Unknown - The Genius

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 Reis-inger, 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 old 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

f hese 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 quiteyit, 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.”