was the only one to speak frankly with her and we started getting along so well that Jolanta started getting jealous, checking up on me on an almost hourly basis.
Jolanta still wasn?t doing anything about separating from her husband. I think that she thought she could get the director?s chair and eventually move in with me.
I was getting sick of the whole place and especially the Garden Event. It was backbreaking work to set up. Power had to be run out to all the tents and then dug underground, and the displays got bigger and bigger each year. Over the winter planning sessions I asked how much power they would need that year and I was told no booth was going to use over 2 amps. I had gotten the OK to get new wire since the old cabling we used was a stiff solid conductor with a thin protective sheath. It had gotten badly torn up over the years and was getting dangerous. Julie Harris, the museum?s point man for the event, wanted me to bury it before they set up and I told him it wasn?t a good idea. Things were always changing and if the landscapers didn?t know where they were they would rip things out. If they were on the surface they could be protected with plywood where they needed to work and then could be buried when everything was done. I left it up to Julie and he decided to bury it before things got installed.
At the last minute he moved a couple of tents and the landscapers started ripping out the underground water lines and wiring. In a panic Julie wanted me to patch the water lines because we had been in a drought for a couple of seasons. The event was in the heat of the summer, the grass around the booths and the plants needed to be watered a few times a day or they would die. Patching the water lines was really messy work, and between that and trying to keep the landscapers from using the Tony Smith sculptures as workbenches I had my hands full. When I finally checked back on the wiring it was starting to badly overheat and the booths that were farther weren?t getting enough power to run their tools. I went to the first tent in the line and found they were running a 14-amp pump for their water display along with their other stuff, and the other tents were doing the same. Arthur Levine got his electrician?s involved and they started blaming me for the problem. At that point I was pretty well exhausted and told them it was out of my hands. No one was supposed to go over 2 amps, I had used a heavier gauge wire that we had before, and if Julie hadn?t decided to bury the wire it would have been easy enough to get some new cable and rewire it. They were Arthur?s electricians and saw a gold mine. They had to re-do the whole thing and charged an arm and a leg. At that point I really didn?t care anymore and let the chips fall where they fell.
The place was a complete mess when it was over and the entire lawn was trashed between the landscapers and the drought. It would have remained a dust bowl but I put in the extra effort to get it renewed. I convinced some of the landscapers to fill in a swale on the far side of the lawn, and then borrowed an aerator from the county to break up the three acres of land. I got bags of moisture retaining plastic beads and a good grass seed mixture to sow after the compacted dirt had been broken up. For the next few weeks I did nothing but prep and seed the lawn, and then got some watering towers that we moved around a few times each day for the next month to get the lawn back before winter. My only consolation was that it looked better than it ever had before. Even the supervisor for the County properties was impressed.
Over the winter Jolanta?s dreams of a coup were smashed. The Board voted the Kadishes off, giving no reason, and Jolanta was shut out of the decision making process. I wouldn?t have minded except that I had to hear about it to a point of insanity from Jolanta. I just couldn?t take it anymore and started thinking about how to leave. I couldn?t just quit or Jolanta would have gone completely insane so I did the next best thing. I asked for a raise. I didn?t ask for much, and many of the trustees went to Connie offering to pay for it, but Connie saw me as a threat at that point and wanted me out for associating with Jolanta. A lot of people suspected we were having an affair, but no one was sure, thinking it ridiculous that she?d be intimately involved with someone like me, who most people thought of as the help.
I wanted to burn all of the bridges, so I waited until the Ball was going to start rolling to quit. If that wasn?t bad enough I told them I was going to stay in the gatehouse for the same three months that Nicky did. I thought it was pretty stupid of Connie not to make some arrangements with me after Nicky pulled off that trick, but she did learn enough to start legal proceedings against me for eviction. I had to go to court and I represented myself before the Judge. I agreed to leave two weeks earlier than the three months I had said earlier, so everyone thought they had accomplished something. I spent most of the time sculpting.
I was cut off from all the people at the museum, but word got back to me that both the Ball and the Garden event were disasters, and that was the last year they ever did a garden show.
Anyone they interviewed to replace me wanted at least $10k more than I was asking. All the prospective employees also insisted on a museum supplied vehicle and rental on any of the personal tools that were to be used to do their jobs, something I did for free. I only asked for gas money for extended trips. In desperation they worked out something with the maintenance guy Ray, who could barely handle a screwdriver, to move into the gatehouse and assume my responsibilities. I can only imagine what happened since I?ve never had any further contact with the employees.