The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [114]
But the connoisseurs did care, and with all their hearts. That made their second mistake almost inevitable. Having committed themselves, the experts could not back away from the stand they had taken. Instead, with their reputations on the line, they spent all their energy trying to ensure that everyone else saw the world as they did.
IN PRINCIPLE, THE dupe’s ardor is easy to understand—no one likes losing face. But in practice, the self-deception grows to such grotesque proportions that sometimes even the con men themselves can hardly believe their good fortune. The story of a notorious hoax perpetrated by the novelist Clifford Irving provides an especially relevant example. In 1969, Irving wrote a biography of the art forger Elmyr de Hory. A year later, it dawned on him to apply the lessons he had learned in a scam of his own. The billionaire recluse Howard Hughes was still enormously famous in 1970, though he had not been seen in public for more than a Decade. Imagine the sensation, then, when Irving told his publisher that Hughes had contacted him, offering his full cooperation on a biography.
Armed with a few letters he had forged in Hughes’s handwriting, Irving sold the project to Life and McGraw-Hill for something on the order of $750,000. (Life had unwittingly handed Irving one of the tools he used to rob them; he had learned to copy Hughes’s handwriting by studying a photo in the magazine.) Irving had never met Hughes or even spoken with him by phone. His scheme hinged on two bold propositions: The first was that Hughes would not come out of hiding to challenge him. The second was that he could count on his victims’ cooperation. “They’ll help us all the way,” Irving reassured an accomplice who had begun to lose his nerve. “Whenever we stumble, they’ll pick us up. Don’t think of them as the enemy. They’ll turn out to be our best allies.”
And so they did. Dazzled by Irving’s success in obtaining a story that no one else had, hypnotized by the fortune they stood to make, and hooked too deeply to wriggle free, Life and McGraw-Hill rationalized away one warning signal after another. Though Irving claimed to have spent endless hours transcribing tape-recorded interviews, for example, no one ever asked to listen to a single tape. His publishers swallowed stories about how Hughes had paddled a canoe to meet Albert Schweitzer and swum naked with Ernest Hemingway.
Still, Irving’s accomplice couldn’t hide his panic. McGraw-Hill was bound to realize they’d bought a fake. “It’s got to occur to them. How can they be so naïve?”
Irving knew better. “Because they believe,” he said. “First they wanted to believe, and now they have to believe.”
The experts have to believe because, if they dared admit the possibility of fraud, the consequences would be too grim to contemplate. If the story held up, on the other hand, careers would be made and downcast rivals would look on in helpless envy.
And so Van Meegeren and his fellow con men waltzed along, carefree, while the experts who might have unmasked them in a moment instead devoted all their efforts to perpetuating a fraud.
Part Five
The Chase
50
THE SECRET IN THE SALT MINE
By the winter of 1944/1945, the Nazi vision of conquest and glory had collapsed. Then began a desperate race. Goering and his fellow Nazis tried frantically to hide their art from the advancing allies. “In the last weeks of the war,” wrote one foreign correspondent traveling with Patton’s Third Army, “they scuttled