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You’ve been to the Temple of Dendur at the Met. Did you know it’s in the Sackler Wing — and how the Sacklers made their fortune? Let me introduce you to the patriarch.
Patrick Radden Keefe
By
Published: Apr 11, 2021
Category:
Non Fiction
2020 was a record year for opioid deaths: More than 81,230 people died from a drug overdose between June 1, 2019, and June 1, 2020. That’s two of three deaths from drug overdoses. For many, the unintentional drug of choice was OxyContin, a product of Purdue Pharma, a company founded by the Sackler family. The company and that family made great efforts to evade responsibility for knowingly pushing a dangerously addictive drug and rewarding doctors who prescribed it. In March, the Times reported, the Sacklers pledged “to pay $4.275 billion from their personal fortune — $1.3 billion more than their original offer — to reimburse states, municipalities, tribes and other plaintiffs for costs associated with the epidemic.” The Sacklers deny all wrongdoing.
A number of books have chronicled this decades-long criminal conspiracy. The best – and at 560 pages, the shortest — has just been published. Why so long? It takes all those pages to tell the story of three generations of the Sackler family, who built their fortune on Valium, became noted for their philanthropy, and who lost everything but their money because of OxyContin. The author is Patrick Radden Keefe. If you’d like his preview of this sordid tale, The New Yorker has it. For an excellent Times review — and a crisp capsule portrait of Arthur Sackler — click here. [To buy “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
In 1987, four months after his death, I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about Arthur Sackler, the patriarch of the family. It was not favorable. And not favorably received by the family — the widow allegedly said, “The body wasn’t even cold.”
Arthur Sackler was a renowned art collector and philanthropist — the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur is in the Sackler Wing — and it was as an art collector and philanthropist that I profiled him. The drug his family would come to market and the hellscape it would bring to people seeking relief from pain were decades in the future. But in my piece, you can see the outlines of his psychology: how Sackler crossed ethical lines to build his business, bullied everyone he encountered, and, as rich people generally can, got his way. Here is “The Temple of Sackler.”
It was going to be the crowning triumph of a very successful life. Dr. Arthur M. Sackler had given other gifts to other museums, but it wasn’t until 1982, when he gave $4 million for a new building at the Smithsonian and donated approximately $100 million worth of Asian and Near Eastern art, that he achieved the ultimate — 22,000 square feet of galleries that would bear his name and be mostly filled with his collections. Months before its scheduled opening, experts hailed it as the center for Asian-art history outside the Far East. So it wasn’t merely hubris for the Smithsonian to order up three weeks of inaugural festivities, with President Reagan invited to cut the ribbon on September 28.
Then something happened that no one —especially Arthur M. Sackler — expected. On May 26, he died. Just like that, at seventy-three, of a myocardial infarction. He got the Great Man obit in the Times: a smiling picture, a list of achievements that would do nicely for three lesser mortals. Only at the very end, just before the list of survivors, was there the faintest hint of controversy. It was, cynics said, an even better obituary than Sackler would have written for himself. And, they noted, the memorial service in June at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was the final ironic touch.
On the surface, the Met was the appropriate place for such a ceremony. In the 1960s, Sackler had become the benefactor of its Arthur M. Sackler Gallery for early Chinese stone sculpture. A decade later, he and his brothers pledged money for the Sackler Wing, which houses the Met’s new Japanese galleries. It is also the final resting-place of the Met’s major tourist draw and the site of most of its big parties — the Temple of Dendur. Strangely enough, however, most Met visitors have failed to connect that enormous wing with the Sacklers. Even society columnists, who should have known better, habitually left out the correct wording, “the Temple of Dendur, in the Sackler Wing,” in order to save space. To Arthur Sackler, they were conspiring with Met officials. The Sacklers had contracts that specified how areas bearing their name were to be publicized, and, dammit, he was determined to make the museum honor those agreements.
But the museum couldn’t control columnists. And it couldn’t keep a Rutgers professor with an interest in art fraud from discovering, in 1978, the existence of a “Sackler enclave” in the Met, where the philanthropist was storing — rent-free — about two thousand pieces of Oriental and Near Eastern art that he was thinking of giving to the museum. Sackler didn’t need a third strike to convince him he might do better elsewhere. And so he manifested his displeasure with the Met by shipping his goodies off to the Smithsonian, where everybody was much, much nicer.
No mention of this contretemps was made in the eulogies delivered at the Temple of Dendur, in the Sackler Wing. And no one hinted that the deceased was probably the most disliked donor in recent Met history. The worst anyone would say about Arthur Sackler was that he was complex.
“I’m always asked, ‘Did he know what he had?'” says Thomas Lawton, director of the Smithsonian’s Center for Asian Art. “Well, he was very familiar with his material. He could correct people who were in charge of his collections.”
That’s certainly the way Arthur M. Sackler would have liked to be remembered. The man who was, at his death, the largest shareholder in Boston’s State Street Bank chose not to emphasize the businesses — and the marketing skills — that had made his fortune. He would be distressed to see himself described here as he was in the most recent Forbes Four Hundred list: a mogul worth about $190 million, $10 million more than that other internationally minded doctor, Armand Hammer. Science, the humanities, and the arts are the only interests specified on Sackler’s two-page, single-spaced vita.
The fact of the matter is that he got his start as an entrepreneur — out of necessity. As a high-school student in Brooklyn, Sackler got himself a job as advertising manager of a chain of business schools after his father, a smalltime landlord, lost everything in the Depression. On the side, he sold ads for student newspapers and delivered flowers on Park Avenue, sometimes with holes in his shoes. He made enough to put himself — and, later, his two brothers — through medical school.
Initially, scientific inquiry was his passion. Linus Pauling told me that Sackler was perhaps twenty years ahead of other researchers in linking changes in body chemistry to mental illness. During their long friendship, “he was always presenting insights about questions that interested me. When others criticized me, he supported me. And when I had trouble publishing my papers [about vitamin C and the common cold], he printed them in two installments in his newspaper.” Sackler was also one of the first to use ultrasound in medical diagnosis and to identify histamine as a hormone.
But as fascinating as research in metabolic psychiatry was, Sackler found commerce more compelling. Ten years into his medical career, he bought William Douglas McAdams, Inc., a medical-advertising agency. A decade later, he started a medical-news magazine that shared headquarters with the agency. He and his brothers also bought into a drug company.
Sackler saw no conflict of interest in these activities. In the early 1960s, others did. The director of the antibiotics division of the F.D.A. was forced to resign after it was learned that he’d received more than $250,000 as editor of a magazine that Sackler had started. Sackler’s defense was that a friend actually owned the journal. By that time he’d simplified his publishing relationships by founding Medical Tribune, a weekly newspaper that now reaches a million doctors in twenty countries. And, by then, he was rich enough to indulge a more private passion.
“When I realized I could not create,” Arthur Sackler once wrote, “I began to collect.” As an N.Y.U. premed student, he had taken night classes in art history, sculpture, and drawing at Cooper Union. Later, when he was an intern, he made his first purchase. It was a small painting of horses in a battle scene, and he bought it for $17.50. But that bargain wasn’t a business proposition; he never sold a piece of art. His driving urge, as he often said, was to acquire scientifically — that is, in bulk.
He started in the mid-1940s, with modest purchases. He darted from modem American art to pre-Renaissance paintings, from Post-Impressionism to the School of Paris. Then, in what he described as a catalytic moment, he saw a small Chinese table in a cabinetmaker’s shop. “I realized that here was an aesthetic not commonly appreciated or understood,” he recalled. He also realized that, for the price of a minor Post-Impressionist work, he could own a major Chinese stone sculpture.
From then on, Sackler never bought a single piece when he could buy a whole collection. “In 1957, I sold some Far Eastern bronzes at Parke-Bernet,” recalls Paul Singer, an eighty-two-year-old psychiatrist-collector who was one of Sackler’s closest friends. “After the sale, Parke-Bernet called. The buyer wanted to meet me. It was Arthur. ‘Next time you want to sell anything,’ he told me, ‘let’s eliminate the middleman.’ A few months later, I decided to sell thirty-two Chinese jades. I could see, as he held them, that pleasure went through him like an electric charge. He bought them all, for $900.”
Sackler was a novice, eager to learn. Singer was a veteran collector, happy to teach. At the Met, where the Far Eastern collection was something less than stellar, Wen Fong was a curator desperate to acquire. In the marketplace, Far Eastern art was still neglected and underpriced. And a new wave of social climbing through art philanthropy was just gaining steam. The combination of ingredients was potentially explosive.
A foreshadowing of trouble occurred in the early 1960s, when Met director James Rorimer allowed Sackler to reimburse the museum for four major works that the Met already owned — and then allowed him to have them displayed with his name as the donor. Once that unhealthy precedent was established, it wasn’t long before Sackler acquired a cavernous storage area above the Rogers Auditorium. He installed his own curators, his private collection — and locks for which Met staffers quite specifically weren’t given keys.
Sackler had previously set up a similar arrangement at the Museum of the American Indian. That one worked until 1975, when he was named as a defendant in a suit that the New York State attorney general brought against the museum’s director and trustees. Sackler was found to be blameless, but the publicity rankled.
The arrangement with the Met, though, was so secret that even the museum’s public-relations office didn’t know about it. That was part of the Sackler dance, a dance that had a great deal to do with money. He and his brothers got their names on the Sackler Wing by pledging $3.5 million, payable over twenty years — an embarrassingly puny amount, considering how long the donors had to make good and how big a tax write-off they got. “I gave the Met exactly what the Rockefellers paid for their wing,” Sackler defensively told intimates. Maybe he’d fill that wing with his art, maybe he wouldn’t. It depended on the Met.
After all Sackler’s generosity, however, the Met was in no hurry to put him on its board. To Sackler, there was only one explanation. “How can you work at such an anti-Semitic place?” he asked one well-connected Jewish administrator. “Who’s anti-Semitic?” the administrator asked. Sackler gave him the name of a top-ranked museum official. “Gee,” the administrator said, “I didn’t know he was Jewish.”
In 1978, Met directors weren’t entirely distressed when Sol Chaneles, then chairman of the Administration of Justice Program at Rutgers, discovered the Sackler enclave and alerted the attorney general. Publicity might, museum officials thought, encourage Sackler to close his private warehouse and move his treasures — right into the Sackler Wing. They read Sackler wrong. He hated not just bad press but all press. “He wanted to be the editor in chief,” suggests art collector and Met veteran Edward Warburg. “He didn’t want anyone else to have the last word.”
A few months before the opening of the Sackler Wing, Chaneles recalls, “I called Sackler a number of times to confront him with what I’d learned. He’d never talk to me. Finally, I told his secretary, ‘Tell him the facts will speak for themselves.’ He got on right away. I went over the facts with him, at which point he offered me several gifts — including a Piranesi — in order not to have the story published. Sackler then said, ‘What do you think of me as a person?’ I said, ‘I think you are a crook, and I’ll make every effort to see that you are indicted.’ ‘But I have children, and grandchildren,’ he said. I told him he might have thought of that before.”
There was no fallout from the “Sackler enclave” revelations. At the opening of the Sackler Wing, Arthur Sackler stood with his third wife, Gillian, and, like a Medici, greeted Society. In every possible way, he was poised to become a major player on the Upper East Side. He had the right apartment, a maisonette on Park Avenue that had belonged to the Leslie Samuels family and had, after Mrs. Samuels’s death, provided the furniture for Imelda Marcos’s mansion. His wife was young, attractive, and English. And there were all those works of art dangling in front of museum directors.
Sackler never made it. He had the right people over to dinner, but it didn’t take. “A mortician’s annex,” thought an old society power couple. Another East Side figure recalls a dinner followed by “woodwinds that blew no good.”
Edward Warburg found Sackler better company on the road. On a Met trip to India, Warburg, who’d had open-heart surgery some years earlier, took ill and his blood pressure went miles high. He asked Sackler for medical advice. “He came in with a suitcase,” Warburg says. “When he opened it, it turned out to be an apothecary shop. ‘I take temperatures the way Mother did,’ he said, and he leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. After that, he came in every three hours. When I got home, I showed the list of medicines he’d given me to my own doctor. ‘What a strong constitution you have,’ he said, ‘to resist all that medication.'”
Warburg found Sackler “not fun, but pleasant.” And a former Met official confides that Sackler was “no worse than most donors.” They weren’t, however, delivering the majority view. “He had the charm of the dollar sign,” an auction-house executive told me. “He’d call, just before an auction, and tell you he wanted to buy the whole lot. You’d tell him that was impossible. Then he’d make you go see him — wearing a green hat, or something — in a hotel where he was registered under another name.” “A tough negotiator,” commented a woman who’d worked with Sackler on a museum project at Harvard. “No one will tell you he was charming.”
And yet, for all his monomania, his desire to have his name stamped on buildings was a powerful force for good. He gave Harvard $10.7 million for a new art museum, the biggest gift of its kind in Harvard’s history, and once the deal was cut, he didn’t interfere. Clark University got $1.75 million for its science department, Long Island University received $2 million for a lab at the school of pharmacy, Tufts was given seed money for a health-communications center that boasts the most electronically advanced library technology in the world. Even the Chinese won big: last year, Sackler broke ground in Beijing for a facility that focuses on archaeological conservation.
Those gifts didn’t represent the end of his dreams. “Every Jewish boy’s ambition is to be a friend of the pope,” George Lang, owner of Cafe des Artistes, told me. “Arthur achieved that with the last two popes. He always felt that the key to world peace wasn’t the United States and the Soviet Union, but the Vatican and China. He was doing some groundwork with the Chinese that could have been very productive. In a sense, his death is a national disaster.”
Genius is often controversial; that’s one way we know it to be genius. But Sackler’s first genius — as a marketeer — was in understanding the hidden motivations of other people. How is it, I asked Elizabeth Sackler, that her father’s philanthropic career was so full of secret entanglements and public misunderstandings?
“My father loved his passions,” she explained. “He wasn’t concerned with what people thought about what he did — or even if they knew. He hated eulogies. He did them for a lot of people, but he wanted none for himself. What concerned him was potential. He thought everyone had potential. He thought we have an obligation to improve the world. When I’d tell him he was a genius, he denied it. He said the mind was a muscle, and that his was just well exercised. He loved the opera, ballet, Peking duck, and matzo-ball soup. He was a great ballroom dancer. When he decided he wanted to learn how to dance, he had a teacher from Arthur Murray come to the office so he wouldn’t waste time. We traveled by boat to Europe in those days, and he and I would dance together at night.”
“Not such a complex man, after all,” I suggested.
“He once said, ‘There’s nothing so beautiful. .” She faltered. Her eyes grew teary. “There’s nothing so beautiful,” she began again, gathering strength as she found the cadence, “as a woman dressed in simple black with a string of pearls.”
“But why,” I asked, “did he exercise his genius so often in trying to enforce unenforceable contracts with museums?”
“Nothing angered him more than to have someone renege. He believed in agreements,” Elizabeth Sackler said, with so much emphasis it was clear that on this matter, at least, she was very much her father’s daughter.
As I went on, and talked to many other people, it surprised me that I kept coming back to that black dress and the strand of pearls and to something that George Lang had told me. “Arthur had the talent to feel fifteen times a day what most of us feel fifteen times in our lives,” he said. “Each time he discovered new beauty — a new artist or a new idea — he went through the roof with pleasure. He never got used to anything he did or had or achieved.” The restaurateur paused. “He was also a mixture of almost surrealistic elements. He was, for one thing, a permanent child, afraid of grown-ups. He feared what they’d do to him and his toys.” Sackler’s widow agreed. “He was an innocent,” Gillian Sackler said at the memorial service. “He always expected his well-meaning sentiments to be reciprocated.”
Such primal feelings — outlandish delight in aesthetics, vociferous defense of good intentions — are never a happy mix in Society. They’re even less useful for an art donor with visions of power at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When curator of twentieth-century art Henry Geldzahler left his position at the museum to work for the city, he quipped, “It’s a great relief to be getting out of politics.” Arthur Sackler never got Geldzahler’s joke.
But at the memorial service, Ed Koch did. Standing at the podium that faced the Temple of Dendur, he looked around the Sackler Wing and, with the bumbling charm that New Yorkers have come to expect from their mayor, blurted out the truth that more refined speakers avoided. “I don’t know why, but Jews aren’t buried in synagogues,” he said. “Well, Arthur built his own temple.” In death, he very nearly said, the Doctor was, finally, In.
