The Billionaire's Vinegar, Page 8

  Now, three years later, Kip was back in London with a buy order. His anxiety was assuaged by the presence of Yablon, who had agreed on a number that seemed reasonable—after which he would drop out. If Malcolm was displeased, they would share the heat. But they didn’t expect that problem to arise, given the relatively low prices of even the rarest bottles of wine. Nothing about this auction seemed that unusual. Any qualms about authenticity had been allayed by Christie’s. And they were under orders. “I’m from the Bronx,” as Yablon said later. “The boss said to buy it.” As far as he and Kip were concerned, they were going home with the bottle in time for the Jefferson exhibit.

  At first, when the bidding was low, Forbes and Yablon alternated raising an index finger or their paddle, number 231, then hung back while others made bids. This was in line with the bidding strategy favored by Malcolm—show only desultory interest at first. The bidding rapidly escalated, and Kip stayed in the game until he had left everyone else behind with a bid of £50,000.

  “Any more?” Michael Broadbent asked. “Any more?”

  WITH KIP FORBES seconds away from winning the bottle for the equivalent of $75,000, Marvin Shanken, in the back row, was thinking Fuck them. His disappointment fully transformed into anger, Shanken grabbed his catalog and stabbed the air.

  “Fifty-two thousand pounds,” Broadbent called out. Without breaking stride, he looked back toward Kip Forbes to see whether he’d raise Shanken to 54,000. Kip did, and a classic duel began.

  No matter how many people wave paddles, an experienced auctioneer homes in on two at a time and bids them up against each other. In this case, everyone else had stopped trying. Shanken and Forbes were the only bidders left, and each was determined to possess the object at the front of the room. At £68,000, there was another pause in the bidding. Then it leapt upward, bouncing back and forth between Forbes and Shanken.

  Forbes bid 78,000.

  Shanken bid 80,000.

  Forbes bid 82,000.

  By now, he and Yablon were nudging each other, but they resisted the temptation to turn around and see whom they were bidding against. Neither had a clue it was Shanken. Yablon knew Shanken was interested in wine collecting, but he also knew that Shanken had recently been through a divorce and likely had no money.

  The room was silent save for Broadbent’s relentlessly upward-counting voice. When Shanken bid £100,000, Broadbent turned again to Kip. One hundred thousand was the drop-out number Kip and Yablon had agreed on. Kip knew, even before this number was reached, that he would probably go at least one bid past it, but theory was easier than practice. He paused.

  Marvin Shanken felt what seemed to him a series of electrical shocks—not because he might lose the bottle, but because he might win it. An improbably long time seemed to have elapsed since he had bid, and as the pause stretched on, the jangling reality seized Shanken: he could actually be on the hook for £100,000. That was nearly $150,000. He had contracted textbook auction fever. Stunned by his own recklessness, Shanken suddenly felt very afraid. He’d be paying this bottle off for the rest of his life. Or else he would be forced to declare bankruptcy. Either way, he’d be ruined.

  “A hundred and five.”

  Michael Broadbent was speaking.

  “One hundred and five thousand pounds, in the middle.”

  Shanken saw that Kip Forbes had raised his finger.

  Kip Forbes had raised his finger!

  Broadbent looked searchingly at Shanken.

  “At one hundred and five thousand pounds,” Broadbent repeated. “Going at one hundred and five. Any more?”

  No frigging way, Shanken thought. He kept his hand down.

  “One hundred and five thousand,” Broadbent said once more, and hammered the lot down.

  The room roared with applause.

  The whole thing had lasted one minute and thirty-nine seconds.

  Kip Forbes was handed the bottle, which he laid gingerly in his green Forbes Capitalist Toolbag. Then he and Yablon, somewhat stunned, left the room while bidding on other lots continued. They had spent the equivalent of $156,000. It wasn’t as if the Forbeses hadn’t bought things at auction for much greater amounts of money, but for a bottle of wine this was unheard of. Kip would allow that he had suffered from “a controlled contagion.” Only after exiting did he and Yablon discover whom they’d been bidding against.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to bid?” Yablon asked Shanken. “We could have talked.”

  Some people had followed them out of the room, curious to learn just who these men were, and a crowd gathered. Journalists’ questions focused on the importance of this bottle, which had been earmarked for the author of the Declaration of Independence. Suddenly, Kip was in the position of having to explain and find meaning in a purchase that had begun as a quotidian chore. “It’s more than a bottle of wine,” he answered, when a reporter suggested his bid had been exorbitant. “It’s a piece of history.” He said the Forbes family had no intention of opening the bottle. He planned to celebrate by drinking a rather younger Lafite.

  With the news about to go out on the wires, Kip figured he had better call his father. “Well, Pop,” he told Malcolm, upon reaching him in New Jersey, “I did what you told me.” When Kip said what he’d spent, his father’s reaction was of the Mason-Dixon variety. Malcolm dropped the phone. When he recovered himself, he was furious. Kip held the receiver away from his ear, but Malcolm was still audible. He demanded to speak to Yablon: The guy who was supposed to take care of the money had allowed this insanity? Gladly, Kip handed the phone to Dr. No, who dutifully took his turn in the telephonic woodshed.

  The idea was to fly the bottle straight to New York in time for the gallery opening that evening, but now Christie’s was confronted with something it had never faced before—a bottle of wine that had sold for so much it would require an export license. A museum was also needed to certify that the bottle wasn’t a national treasure, and discussion ensued as to which museum could most quickly provide this service. Broadbent’s right-hand man set about making the arrangements, while Broadbent called Rodenstock to tell him the news. Like Broadbent and Forbes, the German was taken aback by the amount. While waiting for the paperwork to come through, Kip chatted with Yablon and Broadbent. Ever the salesman, Broadbent wondered if they mightn’t be interested in other bottles from the cache.

  By the time the Victoria and Albert Museum provided the certification, it was nighttime, and there was no way Kip and Yablon were going to make it to the party in New York in time. Export license in hand, they were driven to the Capitalist Tool, idling on the tarmac at Heathrow. With an eight-hour flight ahead, they put the bottle to bed in the plane’s stateroom—swathed in velvet, nestled inside the carry bag, surrounded by pillows, and bound loosely to the mattress with sheets. Then they settled in for the flight, talking about how angry Malcolm was.

  At Newark Airport, the head of Forbes security helped them through customs. They braced for Malcolm, but by the time they saw him, the following day, his attitude had shifted. While worrying that he would look like a horse’s ass—a fear that had seldom vexed his free-spending life—he had gone on the TV program Adam Smith’s Money World, ostensibly to talk about the economy. Inevitably asked about the purchase that was making news around the world, Forbes had grumbled, “The Forbes family would be far better off if Mr. Jefferson had drunk the damn thing.”

  Now he was thankful. Reporters were calling in droves, and it was dawning on Malcolm that the Forbeses had inadvertently staged, as Yablon would later put it, a “masterstroke…the publicity coup of the century.” Marvin Shanken, in his London hotel room, received a call telling him that news reports of the Forbeses’ record purchase mentioned that the underbidder was the publisher of Wine Spectator. The PR was nice, but mainly Shanken was relieved to have escaped without the bottle. Kip Forbes had a hard time believing this. “I think at the end [Shanken] regretted it,” Forbes asserted later, “because it was a slow news moment, and it did g
et huge amounts of publicity.”

  At the Forbes Galleries, curator Margaret Kelly took over. She had learned of the price paid for the acquisition from the radio. The Jefferson table already stood against an angled wood-paneled wall in the narrow Carrère gallery on the ground floor. Recessed in the wall above the table was a diorama containing a miniature replica of Jefferson’s bedroom and study at Monticello. On the table, Kelly had draped a tacky wood crate with salmon-colored velvet, and she now positioned the bottle at an angle, nestled in the fabric, with the engraving showing. Next to it, under glass, were the three Jefferson letters.

  Upstairs, in the company offices, there were a lot of raised eyebrows. Malcolm was known to do crazy things, but this set a new bar. Kip’s siblings, however, understood. Their father had wanted something. There really hadn’t been any choice.

  Years later, Len Yablon, who had a wine cellar at home but was partial to a good cocktail, would recall that at the time he thought it was “meshuggah”—this was a bottle of wine, not a Rolls Royce!—“but it ended up genius.” Still, he acknowledged, a public company could never have gotten away with such an expenditure. That was the joy of working at Forbes—business and fun were never far apart, whether it was owning a motorcycle distributorship or a bottle of wine that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Yablon never knew what was next: A party in Morocco? A balloon trip across the ocean? But of his forty-one years at the company, the purchase of the bottle still ranked, two decades later, as his most unusual experience working for a very unusual man. It reminded him of a great naval battle that lasts only an hour but goes down in history.

  ON THE NIGHT of the auction, in the northern German city of Hamburg, a telephone rang in a house east of Lake Alster. It was answered by Hanns Janssen, a Monte Carlo Rally driver turned wine writer who had been present when Michael Broadbent persuaded Hardy Rodenstock to let him auction the bottle. Rodenstock was calling now. What, he wanted to know, did Janssen think the bottle had sold for?

  JANSSEN: Twenty thousand marks.

  RODENSTOCK: No.

  JANSSEN: Twenty thousand francs.

  RODENSTOCK: Don’t talk in francs or marks. Guess in dollars.

  JANSSEN: Okay, ten thousand.

  RODENSTOCK: No, more.

  JANSSEN: Fifty thousand.

  RODENSTOCK: More.

  JANSSEN: You’re crazy.

  RODENSTOCK: More.

  JANSSEN: One hundred thousand.

  RODENSTOCK: More.

  JANSSEN: One hundred fifty thousand.

  RODENSTOCK: One hundred fifty-six thousand.

  JANSSEN: Now, what do you think of that bottle that we drank? Was it worth one hundred fifty-six thousand?

  CHAPTER 7

  IMAGINARY VALUE

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE FORBES PURCHASE, LUCIA Goodwin appeared on TV for the first time in her life, driving from Charlottesville, Virginia, to the National Agricultural Library in Maryland to tape an interview. Goodwin was, in 1985, the closest thing to a full-time generalist scholar at Monticello. A research associate whom everyone called Cinder, she had a wry and studious nature. She had been at Monticello off and on since 1968, shortly after she graduated from Harvard with a degree in American history and literature. For the last five years she had been consumed with editing the Memorandum Books, Jefferson’s financial diary, a project begun by her coeditor thirty years earlier. She and the coeditor had finally finished the manuscript the year before. Now she had time on her hands.

  When news of Rodenstock’s discovery had broken two months earlier, the staff at Monticello was instinctively skeptical. Some poor widow or other attic-rummaging type was always showing up there bearing an “original” copy of the Declaration of Independence, found in a shoebox in a closet, that turned out to be a 1944 reproduction. The percentage that proved legitimate was infinitesimal. It seemed strange, too, that Christie’s had not heeded Monticello’s input before deeming the bottles authentic.

  As media calls began coming in, Monticello’s curator decided that the seat of all things Jefferson should have an informed position on the bottles. The task of formulating it fell to Cinder Goodwin, who began her research even before the auction took place. Her interest in wine extended as far as most people’s: She liked to drink it. Her obsession was Jefferson. As it happened, Monticello had compiled a comprehensive list of all the Jefferson relics known to exist. And Goodwin was very confident that she could prove, or disprove, Michael Broadbent’s attribution of the Jefferson bottles.

  THE PRIVATE NONPROFIT foundation set up in 1923 to administer Monticello was itself in the collecting business. In the course of his life, Jefferson assembled a substantial amount of art, furniture, and other valuables. He sold some furniture during his lifetime, when his term as secretary of state was ending and he was getting ready to move from Philadelphia to Monticello. In 1815 he sold his personal library to the Library of Congress, which had lost its collection to fire in the War of 1812. Early American artifacts were in demand even during his lifetime, and he gave a draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia; another society in Philadelphia, dedicated to celebrating William Penn’s arrival, owned one chair sat in by Penn and two made from the elm tree beneath which Penn first signed a treaty with the Indians.

  Jefferson anticipated the historic value of his possessions when he gave his granddaughter’s new husband the custom-made “writing box,” or lap-desk, on which he had written the Declaration. “If these things acquire a superstitious value, because of their connection with particular persons,” Jefferson wrote to the granddaughter in late 1825, “surely a connection with the greater Charter of our Independence may give a value to what has been associated with that…. Its imaginary value will increase with years, and if he lives to my age, or another half-century, he may see it carried in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as the relics of the Saints are in those of the Church.” Recognizing that the object’s value hinged on the certainty of its connection to the Declaration, Jefferson scratched out an affidavit attesting to its origin.

  When Jefferson died, in July of 1826, his will specified the disposition of only a handful of items. He bequeathed his walking stick to James Madison and watches to each of his grandchildren. At least ten clippings of his hair were taken posthumously. His farm and account books, as well as his collection of 40,000 letters—every one that he received, plus a duplicate of every letter he sent—went to his grandson and executor, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Most of the silver went to his daughter Martha. A number of valuables were distributed among family members.

  At a five-day executor’s sale at Monticello the following January, the remainder of Jefferson’s personal property was auctioned. This included paintings, sculptures, Jefferson’s copying machine, “130 valuable negroes,” and “various other articles curious and useful to men of business and private families.” Jefferson’s grandchildren bought a lot of the furniture. Other items were bought by friends, neighbors, and strangers. Monticello was overrun by ghoulish tourists who walked away with whatever they fancied, including fig bushes and grapevines; Jefferson’s family resorted to placing a notice in the local newspaper beseeching memento seekers to “desist from such trespasses.”

  Certain categories of items were handled separately. Most of Jefferson’s books (he had reassembled a large library) were sold, in 1829, to a bookseller in Washington, D.C. His art collection was shipped to Boston for auction. On the journey, the paintings were severely damaged by seawater; when they went on the block in July 1828, only one sold.

  In short, Jefferson’s worldly possessions scattered, often without a trace. Over the years, they would briefly surface. On July 4, 1876, at a Boston celebration of the country’s Centennial, the lap-desk Jefferson had given to his grandson-in-law was displayed. Robert Winthrop, a former senator who had become head of the Massachusetts Historical Society, scoffed at Jefferson’s self-deprecating affidavit.

  “Superstitions! Imaginary
value! Not for an instant can we admit such ideas,” Winthrop said. “The modesty of the writer has betrayed even ‘the masterly pen. ’There is no imaginary value to this relic, and no superstition is required to render it as precious and priceless a piece of wood as the secular cabinets of the world have ever possessed, or ever claimed to possess…. Even the table at Runnymede on which the Magna Carta was sealed,” Winthrop went on, getting a bit carried away, “could hardly exceed, could hardly equal, in interest and value, this little mahogany desk. What momentous issues for our country, and for mankind, were locked up in this narrow drawer, as night after night the rough notes of preparation for the Great Paper were laid aside for the revision of the morning!” Ultimately, the desk went to the Smithsonian.

  Sometimes Jefferson relics turned up in the collectibles market or came to light in an academic context. In 1904 a newspaper reported that a brass coal scuttle “said to have been at one time the property of Thomas Jefferson” was stolen from a Manhattan antique store by “a negro.” Around the same time, William Jennings Bryan purchased a marble punch bowl, with original oak pestle, that had belonged to Jefferson. In 1930, Jefferson descendants consigned several items for auction in New York, including a 1776 letter relating Revolutionary news and an 1819 schematic for the buildings of the University of Virginia. In the 1940s a New York antiques dealer named Israel Sack tried selling a Jefferson clock, which had been purchased at the 1827 sale, to the White House and the Jefferson Foundation. In 1947 a scholar combing the libraries and museums of Paris on behalf of Princeton University’s epic project to publish all of Jefferson’s letters happened upon the original wooden models of a new and better plow Jefferson had invented.