The Billionaire's Vinegar (8 page)

Broadbent’s arguments zeroed in on a handful of ambiguous references that punctuated the otherwise compulsive precision of Jefferson’s ample correspondence. To account for the presence in the cache of Branne-Mouton, a wine Jefferson had never mentioned ordering or even drinking, Broadbent pointed to an occasion when the American consul in Bordeaux had told Jefferson he would send “some wine of our own chusing [
sic
],” without specifying which. Broadbent noted other occasions when Jefferson had asked château owners to send the “best.” He pointed to the shipment of 1784 Haut-Brion that had been misrouted and had never reached Jefferson, and suggested that other such misroutings could explain the presence of the Rodenstock bottles in Paris. Broadbent quoted letters from Jefferson requesting that wine shipments be marked with his initials, and he argued that it was unlikely an engraver would ape Jefferson’s eccentric mode of punctuating. Monticello’s argument to the contrary was, “of course, ridiculous.”

Broadbent concluded by noting, irrelevantly if tantalizingly, that 1787 had been “the year that the United States Constitution was signed…John Wesley wrote his
Sermons,
Mozart composed
Don Giovanni,
the ‘Prague’ symphony and
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
…. Whatever the theories, impossible to substantiate either way, we are confident that we have in this sale more than a little bit of history.”

Nowhere in the auction catalog or this accompanying insert did Broadbent mention a dark rumor circulating about the bottles’ origin, the whispered intimation that they were part of a smuggled Nazi hoard. The National Socialists had been as rapacious in their looting of fine wine as of everything else. Göring, in particular, was passionate about Bordeaux, filling his cellar with more than 10,000 plundered bottles. Albert Speer, architect and munitions boss for the Third Reich, later wrote that the only time he felt intimate with the 275-pound Göring was on the evening when Göring shared a Lafite with him. As for Adolf Hitler, a supposed teetotaler who didn’t care about wine as a drink, he did recognize its potential to confer social status. In May of 1945, when Allied forces liberated the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountaintop redoubt in the Bavarian Alps, they found half a million bottles of wine, including Lafite, Mouton-Rothschild, and Yquem.

So the Nazis had their secret stocks of wine. The French did, too. Justifiably worried that the Germans would steal their wine in the early days of the Second World War, people throughout France concealed bottles by walling off sections of their cellars. In 1940, with the Germans closing in on Paris, the venerable restaurant La Tour d’Argent, which had one of the world’s finest lists, culled the 20,000 best bottles from its 100,000-bottle cellar and stashed them in a secret passageway. The Germans took the 80,000 that remained in plain sight, but the hidden stock survived.

Maybe the rumor about Rodenstock’s bottles was unfair—born of anti-German sentiment and nurtured by Rodenstock’s cryptic remarks—but it had surprising longevity. Broadbent, for one, seemed entertained by the Nazi theory. Although it was never clear whether he subscribed to it, he would still be bringing it up in conversation two decades later.

C
HAPTER
6

“W
E
D
ID
W
HAT
Y
OU
T
OLD
U
S”

F
UCK THEM
. F
ROM HIS SEAT IN THE BACK ROW OF THE
West Room at Christie’s, in London, on December 5, 1985, Marvin Shanken was watching the auction of the 1787 Lafite with growing resentment. He had flown all the way to England for this. His life revolved around wine, and for him this bottle had great meaning; he had planned to share it, to use it as an occasion to celebrate wine. The Forbeses weren’t even in the business. It was just another bauble to them, yet here they were, throwing their weight and money around. Now the bidding was up to £50,000, and Michael Broadbent was about to bring down his auctioneer’s hammer. If Shanken was going to stop Forbes, he would need to act quickly.

T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON FOUNDED
the University of Virginia. Marvin Shanken graduated last in his class from the University of Miami. Bearlike and charmingly disheveled, with a shrewd glint in his eye, he was a pleasure-seeker. Forbidden by his wife to smoke cigars in their Manhattan apartment, he bought the adjacent flat, turning it into a smoking lounge. As the owner of
Wine Spectator,
he had a more than social interest in wine, and having worked on John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, he also had a passion for American presidential history. When Shanken learned from Broadbent about the Jefferson bottle coming up for auction, he knew he had to have it. He would display it at his annual Wine Experience event so that, he later said, “people could see a piece of history.”

Shanken first became interested in the wine business as an investment banker putting together West Coast vineyard real-estate deals. His cellar was stocked mainly with California cabernets. He didn’t have much auction experience, and he had never been to the wine-auction mecca, the Great Rooms at Christie’s in London. This wasn’t necessarily the best year for him to be making his debut there, either.
Wine Spectator
was struggling, and Shanken lived from week to week. He didn’t have cash to blow, much less the kind of money he knew it would take to land this bottle.

Shanken had watched as wine prices soared over the last decade, and he had no illusions: this bottle was comparable to the first edition of an old book; it was an esoteric object that would likely draw a free-spending fanatic or two out of the woodwork. The Brits wouldn’t touch it, but a few Americans might have placed advance bids. The bottle could go for as much as ten grand, fifteen even. Exactly where he would get the money, Shanken had no idea, but he was determined to buy the bottle with the great pedigree. Hell, he was prepared to spend up to $30,000, which was just shy of the highest price ever paid for a bottle of wine.

Shanken was so confident he’d be returning to New York on the afternoon of December 5 with the bottle in hand that, rather than using an agent to bid for him, he flew to London so that he could savor the victory right there in the auction room. Arriving around 2:00 p.m., Shanken took a seat in the middle of the room and waited patiently to complete the formality of obtaining the bottle. A few minutes before the afternoon session was to begin, he saw a familiar face. Len Yablon belonged to Beach Point, a country club in Mamaroneck, New York, where Shanken was sometimes a guest. Yablon was a finance guy; he had no connection to the wine business and was not, as far as Shanken knew, a collector.

When Shanken greeted Yablon and asked what he was doing there, Yablon replied, “We came to pick up the bottle.” He introduced the young man next to him as Kip Forbes, son of publisher Malcolm, for whom Yablon worked. Malcolm had asked them to buy the bottle, Yablon explained, and they needed to rush it back to the Forbes Building in Manhattan in time for a cocktail party for advertisers that evening. The party would launch an exhibit in the ground-floor gallery, consisting of original letters written by Thomas Jefferson, a Jefferson table borrowed from another museum, and the bottle, for which a space had already been set aside. “The plane is waiting,” Yablon said.

The plane? Shanken knew that Yablon must mean the Forbeses’ private jet. The man spoke with infuriating assurance, as if their acquisition was a foregone conclusion. Forbes was a major publisher, Shanken an upstart. He knew he couldn’t compete with that kind of money. Dejected, he walked to the rear of the room, taking a seat in a chair against the back wall. Five minutes earlier he had pictured himself as the bottle’s owner. Now he wouldn’t even be bidding; he would only be watching.
The plane!
Shanken could grimly look forward to returning to New York, empty-handed, in coach.

D
ECEMBER
5
WAS
Kip Forbes’s birthday, but he was spending it with Len Yablon running a routine errand. London was the last stop on a weeklong European tour, a whirlwind annual inventory of the Forbeses’ residences on that side of the Atlantic. Courtesy of the corporate 727, they had checked up first on the Palais de Mendoub in Morocco, then on Château Balleroy in France, and that morning, after arriving at Heathrow, on Old Battersea House, their seventeenth-century, Christopher Wren–designed mansion on the Thames. Normally the routine would include a quick visit to Harrods department store to shop for gifts, then dinner at a restaurant before flying back to the States. But this year Malcolm had put in a special order for a bottle of wine.

At home, when their children were growing up, Malcolm Forbes and his wife drank wine with dinner most nights. After Charles de Gaulle spouted the separatist slogan “Vive le Québec libre!” while visiting Montreal in 1967, Forbes protested by boycotting French wine. A Portuguese rosé, Lancer’s, became a familiar bottle on the dinner table.

Although the astute and self-aggrandizing Forbes made few expenditures unsuited for either a press release or a tax write-off, he had genuine enthusiasm for wine. He enjoyed drinking it. He liked its mystique. He made no bones about being an “appreciator” rather than a serious collector. Though he bought blue chips, it was for short-term drinking, not long-term investment. The family was advised in its wine buying by a sommelier from the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, and whenever the man suggested that a particular wine might be suitable for laying down for future generations, Malcolm would get annoyed. He didn’t intend to wait for his grandchildren. He just wanted to know when it would start to peak.

Malcolm favored Bordeaux. He owned ten bottles of 1890 Lafite, and he especially liked Margaux and, because the château was owned by his New Jersey neighbors the Dillons, Haut-Brion. He bought hundreds of bottles of the 1965 vintage, which was considered particularly horrible, at a cost of five dollars each. For years the Forbes family served that and the 1963, another poor year; most people, ignorant of vintages, were impressed merely by the label. To be fair, even bad vintages of a great wine were worthy of drinking, and such vintages could actually be harder to come by than good ones, because nobody held on to them for very long.

In the mid-eighties, on the occasion of the centennial of France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty to the United States, Danielle Mitterand visited New York Harbor. In the afternoon, after a celebration, the Forbes yacht
Highlander
picked her up and motored out to sea. There wasn’t a lot of chitchat—Malcolm spoke no French whatsoever, Madame Mitterand only limited English—but when they reached the cramped, glass-doored wine cellar belowdecks by the staterooms, Malcolm said: “Ah, you’ll be happy to see all the wines from Bordeaux.” Madame Mitterand replied, not entirely warmly, “I am from Burgundy.”

Malcolm loved giving people, for their fiftieth anniversary or seventy-fifth birthday, a bottle from their marriage or birth year, always with the injunction, “If you open it, don’t tell us.” Once, knowing that Richard Nixon loved wine, Malcolm invited the former president to the corporate cellar on lower Fifth Avenue, where a T-shirt hanging on the wall reads, “Life is too short to drink cheap wine.” Malcolm and his sons enjoyed dinner with Nixon right there in the cellar’s crisp, 60-degree air. Malcolm wasn’t precious about his wine, and if he had to work late, he thoroughly enjoyed popping open a Margaux to drink with a Big Mac and fries.

All the Forbes children had taken up collecting: Steve was into historic documents, Bob went for toy boats, Tim bought Americana, and Moira amassed comic books. But Kip embraced the mania most fully. It was Kip who became curator of the family’s collections, and it was to Kip that Forbes senior would later dedicate
More Than I Dreamed,
his memoir of collecting. Kip wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on Victorian art, and had an abiding passion for English paintings of the late nineteenth century. As a young man he seemed to pine for a bygone world of aristocrats. At age twenty-three he married the thirty-eight-year-old German baroness Astrid Mathilde Cornelia von Heyl zu Herrnsheim, and, for a time, took to wearing Edwardian three-piece suits with a pocket watch and chain. In 1976, Kip encouraged his father to buy the
Social Register
. By the time of the 1985 auction, Kip’s Victorian painting collection had grown to some five hundred paintings, most of which he kept at Old Battersea House.

The Forbeses also collected presidential memorabilia. They owned one of Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hats—and the opera glasses Lincoln was holding when he was shot—and they owned three letters from Jefferson on the subject of wine. One was to the chief of the Seneca Indians and said how bad alcohol was for them. Another was to a lady friend, with a gift of six bottles of wine to improve her stomach. In the third, Jefferson invoked presidential privilege to bring wine into the country duty-free.

In 1985, Malcolm had the ground floor of the Forbes Building renovated to accommodate a suite of galleries. Kip was good friends with the president of the Maryland Historical Society, and with a loaned Jefferson table that arrived just six days before the London auction, a special Jefferson display was to open that very evening in New York to inaugurate the Forbes Galleries. When Malcolm read in his Christie’s catalog about the bottle coming up for sale in London, he saw it as a perfect tie-in. He told Kip to go to the auction and get it.

K
IP HAD BEEN
to plenty of auctions before, often on behalf of his father, but never a wine auction. Like his father, he enjoyed wine. His wife’s family owned vineyards. He could be awed, like many people, by famous labels. He had a small cellar in his home, and he had even tasted some exceedingly old vintages, including an 1870s Mouton-Rothschild from the Forbes cellar, which was leaking so badly that his father decided they might as well pull the cork. The wine was “convincingly alive, at least for the first fifteen minutes,” Kip later said. But that was as far as his oenological inclinations went. He had never visited Bordeaux, much less Château Lafite. And he didn’t consider the 1787 Lafite a bottle of wine so much as a historical artifact. He and Yablon would bid £5,000, maybe, a huge sum. But victory was assured. They would claim their prize and drive straight to the airport.

Most of the Christie’s headquarters, on King Street near St. James Square, had been razed by bombing in 1941 and rebuilt after the war, but the Renaissance façade, a four-story sheet of Portland stone, was the original. Kip and Yablon arrived at the auction house dressed for their transatlantic journey. Years before the term “brand representative” would enter the marketing lexicon, the Forbeses had been practicing the concept, and Kip wore a tie bearing the epithet
CAPITALIST TOOL
, and carried a
FORBES CAPITALIST TOOLBAG
tote. He and Yablon took their time wandering through the Christie’s galleries, and then entered the West Room, where Yablon introduced Kip to Marvin Shanken.

Although it was reasonable for Forbes and Yablon to assume that £5,000 would accomplish their goal, they were also conscious of their delicate position. Malcolm had said to buy the bottle; he had not set price parameters. The relationship between Malcolm and exorbitant bids went back a long way, and he knew his own predilection for losing self-control. Once, when buying a piece of Fabergé, he had said he would bid up to $25,000; after that, Yablon should take over the bidding, and Malcolm would tell him when to stop.

Known within the Forbes family as “Dr. No,” Yablon was a loyal retainer who had grown up in the Bronx thinking tennis was “a sissy sport.” He had risen from lowly accountant to something akin to Forbes’s minister of finance. He was the one person close to the patriarch with the power to restrain his extravagant spending. Anything concerning money, Malcolm referred to Yablon. In spite of the “Dr. No” moniker, Yablon made a point of never saying that word to Forbes. Instead, he would say he needed to think it over, which he did; then, the next day, he would have a reasoned discussion with Malcolm, for or against the expenditure. Yablon was hardly draconian. What others might view as Forbes’s spendthrift ostentation, he recognized as being the mind of a savvy brand publicist at work.