The Genius Read online

  When the lights go off and he discovers his predicament, he does not panic. At worst he’ll spend the night indoors. Then he remembers his cart tied up outside, and he sets about looking for a way out, groping around in the near dark. All the exits are bolted shut, as is the stairwell to the second floor. Nonplussed, he climbs onto the stage, wanders into the wings. A single shaft of moonlight aids his search, not enough to prevent him from tripping over a pile of sandbags and banging his head against a chunk of scenery, causing it to tip over and nearly crush him. In leaping to safety he accidentally pushes open an unseen door, revealing a stairwell that descends to a dim corridor. There are many doors, all of them locked except the last. Relieved, he opens it and steps facefirst into the actor himself: naked to the waist, pouring sweat, beard unkempt, filthy, a ham hock in long johns.

  “By God!” he shouts. “Who’s this!” He lifts Solomon by the lapels. “Eh? You? You! By God, man, you’d better say something or I’ll snap you like a twig! What! What’s that! Eh? Man! Speak up! Cat got your tongue?” The man drags him, not unkindly, to a chair, and seats him with two firm hands on Solomon’s shoulders. “Now, what. What, man, what! What’s your name!”

  “Solomon Mueller.”

  “Did you say Solomon Mueller?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, well. Well, good, Solomon Mueller! Tell me something, Solomon Mueller: do we know each other?”

  Solomon shakes his head.

  “Then how is it you’re in my dressing room! Mary Ann!”

  A fleshy woman in a gingham dress pokes her head through a rack of costumes. “Who’s that?”

  “Solomon Mueller!” says the actor.

  “Who’s Solomon Mueller?”

  “Please—” says Solomon.

  “Who are you?” asks Mary Ann.

  Helplessly, Solomon indicates the stage above them.

  “You were here for the show? Yes? Yes? I see! And? Yes? Did you enjoy the show?” He takes Solomon by the shoulders, gives him a friendly shake. “Yes? Yes?”

  Solomon smiles as best he can.

  “You did!” cries the actor. “Good boy! Did you hear that, Mary Ann? He enjoyed the show!” He begins to shake with laughter, his stomach bouncing and his breasts jiggling.

  “Isaac, it’s time to get dressed.”

  Ignoring her, the actor kneels down and takes Solomon’s scuffed, sinewy hands in his own moist ones and says, “Tell me something, Solomon Mueller: you truly enjoyed the show, yes? Yes? Then let me ask you this: would you like to buy me dinner.”

  THE ACTOR’S FULL NAME is Isaac Merritt Singer. As he explains over a meal of potatoes and sausage—which he consumes unaided—Mary Ann is his second wife. He had a first wife, but the show must go on. “Isn’t that so, Solomon!”

  “Yes,” says Solomon, happy to agree with anything this strange man says. Isaac talks about Shakespeare, for whom he does not have enough superlatives.

  “The Bard of Avon! The Pearl of Stratford! The Pride of England!”

  Every so often Solomon makes an effort to insert a comment, but Isaac’s monologue ceases only when he pauses to swallow a length of sausage or to lift his mug. He seems thrilled to have a dining companion, especially when Solomon buys him a second plate of food and a third beer.

  “Now,” says Isaac, wiping his moustache of sauce and crushing his hands together, “tell me something, Solomon Mueller: you’re not from around here, are you?”

  Solomon shakes his head. Then he sees that Isaac is waiting; his chance to speak has arrived.

  Briefly, he recounts his youth in Germany, the boat to America, the success of his business and tragedy of his assault. As he talks, Isaac knits his brows, scoffs, scowls, laughs. Even as a listener he never ceases performing, so that by the time Solomon concludes his tale, he feels as though he has composed a masterwork, akin to Homer.

  And, as far as he can tell, he has done it accent-free.

  “By God,” says Isaac Merritt Singer. “That is a fine story.”

  Solomon smiles.

  “I wouldn’t mind listening to a story like that again. I wouldn’t mind putting such a story up on the stage. I like a man who can tell a story. A man who has a story to tell is a man who’s a friend of mine. Eh? Ah! Well”— taking a huge draught of beer—“I’m glad we’ve met, Solomon. I think we might become dear friends. What do you say?”

  THEY BECOME DEAR FRIENDS.

  A friendship driven on the one side by Solomon’s loneliness, his desire for talk, and on the other side by Isaac Singer’s desire not to pay for dinner. Later, Solomon would estimate that during that summer he spent twenty-five to thirty percent of his income—money he could not afford to spend! Profligate!—on meals with Singer. Or loaning Singer money to patch his trousers, or for a new gewgaw for one of Singer’s many children, or for flowers for Mary Ann, or for no reason at all, simply giving Singer money, giving it away, because his friend asked.

  Not with a mind toward getting rich does he do these favors. He does them because he needs to give something to someone, and Singer makes him feel unalone.

  Nevertheless his generosity comes back to him a millionfold. In 1851, Singer moves to New York, taking with him his family and his wagon and some of the money that he has borrowed from Mueller. There he founds a company called the “Jenny Lind Sewing Machine Company,” a multilayered name. Lind is Singer’s favorite singer; naming his company for a singer puts a pun on his last name, hinting as well at his affection for Life in the Theater.

  However meaningful, though, the name proves a touch unwieldy, and soon enough people have begun to refer to his machines simply as “Singers.”

  Plenty of people in the United States make sewing machines; by the time Singer’s hit the stores, there are four other competing designs. But his is the best, and in a very short period of time, he becomes one of the wealthiest men in the United States—taking along with him Solomon Mueller.

  Still, we may wonder what if. What if Solomon had never been beaten within an inch of his life; if he had gone back to Germany; if he had not enjoyed the show; if he had declined to pay for dinner. If he knew then—as he found out later—that Mary Ann Singer was not, in fact, Isaac Merritt Singer’s second wife, but his mistress; and that she would be the first of many, and that Singer’s philandering would eventually force him to leave the country. As a young man, Solomon Mueller had a priggish streak; perhaps he would have disassociated himself from Singer if he had known the truth. Many alternative realities stood between Solomon and the great fortune that became his. Might he have succeeded on his own?

  He might have. He worked hard, and he had brains. What else do you need?

  ONE OF THE LAST THINGS Isaac Merritt Singer said before he departed for Europe in shame was, “You remind me of my father.”

  This conversation took place many years later, in a drawing room richly furnished, in a home a hundred feet high. By then, Solomon Mueller was Solomon Muller, and Mueller Dry Goods had grown into Muller Bros. Manufacturing, Maker of Finest Machine Parts; Muller Bros., Importers of Exotic Wares; Muller Bros. Railroad and Mining; Muller Bros. Textiles; Ada Muller Bakeries; Muller Bros. Land Development Corporation; and Muller Bros. Savings and Loan.

  “How so?” Solomon asked.

  “You always sounded like him,” said Isaac Singer. “His name was Reisinger, you know. Did you know that?”

  Solomon shook his head.

  “Saxony! He spoke German to me until I was five. By God! Uncanny, I tell you, man.” Singer smiled. “The first time I heard you I said to myself, ‘Well, now, Singer, that fellow is the very ghost of your father!’ Ha! Like Hamlet’s father, yes? Yes. Well what’s the matter, Muller, you look like I shot and ate your dog.”

  Solomon explained that he had thought his accent gone by the time they met.

  “My friend, you still sound like my father.”

  Solomon, chagrined, said, “I do?”

  “Of course you do, man. Every time we speak I yearn to see the o
ld bastard again… Ha! Well, now. Don’t look so sad, Muller, that voice of yours contributes a large part of your charm.”

  Solomon Muller ne Mueller said, “I would prefer to sound like the American that I am.”

  Isaac Merritt Singer, he of the libido and the fortune and the belly and the laugh, that laugh like a bellowing shiphorn, the siren song of America—he laughed and hammered his friend on the shoulder and said, “Not to worry, old man. Round here, you are what you say you are.”

  • 4 •

  These days, the idea of an “opening” has become something of a farce; usually all the work on display has been presold. I decided to buck the trend by refusing to allow any previews or advance sales, and by midsummer I had begun receiving anxious phone calls from collectors and consultants, all of whom I put at ease with assurances that nobody was getting preferential treatment. They’d all have to come discover Victor Cracke for themselves.

  Marilyn thought I was making a terrible mistake. She told me so at lunch, the week before I opened.

  “You want to sell them, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said. And I did, not for the money so much as for the legitimacy: by convincing other people to literally invest in my vision of genius, I made my act of creativity a matter of public record. A closely related part of me, however, wanted to keep the drawings all to myself. I always felt pangs letting go of a favored piece, but I’d never felt the possessive impulse as strongly as I did toward Victor—largely because I considered myself his collaborator rather than his sales representative.

  I said, “Whether I sell them now or after the show, they’re sold.”

  “Sell them now,” Marilyn said, “and they’re sold now.”

  People had a hard time understanding my relationship with Marilyn. To begin with, there was the question of age: she is twenty-one years older than I am. Come to think of it, that part might not be so hard for women in their fifties to understand.

  My less discreet friends, though, tended, when drunk, to point out the peculiarity of my situation.

  Newsflash!

  She’s old enough to be your mother.

  Not quite. Were my mother still around, she would be four years older than Marilyn. But thank you; thanks very much. I hadn’t noticed that similarity at all, not until you brought it to my attention. I appreciate you keeping me in the loop.

  These same friends were usually careful to add (I guess as a means of breaking the hard news to me more gently) She looks good. I’ll grant you that.

  Thanks again. I hadn’t noticed that, either.

  Marilyn does look good, and not just for her age: objectively, she is a beautiful woman and always has been. True, she’s had work done. Who around here hasn’t? At least she comes by her beauty honestly: Ironton High School Homecoming Queen, 1969. What you see is the result of maintenance rather than a complete fiction.

  The southernmost city in Ohio, Ironton bequeathed to its fairest daughter a ferocious ambition and, when she is annoyed, a hint of northern Kentucky drawl, useful both for feigning innocence and for dropping the sledgehammer of Southern condescension. You do not want to make Marilyn mad.

  Today her haircuts cost as much as her first car. She has phone numbers for people who don’t have phone numbers. I strongly suspect that when she walks into Barneys they press a special button to mobilize the sales force. But any true New Yorker knows that the real measure of success is real estate and what you do with it. Marilyn has succeeded. In the dining room of her West Village town house hangs a de Kooning worth ten times as much as her parents made, cumulatively, in fifty years of honest labor. Her uptown apartment on Fifth and Seventy-fifth affords a generous view of Central Park; and when the sun sets across the island, silhouetting the Dakota and the San Remo, flooding the living room with sweet orange light, you feel as though you are floating on the surface of a star.

  You can’t take the Ironton out of the girl. She still gets up at four thirty A.M. to exercise.

  Her rise on the scene is the stuff of legend. The family of eleven; the arrival in New York, literally on a Greyhound bus; the handbag counter at Saks; the banker buying a birthday present for his wife, leaving also with Marilyn’s phone number; the affair; the divorce; the remarriage; the charity balls; the museum boards; the swelling collection; Warhol and Basquiat and disco and cocaine; the second divorce, rancorous as a Balkan blood feud; the jaw-dropping settlement; and the Marilyn Wooten Gallery, opening night, July 9, 1979. I was seven years old.

  However random or fortuitous this chain of events might seem, I have always envisioned her planning it all out—on the Greyhound, perhaps, rocketing eastward, perhaps written down in a little Gatsbyesque composition book. MY VERY OWN TEN-STEP PLAN FOR SELF-BETTERMENT, FAME, AND FORTUNE.

  She found the similarities between selling art and selling handbags to far exceed the differences. And she could sell. The house in the Hamptons, the flats in Rome and London—those she bought with her own money, alimony be damned.

  Everyone knows her; she has run with or over everyone in her path. She called Clement Greenberg, the most prominent American critic of the twentieth century, an insufferable asshole to his face. She was the first to show Matthew Barney, whom she still refers to as “the Boy.” She has capitalized on our culture’s penchant for recycling, buying up unfashionable work and then creating, through sheer force of will and charisma, a revival whose profits accrue largely to her. She sells artwork that she does not own, on the assurance that she will own it sooner or later—a practice that got her banned from the auction houses for a time. Again and again people pronounce her dead. Always she ascends, phoenix triumphant in her tailored suit, gimlet in hand, to say Not quite yit, honey.

  We met at an opening. At the time, I was working the floor for the woman who would leave her gallery to me. I had moved in the art world for a few years by that point, and though I certainly knew who Marilyn was, I had never spoken to her before. I saw her eyeing me through the bottom of her wineglass, and then, in defiance of her own tipsiness, making a beeline for me, wearing her Acquisition Smile.

  “You’re the only straight man in this room I haven’t fucked or fired.”

  An auspicious beginning.

  People used to describe me as having tamed her, which was ludicrous. We simply met at the right time, and the connection proved so expedient, pleasant, and intellectually invigorating that neither of us had any reason to call it off. She is a talker; I am a nodder. We both sold, albeit in very different ways; and though we were both control freaks, we maintained our own private lives, which prevented us from clashing. And although she would never admit it, I think the Muller name plucked a chord of awe inside her. In the pantheon of Old American Money, I might not rate very high, but to Marilyn “My Father was an Industrial Mechanic” Wooten, I must have looked like John Jacob Astor.

  It also helped that we had no expectations of fidelity. That was the unspoken rule. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

  “LEAVE IT TO YOU,” she said, forking her roasted-pepper-and-goat-cheese napoleon, “to find the one who can actually draw. I thought that was the whole point of outsider art, that it looked like shit.”

  “Who said it was outsider art.”

  “You have to call it something.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Because people like their hands held.”

  “I think I’ll let them dangle a bit.”

  “You’re really lousing this up, you know that?”

  “I’m not doing it for the money.”

  “ ‘I’m not doing it for the money.’ ” She sat back, wiping her mouth. Marilyn eats like an ex-convict: hunched over, in perpetual fear that her food will be taken away, and when she pauses it’s not with satiety but with relief. Eight siblings and you learn to protect yourself. “You’ll never get over your love of pretty things, Ethan. That’s your problem.”

  “I don’t see why that’s such a problem. And they’re not pretty. Have you even seen them?” />
  “I’ve seen them.”

  “They’re not pretty.”

  “They’re like something Francis Bacon would draw in detention. Don’t listen to me, darlin. I’m just jealous of your margins. Mine, please?”

  I handed her the rest of my salad.

  “Thank you.” She dug in. “I hear Kristjana is on the warpath.”

  “I had to cut her loose. I felt bad about it, but—”

  “Don’t. I don’t blame you. I had her for a time, did you know that?”

  I shook my head.

  “I discovered her,” she said.

  This I knew to be a lie. “Is that a fact.”

  She shrugged. “In a way. I discovered her at Geoffrey Mann’s. He wasn’t doing anything for her. So I rediscovered her.”

  “Stole her, you mean.”

  “Is it stealing if you want to give it back?”

  “I offered to reschedule her show, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “She’ll live. Someone’ll pick her up, they always do. She called me, you know.”

  “Did she.”

  “Mm. Thank you,” she said, accepting her duck from the waiter. “She pitched her project to me. With the ice? I told her no thank you. I’m not turning off the air-conditioning in my gallery so she can stroke herself off about the environment. Please. Make me something I can sell.”

  “She used to be a good painter.”

  “They all start out that way,” she said. “Hungry. Then they get a couple of suck-up reviews and next thing they start thinking if they shit in a can it’ll be brilliant.”

  I pointed out that Piero Manzoni had, in fact, sold cans of his own shit.

  “It was original then,” she said. “Forty years ago. Now it just smells bad.”

  I DID CONCEDE MARILYN’S BASIC POINT: Victor Cracke’s art didn’t fit into any clear category, which made my role in its success—or failure— that much stronger. Part of a dealer’s skill, his creativity, lies in surrounding a piece with the correct context. Everybody likes to be able to talk about their art to their friends, to be knowledgeable. In this way one can rationalize spending half a million dollars on crayon and string.