BOOKS

Order in the House of Mammon

Bevis Hillier

SOTHEBY'S: BIDDING FOR CLASS by Robert Lacey Little, Brown, £20, pp. 354 here are just a few living writers whose work, when you first encounter it, starts out of the page at you and leaves you feeling, `Here is somebody quite exceptional: I must look out for him/her in the future.' Cyril Connolly had that frisson when Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall was sent him to review. I had it when I first read a book review by Francis Hope, the young fellow of All Souls who was killed in an air crash in 1974. I had it again when I read The Victorian Treasure House, the dazzling first book by another fellow of All Souls, Peter Conrad. With Martin Amis, the expe- rience came not with his early novel, The Rachel Papers, but with a short contribution he made to a symposium about Oxford, in which I relived my own freshman nerves, conjured with an intensity and a ruthless candour that I knew I could never have mustered.

Robert Lacey was one of these 'portent' writers. The first thing by him I read (Illus- trated London News? Late 1960s?) was a descriptive piece about the posh shops in Jermyn Street. I knew my Jermyn Street better than was good for my pocket, and, as with the Amis essay, I had 'the delighted shock of recognition' — of one's own expe- rience heightened. He avoided cliches like a master skier on a slalom run. There was no `advertoriar puffery. He could send wreathing into your nostrils the rich pongs of Paxton & Whitfield cheeses or Floris perfumes. He had fun at the expense of astrakhan collars, frogged dressing-gowns and shirts with zebra-crossing stripes. So I watched out for him.

The next piece of his I read was in the Sunday Times colour magazine and could not have had a more different setting than the West End's ritziest street. It was about a grim young offenders' institution. At the end of the article, Lacey described witness- ing the intimate body search of a new arrival at the prison. 'We 'ave to feel up there,' the warder explained. 'You never know what they've got up there. Some of them tie a pound note to a piece of string.' I noted Lacey's gift for the telling detail, though wondering why not a fiver. I waited to see what he would turn into. A. talented novelist, perhaps, or a Chatwin- like travel writer. In 1969, still in my twen- ties, I was offered by Harold Evans the chance to edit the 'Look!' pages of the Sunday Times — virgin pages which one could fill with whatever one wanted. My then literary agent advised me to turn it down — 'You don't want to find yourself writing about new pairs of pyjamas.' (I later realised he probably wanted me to go on writing books, which made him money, rather than take a staff job on a newspaper, which wouldn't give him a percentage.) I did turn it down; but when the job was offered to Lacey, he took it. I met him at that time and wrote for him. He struck me as the new Mark Boxer — Mark Two, as it were — negligently handsome, gay in the old sense, witty and cascading with bright ideas. But, as I watched his career develop I wondered if my agent had not been right after all. Once on the monogrammed pyjama circuit, Lacey stayed there.

He was one of the first to exploit the demand for books on the royal family, with his book on the Queen, Majesty, blazing a trail which would later attract historians as serious as Ben Pimlott. Unlike most inves- tigative reporters, he has charm. He was able to get access to key courtiers, and to some of the royal family. In 1975 my pub- lishers cheekily sent the Queen Mother the gaudy invitation to the launch of my book Austerity/Binge, about post-war decorative arts. Lacey wrote to me:

When I had tea with the Queen Mother at Clarence House yesterday, the invitation to your book party was on her mantelpiece. I had to advise her not to attend.

(He was genuinely affronted that by some inexplicable oversight he had not been invit- ed.) From the British royal family, Lacey moved on to Saudi Arabia — land of gold wrist-watches when you've got a wrist left to wear one on. Then Aristocrats, a com- panion book to a television series he pre- sented. Then Ford (more oodles of money); a life of the gangster Meyer Lan- sky (ditto); and a life of Grace Kelly, an irresistible blend of money, Hollywood, scandals and royalty. Instead of becoming a great writer, Lacey became a rich one. There are persuasive arguments in favour of that, notably the paupers' graves of great writers all over Europe.

It could only be a matter of time before he wrote a book about Sotheby's — money, money, money, art, glamour and again roy- alty. (The book ends with a chapter on the sale this year of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's effects.) Here, perhaps, I should say that I am something of a Sotheby's man, if not born, certainly bred. When I was 12 my father became their cataloguer of Japanese art, a consultancy he held for 25 years. Through him, in the Fifties, I met some of the firm's leading experts, includ- ing the suave chairman, Peter Wilson, the ceramics authority A. J. B. Kiddell, the eccentric Tim Clarke, who made 'The Rhinoceros in Art' his life's study, John Carter, the books expert whose wife Ernes- tine was the bitchy fashion editor of the Sunday Times, and the all-rounder Billy Winkworth, who taught me to ask antique dealers, 'Could you make a sensational reduction?'

I had to be impartial when I became a sale-room correspondent of the Times in the late Sixties — a time which Lacey justly describes as

a magic moment .. . when just about any- thing seemed possible for the adventurous auction house on New Bond Street. Beautiful objects fetched beautiful prices. Sellers were happy. Buyers could not wait for the next sale .. .

In the Seventies I made two television series on antiques with Marcus Linell, then one of the company's most respected direc- tors. (What a ninny Sir Gordon Brunton of the Thomson organisation must be. According to Lacey, when Brunton joined Sotheby's as a non-executive director in 1978, he listed Linell among directors he thought 'surplus to requirements'. Linell should have been made chairman: if he had been, some of the firm's more ticklish later problems might have been avoided.) And for a time I was editor of Sotheby's Preview, the company's glossy magazine, with a passport to penetrate and quiz all depart- ments.

This book is written by the same old pacy, racy Lacey familiar to us from his royal books, though it is less well researched than some of his other works. He concentrates mainly on big money and scandals. But even here he falls down. It is, for example, beyond belief that he fails to mention the great sale at the Rosebery- Rothschild mansion of Mentmore in 1977 — then and still regarded as the 'sale of the century'. It brought the record total of £6.4m; and though that was exceeded this year by the Hackwood sale (£7.04m), if the Mentmore contents were to be sold today they would probably bring £50m to £100m. On the scandals front, Lacey has been hopelessly upstaged by the publication of Peter Watson's expose of art and antiqui- ties smuggling, Sotheby's — Inside Story, which made front-page headlines in the press. (The scandal was effectively squelched by the firm's American supremo, Diana D. Brooks. There was a resignation and a carefully controlled inquiry which patted Sotheby's on the back for putting its house in order.) Again, Lacey has clearly talked at length to Geraldine Norman, but perhaps she was being modest as he has nothing about the scandal of Tom Keat- ing's Samuel Palmer forgeries, which she exposed in 1976, winning the 'Journalist of the Year' award for 'a good, old-fashioned scoop', and a smacking kiss at the award ceremony from the then prime minister, James Callaghan. During the Keating cri- sis, Sotheby's deputy chairman, Graham Llewellyn, had to write a letter to the Times saying that Sotheby's (whose name had been mentioned in connection with the fakes) would refund money to anyone who could prove he had bought a stumer at Sotheby's.

The subtitle of Lacey's book, 'Bidding for Class', enshrines a misconception. Hard as he may find it to believe, a lot of buyers are not bidding to give themselves some bogus prestige. They are buying because they love the works of art or have studied a particular subject and become immersed in it. 'Taste,' he writes, 'was the alibi by which 18th-century England maintained that its frenzy of acquisition contained more mean- ing than the simple spiral of competitive display.' That is grotesquely cynical. I mean, take somebody like Sir William Hamilton, the marl complaisant of Nelson's Emma: does Lacey seriously imagine that his collecting of classical vases was motivat- ed just by vulgar ostentation? And when Catherine the Great of Russia bought Sir Robert Walpole's Old Masters (through Christie's, as it happens) was her aim to show how jolly important she was?

What Lacey misses about Sotheby's in his grubbing after money and scandal is the firm's role as a great forcing-house and a reservoir of art expertise. He gives little idea of the splendid scholarship that goes into compiling the illustrated catalogues the careful research, the caution over attri- butions. The number and luxuriousness of these books make the normal output of a commercial art book publisher look puny. Momentous art discoveries have been made at Sotheby's. Lacey does not even mention John Hayward, the firm's former authority on the Renaissance. It was he who identified a bronze of Juno as by Ben- venuto Cellini: the Times published a half- page report on it (10 February 1968). Lacey also misses the more off-beat sales which have an entertainment value, such as that reported in the Times of 26 March 1968 under the headline 'Gruesome charades at Sotheby's': Sotheby's had 'some very peculiar telephone calls' after a collection of instruments of tor- ture, sold yesterday, was put on show last week. (One man wanted to know whether they had a branding iron with his initials). . On Friday 1 saw a male model in parti- coloured tights being genteelly racked in front of whirring cameras. But now these insubstantial pageants have faded, leaving not a rack behind. The torture instruments extracted £6,752 from impassive bidders. A tub-shaped chair, its seat fitted with an iron spike, fetched £90. (For once Sotheby's did not need to put up polite notices asking buy- ers kindly to refrain from sitting on the antique furniture.) The book is not all bad news. Lacey being Lacey, it has many compensations. There are flashes of the old skill in phrase- making. The auctioneer's job is 'to glide between two irreconcilable illusions — loot and hope'. (Buyers are hoping to steal a bargain while sellers hope to extort a ridiculous price.) The firm is 'the world's most prestigious finishing school'. (Lacey does not, however, mention the unsubstan- tiated rumour that some aristocratic girls are taken on as receptionists in the hope of winning their grandfathers' possessions when the old boys die.) Describing a recent sale where the prices rocketed: 'Now the rival bids become a mantra.'

Lacey is particularly good on the slippery Peter Wilson, who created the success- story of Sotheby's in the 1950s and '60s. He effectively scotches the old canard that Wil- son was a traitorous spy. Wilson did serve in MI6 in the war: his service number was 007 and he always claimed that his friend and colleague Ian Fleming based James Bond on him. Because Wilson, though briefly married, and a father, was predomi- nantly homosexual, his name has been linked with Anthony Blunt's. People won- dered if he might have been `the Fifth Man'. Not a chance, says Lacey. First, what use would an auctioneer be to the Rus- sians? (Money-laundering?) Second, John Cairncross has been exposed as the Fifth Man. Third, 'There was not enough money in it.' That would have been a very convinc- ing argument to Peter Wilson, who said, `Art for art's sake is really awful rot.'

From Sotheby's' point of view, Wilson has the great merit of being dead. This means that scandals like that of the smug- gled Sevso silver can be largely laid at his door. A modern version of an old English folk song goes:

Old Adam Brown is dead and gone, You'll never see him more,

As what he thought was H2O Was H2SO4.

Sotheby's gloss on this might run:

Old Peter Wilson's dead and gone, He's guilty as Pol Pot; Whatever scandals surface now, We'll blame him for the lot.

Lacey is most effective of all in writing about rich American guys — those who have unsuccessfully tried to take over Sotheby's, and A. Alfred Taubman, the shopping-mall mogul who succeeded. The very English Sotheby director Julian Thompson, a grandson of Walter de la Mare, allegedly told two of the unsuccess- ful Yanks, 'You're just not our kind of Americans.' Taubman, who prefers not to use his first name Adolph, is married to an Israeli beauty queen whom he met when she was working for Christie's. Lacey's tal- ent for winkling out piquant detail is at its best in a passage about her.

`Drop your napkin and see if they're genuine,' whispered Peter Spira to Graham Llewellyn, the long-time jewellery expert, when Mrs Taubman arrived for lunch with the board wearing shoes which appeared to be studded with genuine diamonds and sap- phires. Llewellyn did and reported that they were not — though they were very good copies.

The book is also enlivened by some of the choicest sale-room jokes. One is about Dyson Perrins, of Lea and Perrins Worces- ter sauce, who collected Worcester porce- lain and much besides. Asking a Sotheby Porter to move a big crate for him, he promised him a good tip. When the shifting was over, Perrins gave the good tip:

When your bottle of Worcester sauce is half empty, fill it up with water. No one will ever notice the difference.

I also enjoyed a story from Peregrine Pollen, who for years was regarded as Peter Wilson's dauphin, but did not in fact suc- ceed him. When Sotheby's hung up, in a New York trade fair, large monochrome photographs of Old Masters recently sold in their rooms, a puzzled visitor remarked, `I always thought Rubens painted in colour.'