Chasing Aphrodite (33 page)

Munitz appeased Gardner as often as possible, but he wanted to leave nothing to chance when it came time to defend his performance. He spent hours drafting and redrafting his response to Gardner, an eight-page letter in adjective-encrusted prose that flattered Gardner, promised emphatic but vague changes, and recast his supposed shortcomings as strengths. He gave a lengthy defense of the "dramatic transformation" he had accomplished at the Getty during the past five years and maintained that the "complex challenge with Italy" was being adequately handled. "Our interest in that international question increases with each new insight regarding our special curator and our Board member," Munitz added, unable to resist a swipe at True and Fleischman, whom he suspected of starting the complaints.

T
HE ITALIAN INVESTIGATION
was the main item on the agenda for the January 2003 Getty board of trustees meeting. The executive committee handling the issue—Gardner, attorney Helene Kaplan, and investment guru Lewis Bernard—had a lengthy conference call with Munitz and Erichsen in November 2002 to discuss how to broach the subject with the other trustees. Erichsen had spent months preparing a briefing paper laying out the facts and legal issues. It contained explicit references to the troubling documents the Getty's attorneys had found in their review of the museum's files three years earlier but had kept from Ferri.

The committee agreed that the documents raised uncomfortable questions that the Getty had long avoided answering. What if True had done something wrong? Erichsen thought the Italians were using the charges against the curator to shake the Getty down, but as Bernard noted during the conference call, "It's only blackmail if Marion True didn't do anything wrong."

Kaplan, an expert on governance for the high-powered Manhattan law firm Skadden, Arps, went further. Obviously, True wasn't doing all this on her own, she pointed out. "How do John Walsh and Harold Williams fit into this?" she asked. "Vast sums were spent on the Fleischman collection. This had been going on for a long time. Their approval had to be there. What is our strategy to deal with this?" She wanted to know whether there was any link between the Getty's 1995 policy change and the 1996 acquisition of the Fleischman collection. Was the policy a way of justifying the acquisition? Why was the collection acquired if most people suspected it of being hot? It was Gardner who asked the clincher: what was the board's legal exposure?

The questions kept coming, and there were far too few answers. The search of Getty files so far had turned up several troubling bits of information, but it wasn't a comprehensive investigation. Only a thorough inquiry—one that questioned Gribbon, True, and others directly—would get to the bottom of what had really happened at the Getty. The executive committee had considered the step but backed down each time, concerned about the public relations ramifications.

"At what point must we give the board an honest appraisal?" Kaplan asked. She had doubts about the discretion of her fellow trustees and recommended that Erichsen's briefing paper be kept from the full board. Erichsen pushed back. The trust had a moral and legal duty to keep the board informed, he said. Withholding his briefing paper would look like a cover-up, and he and other members of Munitz's management team wanted to make sure all the board members were fully informed so that no one could plead ignorance later.

In the end, the committee reached a compromise. There would be no deeper investigation. All the references to "troubling" documents and "arresting" Polaroids would be excised from Erichsen's briefing paper, but the trustees would be briefed orally on them. Even the sanitized document would be guarded closely, with numbered copies passed out at the beginning of the board's discussion and collected at the end. Faced with an opportunity to find the truth, the Getty leadership once again opted for only the appearance of due diligence.

The precautions worked too well. During the board meeting, trustees had time only to scan the briefing paper, and none saw the photos. Erichsen's presentation dwelt on legalisms. He glossed over the Getty's own disturbing discoveries, emphasizing instead what he considered Italy's immoral conduct. "Our attempt to accommodate them has only drawn us deeper into a one-sided, even in some respects sordid, effort on their part," he said. "We may yet be able to negotiate with them successfully, but we believe that to do so we need to establish a credible position in the public debate over cultural patrimony."

As Munitz sat through the discussion, he seemed to have other things on his mind. His primary concern was not Italy, but the next topic on the agenda: his raise. Munitz was already being paid more than $1 million a year in total compensation—more than any other museum director, university president, or foundation chief in the nation. His income was essentially tax-free. As part of his contract, the Getty reimbursed him for all the state and federal taxes he paid. He had an SUV at his disposal, a personal driver, and a pool of five secretaries. But that wasn't enough for Munitz. He had a copy of Harold Williams's final contract in a file, and he felt that his benefits paled by comparison. For the rest of his life, Williams was to receive more than 100 percent of his final Getty salary of $600,000, along with secretarial support and office space at the Getty Center. By contrast, the board had put a cap on Munitz's generous retirement package. And whereas Williams had received a completion bonus for bringing the Getty Center in over budget and behind schedule, Munitz would receive nothing for accelerating the completion of the Getty Villa. It was simply unfair.

Munitz had been lobbying Bernard, who as head of the board's compensation committee was responsible for recommending the CEO's annual raise. Bernard was concerned that giving Munitz a large raise in the midst of other, wide-sweeping cuts would send the wrong message to Getty employees and the public. Munitz countered that the tough times had made his job more demanding and therefore more deserving of a reward.

In the end, the board decided that Munitz's performance had been "very strong" but voted to give him only a 4.5 percent increase, on the low end of the range. Although he was the only person at the Getty to get a performance raise for the year, he was furious. Over the next year, he would make it his mission to see that he was fairly compensated.

O
F ALL THE
uncomfortable information facing the Getty during the escalating Italian investigation, one of the most agonizing was sitting at the board table: Barbara Fleischman.

Fleischman sensed that board members were wavering over what to do about their embattled curator and became stridently defensive of True. She urged the Getty to launch a public relations campaign on behalf of True, touting her role as a reformer in the antiquities trade. She called on colleagues to approach their powerful friends—former secretaries of state James Baker and Warren Christopher, or even National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice—to broker a diplomatic solution with Italy. This was, after all, not just a Getty issue, but an issue that affected all American museums. Fleischman accused the Italians of "raping and pillaging" the Getty. At one point, she said that True was taking the fall for Walsh and Williams, much like the Nazi generals who were prosecuted for following the orders of their superiors. "It's just like Nuremberg," she cried.

The board was reluctant to act. With the Italians increasingly focused on how Fleischman and her husband had built their own collection, it was evident that she might soon be a target as well. At the behest of board leadership, Erichsen and Martin had already visited Fleischman in her Manhattan apartment to offer some awkward advice: she should retain her own legal counsel. And since the matter involved her actions before she became a board member, she would have to pay for her own attorney. Fleischman had already racked up $30,000 in legal fees consulting with her attorney about how she might defend herself while also helping True. She was adamant that the Getty should pay the bill and threatened to go over Erichsen's head by raising the issue with Munitz and Gardner. Erichsen warned the board's executive committee that paying Fleischman's legal expenses would be a violation of the U.S. tax code, which would consider it illegal compensation for a board member. Erichsen got the reaction he wanted.

"I agree ... completely," Helene Kaplan told Erichsen in a voice mail delivered from outside a board meeting of the Carnegie Corporation, which she chaired. "I think we would be jeopardizing our potential tax exemption ... and I think that's the way it has to be presented.

"But truthfully, secondly, I think it equally important for the Getty to keep our distance. I don't want us to be implicated any more than we have to."

M
UNITZ'S FEARS OF
a whispering campaign, it turned out, were well-founded. He just had the wrong suspects.

Gribbon had become increasingly angry at Munitz and Murphy, and they with her. The relationship ruptured over the Getty's purchase of Titian's
Portrait of Alfonso dAvalos
for $70 million. Relying on Gribbon's word, Munitz assured reluctant board members that the masterpiece had been cleared for export from France, only to discover later that the paperwork hadn't been completed, creating a potentially embarrassing complication. Murphy, feeling betrayed, stopped talking to Gribbon. By then, Gribbon had begun looking for support from her former boss and mentor, Walsh, who had retired but remained close to her and others at the Getty. Munitz was turning his back on the commitment he had made to build the museum's collection, Gribbon complained. The institution was headed in the wrong direction. Gribbon and Walsh concluded that they had to act before Munitz destroyed the museum they had worked so hard to build. Perhaps if a number of key board members could be briefed, they might be able to do something before it was too late. The CEO served at the pleasure of the trustees, who were the trust's ultimate authority. It was time to go over Munitz's head.

In the fall of 2003, Walsh approached Agnes Gund, one of the few Getty trustees who came from a museum background and a member of the Getty task force that had recommended the $1 billion for new acquisitions. As president of the Museum of Modern Art, Gund had been hearing troubling rumors about Munitz and Murphy. Despite a $1 million Getty grant that Munitz had arranged for MoMA, endowing a curatorial position in her name, Gund had become disillusioned with him. Gribbon, meanwhile, sought out Lewis Bernard, complaining that Munitz and Murphy were destroying the institution by reneging on promises to build the collection. The board needed to do something and had a perfect opportunity when Munitz's contract expired in January 2004.

By November 2003, the whispering had become a murmur. Bernard and Kaplan pulled Gardner aside at a conference in New York to express their concerns again. Despite the previous warning, Munitz hadn't changed. He was still away too much. He was disengaged. There were no regular staff meetings. Munitz had strained relations with Gribbon and True. The Itali an issue was complicating everything. Bernard began asking whether the board should give Munitz a six-month or one-year contract extension and reevaluate the situation at the end of that time.

Gardner was stunned by the suggestion and pushed back hard. Anything short of a three-year contract would be tantamount to a vote of no confidence, he argued. "Look, I understand Munitz has some outspoken critics," Gardner told Bernard. "But my job as chairman is to represent the consensus, and I think the consensus of the board agrees with extending the contract. Keep that in mind."

Bernard relented, agreeing to let the full board decide what to do at its meeting in January. Gardner immediately made an appointment to talk with Munitz. "Your job is at risk, Barry," he warned.

With two months until the meeting, Munitz kicked his personal PR campaign into overdrive. He set up a meeting with his four program directors and promised to resume regular meetings. No more going through Jill Murphy, he told them, adding that he knew some of them had gone behind his back to board members. "You should have come to me directly," he said. "But here we are. Let's make this work." Gribbon wept through much of the meeting.

Munitz then threw himself into his specialty, what he called "board-touching." He had already deduced that Gund and Bernard were lost causes. He concentrated on the other trustees. He and his wife flew to Hawaii, where they spent a weekend with Lloyd Cotsen, former CEO of the Neutrogena cosmetics firm and an avid archaeology buff. UCLA had named its archaeology institute for Cotsen after he donated $7 million, the largest gift ever to a social science program at the school. Among Getty trustees, he was the most openly sympathetic to the Italians. If the Getty had anything that was even suspect, the museum should give it back, he urged. He had also been after Munitz to forget about buying new art altogether, suggesting that the museum focus instead on seeking loans. In Hawaii, Munitz agreed to abandon the acquisition plan—and with it the $1 billion commitment he had made to the museum.

The next weekend, Munitz was in New York, attending church services with board member John Biggs, the recently retired chairman and CEO of the gigantic TIAA-CREF retirement investment company. Biggs, a bespectacled St. Louis native with a straightforward midwestern approach, had commanded national attention during the Enron scandal when he'd testified before Congress against the kind of chummy accounting practices that had led to the spectacular collapse of the energy firm. His testimony had earned him a torrent of protests from the profession and derailed his candidacy to head a new federal accounting oversight board established under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. On the Getty board, Biggs chaired the audit committee, and Munitz was lobbying for him to replace Gardner as chairman of the board.

After attending church with Biggs, Munitz had lunch with the disgruntled Fleischman. He promised to redouble his efforts to support True during her travails.

Gardner, meanwhile, was lobbying other board members, urging them to back the CEO.