40 Something Helga

40 Something Helga

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Bill T. Jones: That is, um, a question every time I hear it, I get a little weak in the knees because I think I'm going to another opportunity to lie. Um, seldom consciously lying, but there's something about the wages of time on the memory. Um, as when I, I have to back way up to say that I am, uh, uh, the 10th of 12 children in an African American family.

I had, did not have a hand eye coordination for basketball like my brother Azel did. I could excel at running. I did not know that there were people around who found me amusing, but I did not know what they found amusing about me. I was just trying to get over. So, um, in a, in a school primarily of young white kids, [00:20:00] pretty conservative kids, they, um, didn't really understand when they, when you were much younger, washing your hands at the sink and they said, oh, it, we thought it would come off. We thought the dark color would come off when you washed your hands. I knew that was absurd. I didn't think they were serious, but what can I do I had to take it. So there was a a, a lot of things that I had already been prepared for by my mother that white people don't really want you and they will kill you if they get a chance. That I understood why people want you to work for very little money. They don't want to live next to you, but they do want you to work for them. My mother never encouraged me to clean houses or be a waiter or anything. She said I'd done enough of that stuff. So there was something, some legacy that we were living through and past that, uh, had been sprinkled since first moments of [00:21:00] my consciousness, but now it was different because I was developing as a sexual being and as a aesthetic driven and thinking human being. Um, and I can, to this day, I realize that I must have known even in high school that I was not destined to be a member of this community, even though at that time it was fine, but I am not interested in going to high school reunions, uh, and the people were not bad people except that I just don't think, I like going back and returning who I had been when we were all much younger.

My leftist therapist, her name was Freda Rosen. She was a gay woman who, uh, was one of the first persons that really got me to think about this counterculture personality and what was lacking in it. She said that, um, uh, having your company is not about building something which is ego fulfilling, but you're actually building a social tool.

There's violence in being looked at, and I know that when I was a young, [00:36:00] young stud, young buck out there doing my thing. And um, when I was a young, young dancer, I knew that there was something that they, a power I had when I stripped off my shirt and when I would look you in the eye as I moved my hips. I knew now, was that violent Was that threatening violence Was that seduction But I also knew the other side of that attraction to me was the impulse to kill me. I knew my mother's tears in her eyes. She said, you can do anything you want. You a man, but don't go to jail because if you go to jail, I can't help you. And she would shake her head. I didn't know. What do you mean don't go to jail now Now I know. Violence. Exclusion.

Bill T. Jones: I think primarily it is not violent. I was offering what I thought I had and I was offering it inappropriately to the very people that I was told to be suspicious of, cuz they will kill you. Now, call it what you will. Is that really is, was that the ultimate freedom to look at your oppressor To look at the person and, and seduce them and to uh, say I have something that I know you want, even though you don't know, you know you want it

Helga: There are lots of questions I would love to ask you, but there's also something else that [00:40:00] we are here to allow to happen and I would love for that to happen as well.

NEWTOWN SQUARE, PA. -- April, 1989. Leonard B. Andrews has had enough. \"When it's over it's over,\" he says in his Texas twang, slamming the door on a closet filled with press clippings chronicling the rise -- and, some would say, fall -- of the art that made him famous: the \"Helga\" pictures by Andrew Wyeth. Since the 64-year-old marketing innovator bought the 240 Helga studies from Wyeth in spring of 1986 for something under $6 million, his life has been largely defined by this square-faced Teuton named Helga Testorf, a model Wyeth drew over and over for 15 years in an attempt to get every line, every hair, just right -- pubic hair included. Now he wants out: asking price, $40 million. \"I just want to divest myself of it,\" says Andrews. \"I have other things I want to do; I want to get out of this limelight thing and go back to just being private me.\" August, 1989. With Helga still unsold, Andrews announces the purchase of his newest passion: 228 more works on paper by Wyeth known as the \"Olson Collection,\" including working drawings related to Christina Olson, subject of Wyeth's most famous painting, \"Christina's World.\" The price: \"several millions,\" but less, he says, than he paid for Helga. \"Andy called to congratulate me,\" says Andrews. \"He says I now have more Wyeths than anyone in the world, whatever that means.\" If Andrews's move last week confounded the art world, it was only the latest curiosity in the life of a man whose career has included, among other things, pioneering the concept of the credit card, publication of a newsletter called the Swine Flu Claim and Litigation Reporter and nine years as a tabloid poet of inspirational verse. During the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63, Andrews was the biggest newspaper publisher in the city, with his interim New York Standard boasting a daily circulation of 450,000. When the strike was over, Mayor Robert Wagner gave Andrews a plaque on behalf of a grateful citizenry; Sigma Delta Chi, the honorary Society of Professional Journalists, gave him a special award. Things have changed. \"There's a lot of negativity in the press, and among critics\" toward him, says Andrews, \"because they think the whole Helga thing was orchestrated. ... They think I'm making a bundle on it, and that I'm just an entrepreneur and it's all flimflam. \"Nothing could be further from the truth,\" he says. \"They don't know the story.\" The story -- at least as perceived through much of the press during the August doldrums of 1986 -- was that Andrew Wyeth, that most conservative and American of artists, had kept this cache of Helga drawings and watercolors \"hidden,\" even from his wife Betsy, the implication being that he had something besides art to hide. But it was Betsy Wyeth herself, known as a shrewd promoter of her husband's work, who put the flame to the fuse: Asked by a reporter from Art & Antiques magazine why she thought Wyeth had worked so long and hard on Helga, she replied with one word -- \"love.\" The story took off like a rocket. \"I think she meant love of work,\" posits Andrews today. What followed was a press blitz rivaled in this decade only by the Andy Warhol auction. Propelled by words such as \"hidden\" (Andrews's word) \"secret obsession\" (Newsweek), \"sex\" and \"love\" (Art & Antiques), the story got bigger and bigger as it fed upon itself. The Helga hype screeched to a halt amid cries of \"hoax\" only after the show opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in May 1987, and turned out to be an embarrassingly overblown affair. Negative fallout began to land on everyone from Wyeth and his wife to Andrews, all of whom were blamed in some way for over-dramatizing the story of an artist's long-term fascination with a particular model. The National Gallery, taking its first real drubbing from the press in years, was blamed for playing along. \"We were used,\" says Samuel Sachs II, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, where the Helga show had just closed when Andrews made his announcement that the collection was up for sale. Sachs wrote Andrews an angry letter telling him so. \"What raises hackles are the commercial overtones,\" says Sachs, \"turning museums into hiring halls -- especially when Andrews had championed himself as protector of what he called 'a national treasure for the American people.' \" National Gallery Director J. Carter Brown, who had booked Helga months before the publicity blitz hit, can't quite recall whether Andrews ever said he wouldn't sell the collection, \"but the implication,\" says Brown, \"was clearly that he was buying it to keep it together; otherwise, it would have dribbled out through dealers. \"He presented himself,\" says Brown, \"as doing a service to Wyeth, and said the collection would be toured, with proceeds going to his own foundation. It all sounded very eleemosynary. \"If we'd known, going in, that the whole thing was going into the market,\" added Brown, \"it would have put a very different coloration on it. But he did give us a very beautiful watercolor, so we felt we were protected.\" It was a small price to pay for the National Gallery's imprimatur, and Andrews obviously appreciates the favor. \"Carter Brown is quite a business man for the museum, and they're lucky to have him,\" says Andrews. \"He's not afraid to ask you for your eyeballs.\" The end of the Helga story -- if Andrews gets anything like his asking price for that collection -- could be his $34 million, 567 percent profit on a three-year investment. Asked whether he will put the Olson-related drawings up for sale along with the Helga collection, Andrews says, \"I don't have any idea,\" but he adds: \"It would be nice if the Olson collection could be exhibited somewhere.\" Asked to comment on Andrews's latest acquisition, National Gallery Director Brown said through his press office that he was on his way to the airport. At Home With Helga In the old stone house here where Andrews lives very modestly and alone (he is twice divorced), Helga, in effect, is the lady of the house. Her presence is everywhere: staring up from the covers of six neatly arranged copies of \"Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures,\" each in a different language, in the very decorated country living room; or looking out from the covers of Time and Newsweek, which hang framed in the downstairs powder room. In the dining room, Andrews stopped to look at some small framed color photographs that dangled like bronzed baby shoes from the wall. \"That's Andy's place, and the room as it looked the day I went to see the Helga collection for the first time,\" he said. \"That was March 15, 1986. I bought it within an hour of seeing it, and signed the papers two weeks later. \"From the moment I saw it, I had a concept that it was a national treasure and the public ought to see it. People say I'm a public relations genius and manufactured the whole Helga thing for the press. But I bought it in an hour! How could I have figured all that out\" Not that he didn't try. \"I sent out a press release right after I bought the collection, and only one paper -- the Daily Local News {in West Chester, Pa.} -- picked it up. It wasn't until Jeff Schaire from Art & Antiques magazine came down to look at the collection, got all excited and wrote his story that anything happened.\" Art & Antiques sent out a titillating release in August announcing that the September issue would carry the story, and also announced that the National Gallery was going to show it. \"What prompted the New York Times to run the story on the front page the next day I don't know -- it was probably a slow news day in August,\" said Andrews. \"Anyhow, that's when everything hit the fan. Next thing I knew, television crews were landing on my lawn.\" \"It was just an entrepreneurial guess, is what it was,\" he said of the Helga purchase. \"But the product was there. If the product wasn't there, I couldn't have done it.\" Creative Banking Years It wasn't the first time Andrews has made a lucrative entrepreneurial guess. The son of a Depression-poor family from Dallas, he parlayed stints as a noncombatant pilot in World War II and Korea -- plus two years in between, studying marketing at Southern Methodist University -- into a career in the Texas banking world. There he moved up swiftly, originating such now common banking services as account-transfer bill-paying, which he invented. By 1962, clearly flagged as a marketing genius, he was in New York as senior vice president of Uni-Serv Corp., an early credit card company, when he realized that the city's long newspaper strike had left his 12,000 merchant-clients stranded, with no place to advertise. Attacking the problem with as much daring as logic, he launched the New York Standard, and for 117 days was, in his words, \"the biggest newspaper publisher in Manhattan,\" with 128 pages daily, and a daily circulation of 450,000. In the process, he netted a half-million-dollar profit for Uni-Serv through newspaper advertising. By the time he was 38, Uni-Serv had been sold to American Express and he'd made his first fortune. He moved to Philadelphia, first as marketing director for Food Fair, then as a member of the underwriting committee at the brokerage firm of Auchincloss, Parker & Redpath. One day in 1970, while vacationing in southern France, he read that the Penn Central Railroad had gone bankrupt -- the biggest bankruptcy in American history at the time. He returned to Philadelphia and started the Stockholders & Creditors News Service, which dealt exclusively with the Penn Central reorganization proceedings. Lawyers were happy to pay large sums to stay abreast of things. To this pioneering litigation reporting service -- for which he was sole reporter, editor and publisher -- he soon added the National Bankruptcy Reporter, the Swine Flu Claim and Litigation Reporter, the Asbestos Litigation Reporter and others, and 350 stringers around the country to help write them. When he finally sold the company in 1987 for an undisclosed sum, he was putting out 27 litigation journals and two monthly trade magazines. Andrews kept the smallest part of that company, Andrews Conferences Inc., and still organizes five conferences a year on subjects such as construction and hazardous waste litigation. But his chief preoccupations at present -- apart from buying and selling Wyeths and small-scale real estate ventures -- seem to be supervising his farm, attending openings and running the Leonard E.B. Andrews Foundation of Newtown Square, Pa. That foundation -- which the National Gallery believed would ultimately fall heir to the Helga collection -- is, in fact, an offbeat, populist affair that appears to encourage amateur artists, municipal employees in particular, by arranging exhibitions of their work in various cities and awarding very small cash prizes or art class scholarships. Foundation headquarters is a spartan, three-room office that looks like a bare motel suite and has one employee. Clearly not profligate with his own millions, he is currently seeking corporate support from others for his enterprise. The Pondering Poet A loner and art world \"outsider\" by choice, Andrews has never pretended to be a connoisseur. He does write poetry, however, and claims to have had more poems published than any poet alive. For nine years, apparently, he cranked them out as a sort of banking sideline, six days a week -- 3,500 in all -- for the New York Daily News. Vaguely inspirational in nature and all in blank verse, they were published in a daily column called \"Ponder This.\" In 1969, Grossett & Dunlap brought them out in an anthology under the same title, now out of print. A few of his favorites hang framed, and more or less behind a door, in Andrews's comfy plaid and pine-paneled den. They are surrounded by paintings and sculptures of horses and roosters. Andrews's only visible indulgence seems to be a pair of vintage Mercedeses, one red, the other a blue convertible, neatly covered with a tarpaulin in the garage. When he isn't microwaving himself a meal or cup of tea at home, he heads for Casey's pub for a soup and salad lunch, accompanied by a bottle of champagne and his old friend, interior decorator/art dealer Kathleen Jamieson. It was Jamieson, he says, who told him about the Helga collection and, according to Andrews, \"had encouraged me to buy Wyeths before.\" He also sought her counsel before buying the \"Olson Collection,\" which she pronounced \"a good deal.\" \"I've earned every nickel I ever had,\" says Andrews. What he seems to want or lack now is someone other than Helga -- whom he's never even seen -- to share it with. The Legacy of Helga A lot of money has been made on Helga. Wyeth's prices have gone up 30 percent, Art & Antiques magazine's circulation has gone up and even Jeffrey Schaire, who wrote the story that set off the sleepy August press blitz, got a raise. But a good deal of damage has been done as well, not only to the National Gallery's reputation (it was the first time it ever took a real pasting from the press for bad judgment), but also to Wyeth, who -- though he did momentarily recapture the public eye -- also caught some of the most vitriolic reviews in recent memory. The New York Times, for example, accused him of \"narcissism,\" \"lack of honesty\" and having \"turned his own back on contemporary life and contemporary art in a frantic attempt to exceed the limits of a meager and illustrative talent.\" \"In the beginning it was all favorable, but now it's all turned against me,\" Wyeth told a reporter recently. After the latest reviews from the Brooklyn Museum show, Wyeth was inured: \"I always say you don't have to worry as long as they're talking about you,\" he said. \"It's when they stop that you have to worry.\" As for the collection, it, like Wyeth, has been a victim of overly high expectations generated, in large part, by press overkill. For one thing, most people went in expecting a show of paintings, not one made up primarily of working drawings, and not particularly interesting ones at that. Others who went only to decide for themselves whether Wyeth and Helga were lovers were often disappointed to find the model herself something less than a femme fatale. The limelight had long since burned out on the Helga show when it opened in June at the Brooklyn Museum, final stop on the seven-museum tour that followed its opening at the National Gallery. There are no long lines in Brooklyn (where the show continues through Sept. 18), and sales have been thin for the catalogue, with its introduction titled \"A National Treasure,\" written by Andrews himself. \"It's really a shame they paint me as a bad person,\" says Andrews. \"If dealers had bought the Helga collection, the public would never have seen it. Museums made a bundle on this show. They should be happy for what I did.\" Whither the Wyeths When Andrews put out the word last spring that the Helga collection was for sale, he told Carter Brown and a few choice Wyeth dealers. As expected, Newsweek called two days later and wrote a short item. CNN and CBS followed up, scheduling interviews on the morning news, but this time, Andrews's luck had run out: He was preempted in both cases by the Eastern Airlines strike. Though publicity since has been harder to come by, inquiries have come in from as far as Japan, which is where most insiders expect the collection to end up. But what if it doesn't sell Three months ago, he replied, \"I'll hang onto it. In five years, it'll be worth $100 million.\" He now appears to have changed his mind. He points out that as soon as the show leaves the Brooklyn Museum, \"the clock starts ticking,\" and he starts paying gigantic insurance fees on the collection until it opens in Japan next year. \"I would hope to sell it before it goes to Japan, or before it comes back,\" he says. \"Otherwise, I might auction it off.\" Though the $425,000-plus income from the show that he admits to having received to date (from museum fees, a cut on catalogue sales, copyrights, etc.) goes partly to him and partly to his foundation, proceeds from the sale of the Helga collection will go entirely to him -- a root cause of much dismay on the part of the museum directors who feel duped. Andrews protests: \"But it will all go to my foundation eventually -- I have no children. What else would I do with it \"Unless I get married again,\" he adds, \"and she takes it all away from me.\" 59ce067264

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