The Burnt Orange Heresy Read online

  "Where," I asked Gloria, "did you get the Haitian primitives?"

  "A widow in Lauderdale sold them to me." She giggled. "For a song. Her husband just died, and she sold everything-house, furniture, collection, and all. She was moving back to Indiana to live with her daughter and grandchildren."

  "You priced the Marcel too low, baby. You can get more than fifteen hundred for it."

  "I doubt it, and I can't lose anything-not when I only paid twenty-five dollars for it."

  "You're a thief and a bitch."

  Gloria giggled. "You're a blackguard. What have you done with Berenice?"

  "She went back to Minnesota. I don't want to talk about her, Gloria."

  "She's an awfully nice girl, James."

  "I said I don't want to talk about her, Gloria."

  We took the elevator to the penthouse, but the door didn't open automatically. There was a small one-way window on the steel door (a mirror on our side), and the Filipino houseboy checked us out before pressing the door release from his side. There was probably a release button concealed somewhere within the elevator cage. There had to be. Cassidy couldn't keep someone in his penthouse at all times, just to push a button and let him in-or could he?' The very rich do a lot of strange things.

  The party was not a large one. Seven people counting Mr. Cassidy. Gloria and I brought the total to nine. It was the kind of party where it is assumed that everyone knows one another and therefore no one is introduced. There are many parties like that in Palm Beach. The main idea is to eat first, and then drink as much as possible before the bar is closed or the liquor runs out. If one feels the need to talk to someone, he introduces himself or starts talking to someone without giving his name. It makes very little difference. Mr. Cassidy had to know everyone there-at least slightly-to brief the Filipino houseboy on the person's credentials for admittance.

  Sloan, the bartender (he wore a name tag on his white jacket), poured us Cutty Sarks over ice cubes. I trailed Gloria toward the terrace, where Mr. Cassidy was talking to a grayhaired man who was probably a senior officer in some branch of the armed forces. He wore an Oxford gray suit with deeply pleated trousers. The suit was new, indicating that he didn't wear it often. This meant that he wore a uniform most of the time. A suit lasts army and navy officers for eight or nine years. Pleats were long out of fashion and Oxford gray is the favorite suit color for high-ranking officers. They lead dark, gray lives.

  "I appreciate that, Tom," Cassidy said, sticking out his hand, and the gray-haired man was dismissed.

  I watched the old-timer head for the elevator. I could have confirmed, easily enough, whether the man was in the service by asking, "Isn't that General Smith?" In this case, however, I believed that I was right and didn't feel the need of confirmation.

  Joseph Cassidy was short, barely missing squatness, with wide meaty shoulders and a barrel chest. His tattersall vest was a size too small and looked incongruous with his red velvet smoking jacket. He needed the vest for its pockets- pockets for his watch and chain, and the thin gold chain for his Phi Beta Kappa key. He had a tough Irish face, tiny blue eyes, with fully a sixteenth of an inch of white exposed beneath the irises, and square white teeth. His large upper front teeth overlapped, slightly, his full lower lip. His high forehead was flaking from sunburn. He wore a closecropped black moustache, and his black hair, which was graying at the sides, was combed straight back and slicked down with water. Cassidy was a formidable man in his early fifties. He carried himself with an air of authority, and his confident manner was reinforced by his rich, resonant bass voice. And his gold-rimmed glasses-the same kind that Robert McNamara wore when he was Secretary of Defense-were beautifully suitable for his face.

  Gloria introduced us and started toward the indoor fountain to look at the carp. The pooi was crowded with these big fish, and I could see their backs, pied with gold and vermilion splotches, from where I stood, some fifteen feet away from the pool. A concrete griffin, on a pedestal in the center of the pool, dribbled water from its eagle beak into the carp-filled pool. It was a poorly designed griffin. The sculptor, who probably knew too much about anatomy, had been unable to come to terms with the idea of a cross between an eagle and a lion. Medieval sculptors, who knew nothing about anatomy, had no trouble at all in visualizing griffins and gargoyles. Cassidy took my arm, grasping my left elbow with a thumb and forefinger.

  "Come on, Jim," he said, "I'll show you a couple of pictures. They call you 'Jim,' don't they?"

  "No," I replied, hiding my irritation. "I prefer James. My father named me Jaime, but no one ever seemed to pronounce it right, so I changed it to James. Not legally," I added.

  "It's the same name." He shrugged his meaty shoulders. "No need for a legal change, James."

  I smiled. "I didn't ask for that advice, Mr. Cassidy, so please don't bill me for it."

  "I don't intend to. I was just going to say that you don't look like a man named Jaime Figueras."

  "Like the stereotype Puerto Rican, you mean?' The peculiar thing is that my blond hair and blue eyes come from my father, not my mother. My mother was Scotch-Irish, with black hair and hazel eyes."

  "You don't have a Spanish accent, either. How long have you lived in the States?"

  "Since I was twelve. My father died, and my mother moved back to New York. She never liked Puerto Rico, anyway. She was a milliner, a creative designer of hats for women. You can't sell original hats to Puerto Rican women. All they need is a mantilla-or a piece of pink Kleenex pinned to their hair-to attend mass."

  "I've never met a milliner."

  "There aren't many left. My mother's dead now, and very few women wear originals nowadays, even when they happen to buy a hat."

  "Are hats worth collecting?" he asked suddenly, moistening his upper lip with the tip of his pink tongue. "Original hats, I mean?"

  I knew then that Mr. Cassidy was a true collector, and, knowing that, I knew a lot more about him than he thought I knew. In general, collectors can be divided into three categories.

  First, the rare patron-collectors who know what they want and order it from artists and artisans. This first category, in the historical past, helped to establish styles. Without the huge demand for portraits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, there would have been no great school of portrait painters.

  Second, the middle-ground people, who buy what is fashionable, but collect fashionable art because they either like it without knowing why (it reflects their times is why) or have been taught to like it.

  In the third category are the collectors for economic reasons. They buy and sell to make a profit. That is, in a tautological sense, they are collectors because they are collectors, but they enjoy the works of art they possess at the moment for their present and future value.

  The one trait that all three types of collectors have in common is miserliness. They write small, seldom dotting "i's" or crossing "t's" and they are frequently costive. Once they own something, anything, they don't want to give it up.

  The collector's role is almost as important to world culture as the critic's. Without collectors there would be precious little art produced in this world, and without critics, collectors would wonder what to collect. Even those few collectors who are knowledgeable about art will not go out on a limb without critical confirmation. Collectors and critics live within this uneasy symbiotic relationship. And artists-the poor bastards-who are caught in the middle, would starve to death without us.

  "No' I shook my head. As we crossed through the living room toward his study I explained why. "Hats are too easy to copy. Original hats, during the twenties and thirties, were expensive because they were made specifically for one person and for one occasion. As soon as a new hat was seen on Norma Shearer's head, it was copied and massproduced. The copy, except perhaps for the materials, looked about the same. Some of the hats worn during the Gilded Age, when egret feathers were popular, might be worth collecting, but I doubt if restoration, storage, and upkeep cost
s would make it worthwhile to collect even those."

  "I see. You have looked into it then?"

  "Not exhaustively. Fashion isn't my field-as you know."

  We entered his study, which was furnished in black leather, glass, and chrome. Cassidy sank into an audibly cushioned chair while I looked at the three pictures on the apple-green wall. There was an early Lichtenstein (a blown-up Dick Tracy panel), an airbrush Marilyn Monroe, in pale blue, from the Warhol series, and a black-and-white drawing of a girl's head by Matisse. The latter was over the ebony desk, in quiet isolation. The drawing was so bad Matisse must have signed it under duress. I sat across from Cassidy and put my empty glass on the rosewood coffee table. The Filipino house-boy appeared with a fresh drink on a tray, picked up my empty glass, and handed me the drink and a cocktail napkin.

  "You wish something to eat, sir?"

  "I think so. A turkey sandwich, all white meat, on white toast. With mayonnaise and cranberry sauce, and cut off the crusts, please."

  He nodded and left.

  "You don't like the drawing, do you?"

  I shrugged, and sipped from my glass. "Matisse had a streak of meanness in him that many Americans associate with the French. When he went out to a cafe-after he became well known-he would often sketch on a pad, or sometimes on a napkin. Then, instead of paying his tab in cash, he'd leave the drawing on the table and walk out. The proprietor, knowing that the drawing was worth a good deal more than the dinner, was always delighted. A man full of rich food and a couple of bottles of wine doesn't always draw very well, Mr. Cassidy."

  He nodded, relishing the story, and looked fondly at his Matisse. A bad drawing is a bad drawing, no matter who has drawn it. But my little story-and it was a true one- had merely enhanced the value of the Matisse for Cassidy. An ordinary person, if he had purchased a bad Matisse, would have felt gypped. But Cassidy wasn't an ordinary person. He was a collector, and not an ordinary collector.

  "An interesting story." He smiled. "I don't have much here, and I haven't decided what to bring down from Chicago."

  Here was a natural opening, and I took it. "I'd like to see the catalogue of your collection some time, Mr. Cassidy."

  "Don't have one yet, but I've got a good man at the University of Chicago working on it. Dr. G. B. Lang. D'you know him?"

  "Yes, but not personally. He wrote an excellent monograph on Rothko."

  "That's Dr. Lang. It isn't costing me a dime, either- except for the printing costs. Dr. Lang teaches at the university, and one of my clients is on the Board of Trustees. Through him, my client, I managed to get Lang a reduced teaching schedule. He teaches two courses, and the rest of his load is research, the research being my catalogue. Dr. Lang's happy because he'll get another publication under his belt and, if he does a bang-up job, the University of Chicago Press wifi probably publish it."

  When Cassidy smiled, exposing his teeth, his canines made little dents in his bottom lip. He stared at me for two long beats. His eyes, behind the gold-rimmed glasses, were flat and slightly magnified. He leaned forward slightly. "When men of good wifi get together, some sort of deal can be worked out to everyone's satisfaction. Isn't that right, James?"

  "If they're 'men of good will, yes. But my own experience has led me to believe that there aren't many of them around."

  He laughed, as though I had said something funny. The houseboy brought my sandwich. I took a bite and called him back before he got out the door. "Just a minute! This isn't mayonnaise, this is salad dressing."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Don't you have any mayonnaise?"

  "No, sir. May I bring you something else, sir?"

  "Never mind."

  In his own way, Joseph Cassidy was as famous as Lee Bailey. In court Cassidy was certainly as good a lawyer, but he wasn't as flamboyant with reporters outside of court as Bailey, nor did he take cases for sheer publicity value. He was a cash-in-advance, on-the-line lawyer. No one had written a biography on Cassidy yet, but he had socked away a lot more money than Bailey. His shrewdness in buying the right painters at the right time and at rock-bottom prices had made him another fortune-if he ever decided to put his collection on the market.

  The houseboy still hovered about, wanting but unwilling to leave. He was upset because I didn't eat the sandwich.

  "Close the bar, Rizal," Cassidy ordered quietly, "and tell Mrs. Bentham that I'll see that Mr. Figueras gets home all right." He exposed his toothy smile. "You don't mind sticking around for a while, do you, James?"

  "Of course not, Mr. Cassidy."

  Because of my upbringing, which has been on the formal side-insofar as observing the amenities was concerned-I resented the easy use of my first name by Mr. Cassidy without my permission or invitation. But I knew that he wasn't trying to patronize me. He was attempting to put me at my ease. Nevertheless, although I considered the idea, I couldn't drop to his level and call him Joe. There's too much informality in America as it is, and in Palm Beach, during the season, it is often carried to ridiculous lengths.

  Rizal left to close the bar, which meant that the party was over. The guests would depart without saying good-bye to their host, and that would be that. Not out of rudeness, but out of deference. If Cassidy had gone out for a series of formal good-nights they would have adjusted to that kind of leave-taking just as easily.

  After Rizal closed the door, Cassidy took a cigar out of his desk humidor, lighted it, and sat down again. He didn't offer me one.

  "James," Cassidy said earnestly, "I know a lot more about you than you think I do. I rarely miss one of your critical articles, and I think you write about art with a good deal of insight and perception."

  "Thank you."

  "This is all straight talk, James. I'm not in the habit of handing out fulsome praise. A second-rate critic doesn't deserve it, and a first-rate critic doesn't need it. In my opinion, you're well on the way to becoming one of our best young American critics. And, according to my investigations, you're ambitious enough to be the best."

  "By investigations, if you mean you've been talking to Gloria about me, she isn't the most reliable witness, you know. We've been friends for several years now, and she's prejudiced in my favor."

  "No, not only Gloria, James, although I've talked to her, too. I've talked to dealers, to some of my fellow collectors, and even to Dr. Lang. You might be interested to know that Dr. Lang's highly impressed with your work, and he knows more about art history and criticism than I'll ever know."

  "I'm not so sure about that, Mr. Cassidy."

  "He should. That's his business-and yours. I'm an attorney, not an art historian. I don't even intend to write a foreword to my catalogue-although Lang suggested it to me."

  "Most collectors do."

  He nodded, and waved his right hand slowly so the ash wouldn't fall off the end of his cigar. "In the art world, you happen to have a reputation for integrity. And I've been informed that you're incorruptible."

  "I'm not getting rich as an art critic, if that's what you mean."

  "I know. I also know how to make inquiries. That's my business. The law is ninety-five percent preparation, and if a man does his homework, it's easy to look good in the courtroom. To return to corruption for a moment, let me say that I respect your so-called incorruptibility."

  "The way you say it makes me feel as if I've missed some opportunity to make a pie of dough or something and turned it down. If I have missed out on something, I sure don't know about it."

  "If you want to play dumb, I'll spell it out for you. Number one-free pictures. That kid's show this evening, ah, Westcott. Suppose you had said to Gloria that you would give Westcott a nice buildup in return for a couple of free pictures, what would have happened?"

  "In Westcott's case, she'd have given all of them to me." I grinned. "But you aren't talking about integrity now, Mr. Cassidy, you're talking about my profession. I've never taken a free picture. The walls of my apartment in the Village are bare except for chance patterns of flaking paint.
But if I ever took one picture, just one, that I could resell for two or three hundred bucks, the word would be out that I was on the take. From that moment on I would be dead as a critic. And a good review for pay, which is still being done in Paris, has damned near ruined serious art criticism in France.

  "There are some exceptions, naturally, and those of us in the trade know who they are. So the way things are, I can't even afford to take legitimate art gifts from friends, even when I know that there are no strings attached. The strings would be there inadvertently. The mere fact that I took the gift might influence my opinion if I ever had to cover the man's show. By the same token, I don't buy anything either. And I've had some chances to buy some things that even I could afford. But if I owned a painting, you see, there might be a temptation on my part to push the artist beyond his worth-possibly-I don't know that I would-in order to increase the value of my own painting. I don't mean that I am completely objective either. That's impossible. I merely try to be most of the time, and that allows me to go overboard and be subjective as hell when I see something I really flip over."

  I finished the last of my drink and set the glass down a little harder than I had intended. When I looked up, there was a smile on Cassidy's Irish face. Perhaps he had been baiting me, but I had been through this kind of probing before. It was natural, in America, for people to think that a critic had been paid off when he gave some artist a rave write-up, especially when they didn't know anything about art. But Cassidy knew better.

  "You know all this, Mr. Cassidy, so don't give me any undeserved credit for integrity. I like money as much as anyone, and I made more money when I taught art history at CCNY than I do now. I'm ambitious, yes, but for a reputation, not for money. When I have a big enough reputation as a critic, then I'll make more money, but never a huge amount. That isn't the game. The trick-and it's a hard one-is to earn a living as an art critic, or, if you prefer, art expert. If you want me to authenticate a painting for you, I'll charge you a fee. Gladly. If you want to ask my advice on what to buy next for your collection, I'll give you suggestions free of charge." I held up my empty glass. "Except for another drink. Or is the bar closed for me, too?"