One of the highest, enduring dividends of my association with CBS was that it brought me to that magical city of New York. I had fallen in love with New York from afar (as far as Philadelphia, that is), living vicariously through the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker the glamorous life of the New York set during the Roaring Twenties. Buying United Independent Broadcasters in 1928 gave me the opportunity not only to visit New York more often, but actually to live there!
Many nights, after leaving my office and most of my cares at CBS, I would go to the Central Park Casino, near the park’s Sixty-fifth Street transverse road. The Casino, hailed as “the swankiest restaurant in New York,” was the unofficial night-time headquarters of Mayor Jimmy Walker, where the so-called “swells” of the city came to meet and socialize in black tie or white tie and tails, along with their beautiful wives and lady friends dressed in long gowns, sparkling jewelry and the latest coiffures. Its dining pavilion in silver and maroon decor offered one of the finest cuisines in the city; its ballroom with walls of black glass and golden murals featured the best of the society orchestras and provided a leap to fame for Eddie Duchin on the piano. It was a fabulous night spot until Robert Moses, then the Parks Commissioner, ordered it leveled to the ground to make way for a children’s playground. He insisted that the City of New York should not provide public land for expensive nightclubs.
Then there was the Mayfair Club Dance every Saturday night in the Crystal Room of the old Ritz Carlton, one of the most beautiful rooms in all of New York. There the literary and theatrical people of the city met with the socialites for the sumptuous high point of their week. While the Casino in the Park was a public nightclub for anyone who could afford its prices, the Mayfair Club was for members only. Thorstein Veblen might have called it conspicuous consumption, but to those who partook of the festivities it was clean, carefree fun for its own sake. Frankly, I had no trouble and no qualms embracing the beautiful night life of New York.
My decision to separate my business life at CBS during the day from my social life at night came rather naturally. I could see the dangers of socializing with my office associates, or with the advertising agency men, or corporate officers who were so important to me in the development of CBS. I just did not want to mix the two. I feared the one-dimensional kind of existence it might lead to and the risk of encumbering my business affairs with my social ones. This separation was more or less understood and accepted at CBS and became a long-standing way of life for me.
As a young, energetic and curious bachelor, I soon found new friends and adapted readily to a social life, revolving around the theater, nightclubs, weekends on Long Island’s north shore, parties until dawn, and the flickering and flaming romances of the time.
In keeping with the spirit of this new mode of life, I treated myself to a rather luxurious triplex apartment on the top three floors of a newly completed building on Park Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street, and I hired the most marvelous English butler-valet, named Watts, to preside over it all. I had the apartment decorated to suit my purposes. The top floor was designed for parties with built-in seats and lounges surrounding a semicircular bar against one wall. On the opposite side of the room, an upright piano was built into the wall, with only the keyboard showing. French doors led to a terrace and a roof garden, where couples could escape the din and noise of music and conversation. It was a good party room and came to be used well for that purpose.
The first floor, which contained my bedroom, a guest room, and a large dressing room, fit the fancies of a New York bachelor. The dressing room was lined with closets and had a desk, a couch, a massage table which folded into a door. But I could not get to like my modern bedroom, and after the first couple of nights, I moved into the guest room, where I had my old furniture. For the next three years, I slept in the guest room and left the master bedroom in its modernity, clean and empty. The living room and dining room on the second floor were done conventionally in oak paneling by another decorator.
Every morning a man came in to get me out of bed, which always was a terrible struggle because of my late hours. His instructions were to pull me out of bed no matter what I said or did. Every morning I fired him. But he would pull me and haul me and get me up and into some morning calisthenics. Then I’d take a shower and he’d give me a quick massage and he’d say, “Fired, am I?” and I’d say, “Oh, no, no, no, just kidding. Come back tomorrow.” This went on every morning. By the time he left the house, I would be feeling fine and ready for another full day of work.
Most of my parties were private affairs for personal friends, but some were in the service of CBS. In 1930 we had brought together the seven leading concert bureaus in America and formed the Columbia Concerts Corporation. A subsidiary of CBS under the leadership of Arthur Judson, it represented more than one hundred of the best-known classical artists in the world. Upon Judson’s suggestion, I entertained some of these artists in a series of parties. I remember best the one I gave for Arturo Toscanini, whom we represented, and who conducted the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra on a CBS broadcast every Sunday afternoon.
My butler-valet, who knew his job well, gave me extraordinary service. He could arrange a large dinner with only a few hours’ notice. But on this occasion I gave him special instructions well ahead of time. I had heard that Enrico Caruso had loved good food and that his chef was the best Italian chef in the world, and was still living in New York. I sent my man out to find him. He found him in retirement but willing to come out and cook a dinner for the great Toscanini. Three days before the party, Caruso’s chef arrived to begin preparations for the great project. We bought special foods and special utensils according to his orders. I invited friends of Toscanini, a few concert managers, some CBS people, and other friends of mine—about twenty, in all.
On the day of the party, a friend came by and casually remarked that Toscanini had sworn off Italian food for as long as Mussolini was in power. I didn’t believe him. I thought he was pulling my leg, but I wasn’t sure. That night, when the guests were at the table, I waited nervously for dinner to unfold. The first dish was served. Toscanini looked at it and said, “No, thank you.” The waiter brought the second course and Toscanini looked at it and said, “No, thank you.” I signaled the butler to bring the broiled chicken I had ordered held in reserve. The maestro ate plain chicken, while the rest of us feasted on the best Italian meal I have ever tasted.
The party came off very well. Toscanini drank martinis and champagne. After dinner in the upstairs room, I risked having a CBS jazz group sing for him, and I was delighted to see the great Toscanini tapping his finger in evident pleasure as he listened.
At a party in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Williams (she was one of the extraordinary beauties and leading hostesses of the time), I was fascinated by one Fats Waller who played piano. I invited him to come in for an audition. We signed him up, and he became one of the favorites on the CBS schedule. Talent-scouting did not always work out that well, however. At a fashionably dark and romantic nightclub, I came upon one singer who had a special and haunting voice that sounded better and better to me as the night wore on. We arranged an audition for the next day. My associates and I sat in my office and listened to his voice over the speaker from the audition room. I couldn’t believe what I heard. The voice was cracked, off key, and just terrible. It seemed that he could sing well only in dark clubs around midnight, and that we could not provide. I endured a great deal of kidding from friends at CBS over that audition.
My association with Paramount and Adolph Zukor introduced me to the mythical never-never land of Hollywood in the thirties where, as a young bachelor, I met and got to know the gods and goddesses of the silver screen. I made my debut on that scene soon after Paramount had bought 50 per cent of CBS, and Jesse Lasky, who was in charge of all Paramount production, gave an ultra-lavish party in my honor at his sumptuous beach house at Santa Monica, California. Just about every glamorous movie star I had ever heard of came to that party. The champagne flowed all night, and I felt as though I were in unbelievable paradise. Invitations to other parties followed, and as time went on, I found myself at various dinner tables talking with Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, Madeleine Carroll, Ginger Rogers, Loretta Young, Paulette Goddard, Norma Talmadge. I met the moguls of motion pictures too—people like Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, the Warner brothers, and, of course, David Selznick, who became one of my best friends. Even after I bought back our CBS stock from Paramount I continued to visit Hollywood every year, and my relationships with the movie greats continued.
New York for me was even more magical. I could never fully anticipate the surprises the city would hold. Not long after I moved here, Harry Hurt, a stockbroker and friend, dropped by the apartment and invited me to join him on a dutiful visit to his sister who lived nearby. When I walked into his sister’s apartment, my knees almost buckled. There before me, my friend’s sister, was the woman of my dreams. For years, back in Philadelphia, while a teen-ager, I had come across her photograph in Vanity Fair, Vogue, or Harpers Bazaar, and I had become enamored with one of the most attractive women I had ever seen, a myth personified in a photograph. I was introduced to her and to her husband, a well-known man-about-town. So startled was I at coming face-to-face with this girl of my dreams that I scarcely said a word, nor did I detect any particular sign of kismet upon her beautiful face.
A few weeks later, my friend telephoned: a terrible thing had happened. His brother-in-law had died in a fall from his apartment. After a while, we met again and she invited me for a weekend to her summer home in Manhasset, Long Island. I arrived just in time to be told that we and her other guest were invited to a neighbor’s home for tea. We drove only a few hundred yards down the road and turned into the spacious grounds of a lovely country place. The main house was white clapboard, quite old, very simple, with an elegance and beauty which struck me as being just right. It belonged to Ralph Pulitzer, the son of the publisher of the World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who had let it out that summer. As I wandered about the house and grounds, I could not help but think that this house on these grounds represented the kind of home I myself would like to own and to live in someday.
The woman of my Philadelphia dreams and I became good friends. At the beginning, we became quite fond of each other. We remained rather close but finally we went our separate ways. As I turned thirty, I was convinced that I would never get married, and in fact was sure that I would never want to get married. Bachelor freedom suited me just fine. My social circle grew wider and wider each year, like the ripples in a pond.
One summer I rented a house at Sands Point on the north shore of Long Island and came to know Herbert Bayard Swope, retired editor of the World, better than I had before. I spent many happy, playful hours at Swope’s home. He did not give parties as such; events just went on and on in his home. His house was the only one I have ever known which was organized on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis. Servants worked in shifts around the clock. Meals were available at any hour one wanted to eat. One guest might have breakfast at 5 A.M., while another at the same table might be eating a steak before going to bed for the night. Some guests never found the time to go to sleep, for fear of missing out on some game being played, or some event or some liaison. Swope particularly liked what he called his “stormy dawn sessions” of backgammon. As befitted an important newspaper editor, he had a guest list varied beyond imagination, and one never knew whom one might run into. I remember Howard Hughes sitting in a corner by himself in nondescript ragged clothes, looking like a statue of himself, speaking to no one, oblivious to everything going on about him. That occasion, as I remember it, was the day or the day after he returned from his record-breaking flight around the world. Writers, editors, playwrights, poets and publishers were in and out of the Swope home, many of them members of the well-known Algonquin Round Table, named for the hotel on Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan where they met for lunch and sparkling conversation. Their chief outdoor sport—and the extent of their physical exercise—was croquet, which they played with passion and vehemence. This became the croquet era of my life, although it did not in the long run replace my own enthusiasm for golf.
One memorable weekend I joined a luncheon group on Long Island and met Dorothy Hearst, wife of Jack Hearst, who was the son of Mr. and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst of the famous newspaper chain. My convictions and faith in bachelorhood soon slithered away. Dorothy was beautiful and she had a quality that enveloped me. She was very bright and had strong opinions on a good many subjects. I was taken by her good looks and her grace, and as it happened, she was attracted to me too. All of this led to a new life for both of us. Eventually, she divorced Jack Hearst, and on May 11, 1932, we were married in Kingman, Arizona, a long way from reporters, where my Los Angeles lawyer knew the justice of the peace. We went to Honolulu for several weeks on our honeymoon.
Marriage brought a more settled social life for us among new as well as old friends. Our circle, combining her friends and mine, widened. Of course, I had to give up my bachelor apartment. My butler-valet, who was no longer the boss of the house, left me. We rented a house at 35 Beekman Place, and, because we liked the little street so much, we bought a five-story house at number 29. We planned to modernize it, but the contractor—the same one who helped build Radio City—told me it wouldn’t cost much more to tear the house down and build a new one that would be fireproof. So we had it torn down and built another, six stories high. Meticulous about architectural details, I put my heart and soul into this first house and most of the people who visited us thought it was one of the most beautiful in New York. I didn’t. After we moved in, I didn’t like it. It had no charm or warmth for me. It was antiseptic. We left it (and later sold it) and moved to a lovely old house on East Seventy-fourth Street. We adopted a son, Jeffrey, and then a daughter, Hilary, bringing a new dimension into our lives.
Though we were not members of the Algonquin Round Table, we came to see more of this group than I had as a bachelor. Among those we came to know quite well were Alexander Woollcott, Bob Sherwood, Heywood Broun, George Kaufman, Neysa McMein (the artist), and Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker. Woollcott was a sort of leader of the group, a great storyteller in private as well as public, and I brought him to CBS to spin his stories to the wide radio audience on a program called The Town Crier. There were many conflicts within the group. They would quarrel and not talk to each other for days or weeks. Then there would be a lot of letter writing, apologies, and tears.
We also met some of the group at the Kaufmans’ and at Moss Hart’s. The Kaufmans gave wonderful parties where everyone had to perform. One would write a playlet, for example, and the others would play the parts. I qualified by playing one of the minor figures in a one-act play. Not being a professional writer, I did not have as much in common with them as they had with each other; I was just happy to be in their company. I remember Harold Ross as always being rather rough and scowling. Raoul Fleischmann, the owner of The New Yorker, confirmed the stories I had heard about Ross and his staff. They dominated him. Raoul said he wasn’t allowed to go into the editorial department; if he so much as opened the door, they would yell, “One more step and we’re going to leave.” Years later he wanted to sell The New Yorker and I offered to buy it from him. I was interested in the publishing business and had great admiration for the magazine. But after a couple of weeks, he came back and said the editorial staff just wouldn’t allow him to sell the magazine, especially to a corporation.
During the summers of the middle thirties, Dorothy and I rented country houses on Long Island, and in 1938, we rented the Ralph Pulitzer estate, Kiluna Farm, the same beautiful place I had seen years before on my very first visit to Manhasset. While renting, we looked around, planning to buy a house on the Island, but nothing so grand as Kiluna Farm’s eighty-five acres, with its guest cottages, barns, indoor tennis court, swimming pool, greenhouses, and gardens. One day my real estate broker suggested, “Why don’t you buy Mr. Pulitzer’s place?” I told him that I did not want to insult Ralph Pulitzer with the maximum I had set for a country home. Without my making a bona fide offer, the agent on his own approached Pulitzer with the information that I was in the market for a house at a certain price. He returned reporting that Pulitzer had quickly agreed to sell Kiluna Farm at that price, saying, “I’d like to have Bill Paley living in my house.” So, in December 1938, I bought Kiluna Farm, and another of my dreams had come true.
Over the next forty years I made few changes in the house I loved from the first moment I had seen it. We put a terrace in the back of the main house and extended the gardens somewhat, but the old house stands, largely as it always has, on one of the few hills on Long Island, overlooking Long Island Sound in the distance. The indoor tennis court, with its glass roof for daylight play, and its indoor lights for night play, is unchanged. A new swimming pool has been put in, but the old swimming pool deep in the woods remained for those who preferred privacy. I once asked Ralph Pulitzer why he had put the pool in such a faraway and secluded location, and he told me, “When I built the pool, men liked to go in swimming without the tops of their swimming suits.” How life has changed. The main house retains its quiet simplicity and the patina of age.
Through my business dealings with the investment banking firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman in the early thirties, I became acquainted with Averell Harriman, whose extraordinary combination of human qualities I admired. He was to have an influence upon my life and my own sense of values. Averell was a natural patrician with a real sense of public service. And he transmitted to me certain pleasures of life about which he knew a good deal, particularly the love of art which became the primary avocation of my life ever afterward. Averell’s wife, Marie, owned an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, dealing mainly in French Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings and some contemporary American art.
Averell and Marie had a way about them of combining a sense of style with a feeling for fun in life. In the family home, called Arden, up the Hudson River near West Point, they lived in a veritable castle, built by Averell’s father, who had made a vast fortune developing the Union Pacific Railroad, and children rode their bicycles through the great halls. There, I was introduced to people from all walks of life, and after my marriage the Harrimans lured Dorothy and me on several jaunts which remain memorable.
On one of our trips in the mid-thirties, to the Salzburg Music Festival in central Austria, Averell insisted that I join him in a “shoot” to which he had been invited in Hungary. “No, no,” I said, “I’ve never shot a gun in my life.” But Averell waved off such an answer. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll show you everything you have to know about shooting and you’ll have a good time.” One could never be certain if he were joking or being serious. I knew he was a health buff, was careful of what he ate and swore by the help rendered by osteopaths. So I was not too surprised when once he advised me that if I wanted to live a long life, I should upon waking up every morning put on my socks so that my feet did not get cold. Or that he once gave me a walking stick for Christmas and explained that the top could be unscrewed, revealing a secret button, and that by pressing the button, I could take oxygen from the cane. “One should always have a cane with oxygen,” he remarked, and to this day I still do not know if he was kidding.
So, for my first “shoot” I reluctantly accompanied him to Vienna, where I was outfitted with the proper clothing and shotguns, and while our wives went on to Budapest, by train, Averell and I drove across the border to a grand old castle, somewhere in Hungary, arriving about two in the morning. Averell loaded a shotgun with blank cartridges, placed a candle on top of a wardrobe, and taught me how to aim and shoot at a flickering flame. He instructed me on the rules of gun safety and the gentlemanly conduct expected in shooting birds. We practiced through the night. “By the way,” he commented ever so casually, “don’t let on that you’ve never shot before.” When I protested, he insisted, “People get nervous when they shoot with someone who has never shot before; there are some dangers in shooting, of course. But don’t you worry, I have instructed you and there’ll be no real danger. . . .” He was so sure of himself. But the danger I feared was not bodily harm but rather the prospect of the humiliation of a pretender.
The next morning, dressed properly as a hunter, I met the others, some ten men. We spread out in a line on a field, at ready. The first bird out came past me. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. The butt of the damn gun hit me hard in the shoulder, nothing like shooting blank cartridges, and Averell had not told me about that. Of course, I missed the bird. My lack of expertise went unnoticed, for the others seemed to be missing too. Then, when I had begun to worry—I was still missing and they were hitting their birds—I only half closed my eyes and tried for a bird that came by very high, a shot I should not have attempted at all, and, lo and behold, the bird fell. Pure luck. But through the afternoon, I began to get the hang of it. I passed, I think, not as a rank beginner but just as a bad shot. And so it went until our final night when at a farewell party, Averell raised his glass in a toast and recounted our “secret.” That changed my status in that group of strangers from one who had been barely accepted to that of a bon vivant who had risked humiliation to be among genuine hunters. It all meant next to nothing, really, except that at the time I had caught the fever of a new hobby. I had learned something completely different and I plunged into a new world of sensation. It is hard to describe. In any event, on our way home, I went to Purdey’s, the famous gunmakers in London, and ordered a pair of custom-made Purdey shotguns, fitted exactly to my own proportions. I went hunting in this country on occasion using those shotguns with much pleasure.
On the way home from that same trip, Averell coaxed me into accompanying him on a tour of art dealers and their private collections in Paris. He described it as an art hunt. Aside from some sporting prints I had collected, I knew little about painting and had little interest in art. Over the next two or three days, I saw several private collections of paintings that intrigued my sensibilities: oil paintings signed by artists then not as well known as they are today: Cézanne, Derain, Renoir, Gauguin, Monet, Picasso . . . I was hooked, and I did not know why. Back in New York, I began to read about these artists and their works and I searched them out in the galleries of New York. And I grew to love these Impressionist paintings. In the presence of these works of art which touched me, I felt a sensuous, aesthetic delight. I cannot plumb the depths of these feelings with words, but they would in time result in my wanting to surround myself with this kind of painting.
Although inspired, I recognized that these unique works of art were bought and sold for rather large amounts of money and that a collector inevitably had to think about market values. My urge was to buy, but I had to think about what I could afford to pay for the paintings which so appealed to me. One can view great art at an orderly and leisurely pace in museums where collections are more or less permanent. But for the private collector, only a few works of art ever become available and only at certain times and places. So, the opportunities to buy and to collect take place in rather disjointed episodes, and because few men can spare the enormous amount of time involved in searching out paintings that they want to own and that are for sale, collectors must rely to a great extent on art dealers and agents to do the legwork.
I bought my first major Impressionist painting through the well-known dealer Valentine Dudensing in New York, who had urged me with his usual passion to start small, to buy a rather insignificant painting, to live with it awhile, and then gradually build up a collection with finer and finer pieces. But I did not want to buy mediocre paintings. “I’d rather have one good thing than five or six mediocre ones,” I told him, knowing intuitively that I must be very careful about the first picture I purchased. I knew it was to be the beginning of something important in my life. I rejected this and that and waited until he finally came to me with a painting I liked. In September 1935, I bought it and I have it still and I love it as I did at first: a Cézanne landscape called “L’Estaque,” the name of a village in southern France.
Averell used an art agent in Paris who later became Europe’s most famous publisher of popular art books, Albert Skira, who became my agent, too. With his vast knowledge of art, the dealers, and the collectors, Skira was an inspired agent who would direct me to the best paintings available of the period I preferred. “I’ve found something that I think is awfully good. Come and look at it,” he would say, and I would rush off whenever possible to see what he had found. Then, if I liked it, either he or I would negotiate with the owner or dealer on terms. Through Skira, I began to acquire a number of French Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings.
There was a sport in collecting, too. One memorable art dealer in my early collecting days was a snappy fellow who lived extravagantly on the Champs-Elysées. He had two loves: art and the horses. When the horses were good to him, he would be insulted by any price offered for one of his paintings. But when he lost at the races, he was casual, almost flippant, about selling. “What do you want and what do you want to pay for it and take it away,” he would say, all in one breath. He lived with flair. On one occasion, he sold me the rug on the floor of his office. Another time, when I had bought several small pieces, he came across a folded and crumpled water color in the back of his desk drawer. When I admired the painting, he exclaimed, “Take it, take it, a gift. . . .” At the Knoedler Gallery in New York some time later, I had it pressed out and discovered he had given me a Cezanne.
He also introduced me to the son of the famous Ambroise Vollard, one of the great art dealers of all time, who discovered and admired the French Postimpressionists long before most people appreciated their work. Vollard had left most of his collection to this boy’s mother, who then passed it on to her son. The son’s apartment in Paris contained virtually nothing but paintings, great bins full of them, unframed canvases arranged in large portfolios. He would flip them over: twenty-five Cézannes, thirty Degas . . . I never saw such a collection in my life. I even managed to buy some from him.
I enjoyed the European art galleries, but private collections were usually far more interesting. Once I went to the apartment of Cezanne’s son, Paul, who as a matter of courtesy allowed me to see his personal collection. I was taken with a self-portrait of his father. “If this painting ever comes on the market,” I told Skira, “I would very much like to have it.” Somehow, Skira came to an agreement with the artist’s son that if he ever decided to sell it, I would get first refusal. Two years later, a cablegram from Skira arrived, saying Paul Cezanne had decided to sell his father’s self-portrait. I cabled back immediately, yes, and it is now in my living room in New York. This head of Cézanne, with a beard, wearing a yellow sombrero, is, I believe, one of the best of his self-portraits.
The men dealing in the art world were (and still are for the most part) highly individualistic personalities, a pleasure and a challenge to know and to deal with. But if these men had their personal idiosyncrasies, the artists and painters themselves lived in a fantasy world of their own. My greatest pleasures came from knowing and buying paintings from the artists themselves. In the mid-thirties, I would often visit the studio of André Derain, who had been one of the avant-garde leaders of French art, although by the time I met him his influence had been adversely affected by the critics. Nevertheless, I liked his work, especially his earlier paintings. A man with great force of character, he went on painting austere landscapes and portraits in his own style, which was avant-garde no longer. Nor was he among the most organized of men. Once in his studio I came across a half-finished painting of two Italian actors rehearsing, which I particularly liked. “Why don’t you finish it?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ll get around to it someday,” said Derain.
“No, I want to buy it and I want you to finish it now,” I insisted. So, he put that painting up on his easel and while I waited, he completed the work. Of course, you cannot tell now, but if ever the painting is examined scientifically, some art historian will be perplexed to find that the upper part of the two men was painted during Derain’s prime, before 1925, and the lower legs were done some years later. To me, it’s a very interesting painting, and beautiful, too.
On another occasion, I came across a small painting in a dark corner of Derain’s studio, which was so covered with grime that I could hardly make out its true colors. I had to use all my powers of persuasion to get him to clean away the dirt. Then I announced, “I’ll buy it.”
“Oh, you don’t want to buy that,” he said. “Yes, I do,” said I. “I’ll give it to you,” he said. “I don’t want to take it,” said I. But he insisted, “Yes, you’ve got to. As a friend, you’ve got to take it.” I remember that scene as if it were yesterday, it was so representative of his personality. That small painting, “Head of a Boy,” hangs in my office at CBS now. It is one of my favorites, done during Derain’s best period.
This same period, I came to know Matisse, who agreed to do a painting of my wife Dorothy. Every day I accompanied her to his studio for the sketches—he must have done fifty sketches of her—but when he was about to start to paint, he fell ill, and said, “I can’t finish it this year, but next year we’ll do it.” He never did do the painting. Later he sent one of the sketches to Dorothy for Christmas. In his apartment, I came upon a painting of a woman with a veil, which I absolutely loved, and asked about it.
“Everybody in the world has been trying to buy this painting for years,” Matisse said.
“Well,” said I, “there must come a time when you will want to sell and here I am and I want to buy it.”
He looked at me and murmured, “Let me think about it.” Finally, some days later, he said: “All right, if you really want it, you can have it.” So I bought it. Today, in my bedroom, is that now famous painting “La Voilette.”
In contrast to most painters, Matisse had a passion for order. His brushes not in use were always clean, there was never a speck of paint on the floor or on his clothes, and yet he was the most imaginative of painters. His genius lay in using colors side by side that had never gone together before, and achieving an aesthetic balance in his paintings which eluded the best of others. So, I took an inordinate sense of pleasure when he complimented me on what he called “instinctive sense of balance.” I had shown Matisse several series of photographs I had taken while in Paris and he advised me avuncularly at one point: “Please, whatever you are doing (as a career), drop it, and take up photography seriously.” I admired him enormously as an artist, but I declined to take his advice.
Matisse’s son, Pierre, had opened a gallery in New York and the first time I walked into his gallery he was struggling with a wooden crate. I introduced myself and asked “What’s in there?” Matisse explained that he had asked his father to send him “something exciting” so that he could achieve a bit of status for his new gallery. “This case contains the painting my father sent me. I haven’t even seen it.” We opened it, and, oh, my God! I almost died, it was so beautiful. It was called “Odalisque.” I thought it was the best painting Matisse had ever done and so I said, “I like that. I’d like to buy it. What’s the price?” He quoted me one. I said, “I’m going to buy it and I’m going to take it right home with me now.” The next day he called me up and said, “All hell has broken loose. I didn’t realize people all over the world have been trying to buy it. It just got out that my father sent it to me. I’ve had telephone calls and cablegrams from all over the world about it.” He was a gentle, honorable man. “If you’d like to make some money,” he said, “I’d like to buy it back from you. I’d pay you a good price and still I could make some money on it.” I declined his offer as gently as possible.
It must be remembered that these French painters were hardly as famous then as they are now. But collectors like myself bought their paintings because they held a very special appeal for us, not because we envisioned the future fame that would be accorded to these artists and their paintings or the high monetary values that would be put on them.
There was a famous collection in Berlin—the Schmidt Collection, about which Skira approached Averell and me, saying that this whole collection was for sale for $400,000. It was a fantastic opportunity: approximately fifty important paintings. Averell and I agreed to buy the collection together. Then each of us was to select what he wanted from the collection and pay the amount that was represented in the value of each picture—the value to be determined by a third party. Those we did not want would be sold for us by the Marie Harriman Gallery. At the last minute Averell got cold feet, saying he had changed his mind because it was too much money. I pleaded with him, begged him. He was adamant. So we had to tell Skira we were backing out. Skira nearly cried. “You can’t do this. You must buy it,” he protested. He then appealed to me, but I said, “I can’t. I can take half but I can’t go all the way.” We allowed our option to lapse, and the collection was bought by the Wildenstein Gallery, which made millions on the deal. I bought a Cézanne still life from the collection and at a high price. So there was a great opportunity lost, however you measure it.
On another occasion, I was plain lucky—I was in St. Moritz when Skira telephoned from Geneva. “I’ve got a great painting here. You must come right down and see it.”
“Albert,” I said, “I just got here and I’m dead tired. I’ve been leading a very energetic life in Paris for the last couple of weeks.” When he insisted, I finally said, “Listen. If it’s so good, why don’t you bring it up here?”
“I can’t,” he responded. “It’s too large. I can’t get it in my car.”
“Well, get a truck,” I said jokingly.
“I can’t do that.”
“Well, I’m sorry. I’m not going to Geneva,” I told him.
The next day, a truck pulled up in front of the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz and the painting—a Picasso—was taken out and put in the lobby. I liked it. I asked Skira the price, which was quite modest. I said, “That’s fine, I’ll buy it.” Then I asked, “Whom does it belong to?”
He replied, “That’s the one thing I can’t tell you. I’m sworn to secrecy. There’s no question about its authenticity.” There certainly wasn’t and I took it. It is the painting called “Boy Leading a Horse,” now one of the best known of all of Picasso’s paintings. It’s priceless, and I have promised it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
I was always curious about who had sold it to me. Years later, at the museum, the mystery was cleared up. A famous Berlin dealer named Thannhauser came up to me and said, “Mr. Paley, I’ll bet you’ve often wondered who owned that ‘Boy Leading a Horse.’ ”
“I sure have.”
“Well, let me tell you a story. When you were in the lobby of the hotel looking at that painting, I was on the outside looking through the glass. And I was shivering. I needed that money so badly that I had smuggled the painting out of Germany. I had to have the funds and I didn’t want anyone to know who owned the painting because it would be traced and I would have gotten into trouble. I was the owner of that painting.” He had somehow got many of his paintings out of Nazi Germany and eventually came to New York with them. He sold some, lived very comfortably for the rest of his life, and left the balance of his collection to the Guggenheim Museum, where it now remains.
Although I pursued no conscious pattern in buying paintings, but only followed my taste in selecting them, I have been told by artists and other collectors that they can see a pattern and a kind of taste that is a sign that one person put the collection together. That is the sort of comment about style which pleases a collector.