Rogues' Gallery by Michael Gross

Author:Michael Gross
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780767931458
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-05-16T21:00:00+00:00

GELDZAHLER WAS STILL AT HARVARD WHEN TWO OTHER, EQUALLY consequential new arrivals stuck their noses under the Metropolitan’s tent. Charlie Wrightsman and his wife, Jayne, had made their first gift of money to the museum and loans of art (a Savonnerie carpet and a recently acquired Vermeer) in the spring of 1955, their quiet entrance belying the profound influence they would soon have. By 1956, Charlie’s name was in play for a board seat; he was elected that fall, and years later would be replaced by his wife. Though she stepped back to become a trustee emerita in 1998, Jayne still served on the acquisitions committee and as an advisory member of the executive committee at age eighty-eight.

Charles Bierer Wrightsman was born in 1895, the son of Charles John Wrightsman, an Oklahoma oilman, lawyer, and politician. One of the nineteenth century’s original oil wildcatters, the first Charles drilled wells, hit gushers, and built an oil company. As a lawyer, he helped create the oil depletion allowance, a tax credit to encourage exploration. He’d begun his political career when Oklahoma was a territory, served as the Pawnee County attorney, and would run for the U.S. Senate several times but lose, once due to an apparently unwanted endorsement by the Ku Klux Klan, the second time losing to Thomas P. Gore, a blind ex-senator.

Young Charlie’s sister drove the only Rolls-Royce in Oklahoma.

After an elite education (Exeter, Stanford, Columbia), Charlie became a navy pilot and met his first wife, Irene Stafford, a socially prominent girl from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the winter of 1921 in Miami. By then, Wrightsman, who’d been an asthmatic child, had grown up into a professional polo player who flew his own planes. “He made money scouring the Southwest, buying up property and mineral rights,” says his great-grandson Dana Dantine. “He was a genius; he had a vision, and he accomplished it.”

Charlie and Irene were married in Tulsa that June. They promptly sailed for a two-month tour of Europe, including a sojourn at a château in Deauville. The trip was marred by the announcement in July that he’d cheated in an airplane race the year before and been ordered to return a $3,000 prize. That wasn’t the only time that Charlie behaved badly. When his father fell ill a few years later and transferred his oil well titles to him for safekeeping, Charlie refused to return them when his father recovered; he was disinherited.* No matter; he had the money and by 1927 had moved to a ranch in Santa Monica, and his wife gave birth to the first of two daughters, whom they named Irene. In 1932, he fought a proxy war for control of Standard Oil of Kansas and became its president.

Tom Hoving’s stepmother knew Wrightsman in Tulsa, where he was known as “a brash, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking guy who was famous for flying a small plane upside down under bridges and cheating at polo,” Hoving says. “My stepmother got him to stop swearing, invited him to parties, cooled him down.

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