Authors: Ken Perenyi
The American School
A
t the end of August, Roy was still away on vacation and there was still no decision on the purchase of the town house. With the extra money we'd raised from the sale of Encounter's assets and plenty of time on our hands, I thought it wise to get away from Sixty-Eighth Street for a while and let things work themselves out.
With that, José and I packed our bags and booked a flight to Tampa. We rented a second-floor apartment in an old cottage on Madeira Beach, not far from my parents' house. We went swimming in the Gulf, caught fish, and cooked it ourselves. I even brought along a few panels, in case I felt like painting.
Then one night, after coming back from a movie, I bounded up the staircase on the side of the house. Near the top, I slipped and came tumbling back down the flight of steps. When I regained my senses, I realized that my leg was badly broken.
The next day, when I woke up in the hospital, it was bad enough when the doctor told me that my leg was broken in three places and the bones would have to be screwed back together, but then I almost had a heart attack when he informed me that I'd be in a plaster cast up to my thigh for the next five months and that it would be a year before I could walk without crutches. For the next week I lay in the hospital bed, worried about how I would survive this. I told José that he could go back to New York if he wanted. Instead, he refused to leave me laid up in the hospital and went out and got a job as a gardener. Soon I was back in the cottage, propped up in bed, and trying to get used to the idea of a long, slow recovery. Months passed; my mother brought over home cooking, and José went to work every day to pay the bills.
Eventually, the Fergusen Club was sold. A developer bought it for a hundred and ten thousand dollars and planned to divide it into co-op apartments. It was some time later that I got in touch with Maurice, who was back at work at Sabu. According to him, one by one, everybody finally left the house, as it became unmanageable. Then one day, from the salon, he saw a truck pull up. “Several well-dressed people went into the house,” he said, “and removed all your artworks, loaded them into the truck, and left.” Everything left behind at Sixty-Eighth Street was lost. All that counted now was to survive the months ahead.
The Jeep was a lifesaver. We got it out of storage and had transportation. When I felt well enough, José drove me to an art-supply store so I could buy some paint and brushes. Fortunately, I had brought four period panels with me from New York. José helped me set up a table and a chair from which I could paint.
After I had completed my new “collection,” I thought it was time to get in touch with Paul Gabel. I told him what had happened and that I was stranded in Florida. It turned out that Paul was preparing to load up a truck with antiques and do the winter Miami Beach Antiques Show. He suggested that he could stop by on his way down and see how I was doing.
A couple of weeks later, Paul showed up at the cottage. He volunteered to take some of the antiques I had in storage and a pair of the “Dutch” paintings I had finished to the show and raise some badly needed cash for me. I didn't have to wait long before Paul called with good news. The show had been a success. He had sold the antiques and the paintings as well.
Finally the cast was removed, but it would take the next year to get my muscles built up again and to be able to walk normally. During that time, José continued to work and I stayed home painting pictures. Local antique shops supplied the necessary furniture that I could break down for panels. I sent completed works in the styles of van Goyen, van Ruysdael, and others directly to Paul in Nyack. He in turn sent money as soon as a picture sold. Eventually, José and I moved into a larger house that we rented on the beach.
Paul insisted that as soon as I was able to walk again, I must come up to Nyack and meet some of his friends. Nyack is a charming old town overlooking the Hudson River, just a half-hour drive north from the George Washington Bridge. It's one of a number of towns along the Hudson that date back to the Revolutionary War. I was already familiar with it from my days at the Castle, when several of us used to drive up there to explore the old town.
In the summer of 1977, I packed a bag and got a night flight to New York, and Paul met me at LaGuardia.
The next day, I woke up in Paul's luxury high-rise apartment on the Hudson River. I went out on the terrace and took in the panoramic views and the fresh air. After breakfast, Paul wanted to show me around Nyack. We visited a number of antique shops whose dealers rented space in properties Paul owned. Paul was aware of my experience working for Sonny and suggested that if I opened an art-restoration studio in Florida, he could ship work down and keep me busy with jobs from his tenants alone. Then we headed to Paul's shop, where he wanted me to meet his partner, Sandy, who had seen my work and was in on the secret.
Paul had bought a nineteenth-century Masonic temple that he converted into the biggest antique shop in town. He kept it loaded to the rafters with furniture, paintings, china, architectural fragments, and bric-a-bracâsome junk and some valuable. Every weekend, his shop was crowded with well-heeled day-trippers from the city.
When Paul introduced me to Sandy, I was not impressed. At thirty-two, he stood five feet, five inches tall and weighed around a hundred and eighty pounds. He wore cowboy boots and blue jeans that prominently displayed a huge silver buckle on a belt that stretched across his belly. His big head of bushy hair and oversized mustache gave him all the charm of a cartoon cowboy.
Sandy was a local Nyack boy. His father, a prominent accountant, had raised Sandy with a silver spoon in his mouth. Problem was, he was never encouraged to make anything of himself, and his parents had recently passed away. Sandy's inheritance was about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and part ownership in a swank Rockland County country club.
When Sandy got his hands on the money, he bought a Winnebago, managed to acquire a girlfriend, and spent a few months touring the Northwest. When he finally returned to Nyack, the girl fled and Sandy decided he would become an antiques dealer.
He lived with two humongous sheepdogs named Kook-a-poo and Pook-a-noia. They inhabited a big old Victorian house that he rented in town. He was obsessed with treating his dogs as though they were human: gourmet meals from local restaurants, weekly visits to the groomers, hundred-dollar pedicures, a professional trainer, and even a psychoanalyst. It was to no avail. They shit and pissed all over the house and ripped every piece of furniture to shreds the second he left them alone.
Paul agreed to take him in and teach him the businessâbut Sandy's idea of being an antiques dealer, according to Paul, was “going to Paris on buying trips, checking into the George V hotel, knocking back bottles of Château Lafite, and coming home with an asparagus dish!” After two years of “this bullshit,” as Paul described it, and innumerable trips to the local bank that allowed him to borrow against his share of the country-club property, all Sandy had to show from his inheritance were a few antiques scattered around Paul's shop, his shiny cowboy belt buckle, and a secondhand BMW that broke down on a weekly basis.
When I met Sandy, he looked like a person on the verge of a breakdown. The last of his money was rapidly disappearing in T-bone steaks for his dogs, repairs on the BMW, and (like his dogs) weekly visits to an analyst. In fact, some weeks he went twice, so great were the issues he was grappling with.
For some time now, Paul had urged me to expand my horizons and begin to study American paintings. “If you could start painting me some portraits of American Indians,” Paul said, “we could sell them like crazy. Besides, you can't go on just painting the same stuff. You've got to diversify, and American paintings are red-hot.”
“Oh, that American stuff,” I said. “It's so boring. I used to see it all the time down at Sonny's, and it didn't interest me.”
“Well, we're going to see my friend Jimmy tomorrow, and you'll see how boring it is,” Paul said.
“So who is this guy?” I asked.
“He's a collector of American paintings and sculpture, one of the biggest. I showed him some of your work, and he was very impressed. He uses Sonny, and he thinks he remembers you working there.”
The following afternoon, we drove down to the picturesque village of Piermont. Nestled in a hollow along the banks of a creek that empties into the Hudson was a collection of beautiful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes. Perched on a knoll overlooking the creek stood a neoclassical mansion that resembled the Parthenon. This was Jimmy's “house.”
We parked in back of the mansion, walked around to the front, and knocked on the big antique door. After some moments, we heard the sound of bolts being thrown open. We were greeted by a tall, aristocratic-looking man dressed in a dark suit and tie. His bald head and prominent nose reminded me of Charles de Gaulle's. He looked straight at me with piercing hazel eyes and welcomed us in.
I was speechless the moment I stepped into the entrance hall, where magnificent paintings in antique gold frames contrasted beautifully with the lavender walls. Impressive pieces of antique sculpture stood next to the entrances of the various rooms.
With a wave of his hand, Jimmy graciously led us through to a drawing room containing more beautiful paintings. All the furniture was Empire, Jimmy's favorite, circa 1820, the approximate time the house had been built. Jimmy motioned us toward an Empire sofa as he settled into an armchair. I knew at once that I was in the presence of an extremely intelligent, unique individual who could be very eloquent one moment and then gruff, even arrogant, the next.
“I remember seeing you down at Sonny's,” he said. “He had one of my Benjamin Wests at the time.” I couldn't recall seeing him and so quickly turned the subject to the history of the house and his amazing collection of paintings.
As Jimmy rambled on and I glanced around, I realized that there wasn't a single thing in sight, not even a lamp, that reminded me that we were in the twentieth century. Like Mr. Jory's shop, the atmosphere in Jimmy's home was enchanting. The house was enveloped in a wonderful silence, broken only by the occasional call of the crows outside. A woody scent common to ancient buildings permeated the air.
Everything was a little faded, a little dusty, and, like Jimmy himself, a bit frayed at the edges. From the paths worn along the old pine floors to the splits in the silk upholstery, everything convinced me that nothing here was contrived. Even Jimmy was like a ghost from another century. Or perhaps, I mused, maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is all staged, an act put on for my benefit? Whatever the case, I had never come across anything quite like this before, and I fell utterly and completely under Jimmy Ricau's spell.
Our visit came to an end as the sun began to set and the soft light in the drawing room grew dim. Casually, before Paul and I got up to leave, Jimmy mentioned that he'd seen a few of my paintings and thought they were very well done. As he walked us to the door, he suggested that I come back the next day, preferably in the morning, and we could spend the day “looking at pictures.”
That evening, Paul invited a few friends over for a dinner party, and Jimmy Ricau was the main topic of conversation. James Henri Ricau had been born in 1916 to an old New Orleans family. He had been sent to the best schools, received a classical education, and eventually entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Jimmy cultivated an enduring love of Greek sculpture, neoclassical painting, and literature. In World War II, he served as a navy bomber pilot and narrowly escaped from a burning plane just seconds before it exploded during a crash landing. After the war, he came to New York City, where he settled into an apartment on East Eighty-Sixth Street. At one point, he worked on a tugboat by day and then got dressed to hobnob with high society at night, even palling around with the Guggenheim sisters. His society connections eventually led him to
Life
magazine and a career as a film editor.
Jimmy was regarded as a pioneer in the collecting of American art, an interest he had developed as a young man growing up in New Orleans. He collected paintings by artists no one had ever heard of and works by sculptors that were literally being thrown out in the garbage.
In the 1950s, when people wanted boomerang tables and swag lamps, Jimmy didn't have to look much farther than local junk shops around New York City to find some of his best pieces. When he had time off from work, he'd travel down to cities like Savannah and his hometown of New Orleans in search of treasures.
Jimmy also enjoyed a reputation as a certified eccentric, and many stories of his mysterious life were part of local lore. Even the purchase of his house in 1958 had a dark and sinister tale behind it. As the story goes, while hunting for paintings in the old towns north of the city one weekend, he discovered his lifelong obsession, one of the finest neoclassical mansions in the Hudson Valley. It could be his, in all its original unrestored glory, for a mere twenty-five thousand dollars.
After the purchase, Jimmy had a housewarming of sorts, so the story went, and invited the owners of a famous gallery, a gay couple who ran their prestigious establishment from a landmark neoclassical town house on upper Madison Avenue. They arrived for an overnight dinner party with a Russian teenager they had been keeping as a houseboy, who was, according to Jimmy, “the most remarkably beautiful boy you could imagineâand he didn't speak a word of English.”
At some point during the course of the evening, the company noticed that the boy hadn't been seen for quite some time. Alarmed, Jimmy went about the house looking for him. To his everlasting horror, he found himâdead, slumped over a toilet seat. On the floor were a syringe and the paraphernalia to cook heroin. Jimmy was hysterical, and there was nothing for his guests to do but spirit the body away, presumably to be deposited in some back alley of the Lower East Side.