The Lady in Gold (2 page)

In the distance, St. Stephen's Cathedral rose toward the heavens, reaching for the love of God. Its majestic blackened spires towered over the site of an ancient moat built by Roman emperors over the remains of a prehistoric Celtic settlement.

Here was the primeval heart of Vienna.

Above Schoenberg, stone gods and goddesses gazed down from the parapet
of the palace. Cherubs cast mischievous glances, as capricious as love itself. A group of Japanese tourists stood and shivered, waiting for the museum to open. Schoenberg hurried past them.

The Belvedere Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Baroque monument to the victory over the Turks. (
Illustration Credit prl.1
)

A silver-haired patriarch in a gray overcoat stopped his morning walk and stared: it was that American lawyer from newspapers and television. “Schoenberg!” the Austrian hissed to his wife. They exchanged stony glances.
Schoenberg.
The man who wanted to take the gold portrait from Austria.

Inside, Schoenberg was greeted with cool circumspection by the director of the Austrian Gallery,
Gerbert Frodl. Frodl was a tall man with watchful eyes and a thin smile. Schoenberg was the last person Frodl, or Austria, wanted to see. But Frodl was shrewd enough to realize that it would be best to treat the composer's grandson with courtesy. Ticking him off would only make things worse.

For years, Austrian officials had stonewalled Schoenberg. Now Frodl was reduced to showing him the way to precious paintings like a museum guide. Frodl quickly handed Schoenberg off to a tight-lipped functionary. She led him to a glass elevator and pushed a button. They rode down in silence. Deep under the museum, the elevator groaned to a halt. Schoenberg
followed the administrator down a maze of dark passageways, their footsteps echoing. Schoenberg thought, What is this place?

He knew better than to ask. The answer might not be pretty. Bunkers like this were not built for fairy-tale palaces.

Finally the administrator opened a heavy door to reveal a strange chamber, as immense and fortified as a refuge to wait out the end of the world. The administrator didn't bother to offer an explanation for this place, whose colossal walls, built during
World War II, had been strong enough to withstand aerial bombardment.

Like many things and many people in Austria, the
bunker beneath the Belvedere possessed a mysterious pedigree. Museum curators whispered, incredibly, that it was built as a last refuge for Hitler. But there was no official explanation.

The bunker now sheltered the artistic treasures of Middle Europe. Some of the art locked away here had been “collected” by the Nazis—meaning that it had been stolen, appropriated as ransom from families of accomplished Jews, who were humiliated, fleeced, and finally hounded out of Vienna. If they stayed, far worse fates befell them.

Older Austrians wished to forget this unpleasantness. Museum officials, in particular, had no incentive to sort through their institution's own musty papers and pull out letters from Nazi functionaries proving that this or that painting did not belong on their walls. They disliked being reminded that fellow art historians and mentors—even relatives—had curated art for Hitler. Now, unbelievably, it had come to this: this Schoenberg was going to paw through national treasures like Napoleon.

The administrator led Schoenberg into the shadowy vault. He blinked to adjust his eyes to the dim light. What he saw astounded him. Rack after rack of paintings lined the walls. Centuries of art that had once hung in monasteries, palaces, grand apartments, and country homes.

The administrator walked silently along the rows of gilded frames, then stopped. Here, she said decisively.

Schoenberg lifted the first painting in the rack, and the light caught a shimmering surface. Here was the masterpiece Schoenberg was fighting for. He stared in wonder at Adele's face, floating in a haze of gold, as pale and sultry as a diva of the silent screen.

For eight years, Schoenberg had argued this painting did not belong to Austria. Most people would have given up long ago. But Schoenberg had a remarkable client, with a stubbornness to match his own. A ninety-year-old retired dress-shop owner, disarmingly charming and as dignified and composed as the carefully cultivated Viennese debutante she had once been.
This onetime Vienna belle,
Maria Bloch-Bauer Altmann, was the last living link to her aunt Adele, who was the muse, and perhaps much more, of Gustav Klimt.

Maria Altmann had all the will in the world. But she didn't have much time. Never had a little old Jewish lady in Los Angeles caused Austria so much trouble.

Schoenberg was not the first attorney to hold this contested jewel in his hands. Half a century before, a Nazi lawyer, known for his arrogance and tailored suits, turned the key of the Elisabethstrasse
palais
of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Vienna was ruled by a native son,
Adolf Hitler. The attorney,
Erich Führer, was riding the crest of this triumphant wave. Even his name was serendipitous. Führer was proud of his stern hatchet face, and the long scar on his cheek that advertised his membership in an elite anti-Semitic university fencing fraternity.

Führer was from a “good family.” But when he opened the massive wooden door of the Bloch-Bauer
palais,
he looked like a thug in a suit. It was a pose he relished, and like Hitler, it was very much in vogue.

The four-story Bloch-Bauer
palais
was just off the Ringstrasse, or “Ring Street,” the broad avenue built in a circle around the city after 1857, when Vienna began to tear down the massive walls that had staved off the Turks. Jewish barons like Rothschild and Schey were allowed to build the ceremonial mansions that the Viennese called
palais
on the empty ring of land where the battlements had stood. The Ringstrasse became the home of a newer elite known as the “second society.”

Now brilliant Jewish families like the Bloch-Bauers were gone. The salon was silent. Curtains were drawn over the long windows overlooking the Schillerplatz and its statue, draped in a garland of golden roses, of the poet Friedrich Schiller, beloved for the
Ode to Joy
that was his “kiss to the whole world.” Angels gazed down demurely from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts across the square. Once this Elisabethstrasse
palais
had witnessed the academy's humiliating rejection of Hitler, when he was a penniless young art student.

Denying Hitler anything in Vienna was inconceivable now.

Führer strode across jewel-toned Persian rugs, until he reached the bedroom of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the late wife of the man who had been forced to flee this mansion. She had died years ago. But there were flowers in a
vase on a table, so withered and dry they crumbled at the touch, and a framed photograph of a bearlike man, grinning and embracing a black-and-white kitten.

Klimt.

Whatever did women seen in him?

Führer walked deeper into the shadowy, cold room. Then he spotted his quarry. For a moment, he stood before it and stared. Here was the portrait that had dazzled turn-of-the-century Vienna. A painting with the flourish of Mozart, yet a product of Freud's emerging age of the psyche. In this painting, Vienna's glittering past met its fratricidal present.

Now it would meet its future.

Führer knew Klimt's work was not entirely in keeping with Nazi tastes. Hitler had an aversion to modernists, and Klimt had been a notorious “philo-Semite,” a friend of Jews. Yet his portraits of society ladies were synonymous with Viennese glamour. The fact that the woman in the golden painting was Jewish was inconvenient, but not incurable.

The painting of Adele would be hoisted into a vehicle and driven across town, slowly, to protect the fragile gold leaf. Führer would not deliver the painting to brutal Nazi storm troopers with guns and boots. He would present it to bespectacled curators at the
Austrian Gallery, who were advancing their careers under Nazi rule. It was to these tainted aesthetes that Führer would offer the beautiful Adele, like pirates' booty, or a trophy of war, with a letter that bore the salutation “Heil Hitler!”

The placard on the wall at the Belvedere gave no clues as to the identity of the woman in the portrait. Any hint of her Jewish origins would betray the Nazi lie of racial superiority.

So they engaged in one of the greatest identity thefts in the history of artistic provenance, craftily erasing the traces of Adele's life and legacy. The first mention of the “acquisition” of Adele's gold portrait was written in 1942 by an old friend of Klimt. He knew very well who Adele was. Yet in one of the small collaborations that pushed the Nazi machinery forward, he politely called the gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer the
Dame in Gold.

The Lady in Gold.

Adele would gaze down mutely on well-dressed visitors, like a deposed queen of fin de siècle Vienna, a forgotten fragment of the birth of modernism. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she were about to speak. It might take years for Adele's truth to get out, but her secret would not remain locked up forever.

——

The woman who held the key to the mystery carefully balanced a tray of aromatic Viennese coffee, brimming with whipped cream, and set it on a table in a sun-dappled living room in Los Angeles at the turn of another century.

Maria Altmann was gracious and warm, the kind of woman referred to in another era as a grande dame. Her face was deeply lined, but her bright blue eyes still held a gaze of wonder.

“It is a very complicated story,” Maria began, in an elegant Old World accent that belonged to a vanished world in
Mitteleuropa.
She paused a moment, trying to decide where to start. “People always asked me, did your aunt have a mad affair with Klimt? My sister thought so. My mother—she was very Victorian—said, ‘How dare you say that? It was an
intellectual
friendship.' ”

Maria looked up at a reproduction of Adele's portrait on the wall, regarding her face thoughtfully.

“My darling,” she said finally, “Adele was a modern woman, living in the world of yesterday.”

It was 1898, and the devil himself seemed to dance in Vienna.

The mistress of Emperor Franz Joseph was Vienna's premier actress,
Katharina Schratt, and she was threatening to retire from the stage unless the Imperial Burgtheater staged a scandalous
Arthur Schnitzler play that glamorized free love. Vienna's most acclaimed star couldn't possibly be allowed to step down in the Jubilee Year, the fiftieth anniversary of the reign of the Austro-Hungarian monarch.
So when the curtains opened on Schnitzler's
Veil of Beatrice,
the emperor personally saw to it that his mistress was onstage in a black veil, in the role of the seduced woman.

If it had once been unthinkable for the Austrian emperor to publicly indulge the whims of a common actress, Vienna was now a hothouse where nothing seemed impossible.

For hundreds of years, the great
Habsburg dynasty had reigned over this crossroad of East and West. Behind immense battlements, its frilly court united German, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Croatian aristocracies into a single royal house whose multicultural capital was as ornate as a Fabergé egg. Even their German acquired elaborate embellishments and a lilting cadence, softened by Italian and French, and Baroque exhortations to
kuss die hand.
This culture of pleasure was so unabashed that one Habsburg archduke declared wine “
the principal nourishment of the city of Vienna.”

Now Vienna's ancient ramparts had come tumbling down, and a wave of newcomers was crowding in from Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Transylvania. You could hear a dozen languages in a single street—or a single tavern.