A SORDID SAGA OF GREED AND WEISS

William Cash investigates the real reasons

behind the forthcoming sale of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex

Los Angeles WHEN JOAN WEISS inherited over $16 million in 1989, as the heir of Frances Hammer, the wife of Mephistophelean oil tycoon Armand Hammer, she thought she was saved from ever having to work in her life. But now, she told me over lunch on Monday, her occupation is 'litigation'.

Just in case $16 million wasn't quite enough to live on, she has spent the last four years — so far having racked up a $5.5 million lawyer's bill — in the Los Angeles courts in order to get a legal grip on the pharaonic Hammer art fortune that she began disputing five months before her 92 year-old uncle died in 1990. This week a Los Angeles Superior Court heard the closing arguments of the second phase of her $400 million law suit — said to be the reason for the Armand Hammer Museum's forthcoming sale of Leonardo da Vinci's Coder in November — in which Weiss alleged that Armand Hammer improperly persuaded his child- less wife to sign away her 'community property' rights. At stake is $200 million- worth of art.

The Leonardo Codex is being sold through the agency of Christie's in New York. There is a special style of conde- scending look that Christie's New York staff have perfected for dealing with obvi- ous walk-in auction tourists. I received a nice example the other afternoon, after pushing through the Park Avenue glass doors, leaping up the white marble stairs and casually inquiring at the reception desk about the Leonardo's Codex Hammer.

A 72-page loose scrapbook-style collec- tion of more than 350 Leonardo drawings — mainly boring-looking scientific con- traptions, such as sewage and drainage devices — along with personal notes, the Codex became the world's most expensive autograph manuscript ever sold when bought in London for £2.4 million in 1980 by the oil tycoon, art hoarder, swindler and general Mr Rotten Egg, 'Doctor' Armand Hammer. It is up for sale again on 11 November. Being the last chance for a pri- vate buyer to own a Leonardo — all other works are in the museums — it is expected to fetch more than $10 million. One of the darker ironies of this ugly little saga is that, whilst the Leonardo manuscript was a sort of private note-book geared towards improving the lot of mankind, the controversial ownership his- tory of the Coder has — for centuries been dogged by displays of human nature at its most resplendently greedy, depraved, foolish, incompetent and morally delin- quent. In a characteristic display of rampant vanity the megalomaniac Hammer renamed the Codex after himself. Admit- tedly, it used to be called the Codex Leicester, after the first Earl of Leicester, Thomas Coke, who bought it in Italy in 1717 whilst on his Grand Tour. The previ- ous owner had been the painter Giuseppe Ghezzi, who had acquired the manuscript `by the great power of gold' (Hammer kept a plaque in his bedroom which stated `He who hath the gold maketh the rule') after finding it amongst the papers of its first owner, the 16th-century Milanese sculptor Guglielmo della Porta. The Codex left Britain in 1980, largely thanks to the failure of Viscount Coke to strike a death- duty deal with the Treasury.

The manuscript is being sold by the Armand Hammer Museum — a dimly lit, sinisterly Masonic-feeling marble shrine lumped next to the Occidental Building in Westwood that Armand Hammer built (at a cost of $98 million, paid for by Occiden- tal despite his owning less than 1 per cent of the company stock) to honour himself 'I'm a yob culture-vulture.' and stash what Robert Hughes once described as 'mostly junk, a mish-mash of second- or third-rate works by famous names'. Some of the art — such as the Titian — is rumoured to be fake. The real Hammer is buried in a mausoleum across the street in the Westwood Cemetery (where Hugh Hefner has just bought the burial spot next to Marilyn Monroe).

It says something about Armand Ham- mer's reputation today that in his own museum bookshop his ghosted autobiogra- phy is kept out of sight — remaindered copies (I had to request one) being sold off for $10. Another, even more gruesome labour of self-adoration, a coffee-table photo-book called The World of Armand Hammer, is also on sale. The book contains a painfully embarrassing chapter entitled `The Royal Family' — 'In their living room in LA, in a place of honor on the piano, is a color photograph of Mrs Hammer with Prince William on her lap. For newborn Prince Harry, Dr Hammer sent his father a baby jogger cart.' The pages are padded out with snaps of the tycoon sucking up to Prince Charles (who used Hammer as a donor bank for his charities); there is one splendid photo of Hammer grabbing the hand of Prince Philip whilst the Queen's consort is quite clearly talking to somebody else.

It is possible — I timed myself — to walk around the deserted main exhibition gallery in 55 seconds. Several of the other rooms were closed. In three visits, I failed to encounter a single visitor. The restau- rant comprised an unmanned hot-dog stand. The only evidence of the Codex now is a framed poster of its exhibition in Moscow (despite his ruthless capitalist business methods, Hammer worked as an agent for the Soviets most of his life) hang- ing on the administration office wall. When Robert Hughes (whom Hammer tried to get fired as art critic of Time) inspected Hammer's Codex, he declared, `There is not a single drawing of aesthetic interest among the meagre diagrams in the margins.'

The cost of fighting off Joan Weiss's liti- gation might not be the only reason for the imminent auction of the Codex Hammer. At the time of Hammer's death, Occiden- tal was landed with $8.5 billion of junk- bond debt: the Armand Hammer Museum has very awkward financial 'difficulties'. In fact, the Codex Hammer never properly belonged to Hammer. It was bought with $5 million of Occidental funds, a discovery that led to a rash of (other) lawsuits from shareholders and a bitter row over wastage of corporate assets. When the museum opened in 1990 — two weeks after Ham- mer's death — there were so many lawyers involved in its controversial conception that they had to be invited to a special lawyers-only preview.

It will come as no surprise to observers of Hammer's infamous career (he was a role model for Robert Maxwell) as a fraudster, social creep, bully and faux phi- lanthropist that his art museum was head- ing for the financial rocks. Like Hammer himself, it was all show. Following the morally suspect debacle over his reneged promise to hand over his Old Masters to the Los Angeles County Museum, the col- lection is now overseen by UCLA.

Hammer's main problem was that he neither cared nor actually knew much (experts advised him) about art; his mod- est two-storey house in West LA boasted an indoor swimming-pool but no paintings to speak of other than a fake Modigliani. It is worth remembering that in the 1930s he and his brother Victor (whose estate he sued for $650,000 when he died) used proudly to exhibit cheap Russian furniture taken from hotels and markets as `Romanov treasure'.

Heading the opposition to Joan Weiss is Michael Hammer, Armand's vacuously blue-eyed, chunky gold, Rolex-wearing grandson — formerly vice-president and secretary of Occidental. In November 1991, Scott Deitrick, an old college mate whom he installed as the 'administrator' of the Hammer Museum, was arrested for suspected drug-dealing and smuggling $60,000 into the country, most of it hidden down his cowboy boots. Michael Hammer bailed him out for $250,000. When I asked why he thought Joan Weiss was suing his grandfather's estate of which he was executor, he said, 'Money does strange things to people — greed does strange things to people.'

Michael — whose father Julian (Ham- mer's son) once killed somebody should know. On the actual night of his grandfather's death, Michael Hammer went round to Armand Hammer's house, and swiftly — with a chauffeur — began carting away Hammer's belongings, including cheap tacky furniture and old books that belonged to Frances. The house had, in fact, been left to Joan Weiss. When she heard that Michael was empty- ing the house, she rushed around, and an ugly fist-fight took place. 'It was sick,' Joan told me. Armand's body was hardly even cold.'

Throughout the lawsuit Joan Weiss has been portrayed by the Hammer estate as a scheming super-bitch who almost black- mailed her 86-year-old aunt — a woman who had always treated her like her own daughter — to change her will shortly before she died. An attorney described Weiss as a 'pulsing blob of greed'. Last month, after just two days, a judge threw out the first part of the multi-million-dol- lar suit, saying that there was 'not a shred' of evidence to suggest that Hammer had deceived his wife.

But anybody who knows anything of Armand Hammer — if in doubt flick through The Dark Side of Power: The Real Armand Hammer by his own corporate publicist Carl Blumay — knows that decep- tion and dishonesty were his professional trademarks; for example, he fragrantly fibbed about his illegal contribution to Nixon's re-election funds — hounding Rea- gan for years (hatching plots to sit next to him in the barber's chair) for a pardon — and bribed Columbian drug terrorists who threatened his oil-fields with cash.

Towards the end of his marriage, howev- er, he constantly deceived his wife, Frances, surrounding himself, and involv- ing himself, with various women; it was no secret that Hammer had a bizarre relation- ship for many years with a former airline magazine publisher called Martha Wade Kaufman, who went on to become the chief fund-raiser behind his art museum.

Frances Hammer, one of the few sane characters in this sordid saga, treated Joan Weiss like her own daughter and clearly wanted her to get all her money. Frances knew she was being duped by Armand, and apparently wanted a divorce. She certainly didn't want any of her money going to a bunch of corporate strangers (in particular Martha Kaufman) at the Armand Hammer Museum — or to one of Hammer's crazy charities like the United World College in New Mexico. She wanted it to stay in her family, and out of the clutches of Ham- mer's army of lawyers.

I am not at all convinced that Joan Weiss, in fact, is anything like the greedy witch as she has been portrayed. The only really naughty black spot shown in the evi- dence was that of her and her husband scheming to use a gift of $550,000 from Frances as a deposit on a $2 million man- sion in Bel-Air — rather than using it, as they said they would, to buy Weiss's hus- band, Robert, a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Weiss has since divorced.

A plump, friendly-looking middle-aged blonde woman with podgy little fingers, a Beverly Hills bob, two teenage children, and dogs, Joan Weiss lacks any style or glamour; she is wholly unsocial and lives modestly in the old Hammer house in West LA. She carries a black plastic handbag — the only sniff of her $16 million wealth being a Tiffany silver biro she lent me once. On Monday, standing outside the restaurant after lunch, she asked me whether I would do her a big favour.

`What?'

Will you adopt a black labrador dog of mine — I've already got two corgis and I can't cope.'

The valet parker pulled up in a battered old Toyota Celica. Before I had time to answer Joan Weiss had driven off.

William Cash writes from Los Angeles for the Daily Telegraph.