The short article titled “W. T. Grant Estate Sold,” buried deep in the “Real Estate” section of the Sunday New York Times on June 3, 1973, was easy to miss. The $1,325,000 sale of the 12.3-acre Connecticut waterfront estate—built in 1948 for William Grant, the discount department store tycoon—was the most ever paid for a single residence in affluent Greenwich.1 The house, put on the market months earlier at a $1.8 million asking price, had been designed by Edward Durell Stone, a pioneering modern American architect whose iconic New York works included the Museum of Modern Art and Radio City Music Hall. The New York Times described it as “one of the most spectacular private waterfront properties between New York and New Haven.” Grant had died the previous year and bequeathed the estate to a local nonprofit hospital, which promptly put it up for sale.2
There were no buyers, however. The estate had huge upkeep costs. Grant employed nine full-time gardeners just to attend to his award-winning rose garden. And some potential buyers held off on making a bid since weak economic data through the spring of 1973 signaled an imminent downturn. Economists mark the ensuing recession, with high unemployment, runaway inflation, and a 40 percent drop in the stock market over eighteen months as the official end of the tremendous post–World War II expansion.
Who had the money and courage to pay a record price at a time the economy faced strong headwinds? No one knew. The anonymous buyer hid behind a real estate holding company that had created a PO box address for the deal. When a local reporter tracked down the holding company’s Greenwich attorney, he refused to identify his client.3 The lawyer disclosed that a shell corporation had provided $325,000 cash for the purchase. The additional $1 million came from a mortgage issued by a firm called Mundi-Inter. It was listed on the property deed as a New York corporation with a Norwalk, Connecticut, address.4 When a New York Times reporter called the Mundi-Inter telephone number listed on the deed, an operator answered: “Good morning, the Purdue Frederick Company International.”5 When the journalist asked about Mundi-Inter, he was referred to Purdue’s Manhattan headquarters. Upon calling Purdue, he was given the number of a New York lawyer. That attorney “declined to discuss any aspect of the purchase transaction.”6 No journalist followed Purdue Frederick back to the Sacklers. Their name did not appear in any story about the purchase of the Grant estate.
The house was for Raymond. Mortimer was spending much of his time abroad directing their rapidly expanding foreign operations. Arthur split his time between his midtown condominium and a four-story townhouse on East 57th Street in Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place. He had bought that “on the spot” in 1960 at an estate sale. (Marietta Sackler later wrote, “Arthur surprised us with a townhouse that’s too small for all of us but just right for him!”)7
The big real estate purchases by the Sacklers were evidence of how well their ambitious business ventures were paying off. They were content as successful capitalists, their communist convictions a distant memory. None felt guilty about their newfound wealth. It was not the result of some clever invention or breakthrough drug. They had worked hard for it. Purdue’s biggest-selling products were the laxative Senokot and antibacterial scrub Betadine.8
Arthur’s McAdams agency had a larger roster of clients than at any other time in its history. In addition to Pfizer and Roche, he had added the Swiss multinational Ciba-Geigy after the two independent companies had merged in 1970. McAdams was approaching 150 employees and its billings were at a record, nearing $50 million annually.9 Arthur’s Medical Tribune was an international success. Bill Frohlich, to whom Arthur had given a small, then secret ownership stake, had used his excellent contacts in Germany to open the first foreign edition of Medical Tribune in 1967.10 Seven other countries soon followed. Sackler’s physician mailing list was unmatched.11 Twice a week it reached more than a million doctors worldwide. In the U.S., ad pages cost $7,000, and annual profits were estimated at a million dollars.12
Arthur had also spun off a series of special supplements about psychiatry, cardiology, allergies, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and sexual medicine into six stand-alone magazines. To handle all his publications, he had created World Wide Medical Press and World Wide Medical News Service and Medical Tribune International (it later became Excalibur International Inc. and then Excalibur International Group).13 The most successful of the new launches was Sexual Medicine Today. Arthur was listed as the publisher; his son, Arthur M., was the managing editor on later issues. Targeted toward psychiatrists, it straddled a precarious line between recent medical developments and quasi-tabloid coverage of then risqué subjects, including “Nazi Sexual Practices,” “Do Sore Nipples Inhibit Sexual Foreplay?,” “Medical Story of the Castrati,” “Homosexual Prostitute: A Boy Prostitute,” “Aphrodisiacs and Drugs,” “Sex Change Surgery,” and “Quest for the Ultimate Orgasm.”14
Purdue Frederick had relocated its headquarters from New York City to Norwalk, Connecticut. In Connecticut, whose population had doubled in twenty years, an Economic Development Agency lured out-of-state businesses either to relocate or open branches. The Sacklers liked the state’s lower business income tax rates and their move was sealed by an under-market rent at a new office building. With nearly three times the space as their cramped Greenwich Village headquarters, the brothers went on a hiring spree. For the first time Purdue surpassed two hundred employees.
The record-setting price paid in the late spring of 1973 for the Grant estate was not the only evidence of the family’s financial success. The number and size of the bequests from their charitable foundations was further proof. Although the Sacklers went to considerable lengths to keep their names out of the news as buyers of the Grant estate, as patrons of the arts, education, and medicine starting in the mid-1960s they did so only on the condition their names were attached to major gifts.
It was logical that the brothers, involved as they were in so many aspects of medical publishing and pharmaceutical manufacturing, made their first major donations to medicine and education. In 1964 they underwrote construction of the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv (its American “admissions office” shared the same address and telephone number at one point as Arthur’s McAdams agency).15 When it opened in 1966, it attracted students who had moved to Israel and had completed at least three years of medical studies in their native countries. They could finish their education at the Sackler school and then do clinical training at other Tel Aviv hospitals (as of 2018, the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv is Israel’s largest medical research and training facility, and has a unique arrangement with New York State whereby students who study there can be licensed as New York–qualified physicians).16
The Sacklers’ debut in the world of elite philanthropy had been a $150,000 gift in 1963 to New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now, a decade after Arthur had struck that deal with James Rorimer, the Met’s director, he learned the museum was having difficulty finding a benefactor to finance the construction of a new wing to house the Egyptian Temple of Dendur. Egypt had given the two-thousand-year-old temple to the United States in gratitude for American assistance in building the Aswan High Dam. If the temple had not been moved piece by piece it would have been lost forever, submerged in the lake created by the dam.
Major American museums and universities wanted it. The National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities established a commission to review all the applications. The Metropolitan was on a short list from the start.17 The Met did a masterful job of explaining why the best way to preserve the monument was to build from scratch an ambitious new museum wing in which Dendur was reconstructed and displayed permanently.18
By the time the Met was awarded the temple in 1967, it had a new director. James Rorimer had died the previous year from a cerebral hemorrhage and the trustees had tapped Thomas Hoving as his replacement. Hoving, a charismatic art historian and New York’s parks commissioner, learned that not much had happened since Egypt sent the dismantled six-hundred-ton temple by freighter to the U.S. The Met had stored the enormous 647 pieces in crates in an open-air building on its south parking lot.19 The lack of progress was not for lack of desire. Hoving was a regular on New York’s social A list and was tireless in charming the handful of ultra-wealthy philanthropists who might help underwrite the new wing.
He had tried all the usual suspects. Robert Lehman, heir to one of New York’s great banking families, who had agreed to give the Met his 2,600 premier works of American and European art, was not interested. Nor was Michael Rockefeller, who had already made a gift of a major portion of his fine art collection. The same polite rejections came from other major Metropolitan benefactors, including André Meyer (Lazard Frères), investment banker B. Gerald Cantor and his wife, Iris, and private equity titan Henry Kravis.20
At one point, Hoving was tantalizingly close to convincing Lila Acheson Wallace, the Reader’s Digest cofounder, to write a check. She even tentatively said yes but then changed her mind. “It sometimes seemed the Temple of Dendur had fallen under King Tut’s curse,” Hoving later recounted.21 As he went down the list of less likely donors, he stopped when he reached Arthur Sackler. The two had met shortly after Hoving had become the museum’s director. Hoving had liked Arthur, judging him as “touchy, eccentric, arbitrary—and vulnerable, which made the game much more fascinating.” And it had been in that meeting that Arthur surprised Hoving by announcing he was prepared to contribute another $150,000 to an acquisitions fund the director could use at his discretion. Sackler also wanted to underwrite the renovation of a special exhibitions gallery, adjacent to the one on the second floor named after his family. All he asked was that it should be named for his wife, Dr. Marietta Kade Sackler.22
Having run into a dead end on raising money for the Temple of Dendur wing, Hoving now remembered something else that Arthur said during their meeting six years earlier. Sackler “had mentioned his dream of uniting Egypt and Israel.”23 Figuring he had nothing to lose, Hoving called Sackler, who “surprised me by saying he would come to me, and he arrived less than a half hour later.” Hoving told Sackler he was the “only one with the guts and the foresight” to pay for the Temple of Dendur and the Egyptian wing. Arthur knew he was not the museum’s first choice; still he did not say so, instead allowing Hoving to pile on the compliments. After a few minutes, Hoving got to the bottom line. The Met needed $3.5 million ($21.5 million in 2019 dollars).
Hoving had hoped that Sackler might commit to give some of the money and help the museum raise the rest. He was not even certain whether Sackler was wealthy enough to make the bequest even if he wanted to do so.
Twenty seconds of silence elapsed. Hoving thought that Sackler was quiet because he was “embarrassed and was trying to figure out how to say no without making me feel like a fool.”
“I’ll do it,” Arthur announced.
Hoving stared forward, not knowing for a moment what to say. He did not know that Arthur needed help from his brothers. Mortimer and Raymond agreed to join in underwriting the $3.5 million. They agreed it would come from their shares of Purdue Frederick profits.24 So as not to put too much pressure on Purdue, the Sacklers wanted to put up as little cash as possible. Sonnenreich proved a tough and capable negotiator. It took a year of hard-nosed talks before there was a final deal.25 The Met’s biggest concession was allowing the brothers to spread their donation over twenty years, without interest. That translated into two decades of tax write-offs for the family.26 The slow payout, Hoving later recalled, forced the Met “to borrow a few times from the endowment to pay the contractors.”27
The Sacklers had agreed that besides the Dendur Temple they would bankroll new galleries for Egyptian Art, an archaeological and antiquities laboratory, and offices for the museum staff. The Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery for Assyrian Art was placed in a prime location, just to the left of the museum’s main entrance.28 The Mortimer and Theresa Sackler (his third wife) Gallery was dominated by three huge Tiepolo canvases and had a coveted location at the top of the Grand Staircase. The Temple of Dendur would be the first-floor portion of the newly named Sackler Wing. Each brother’s name would be listed individually. The Sacklers had final say over press releases. The Met agreed that any further gifts they made would instantly be part of the museum’s permanent collection. All catalogs, shows, photographs, or use of their galleries would feature their names.29 “They insisted on having the M.D.’s on there,” recalled Arthur Rosenblatt, the museum’s vice director, saying later only partially in jest that only their office hours had been omitted.30
Old New York society had always sneered at the Sacklers as nouveau riche bargain hunters who bagged their naming rights from Rorimer at a fire sale price because the Met had then been desperate for money.31 The arrangement for the Egyptian Wing and the Temple of Dendur did not require the Sacklers to donate any significant portion of their own art. Even their contribution—$3.5 million spread over twenty years without interest—seemed paltry compared to that of donors who underwrote their own wings, a low of $7 million from Gerald Cantor to $23 million for Lila Acheson Wallace.32
Arthur Sackler did not get a seat on the Met’s Board of Trustees.33 The sitting directors judged him too pushy. Sackler told his brothers that anti-Semitism kept him off and blamed the museum’s general counsel, Ashton Hawkes.34 Some of the patrician WASPs at the Met undoubtedly had dismissive and stereotypical views of self-made Jews such as the Sacklers. The evidence of that snobbery was that the Met’s first Jewish trustee had decades earlier been George Blumenthal, the head of the U.S. branch of Lazard Frères. The refined German-born Blumenthal had built a mansion in Manhattan that occupied an entire city block. He needed the space to display a stunning art collection (most of which he bequeathed to the museum). He was also a generous philanthropist, writing a check for a million dollars to the Met in 1928 ($15 million in 2019), and equally large bequests to New York’s Public Library and Mount Sinai Hospital.
Arthur would never have the right pedigree. On one occasion, C. Douglas Dillon, the Met’s vice chairman, invited Sackler and Sonnenreich for lunch to his East 80th Street townhouse.35 By then, Dillon was not only the chairman of an eponymously named international banking house, but he had served as Eisenhower’s ambassador to France, treasury secretary for JFK and LBJ, and chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and Brookings Institute.
“It felt like he [Dillon] was suffering our presence,” Sonnenreich recalled to the author. “I would have left if I was not with Arthur.”36 When it was over and they had left, Sonnenreich told Arthur, “This was ‘take a Jew to lunch day,’ that’s all this was. I’m just telling you bluntly.”37
Arthur had not told Sonnenreich about his desire to become a museum director. Sackler knew he would have told him it was a waste of time. “Arthur had always tried to downplay his Jewish roots,” Sonnenreich told the author. “He had even pretended he was Catholic for a while.” Sonnenreich understood why it was such a sensitive matter; he had been at meetings at drug companies in which there were “all those kike jokes, you’d have to laugh with everyone else or it would have seemed strange you didn’t think it was funny.”38
However, not long after going to work for Sackler, Sonnenreich told him, “Let me explain something to you Arthur. If there is a pogrom, I don’t care what you tell them you are, you are going to be in the same cattle car as I am. Stop the games. Stop them because they are not going to continue to work. You could marry all the Christian girls you want, it ain’t going to work. They are still going to put you on the train and that’s that.”39
That pep talk had an impact on Arthur. Although he did not go out of his way to tell people he was Jewish, he no longer shied away from it whenever it came up.
Arthur Rosenblatt, the Met’s number two, was Jewish. Rosenblatt thought the Met by then needed “every rich Jewish real estate mogul” since they had “run out of WASPs with money.”40 Still, the power brokers at the Met were slow to change.
Although Sackler did not become a trustee, he convinced Hoving to hire Princeton art historian Wen Fong as a special consultant to the Department of Asian Art.I41 It had been Fong who had persuaded Arthur a few years earlier to donate to Princeton the largest collection of paintings by Tao-Chi, an important seventeenth-century artist.42 The million-dollar gift created the Sackler Gallery for Chinese Art at Princeton. Maybe it was time, Sackler decided, to provide some not very subtle reminders to the Met that he had not yet decided where he would give the Chinese art stored in their basement.43 He did little to hide meetings with university and museum directors who courted him. The National Gallery and Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum were the most persistent.
Arthur would later donate $2 million for a therapeutic research lab at Long Island University, another $8 million for the Arthur M. Sackler Sciences Center at Clark University, and millions for the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Science at New York University and the Arthur M. Sackler Institute for Advanced Studies in Public Health, Medical Research and Communications at Tufts University. During his many travels to China, where he attended to his expanding Medical Tribune, he charmed government officials in the hope of getting permission to build the country’s first post–Mao era museum at Beijing University.
Meanwhile, Mortimer and Raymond were expanding their bequests beyond the United States.44 Mortimer led the way. He had in 1959 divorced his first wife, Dr. Muriel Lazarus Sackler, and married a much younger native Austrian, Gertraud (Gheri) Wimmer. Mortimer oversaw the family’s Napp, Bard, and Mundipharma companies and split his time between homes in London, Gstaad, and the French Riviera. He soon added a ski chalet in the Austrian Alps and Rooksnest, a five-thousand-acre, sixteenth-century estate ninety minutes outside London. The following year he surrendered his American passport and became an Austrian citizen. His brothers were shocked. He chided them for remaining in America where the tax rates were significantly higher.45 Whatever success the brothers had in the future, he would do better than they since he was free of U.S. taxes. At that time the top federal rate was 70 percent for couples earning more than $180,000.II 46
While Arthur focused on China and the U.S., Mortimer and Raymond gave lavishly to London’s Tate Modern, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy of Arts. Raymond, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1995 for his support of British arts and sciences, was later a major benefactor of an emerging field called convergence science, “the intersection of mathematical, engineering and physical sciences with biomedical science.”47
Not to be outdone by his brothers, Arthur went on a buying binge, as if to further tease the Met and his brothers with notable additions to his collection. Marietta knew there was more behind it than simply taunting the Met and Mortimer and Raymond. “Arthur found safety and comfort in objects,” Marietta later wrote. “They could not hurt him, they could not make demands on him. The irony, of course, was they made him their slave.”48
I. In July 1973, shortly after Sackler committed to donate $3.5 million for the Temple of Dendur, Hoving bought twenty-five tenth-century Chinese paintings and scrolls from C. C. Wang, a Hong Kong artist and dealer. Fong had recommended the purchase, which became embroiled for several years in a public controversy as to whether Fong and Hoving had been duped by high-quality fakes. The authenticity of another painting, Travelers, that Fong acquired for the Met was also disputed by some leading Asian art experts. Fong and the Met acquired it from Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian), widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s most talented fine art forgers.
II. During subsequent divorce proceedings, Gertraud charged that Mortimer had given up his American citizenship because he wanted to avoid double taxation. After the couple reached a settlement and the divorce litigation records were sealed, Gertraud claimed that Mortimer’s decision was not at all about taxes but only his love for Austria.