Book On Armand Hammer Details Deceptions

On a January day in 1979, shortly after admitting defeat in a bitter industrial war, corporate mogul and art collector Armand Hammer brainstormed privately with his lawyer about some troublesome fallout.

Several years earlier, he had passed off a $60,000 Goya painting as a million-dollar bequest to the Soviet Union. Suddenly, the transaction and a cash kitty it disguised threatened to become public, embarrassing him with his Russian friends and entangling him with U.S. investigators.

Now, six years after the death of Hammer at the age of 92, the episode and much besides have emerged in a new book that casts a corrosive light on the often-preening supercapitalist who shook Lenin’s hand, cultivated American presidents, built a global oil and whiskey empire and left a legacy of familial ruin and lawsuits against the multibillion-dollar Occidental Petroleum Corp., as well as the foundation and art galleries he controlled.

The book, “Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer,” written by Edward Jay Epstein, published this month by Random House and excerpted last month in The New Yorker, ties Hammer to bizarre deceptions, from contriving a makeover and fake identity for an art adviser/mistress whom he was hiding from his third wife to serving as a conduit for dubious Russian artworks.

Among other schemes, it says he trafficked in fake Imperial Faberge eggs that he authenticated as genuine with an official stamp.

From early on, Hammer’s career diverged from the legendary one he later took pains to construct. After meeting Lenin in 1921, the book says, Hammer secretly distributed the equivalent of $600,000 in today’s currency to agents of Communist International in New York.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept track of Hammer and his associates - a “rotten bunch,” J. Edgar Hoover noted in his files - but whether for investigative reasons or whether Hammer was able to outwit his pursuers, no security case was ever made against him, the book says. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt on, however, were warned to keep their distance.

He browbeat Occidental’s directors - from whom he had demanded signed and undated letters of resignation - into spending nearly $100 million of Occidental’s money to build the Armand Hammer Art and Cultural Center at corporate headquarters in Los Angeles.

Perhaps the strangest of Hammer’s schemes occurred in the late 1980s when he arranged for Martha Wade Kaufman, whom he had hired as his art adviser in 1974 and who became his mistress, to undergo a makeover and legally change her name to Hilary Gibson to deceive his third wife, Frances.

In an episode documented by Epstein but not detailed in the book, when Gibson found herself fired and unexpectedly cut out of Hammer’s will after his death, she visited a banker for Hammer in Basel, Switzerland, and absconded with a document listing a secret bank account. Lawyers for the Hammer estate then settled her claim out of court, awarding her $4.2 million.