Chasing Aphrodite (21 page)

To show that he was serious, Canavesi enclosed two photocopies of photographs taken of the statue years earlier. The copies were of poor quality, but one showed the outlines of the statue's head, and the other showed what appeared to be its body. Williams promptly forwarded the letter to Walsh, who relayed it to True with a note: what did she make of this?

An academic known for her thorough research, True reacted strangely. She ignored the potential for acquiring crucial evidence and questioned Canavesi's motives. Did he want money? Perhaps. Or maybe his intentions were more sinister. Why hadn't he simply provided the missing pieces and the information he offered?

True called Symes and Michaelides in London. With obvious annoyance, Michaelides confirmed that Canavesi was indeed the previous owner of the statue, but he said that Canavesi had agreed never to contact the Getty directly.

True sent a letter to Canavesi vaguely committing to meet with him when she was next in Europe. In a fax, Canavesi upped the ante by asking for a meeting in Switzerland, adding that he had dozens of photos of the statue he could show her. True answered with vague but polite interest, then dropped the matter.

M
ORE THAN A
year later, in October 1997, True traveled to Italy's University of Viterbo as a featured speaker at a conference titled "Antiquities Without Provenance."

The audience was full of leading experts on the subject. Some were friends—such as archaeologist Malcolm Bell, Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer of the Berlin Museums, and even General Conforti. But many had had run-ins with the Getty and its curator: Silvio Raffiotta and Graziella Fiorentini from Sicily and several senior Itali an Ministry of Culture officials and archaeologists. True's task was to convince them that the Getty had changed its ways.

Before she could, however, an outspoken Italian archaeologist named Maria Antonietta Rizzo had a surprise for the Getty curator. Rizzo delivered a paper on an important Greek vase in the Getty's collection, one potted by Euphronios and painted by Onesimos, two of ancient Greece's most acclaimed artists. The museum was especially proud of the piece, which True had assembled painstakingly from shards purchased from several different dealers. But rather than praise the vase's artistry, Rizzo revealed convincing evidence that the fragments had all been looted from the Etruscan archaeological site at Cerveteri. She claimed to have spoken to the tombarolo who had excavated the Onesimos fragments from one of the underground tombs there. The Getty should have suspected the Etruscan origin of the vase, she continued, because Cerveteri was home to a thriving cult of Hercules. The Getty's own publications noted that there was an inscription on the foot of the vase containing the word "Ercle," the Etruscan name for Hercules.

"Will the P. Getty Museum, represented here in the person of Marion True ... give back to Italy a piece that has been trafficked in such an obvious way?" Rizzo asked, locking eyes with True, who sat in the front row of the audience.

The curator was visibly stunned. Her face turned deep red, but she kept her composure until it was time for her own presentation, titled "Refining Policy to Promote Partnership." As she stood to speak, she looked angry and nervous.

"It is unfortunate that this information and substantial evidence has never been formally presented to the Getty Museum," True said. She promised that the Getty would investigate Rizzo's allegations. If they proved true, the museum would return the vase.

True soldiered on with her prepared remarks, painting herself as the broker of a new peace. In the wake of the ambush by Rizzo, however, her words struck some as ironic.

"Confronted with the brutally direct evidence of destruction of sites presented by the archaeologists at this meeting, it seems hard to understand why the process for change has been so long and frustrating," True said.

The blame, she continued, rested with all sides—the collectors, archaeologists, museum curators, and government officials sitting before her. Each group had let their personal feelings and professional vitriol get in the way of reform. She called for a new understanding, a staking out of the middle ground. She endorsed Heilmeyer's solution of long-term loans from source countries to museums and noted her own efforts at the Getty, recounting in a slide show her role in the Goldberg mosaic case and the museum's 1995 acquisition policy, as well as the return of the Lex Sacra and tripod.

She then displayed a slide of the Aphrodite, going on at length about the museum's openness in the dispute over the object. She said that the Getty had acquired its limestone and marble goddess only after "no information or objections were offered" by Italy and underscored the museum's cooperative spirit in supplying the limestone chips to help Italian geologists ascertain the origins of the statue. Although a preliminary analysis of the limestone suggested that it had come from Sicily, there was still no proof that the statue was from Morgantina, she added.

It was a bold performance—too bold for some in the audience. True was staking out a public position she would not be able to sustain for long.

I
N DECEMBER
1997, the Getty Trust officially opened the new Getty Center, a cluster of brilliant white structures set atop a promontory in Brentwood, overlooking the sprawling Los Angeles basin.

The unveiling was a cultural coming-out party, noted around the world. The Getty Center had taken fifteen years and well over $1 billion to build—an obscene amount that far exceeded even the most inflated estimates produced over the years. But unlike the original Getty Museum, which had been greeted with scorn, Richard Meier's modernist creation was received with breathless reviews. Critics hailed the center's six buildings, clad in white aluminum and fourteen thousand tons of Italian travertine, as a monument to the growing sophistication of southern California. Los Angeles, it seemed, had finally outgrown its reputation as the vapid capital of Hollywood kitsch.

For the Getty, the new campus fulfilled the vision of its founding CEO, Harold Williams. The trust's seven far-flung programs were now gathered together on one site from the anonymous office suites and warehouses around the city where they had been located for years. A circular building housed the Getty Research Institute, with its 900,000-volume library. Others housed the Conservation, Education, Information, and Leadership institutes, as well as the Getty Grant Program. But the centerpiece was the five pavilions dedicated to the Getty Museum's art collection, expanded in the 1980s from J. Paul Getty's original collecting areas of antiquities, decorative arts, and paintings to include drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and photography.

As the Getty entered a new era, it was intent on shedding its image as aloof and elitist. More than seven hundred dignitaries and guests took their seats on the center's massive open-air plaza for the inaugural ceremony, a carefully choreographed display of Los Angeles's diversity. After a youth orchestra introduced the program, the all-black Crenshaw High School Elite Choir, in blue robes with billowing yellow sleeves, swayed to a hand-clapping Gospel rendition of "America the Beautiful." Actor Denzel Washington spoke movingly about the Getty's commitment to bringing high culture to inner-city black and Latino schoolchildren. A giant temporary screen lit up with a video of First Lady Hillary Clinton walking through the galleries with a group of minority youngsters while discussing the emotional impact of Monet's haystacks and van Gogh's irises. The headline act was Los Lobos, the Latino rock band that had its roots at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

The event also served as a triumphant sendoff for Williams, who was scheduled to retire on his seventieth birthday, just seventeen days after the ceremony. He was being replaced by Barry Munitz, who was largely overlooked during the ceremony. When Munitz was called up to the stage at the last minute, he made a statement without saying a word. While most of the honorees were dressed in white shirts and dark suits, the Getty's incoming CEO made his debut in a turtleneck and sports coat.

Munitz, former chancellor of the California State University system, already had his marching orders to revamp the Getty Center's image. His goal was to change the Getty's profile from that of an aloof, gluttonous institution to one that was leaner, more focused, and intent on "coming down the hill" to connect with the diverse metropolis it served. A small, high-strung man of fifty-six with a walrus mustache and perpetual tan, Munitz couldn't have been more different from his avuncular, wattle-necked predecessor. Whereas Williams was usually quiet and discreet, Munitz was an incorrigible schmoozer and name-dropper who fancied himself a man of the people.

Munitz had grown up in a Russian Jewish immigrant family in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. His father got up from the dinner table one day and disappeared for years, leaving the young Munitz to help his mother and clubfooted sister scrape by. He managed to parlay his smarts into a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Princeton University, where he eventually received a Ph.D. in comparative literature. He taught briefly before launching into the political side of education, rising through the academic ranks to become chancellor of the University of Houston—Main Campus at age thirty-five.

Munitz's charm cut a swath through Houston society. He left his third wife for his fourth, the associate director of the Houston Grand Opera, and then left academia for an excursion into high finance with a tennis buddy, corporate takeover impresario Charles Hurwitz. By the late 1980s, Munitz was vice president of MAXXAM, which through its subsidiary Pacific Lumber had enraged environmentalists by harvesting old-growth redwoods in northern California. He also became chairman of a Texas savings and loan association, which federal regulators seized in 1988, making it the fifth-largest thrift failure in American history. The federal government accused Munitz and the association's board members of enriching themselves through hefty pay raises while hiding millions of dollars in losses from junk bond and tanking real estate investments.

By the time regulators sued, Munitz was four years into his chancellorship of the 369,000-student California State University system, the largest degree-granting institution in the world. He steered it through a severe financial crisis by cutting costs and hiking fees, winning praise from the business community and outrage from students and faculty. He emerged as a national spokesman for higher education, speaking of students as "customers" and education as a "product." He drove a purple Camaro with the license plate
CUS CHIEF
and indulged his childhood passion for chess, displaying fifty sets from around the world in his Long Beach office.

Munitz's decision to take the Getty post stunned his friends but delighted pol itical observers. Those closest to him, including Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing, immediately saw a mismatch. Munitz fancied himself a crusader for the working class but was about to start taming a notoriously headstrong and snobbish high-culture crowd at the Getty. Others lauded the Getty's coup in landing such a "visionary populist." A
Los Angeles Times
editorial called Munitz "the Getty's latest treasure" and predicted that the trust would soon take on his qualities of being "extroverted and socially involved."

Not long after his appointment, Munitz and others charged in the Texas savings and loan debacle settled for $1 million, paid by the thrift's insurer. (A federal judge in Dallas later ruled that government regulators had been overzealous in their efforts to punish Hurwitz and his associates.) The settlement barred Munitz from working in a bank or similar business for three years, but it said nothing about managing one of the largest nonprofit endowments in the world, estimated at $4.3 billion, second only to the Ford Foundation. To the Getty board members who selected him, Munitz's track record at Cal State and the prospects for a change in culture at the Getty overcame any lingering doubts about his past.

W
ITH THE GETTY
Center opening, attention within the trust turned to transforming the original Getty Museum. Munitz considered it a rejoinder of sorts to the Getty Center, which was a monument to Williams. He privately badmouthed the Getty Center for its outrageous cost overruns and poor planning, which had prompted a front-page story in the
New York Times
about the embarrassing lack of toilets. Adopting the Getty Villa renovation as his own, Munitz persuaded the board to undertake the $275 million project in one shot, rather than in stages as originally planned. The trust would finance much of the work through tax-free bonds so as not to raid the endowment as Williams had done.

Meanwhile, True relished her newfound prestige as the person in charge of the villa project. She traveled to Europe to inspect other museums for ideas and became the Getty's public spokesperson for the renovation project. She led a contingent of trust officials and lawyers to a Los Angeles Planning Commission meeting, where they unveiled their plans. The contentious meeting dragged on for a record seven hours. True also attended coffee klatches with nearby homeowners, showing up with her trademark scarf and brooch to discuss their concerns. Their main complaint was about the proposed outdoor Greek amphitheater, a feature True specifically wanted. Fearing that the plays and other events would ruin their seaside peace, the neighbors filed a lawsuit to block the theater. The case went to the California Supreme Court, where the Getty prevailed. But residents delayed construction long enough to force important concessions about when the Getty would use the theater.

As True took charge, friends and colleagues noticed a change in her personality. The intelligent, quiet assistant curator of the 1980s with the mousy brown hair had become an imposing, matronly woman with a platinum-blond upswept bouffant. Insiders began referring to her as "the Mayor of Malibu" or "the White Goddess of the Villa." To cross or contradict her was to risk provoking her volatile temper. She cut people off with a hot glare or piercing remark and banished anyone who was judged guilty of disloyalty. When drawings curator George Goldner, a close friend, took a job at the Met, True stopped speaking to him.