Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow at The Nation Institute, whose book, Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books), is forthcoming in Spring 2009. Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.
Blogs and Stories
Torrid Affairs at the Getty Museum
In an excerpt from her new book Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, the author explores the seamy underworld of stolen antiquities.
One thing stood out about the Getty Museum, and that was the sex. Numerous current and former Getty employees describe the atmosphere from the 1970s onward as convivial in the most carnal sense of the word.
“It was like Peyton Place,” was how one former employee described it. “Sodom and Gomorrah” was the phrase used by another. Peggy Garrity, a lawyer who sued the Getty over a client’s sexual harassment claim, put it this way: “They were fucking like rabbits behind the paintings.”
To some degree, this was to be expected. The Getty was an elite institution, isolated on a hillside in Malibu, and later on a higher mountain in Brentwood, hosting academic stars and worshipful young researchers. Sex was bound to happen. But something about the Getty seemed to facilitate, if not exactly encourage, illicit sexual behavior.
“There was a hazy smoke of sex in the atmosphere, of staff members sleeping with one another,” recalled a former Getty official. “People at a high level of the museum had a reputation for screwing around, for institutional misbehavior. People didn’t know how to behave.”
The sexual shenanigans were not directly tied to the problems the Getty would later face over stolen antiquities. But they were not insignificant either, creating a backdrop of interpersonal drama and tensions that played out fatally when the museum faced substantive issues over acquisitions, governance, or finances. This had a pronounced impact on the functionality of the institution and its credibility within the museum world.
Such was the case with Harold Williams, the president of the Getty Trust, who left his wife to marry in 1987 the second-in-command at the trust, Nancy Englander, widely reputed to be brilliant at her job. But Englander had to resign from the board as a result, and Williams was subsequently furious because of it. By the mid 1990s, he and the board were barely on speaking terms, according to a well-placed official at the time.
Jiri Frel, meanwhile, was known for his priapic tendencies; he had a three-sided desk useful for cornering research assistants against the window. (The research assistants did not always complain, it should be noted.)
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Sharon Waxman is the author of the recently-released book Loot, an award-winning journalist, and a former correspondent for The New York Times. Waxman is the editor-in-chief of her blog, Waxword, and is preparing the launch of a new online news network covering entertainment, The Wrap News, in January 2009. Her current book, Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, will be published by Times Books in November 2008.
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He shagged. She shagged. Yawn.
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