Michener, James A. (206 page)

dent, the Chief Justice and some hundred dignitaries from American and European universities. It was a rather thick pamphlet and three-fourths of it was taken up by photographs; before I could inspect them, Rusk said: 'I worked with him. One of the best.'

What the rear two-thirds of the pamphlet showed were the twenty-seven colleges and universities to which the Texan had given either magnificent solo buildings or entire complexes. Any one would have been the gesture of a lifetime—a tower at MIT, a quadrangle at the University of Vancouver in Canada, a School of Geology at Sidney in Australia—but when I saw the two entire colleges, and I mean all the buildings, which he had given to Cambridge in England and the Sorbonne in France, I was staggered.

Twenty-seven tremendous monuments dug from the soil of the most barren fields in Texas, twenty-seven halls of learning. The total cost? Incalculable. But there they stood, in nine unconnected corners of the world, more than half in the United States, and more than half of those in Texas, centers of learning and of light.

i want us all to think in those terms,' Miss Cobb said, and Rusk snapped: 'It's my money we're talking about,' and she said: 'My father always told us "Rich people need guidance." We're here to help you, Ranee, because we love you and we don't want to see you miss the big parade. Now, what bright idea did you and Barlow come up with?'

'Sport,' Rusk said, and Miss Cobb asked: 'You mean one of those pathetic Halls of Fame? Old jockstraps cast in bronze. Old men recalling the lost days of their youth?'

i do not,' Rusk snapped. 'I mean an art museum. As legitimate as any in the world. Fine art, like the Kimbell, but glorifying sport.'

Miss Cobb pondered this, and then said enthusiastically: 'That could be most effective, Ransom, but don't keep it parochially American. Be universal.'

'You mean art from all the world?' he asked, and she replied: 'I do. We Americans forget that our three big sports—football, baseball, basketball—are focused here. If you do this, don't be parochial.'

If there was one thing the new Texan, of whom Rusk was a prototype, did not want to be, it was parochial: 'You make sense, Lorena.' Then, turning to me, he issued an imperial ukase: 'Barlow, we'll make it universal.'

At the end of that long day she kissed Ransom: 'I have a feeling, Ranee, you'll do it right. Make Quimper your treasurer. He likes to spend other people's money. And keep Barlow at your side. He'll know what art is.'

Early next morning Rusk summoned me to his office: 'Hire the man who built the Kimbell and tell him to get started.'

'Louis J. Kahn is dead. That was his masterpiece.'

'Get me the next man . . . just as good.'

'They don't come "just as good," but there are several around who design buildings of great beauty.'

'Get me the best and have him start his drawings this weekend.'

'Architects don't work that way,' I warned him, and he growled: 'This time they will,' and within a month, an architect from Chicago, noted for buildings of great style which caught the spirit of the West, was making provisional designs for a new kind of museum ideally suited to the Fort Worth site, and two months later, ground was broken, with no announcement having been made to the public.

In the meantime I had opened an office in New York to which all the dealers in America, it seemed, traipsed in with samples of their wares, and I was astonished at how many fine American artists had created works based on sport. With a budget larger than any I had ever played with even in my imagination, I put together a guiding committee of seven, three art experts, two artists and two businessmen unfamiliar with Texas or Ransom Rusk, and with the most meticulous care we began reserving a few pieces we would probably want to buy when we started our actual accumulations. Rusk flew in from Dallas to see if we were prepared to fill his fine new museum when the scores of builders and landscape architects working overtime had it ready. For when a Texas billionaire cried 'Let us have a museum!' . . . zingo! he wanted it right now.

Loath to accept personal responsibility for what he termed 'this disgraceful delay,' I assembled my committee and seven major curators and experts for a day's meeting at the Pierre, and there we thrashed out our problems. Rusk listened as a curator from the Metropolitan explained that in the case of a wonderful Thomas Eakins painting, 'Charles Rogers Fishing,' negotiations with the present owners could require as much as a year: 'The Sturdevant family is divided. Half want to sell, the other half don't. A matter of settling the old man's estate.'

'Then we'll forget that one,' Rusk snapped, but the Met man counseled patience: 'Were you fortunate enough to get that Eakins, it alone would set the style for your whole museum. Men like me, and Charles here, we'd have come to Fort Worth to see what other good things you have.'

'You're satisfied there's enough out there to build a topnotch museum?'

'Unquestionably!' and they all grew rhapsodic over the possibilities.

One man from Cleveland summarized the situation: 'Even we were uninformed as to the magnificent possibilities. In the short time we've worked we've come up with a dazzling list of how artists have portrayed men engaged in sports. Ancient Greek statues, Roman athletes, Degas jockeys, Stubbs' unmatched portraits of racing horses.'

'Never heard of that one. Who was he?'

'George Stubbs of England—1724 to 1806. No one ever painted horses better than Stubbs.'

'Can we buy one of his works? I mean, one of his recognized masterpieces?'

And that was the question which led to the explosive idea which got the Fort Worth Museum of Sports Art launched with a bang that no one like me could have engineered, because when these experts explained that to find a Stubbs or a Degas that might be coming onto the market took infinite patience and a high degree of skill to negotiate the sale, Rusk saw that his building was going to be finished long before he had much to put in it.

'The things you've been talking about are European. I understand why they might be difficult to find and deal for. But how about American art? Have we produced any good things?'

It was here that the experts became poetic: 'Wonderful things! But again, Mr. Rusk, all requiring many months of bargaining and cajoling.'

'Why can't we just find a good painting and say "I'll take that"?' and the man from Cleveland laughed: 'Mr. Rusk, if it were that easy, experts like us would lose our jobs.'

I now set up a screen, and with slides I'd been accumulating, gave a preview of the Rusk museum, with the experts gasping at the beauty of some of the artwork we'd located but not yet purchased, and several times some museum curator would sigh: 'I'd like to get that one!' at which a member of our staff would warn: 'Remember, we were promised that Fort Worth would get first crack.'

I showed a marvelous Winslow Homer, one of the finest George Bellows prizefight canvases, cattle-roping scenes by Tom Lea, Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, a masterful George Bingham which someone said we might get for $800,000 and a wonderful semi-hunting scene by Georgia O'Keeffe. But the one which brought cheers was a football scene by Wayne Thebaud entitled 'Running Guard 77,' in which an exhausted lineman sat dejected on the bench, his huge numbers filling the canvas.

Nineteen fine paintings in all flashed across that screen, and at the end the man from the Met said: 'Mr. Rusk, if you can land those nineteen beauties, you're in business. Add nineteen like them, and you have a museum.'

And then Rusk returned to his penetrating question: 'How long to buy them? Assuming we can find the money?' and the men agreed: 'Maybe three years. If you're lucky.'

'I can't wait three years,' Rusk said. 'Why don't we borrow them? Let people see the kind of stuff we're after?'

A hush fell over the darkened room as these wise men, who had assembled so many enlightening and enriching shows of borrowed art, contemplated this perceptive question, and finally the man from Boston said, with guarded enthusiasm: 'Mr. Rusk, if it were done right, and if you could establish a committee of sufficient gravity to give the thing credibility with the foreign museums . . . goodness!'

His confreres were less inhibited: it's never been done!' it's a capital idea!' 'I can think right now of forty items you'll have to have . . . and probably can get!' I had rarely seen a workable idea catch such immediate fire, and within the hour we had put together recommendations for a prestigious group of financial and publicity sponsors. Reaching for the list, Rusk began telephoning the well-known men and women and received the consent of most. At the same time the rest of us were drawing up a list of great works of art from various museums in the world, and plans were launched to request loans for a huge show to open the Fort Worth sports museum. When Texans dream, they do so in technicolor.

Then something happened which brought our meeting back to an equally exciting reality. A New York dealer, who had sat outside waiting to present seven good canvases for my inspection, asked if he could now come in, and I was pleased to see that these world-famous experts were always eager to see whatever the art world was putting forth.

He was a modest man, as were his seven canvases, but after we had been soaring in the empyrean it was good to come back to earth: 'These are fine works of museum quality and condition. I have wanted you to see what is immediately available.' And he showed us a perfectly splendid painting by a man I had not heard of, Jon Corbino, of athletes posturing on a beach, and then an exhilarating oil by Fletcher Martin titled 'Out at Second.' It presented a baseball ballet, showing the runner coming in from first with a hook slide to the right, the shortstop sweeping down with a tag from the left, and the energetic umpire throwing his arm up in the hooking 'Out' signal.

When the man completed his presentation, Rusk said: 'Would you please step outside for a moment?' and when he was gone, Ransom asked his advisers: '1 liked them. But were they good enough for a museum?' and the experts agreed they were.

'Call him in,' Rusk told me, and when the dealer returned, Rusk said: 'We'll take them all.'

'But we haven't talked price, sir.'

'Barlow will do that, and I've already warned him to offer no more than half what you ask.'

'With your permission, I've brought along a European painting I thought you might want to consider. It's certainly not American and the sport it presents isn't the way we play it today. But please take a look.' And he placed on the easel a rather small canvas painted by the Dutch painter Hendrick Avercamp, 1585-1634, showing a frozen canal near Amsterdam with lively little men in ancient costume playing ice hockey.

It was the epitome of sport—timeless, set in nature, animated, real—and in addition, it was a significant work of art. The curators and experts applauded so noisily that I cried 'Accession Number One.'

But Rusk forestalled me: 'We want it, surely. That's just the kind of thing we do want. So old. So beautiful. But not as our first acquisition. I've already bought that, and it ought to be in Fort Worth ready for installation when we get back.'

This man Rusk never ceased to surprise me, for when I returned to Fort Worth two weeks later, I found that he had installed in the rotunda of his emerging museum a splendid antique Italian copy of perhaps the most famous sports-art item in the world, the dazzling Discobolus of Myron, dating back to the original Olympic games.

'Where'd you get it?' I asked, and he said: 'Old Italian palace. Saw it on our honeymoon and remembered it ever since.'

An art dealer from New York had come to Dallas with color slides of eight canvases relating to sport, including a Thomas Hart Benton of a rodeo cowboy trying to rope a steer, and I was concluding arrangements for their purchase when Ransom Rusk phoned urgently from Larkin: 'Come right over! Catastrophe!'

Since Rusk rarely pushed the panic button, I excused myself, hopped in the car Rusk provided when I worked in Dallas, and sped out to the mansion, where in the African Hall, I met Rusk and Mr. Kramer, the armadillo expert, in mournful discussion with a Dr. Philippe L'Heureux of Louisiana, a very thin man with beard and piercing eye. When I looked at his card and fumbled with his

name, he said: 'Pronounce it Larue. Half my family changed it to that when they reached America.'

'Tell him the bad news,' Rusk said, slumping into a chair made from the tusks of elephants he and his partners had shot on safari, and L'Heureux, standing straight as if giving a laboratory lecture to a class of pre-meds, revealed a shocking situation.

'We have solid reason for believing that the armadillo not only serves as a laboratory host for the study of human leprosy but can also infect people with the disease.'

There was a painful silence as we four stared at one another. L'Heureux stood rigid, prepared to defend his accusation. Mr. Kramer, whose years in retirement had focused on Texas storms and the armadillo, looked mutely from one of us to the other, unable to speak. Rusk, whose walls bespoke his constant interest in animals, was confused, and I, whose only contact with the armadillo had been chuckling at the beer advertisements which featured them, did not know what to think.

Finally L'Heureux spoke: 'We're recommending that since the threat of leprosy is real, and since we have identified five documented cases in Texas in which persons handling the animals have contracted it, all armadillos that might come into contact with humans be eradicated.'

'You mean we're to poison them?' Rusk asked.

'Or shoot them.'

Mr. Kramer rose, moved about for some moments, then looked out toward the former bowling lawn: 'I could not shoot an armadillo. I suspect your evidence is nothing but rumors.'

'I wish it were,' L'Heureux said. 'But I assure you, the danger is real.'

'Actual cases?' Kramer asked, his white hair glowing in the morning sunlight.

'Yes.'

'And you're recommending extermination?' Rusk asked.

'We are. And so are the experts in Florida. And the epidemiologists in Atlanta.' And hearing this verdict delivered with such solemn authority, Rusk said: 'As responsible citizens we must do something, but what?'