One Cent Magenta Page 11

  Precious stamps like the one-cent magenta figured in other movies while Small owned it, notably Charade in 1963. The Audrey Hepburn character ran around with an envelope to which several world-class rarities had been affixed. The plot revolved around hiding them in plain sight, right in front of a cast that included Cary Grant and Walter Matthau.

  But the largest single audience heard about the one-cent magenta on a quiz show. On January 18, 1951, five days before he collected an Emmy Award, Groucho Marx lit a cigar and settled into his seat on the quiz show You Bet Your Life. The program was a vehicle for Marx’s zaniness—the audience tuned in for Marx’s one-1iners, which appeared to be ad-libbed (although the director let slip that Marx depended on writers scribbling on an overhead projector, out of camera range, that only he could see). The show had been running on radio since the 1940s, and in 1951 it was still running on radio. But it had added a television broadcast the year before, with cameras whirring away.

  In the episode filmed that January evening, George Fenneman, the announcer-sidekick, introduced two contestants: a letter carrier and a stamp collector. Marx joked with the letter carrier about playing post office. Then he turned to the other contestant, Alice Backes, and said, “You’re a stamp collector, is that right, Alice?”

  She said she was. “Although I’m more of a philatelist.”

  “You’re more a what?”

  “A philatelist.”

  “Well, I am, too,” Marx deadpanned. “What is a philatelist?”

  “Well, it’s, it stems from a Greek word meaning, um, lover of taxes,” she said.

  “Lover of taxes?” Marx said. “There isn’t a philatelist in the house.” The studio audience laughed.

  Then Marx asked what was the rarest stamp she knew about, and she started talking, knowledgeably, about the one-cent magenta—that it was issued in 1856 and that it was worth $50,000.

  Marx, then approaching sixty, made a joke about himself and his longevity: “If I’d only known. I bought a dollar’s worth of those when they first came out, and like a fool, I wasted them all writing mash notes to Dolley Madison.”

  Alice Backes wasn’t just a starlet the producers had brought in to flirt with Groucho, as they often did. “She did collect stamps,” recalled her younger sister, Virginia Baxter, who said she had helped with Alice’s album when they were girls. “I would get mail and ask if she wanted the stamp,” Virginia Baxter told me. “Sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t.”

  Alice Backes went on to a long career as an actress, appearing on programs like Dragnet, Bachelor Father, Gunsmoke, The Andy Griffith Show, Mayberry R.F.D., and Columbo. She died in 2007 at age eighty-three. Her sister told me Ms. Backes kept her stamp album for years, but it was apparently destroyed in a house fire.

  NINE

  $286,000

  1970: The Wilkes-Barre Eight

  The distance to Manhattan from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—a fading little city in coal country—is 134 miles. For the ten years that the stamp was owned by eight people from Wilkes-Barre, it stayed in a safe-deposit box in a Fifth Avenue bank. The one-cent magenta went to Philadelphia for the nation’s bicentennial. It went to Canada. It went to India and Australia. But it never went to its owners’ hometown.

  I did, on a Sunday morning, because I had decided that Wilkes-Barre was another important stop in my journey through Stamp World.

  From reading up on Wilkes-Barre, I had a sense that it was a shot-and-a-beer town, and like so many blue-collar strongholds across the nation’s industrial crescent, it was in decline almost before people realized it. From 1950 to 1960, the postwar boom decade when white-collar jobs surpassed blue-collar jobs, Wilkes-Barre’s population fell 17 percent; by 1970, it was two-thirds its size in 1940. After so many years of industrial losses, Wilkes-Barre was a past-tense kind of place, a place to have left after growing up. The actor Jerry Orbach did. Even Joe Palooka, the naive comic-strip prizefighter, did.

  But clearly a few of those who remained in Wilkes-Barre, or who moved back after a year or two in Manhattan during their twenties, did well there—very well. The stamp’s new owners were wealthy enough to put up $50,000 apiece (as much as $834,000 apiece in 2016 dollars). Seven of them were not stamp people. The eighth was, and the whole adventure was his idea—the partnership to buy the stamp, the trips to display it at philatelic conventions around the world, the stunts to promote it. His name was Irwin Weinberg. For more than half his life, his business address had been a suite in a bank building: two cluttered rooms and an old-fashioned vault with a military-green door that swung open when he dialed in the combination.

  Which is what he did when my wife and I finally got there, and it took him a couple of tries. Inside the vault were stacks and stacks of stamps on shelves that reached to the ceiling. Weinberg said, proudly, that the shelves were rigged with an alarm that would go off if anyone touched anything. The words “booby-trapped” popped into my mind, and I wondered whether “anyone” included Weinberg himself. He showed us any number of stamps in the vault, but he pulled them from boxes on the floor, not the trip-wired shelves. (I’d bet that Ferrary, another shelf-storer, would have rushed back to Paris to install the same kind of security setup if he had tiptoed through Weinberg’s vault.)

  We had gone to Weinberg’s office after a couple of hours at his house, which turned out to be a large, comfortable Leave It to Beaver kind of place a mile or so from downtown Wilkes-Barre. The front door had swung open as my wife and I started up the walk, and a tallish blonde woman had stepped out. She was wearing a fur coat over what looked like pajamas.

  We were deep in Stamp World now.

  She introduced herself as Weinberg’s daughter. She managed an expression that I remember combined a smile and a scowl. She said they were dealing with a domestic disaster. The boiler had blown up the day before and could not be repaired until the following day.

  Weinberg was wearing a heavy topcoat over layers of jackets and shirts. They led us into his dark, wood-paneled library, in which someone had set up a couple of space heaters that thrummed and glowed but did not heat the space. He did not care. He wanted to show us a photograph from a White House ceremony in 2002 at which Coretta Scott King had presented President George W. Bush with a portrait of her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Weinberg still sounded thrilled to have been invited and to have met Mrs. King and the Rev. Al Sharpton, another guest.

  Weinberg asked what my wife did for a living, and when she said she is a doctor, he launched into his medical history. I began to worry that we would never get around to stamps, but one of his ailments seemed as unique as the one-cent magenta: a malignant tumor inside his ear. It was treated with radiation that weakened the muscles on one side of his face, as if he had had a stroke. I could see from photographs around the room that he had once been handsome and charismatic, and he was still happy to be alive, even if the treatment that saved his life had left him damaged. He was the opposite of Ferrary and Small, who had owned the one-cent magenta before him, and du Pont, who owned it after him. He was more like Hind, an extrovert. He enjoyed people.

  But we were shivering. He showed us souvenirs he had brought home while squiring the one-cent magenta to exhibitions around the world. Then we decamped to his office, trailing him as he drove his yellow BMW convertible to a tall, fortress-like building in downtown Wilkes-Barre that had once been the headquarters of a bank. He explained that the bank was gone and the building was being converted into apartments. He told us he had worked out a deal to stay—the only tenant from the old days, when office space upstairs, on the floors above the bank, was filled with lawyers and doctors.

  Weinberg settled in behind his big desk and told us that he had done well in the stamp business when he was young. He had also owned a rug-cleaning operation that he bought in the 1950s with a loan from the same bank. He said that a friend at the bank had heard it was for sale and told him that the bank would finance the deal for him. When Weinberg said he knew not
hing about running a professional cleaning business, the friend said, “The man who owns it now comes in every Friday with a big deposit. That’s all you need to know.”

  But by the late 1960s, he was edgy. An ugly war in Southeast Asia was dragging on, and the economy was sluggish. Wall Street sensed it. Weinberg, an assiduous reader of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, sensed it. Weinberg knew from his reading that industrial production was continuing to rise as defense contractors kept pace with the escalation in Vietnam. He was also concerned that unemployment rates were close to historic highs. Weinberg knew that those two elements together would put pressure on the third variable in the economic equation, consumer prices, and that the result would be inflation.

  He was right: the cost of the most basic items shot up. The Consumer Price Index climbed more than 4 percent in 1968 and more than 5 percent in 1969, and would jump nearly 6 percent in 1970. Weinberg suspected that the country was sliding into its worst money crisis since the Depression. Conventional economic thinking held that runaway inflation and high unemployment were mutually exclusive—they could not happen at the same time. But the frustrated chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, could say only, “The rules are not working the way they used to.”

  Weinberg thought he knew how to beat the dismal economic forecasts: buy famous stamps.

  And then he heard that the rarest and most expensive stamp of all was going on the block.

  Weinberg got hooked on stamps in the late 1930s, when the policymakers in Washington, concluding that the Great Depression was over, cut spending and raised taxes— and the economy slipped into a recession that came close to destroying the still-new New Deal. Weinberg was nine or ten years old, and a boy in his Wilkes-Barre neighborhood made what sounded like a puzzling offer: he would give Weinberg some stamps—and some hinges. Weinberg said to himself, “Hinges. How am I going to fasten a stamp to the page with a door hinge?”

  Weinberg soon learned what stamp collectors’ hinges were. And Weinberg saw the potential for making money from stamps. “I thought to myself, you know, there are stamp dealers out there, and I wrote to one of them and he sent me stamps to buy. And I spent a good twenty-five cents or something, and as time went on, I thought to myself, I’d like to be a stamp dealer like that.”

  Weinberg got a glimpse of the one-cent magenta at the World’s Fair in New York in 1940. There was so much to see: the icons of the fair, the Trylon and Perisphere; Futurama, with its promise of automated highways; the giant cash register atop one building; even little Lorin Maazel, the future music director of orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, making his New York conducting debut at nine years old.

  Weinberg was twelve and staying with cousins who lived in Newark, New Jersey. At the fair, $1 million worth of stamps were on view at the British Pavilion, celebrating Rowland Hill’s legacy, the hundredth anniversary of Britain’s first postage stamp. Weinberg and his cousins followed the crowd to where the one-cent magenta was on display, courtesy of Mrs. Hind. Weinberg did not see her and was not overwhelmed by the tiny scrap of dark reddish paper. “I never thought about it again”—until, he told me decades later, he owned the stamp.

  Weinberg had after-school jobs as a grocery-store stock boy and as a Fuller Brush salesman—“I’d knock on the door, put my head down and say, ‘I’m your Fuller Brush man. May I come in?’ and then just go right through, dump all the stuff on the floor.” He was persuasive, and from his house-to-house rounds, he made money he could spend. For $5.18, he bought himself a bus ticket from Wilkes-Barre to New York.

  The bus dropped him off near Times Square, but he was not interested in the lights of Broadway or the heights of the Empire State Building. The destination he had in mind was Nassau Street downtown, not far from the New York Stock Exchange, where the stamp dealers were. Many were there because they had been stockbrokers before the crash of 1929; a few were refugees who had arrived in the United States with the only thing they could carry, a pocketful of stamps.

  Weinberg spent $18 on a box full of stamps, which he then sold, making about $25 by the time the last one was gone. He took the $25 and went back to New York and bought more stamps, again selling them for more money. Eventually, one of the dealers promised him a thirty-five-dollar-a-week job when he graduated from high school. Weinberg accepted the offer, rented a room for $5 a week and, by advertising and selling his own stamps on the side, did better than he had expected. Then, on a trip back to Wilkes-Barre, he toyed with the idea of opening his own stamp business there. The overhead would be lower than if he set up shop in New York. He could work from his bedroom in his parents’ house. So that’s what he did.

  But Weinberg kept in touch with the big-city stamp dealers in New York. One of them asked what Weinberg did with the names of the people who answered the ads Weinberg placed in stamp magazines. “Nothing,” Weinberg said. The dealer said that was a mistake. He told Weinberg he should build a mailing list from the ad responses and send out a list of “other merchandise”— meaning other stamps he had in his inventory. “I said, ‘Oh. I don’t have any other merchandise,’” Weinberg recalled, but the other dealer offered to lend him stamps to sell. He and Weinberg split the profits for a year or two as Weinberg sent out the first of his lists, which he typed up like a newsletter. Miner’s Stamp News, he called it.

  Seventy years later, Weinberg was still typing lists and sending them out every Monday. The only difference was the way he printed them. In the 1940s he had spent $5 on a used mimeograph, a smallish machine that did not take up much space in his bedroom. By 2015 he had a massive copying machine that filled the lower half of a wall in his office. He complained that the array of buttons and touch-screen controls was confusing, and that the mimeograph machine worked better. And, on the Sunday afternoon we visited Weinberg—deadline time for Miner’s Stamp News—the paper jammed deep inside the new and complicated machine. He looked befuddled, so I started opening the many doors and drawers on the copier. It took a few minutes, but eventually I cleared the jam for him.

  Buying the one-cent magenta was, Weinberg told us, “sort of an afterthought.” His plan, in the late 1960s, had been to buy rare stamps as a hedge against the inflation he was certain was coming—stamps that were better looking than the one-cent magenta and that would be appealing when the time came to sell them and cash out. “He [was] bullish on ‘conservation of capital,’” the stamp writer Viola Ilma reported after meeting Weinberg. “He says, ‘True investment must have withstood the test of time, have protected its capital consistently in terms of purchasing power and … be instantly liquid.’” He said that other luxury investments—gold, diamonds, even real estate—were dangerous, but “the great classic stamps are first of all known unchangeable quantities.” Nothing else held the promise of stamps.

  By 1968, he was mulling over the timing. He was so sure the economy would overheat and inflation would become a bigger headache than it had been in 1966 and 1967 that, chatting with his mother-in-1aw one day, he said, “It’s almost a sure thing unless the war ends.” She said, “If that’s all that’s holding you back, get going with it, because Nixon will never end this war.”

  Weinberg recruited eight investors and set up a limited partnership. None of them knew much about stamps. One was a lawyer, another owned some hotels, another was a furniture manufacturer—“but,” Weinberg said, “they all could see what I thought I saw.” Weinberg, as the partner in charge, would make the decisions on what to buy. He was so confident in the investment power of the Inverted Jenny that he bought two in one week in 1969—one for $29,000, the other for $33,000—and in 1970, he bought another, for $34,000. He would go on to spend $10,000 for some extremely rare Alexandria Provisionals from the 1840s. Like the one-cent magenta, these were apparently printed at a local newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette in Northern Virginia. They were issued before the United States introduced postage stamps that could be accepted anywhere in the nation. Not many Alexandria Provisionals exist. The
one that Weinberg bought took longer to be discovered than the one-cent magenta. It was not found until 1894.

  Weinberg proselytized about stamps as an investment. He would tell people that stamps were “the only investment that has not had a major recession.” “Inflation and devaluation are twin specters that Weinberg often plays on,” Joseph L. Lincoln later wrote in the Sunday Bulletin in Philadelphia. “It’s not a question of how high stamps will go, but how low your currency will go.”

  Most financial advisers would caution that stamp collectors should never expect anything other than enjoyment from what is, after all, a hobby. But Weinberg was betting on something more than fun: solid returns from relatively modest investments in stamps. Until the day a reporter from the local newspaper dialed Weinberg’s number.

  The reporter had seen a wire-service story that said the one-cent magenta was coming up for sale for the first time in thirty years. The reporter wanted to know if Weinberg planned to bid on it.