Art: Vandals

When wealthy city people move to the country for the summer, their homes, though usually closed, do not remain untenanted. The furniture may be clothed in white muslin dust suits; only the window-buzzing of imprisoned flies may break the silence of the shaded rooms; but in the vacant dwellings a host of people and personages continue their existence without regard to season—smiling the same smiles, making the same gestures, staring perennially in fixed directions.

To bring such a host of permanent residents to Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, has cost millions of dollars. There the “objects of art” in paint, marble, bronze, tapestry, are mostly by world-famed masters. Their owners go off summering comforted by thought of the heavy insurance policies, faithful watchmen, alert elevator attendants provided to protect the expensive stay-behinds.

Last week an interior decorator went to the Fifth Avenue triplex apartment of C. Bai Lihme, retired Danish-American zinc man. He was commissioned to remove some 16th Century Flemish tapestries which Mr. Lihme was lending for exhibition. But, being a first class decorator, he knew he would see even finer things than tapestries at Mr. Lihme’s. He knew that in the Lihme drawing-room was the $50,000 “Portrait of an Old Man” which Peter Paul Rubens painted some 300 years ago, a patrician subject whose disdainful brow, thin smile and scornfully intelligent eye must have been a relief to the painter after his usual run of exuberantly plump females and amorous burlies. On the west wall of the same room would be a large canvas by Rubens’ sensitive pupil, Anthony van Dyck, showing the Marchesa Lommelini, a 17th Century Genoese beauty, and her two infants, piously gowned, posed beside a statuette of Christ.

The Rubens came to Fifth Avenue via the salons of princes and potentates. The Van Dyck, worth perhaps $200,000, was one of a set of eight that were, until 1906, the pride of the Palazzo Cattaneo (Genoa) for three centuries.

The decorator made known his errand at the Lihme apartment building to a suavely superior individual in grey livery, John Healy, stalwart doorman; and was formally admitted. He ascended to the Lihme floor, entered the apartment, halted, gazed awestruck. Gulping with astonishment he called back the elevator man, who summoned blue arms of the law, who brought detectives and newsgatherers in their train. Soon the Lihme apartment—once imposing, now dismaying—was filled with a buzz of talk, excited, threatening, incredulous, ominous. With the aid of stalwart Doorman Healy whose front changed from polite surprise to bitter penitence, the time was shifted back several days, the scene remaining the same. . . .

Doorman John Healy comes to work Sunday morning bringing a partly finished bottle of whiskey. He greets his colleague, George Tiernan, nightman, with the suggestion that they “kill the quart” before Mr. Tiernan goes home. They are bosom friends and two hours pass pleasantly while they rehash what has been their favorite conversational topic since the Lihmes left town, namely, the stinginess of “The Old Swede’s” (Mr. Lihme’s) tips and the indisputable right, the incontrovertible necessity of two fine Irish elevator men to get an increase in pay.

Hadn’t the apartment company promised them ? Couldn’t the company afford it? Didn’t they deserve it? Sure and they did, said Messrs. Healy and Tiernan. They called John Dacey, another elevator man in the building, to come, have a drink and agree with them.

Mr. Dacey came but the whiskey was about gone. Let them all go up to the Lihme apartment then, suggested Mr. Healy. Perhaps they could find a bite to eat and settle the matter as became three Irish gentlemen.

The Lihme pantry yielded cakes. The Lihme icebox yielded a clove-fretted sugar ham—and bottles marked “Frontenac Export Ale.” Mr. Healy and friends disposed themselves on antique gilt chairs in the Lihme dining-room and gnawed the ham without benefit of cutlery. When ale had washed down ham, one of them flung the ham bone through the glass panel of the pantry door. The bone lodged amid the china on a pantry shelf and Mr. Healy, feeling exceedingly “good,” started jumping up and down in the dining-room, swinging his arms, shouting drunkenly.

What Mr. Healy said about Mr. Lihme & family during the next hour or so was not complimentary, and now, in his leaping stage, his eye was caught by the Lihme chandelier, a massy affair of wrought metal and crystals.

A fine chandelier! thought Mr. Healy, and said so. A darlin’ chandelier! Springing, he seized a loop of it in his hairy hand and swung himself into the air. Crystals fell in a tinkling shower. Mr. Healy roared with joy. The fixture groaned, plaster crumbled—down went Mr. Healy with the chandelier atop him. Messrs. Tiernan and Dacey rocked in woozy mirth.

Mr. Healy arose, furious. No chandelier could fall on him and not be punished. Not on your—ugh—life! He kicked the tangled mass, fetched a poker and beat it, smashed it, crashed it, until his comrades fell into the spirit of the thing and started flinging other things about the room—glasses, salvers, cruets, chairs, ale bottles.

They got a long knife and the fire tongs. Taking the empty ale bottles with them, they lurched out to the foyer, overturning tables as they went, bashing at lamps and pictures, slashing at hangings. Before two pastels of blonde young ladies—Mrs. Olga Griscom and the Princess Anita Lobkowicz, Mr. Lihme’s daughters—they swayed, squinting. They swung their weapons, ruined the faces, lurched on to greater havoc, Mr. Healy pausing only to exercise his muscle further on another chandelier.

In the drawing-room, Mr. Healy began to throw things and the others joined him. The bottles were their favorite ammunition, but when the last pint had crashed into “The Old Man’s” (by Rubens) forehead, its dregs and fragments joining the unholy litter on the rug, they picked up vases, jars, bookends, ash trays. They caved in the forehead of the youngest Lommelini (by Van Dyck), raked the mother’s face with chair legs, sent a bottle-neck through the Lommelini daughter’s cheek. One of them yanked open the vitals of a $17,000; built-in parlor organ; twisted the pipes, knocked off stops, walked on the keys, stamped, scuffed, dug with heels.

Long before their fun was over, Mr. Healy & friends had made Mr. Lihme’s apartment of art look, as a bluecoat said, “like it had had a snootful.” The damage was estimated at $300,000. Mr. Lihme had insurance against theft, fire, weather, et al.,—but not against drunken lackeys.

In court, under $25,000 bail, the sobered vandals tried to retract their first confessions and pleaded not guilty. But they shifted uneasily before the gaze of 200 masked detectives who had been assembled to scrutinize them. Mr. Tiernan was recognized as a suspect in prior burglaries.

Mr. Lihme, staring moodily through his octagonal spectacles, exhibited more sadness than rancor. Other wealthy city dwellers with homes full of valuable works of art eyed their own underlings askance, wondered whether to increase their insurance, store their treasures or give higher wages, fatter tips.