O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Enfant Terrible at Met Museum : Former director Thomas Hoving recounts Machiavellian plotting and power plays that make New York landmark one of a kind.

L.A. Times Archives

Jan. 26, 1993 12 AM PT

NEWPORT BEACH — The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a “high-octane juggernaut” fueled by greed and social climbing, a combination of “Versailles before the fall, Ali Baba’s cave, the sultan’s seraglio and the Vatican.”

So says former Met Director Thomas Hoving, whose hyper-inflated, self-aggrandizing lecture style enthralled a large audience in a hotel ballroom here Sunday afternoon. Hoving’s dramatic rhetoric is kissing cousin to the style he employs in writing, most recently in “Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” the book he is hawking on the lecture circuit these days.

His hourlong talk, sponsored by the Newport Harbor Art Museum, was laced with tales of flashy power plays, Machiavellian plotting and smooth-tongued seduction. Imposingly tall, with a loud, somewhat grating voice that growled and purred as required to illustrate his anecdotes, Hoving frequently gestured on a scale as grand as his points of reference.

A museum director must be “a connoisseur, a scholar, a diplomat,” he said, as well as “a married man,” a phrase he underscored with heavy irony. The job also involves being a “gunslinger, a fixer, an accomplice, a smuggler” and “most of all, a toady.” In Hoving’s mouth, the word acquired a sneering pride. After all, deeds speak louder than blandishments.

Hoving had been curator of the Cloisters, the Met’s secluded repository of medieval objects, when he was appointed New York City Parks Commissioner by then-Mayor John Lindsay. In 1967, after less than two years in the job, he became director of what was then a reserved and stately museum on Fifth Avenue, a repository of art (and costumes and armor) spanning Neolithic to modern times.

“Overnight,” he recalled, the museum trustees “began to kiss my ring. It was absolutely marvelous.”

Deadly enemies lay all about, from New York Times art critics to city bureaucrats and ungrateful trustees. But lo! the Hoving juggernaut steamrollered over one and all, and emerged (mostly) victorious.

He recounted how one of his first big moves was to get Robert Lehman, a 74-year-old investment broker, to leave his major collection of Old Masters to the Met instead of to Hoving’s hated rival, the National Gallery in Washington.

The admittedly “brash, arrogant” then-36-year-old director asked for an audience with Lehman. Promised 10 minutes, he said five minutes would be ample. He was inside Lehman’s office when Lehman walked in. “He took one look at me and almost fainted dead away.”

Lehman later confided that he had mistaken Hoving for “some political hack” rather than the clever young man who used to be at the Cloisters. In any case, the two got along famously, as Hoving tells it, and chatted for more than two hours.

When Lehman became a museum trustee, Hoving cannily catered to his needs and wishes, always keeping his eye on the prize. Why not appoint Lehman’s great friend, financier Andre Mayer, to the board? Why not make Lehman board president?

Actually, the board already had an able president, Arthur Houghton, president of Steuben Glass. But wily Hoving had the perfect solution. A new post was created for Lehman: chairman of the board. According to Hoving, the duties consisted of saying: “Arthur, will you open the meeting?”

After Lehman died, a news report said the Met would receive $100,000. No mention was made of the works of art.

“I did not go through all this for a mere bus token,” was Hoving’s haughty response. Ultimately, the New York Times announced--on Page One, no less--that the collection was going to the Met, albeit under Lehman’s terms (under which the collection would be housed in a special wing and never disbursed throughout the museum).

In comparison, the care and feeding of Lila Acheson Wallace, heiress to the Reader’s Digest fortune, was a relatively simple matter. Informed that she wished to spend all her money to beautify New York, Hoving invited her to view a perilously pricey ($8 million) design for sprucing up the museum’s facade and Great Hall.

“I used to stand in front of mirrors at home and go, ‘Eight million dollars,’ ” he joked, flipping his hand with studied casualness.

Wallace, in her early 80s, was “a gorgeous woman, blue from the top of her head to her Capezios,” in Hoving’s typically backhanded compliment. Not only did she love the renovation design, but her attorney also suggested $10 million would be a more appropriate figure. Years later, when the Reader’s Digest stock went public, Hoving said, Wallace’s museum beautification endowment was revealed to be worth a whopping $425 million.

In his enfant terrible guise, Hoving insisted that “the only project I really got a kick out of personally” was the museum’s parking garage, the pursuit of which demonstrated his knack for threatening lawsuits, wheedling favors from highly placed friends--and finding new ways for the museum to make money.

Still, there are some art-related matters tied to his decade-long tenure for which he proudly takes responsibility, such as the acquisition of 25,000 individual works of art. One of these was Monet’s “Terrace a Sainte Adresse,” which the museum acquired for $1.4 million, “a price considered to be morally turpitudinous by the New York Times.”

Hoving nabbed a Frank Lloyd Wright house plus the architect-designed contents, for $150,000, and then reaped the bonanza of a trunkful of Wright’s drawings that was found in the cellar (“Each drawing was worth easily twice $150,000.”)

Newport Harbor Director Michael Botwinick, whose first postgraduate school position was at the Cloisters, working under Hoving, introduced him as the man who “gave (museums) back to the people.” Indeed, Hoving perhaps is best known as the father of the crowd-pulling blockbuster exhibition, beginning with the King Tut show.

But even Hoving doesn’t take credit for deciding to bring the ancient Egyptian tomb objects to the United States. That was the work of then-President Richard M. Nixon, who proposed the U.S. tour to Anwar Sadat as a symbol of Egypt’s cultural importance and the end of Soviet dominance.

Said Hoving, with more than a touch of admiration: “Only Nixon would have thought in terms of art and realpolitik.”

He zipped through his version of the saga of the infamous Euphronios krater--the ancient Greek urn he bought for $1 million from an allegedly questionable source--so quickly that only those familiar with the scandal were likely to follow the story. But two points were clear: He was conned by an unscrupulous dealer, and it’s all in the book.

Its title, by the way, derives from a conversation Hoving had with Lindsay about working at the museum. The mayor was incredulous that his parks commissioner was interested in “that dusty hole.” But, he added: “Well, knowing you, you’ll make the monkeys dance.”

They stopped dancing in 1977, but not because Hoving was “thrown out by enraged trustees” as his critics charged. Hey, if he had been thrown out, he said, he would have taken on the tone of an aggrieved martyr. In fact, he was the victim of his own willfulness.

Angered that a special arrangement he made with then-Mayor Abraham Beame for buying an early Renaissance painting at public auction had been ignored by the museum’s executive committee--which decided not to purchase the $4-million work after all--he told the board he was quitting. It was the sort of announcement that did not permit a change of heart.