One Cent Magenta Page 12
Weinberg faked his way through the conversation. He did not tell the reporter he had not heard about the sale, saying, “We will probably be interested.”
There was no probably about it. Once he hung up the phone, Weinberg went into high gear, even though, as he put it, “This was way out of proportion for us.” He had not contemplated spending as much on any one stamp as he would have to bid for the magenta. Nor had his original strategy included bidding against better-known collectors who probably had deeper pockets. Still, he called his investors together. They urged Weinberg on, insisting he almost had to buy the one-cent magenta if they were to reign as leading investors in rare stamps.
Weinberg was surprised. “I really didn’t think they’d all react this way,” he said, “and of course there was the unknown as to what the price would be.” After so many years in the stamp business, he assumed it would be high. “I told them it was going to be a number significantly larger than any we had used to buy anything,” he said. Weinberg guessed the bidding could climb toward the half-million-dollar mark. “It’s the only one like it,” he said. “I knew the world was going to be interested. The queen [of England] was rumored to be interested. And there are other people out there.”
Each partner put up an extra $50,000. Not quite $200,000 remained in the partners’ account—money Weinberg had not yet spent on less expensive purchases. They agreed that Weinberg could go to $500,000. If the bidding for the one-cent magenta went higher, he would have to drop out.
Now Weinberg was in the big leagues. The lavishly printed catalogue for the sale confirmed it: seventy-six pages bound inside a blue velvet cover designed for this annual “rarities of the world” sale. The one-cent magenta was shown in color on the title page and in black and white on page seventy-one, where it was listed, a bit breathlessly, as Lot No. 279 in the sale: “Unique, the rarest and most valuable stamp in the world.” The other pages of the catalog were packed with lesser treasures. A one-cent Benjamin Franklin from 1861 with a minimum bid of $9,000 was described as “fresh, fine, [a] handsome example of this great rarity.” An 1869 block of six ninety-cent stamps with Abraham Lincoln’s portrait was “very fine, a fabulous showpiece.” The next line said that only one other block of six was known to exist—and that the minimum bid was $13,500.
Some mistakes were expected to bring big money. Four lots featured one-cent stamps known as Pan-American Inverts from 1901. The stamps celebrated “Fast Lake Navigation,” according to the legend above the words “Postage One Cent,” but the impressive-looking ship in the center, like the Inverted Jennies later on, was upside down. Lot No. 136 was a two-cent Pan-American Invert that saluted “fast express.” Its train, with a smoke-belching locomotive trailed by old-fashioned coaches, was also upside down. A few sheets of the inverted stamps had somehow escaped whatever checking was done at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Philatelists assume that someone at the Bureau stopped the presses and turned the sheets around before they went through the second time. About two hundred misprints apparently slipped out and were spotted—and quickly sold—in at least four post offices.
The owner of the one-cent magenta, Frederick Trouton Small, had chosen Robert A. Siegel, a leading New York stamp dealer, to handle the sale. At the firm’s office in Midtown Manhattan, there was discussion about how to showcase the one-cent magenta as the star of the sale. Siegel’s wife, Miriam, hatched the idea of the velvet cover. She had two prototypes made, a green one and a blue one. She decided on the blue velvet cover. The firm also ordered brandy snifters with the firm’s logo on one side and a reproduction of the one-cent magenta on the other.
Despite the assurance on page seventy-one that the one-cent magenta was unique, in one respect it was not. It was one of three lots in the sale that were so rare that they did not carry estimated prices. The Apollo 11 first-day cover that comprised Lot No. 203 was practically brand-new. It had been issued six months earlier to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing and had been engraved with a die that had been aboard the lunar landing craft. Nearly nine million first-day covers were processed, more than for any other stamp in United States postal history. But this one was different. The colors were not aligned correctly. The dark blue of the earth was on the surface of the moon, and the red stripes of the American-flag shoulder patch on Neil A. Armstrong’s space suit almost at his elbow.
But it went unmentioned in the three-page introduction in the front of the catalogue, which was all about the one-cent magenta. The introduction recounted the “emergency shortage of regular stamps” in British Guiana that prompted the postmaster to order provisional stamps—and the improbable journey of this stamp from Vaughan to the unidentified “present owner.” Small’s identity was revealed only after the catalogue had gone to the printer.
“The eyes of the philatelic world are focused on the Louis XVI Room of the Waldorf-Astoria,” the catalogue announced, hinting at how the Waldorf was synonymous with New York itself. The Waldorf was where presidents and princes and playboys stayed. Herbert Hoover and General Douglas MacArthur had lived there. As stamp collectors knew, James A. Farley, the Postmaster General under Franklin D. Roosevelt, had lived at the Waldorf since the 1940s. What the catalogue did not hint at was how many people would want to be on hand. The auction had to be moved to the far larger Grand Ballroom to accommodate the crowd, which the New York Times carefully reported was “likely the largest ever for a stamp auction.”
The “rarities of the world” sale was a rite of spring for stamp collectors. Siegel’s stepson, Andrew Levitt, then thirty years old, presided, gavel in hand. In the crowd were notables like Robert Price, a former deputy mayor under John V. Lindsay, who repeated the rumor that “a band of Englishmen” had designs on the stamp and would bid for the queen, a prospect that had frightened some collectors into keeping their paddles in their laps when the one-cent magenta finally went on sale.
Another was Martin Apfelbaum, a dealer from Philadelphia who had grown the stamp business he took over from his father into the nation’s largest retail stamp operation. Apfelbaum’s father had sold his own collection in the Depression to make ends meet, and Apfelbaum, just out of college, would load his car with books of stamps and consign them to hobby shops and drug stores. By the 1960s, he was in the hunt for rarities, and he had money to spend. He bought a tractor-trailer-load of stamps for $150,000 in 1957. It took seven years to sell the twenty-five million stamps inside.
Though Weinberg presented himself as a small-town guy, he was not as unfamiliar with glamor and glitz as he claimed. For years he was a regular in Atlantic City, and with stamps as his calling card, he had connections. He became friendly with Frank Sinatra’s business manager, a fellow philatelist, and with a Manhattan hairstylist who introduced him to the salon’s A-list clients, among them Patti Page, Greer Garson, and Lena Horne.
Weinberg booked a suite at the Waldorf and holed up in it during the afternoon, away from the crowd that was building in the ballroom. He was jittery. He could not afford to tip his hand. He did not want to risk someone overhearing him make a casual remark and figuring out how much to bid against him. Weinberg feared that even his facial expressions would give him away, that competing bidders would realize he had other people’s money—lots of it, by Stamp World standards—and the authority to spend it, up to a point. Weinberg knew the major players, and they knew him. Siegel, the patriarch of the prestigious firm running the sale, was on hand; his stepson was its public face.
Andrew Levitt had started in the Siegel firm’s mail-room as a teenager. His stepfather had promoted him to auctioneer and then to vice president, and it was Levitt who would bring down the gavel on Lot No. 279. In his career he would sell scores of rarities, not all of them stamps—checks signed by Charles Dickens and Calvin Coolidge, and land grants signed by James Monroe. But he would brag about selling the one-cent magenta for the rest of his life, during which, by his tally, he sold more than three hundred million dollars’ worth of stamps.
We
inberg looked nervous when he walked into the Grand Ballroom. He tried to stay out of sight behind the curtains at the back of the room. Finally, when Levitt announced the one-cent magenta, with a minimum bid of $100,000— the crowd quieted down. Looking out from his lectern, Levitt saw several hands go up. They stayed up as Levitt pushed the bidding along, first in jumps of $20,000, then in spurts of only $10,000. At $200,000, Robson Lowe, perhaps the leading British dealer at the time, lowered his hand. Joseph L. Lincoln, a senior at Princeton who had been the stamp columnist for the Sunday Bulletin in Philadelphia since junior high school, recalled a “staring contest” between Weinberg and the Weills—Raymond and Roger, well-established New Orleans dealers with whom Weinberg did not want to duel. The New Yorker magazine noted the Weills had looked “calmer and calmer” and Weinberg “more and more nervous.”
“We figured this meant that the Weills weren’t going to go for it and Weinberg was,” The New Yorker concluded. The New York Times wrote that the Weills dropped out at $250,000. Weinberg kept his hand up. So did a Boston dealer, but not for long. After only one more round back and forth, which drove the price $30,000 higher, all the other hands had come down and Weinberg was the only bidder still standing—literally. He had been on his feet the whole time, pacing in the back of the ballroom. Levitt said what auctioneers always say before they pound the gavel—“fair warning.” Following the custom of not identifying buyers by name, he said the one-cent magenta was “going to I.W.” He did not have to say who Weinberg was. Well-wishers surrounded him.
It was over in about ninety seconds. Weinberg told me that he felt “euphoric”—and more than 40 years later, he was still so excited that he spelled out the word forward and backward. “A lot of people, including Mr. Weinberg, thought that Mr. Weinberg had acquired a bargain,” The New Yorker observed tartly. Weinberg was happy that the price was so far below the partners’ $500,000 limit. Apfelbaum said the chatter about possible British bidders had shaved at least $100,000 off the price.
There was some grumbling, louder than when Small bought the stamp, that Weinberg and his noncollector partners were transforming what should be a pastime for amateurs into a business. “A lot of people questioned spending that much,” Ken Martin, the executive director of the American Philatelic Society, told me. “Some questioned whether he was turning it into a commodity.” David Lidman of the New York Times, who covered the sale, quoted one of the Weill brothers as saying they preferred a customer “who has a warmth for stamps. It’s a waste to sell a rare stamp to someone who sticks it in a safe and forgets it.”
Weinberg stuck it in the safe, all right, but he did not forget it, and he did not let the world forget it. He marketed the stamp more exuberantly than Hind had. “What do I know, huh?” Weinberg told me. “I believe in ‘Camelot.’ I believe in stuff like that, I really do. I believe in The Great Gatsby.” He identified with Nick Carraway—“but I was going to become a Gatsby. That was my thinking.”
He was going to do it with hoopla and hype. The stamp was coddled and cooed over, and he was comped. Baby-boomer philatelists who had grown up figuring they would never see it marveled at—well, not its beauty. But taking it to stamp exhibitions was an element of Weinberg’s strategy. He wanted to build interest that would pump up the price when he decided it was time to part with it—or, as he put it, “I was trying to introduce it to the world, and maybe find a buyer.”
It turned out that Weinberg had a knack for stunts that generated publicity far beyond stamp magazines. In return for press releases and photo ops, airlines offered him free seats. Weinberg stole an idea from Mrs. Hind and once asked an armored car to take the stamp from the bank on Fifth Avenue to the airport—again, in return for the publicity. His plan was to slip the one-cent magenta into his briefcase, climb into the armored car, ride to the airport and fly off with the briefcase clutched in his lap. He even drummed up television coverage simply by telephoning a station in New York. A camera crew met him at the bank.
“It was uneventful,” Weinberg told me, “excepting that the armored car got lost on the way to the airport.” Weinberg rushed onto the plane with the stamp safe in his briefcase. Everything else he had packed for the trip— the luggage he checked at the gate—was lost.
The word spread. A Japanese delegation arrived in Wilkes-Barre to invite Weinberg to Tokyo. He was reluctant or coy—or both. “I said I really didn’t think I want to do it,” he remembered in 2015. “They said, ‘You don’t realize what this could be.’ I said, tell me. They said it would be shown in Tokyo the same way the Mona Lisa was, plus all expenses, plus ten-thousand dollars for my partners.” Off he went. He rode the bullet train and was the guest of honor at “parties galore.”
“Most of the time, I was in nirvana,” Weinberg said— even when things went wrong.
In 1978, Weinberg booked a trip to Toronto and another stamp show with an acronym—CAPEX, for Canadian Philatelic Exhibition. It celebrated the Universal Postal Union, the main forum for international cooperation among nations with postal networks, which Canada had joined one hundred years earlier.
Weinberg needed a new gimmick. The armored-car ride would no longer generate attention or press coverage, but he hit upon an idea that would: he would chain himself to his briefcase. He sent his teenage son to an army-navy store for a pair of handcuffs.
Weinberg was not afraid that the briefcase would be snatched and the stamp stolen. He did not even snap the handcuffs onto his wrist until the plane was about to land in Toronto. The handcuffs were a prop that would get the attention of the photographers he knew would surround him as he emerged from the jet bridge. Officials from the stamp show would promptly whisk him off to a news conference.
The reporters asked the usual questions—how much was the stamp worth, where had it been, what were his plans for selling it. As the news conference dragged on, Weinberg figured the photographers had their photographs, and the handcuff felt tight on his wrist. No one noticed as he slipped the key from his pocket and pushed it into the handcuff, and he kept his game face on as he turned the key and felt it break in his hand. “I thought it best not to say anything. I thought, just keep talking and worry about it later,” he said. “So, as things went along, one of the reporters said, ‘When are you going to take the handcuff off?’ I said, ‘A little later on, when I get to the room.’”
The reporters left. Weinberg broke the news to one of the organizers: He would remain shackled to his briefcase unless they found someone to free him. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll get somebody in here to help you,’” Weinberg recalled. Security guards borrowed hairpins and paper clips but could not open the handcuffs with them. A firefighter arrived a bit later and announced, “I have just the thing that will do it.” He left the room, only to return with a saw.
He was just starting to cut into the handcuffs when the door opened and one of the reporters returned. “He said, ‘I saw this guy coming in with a handsaw,’” Weinberg said. “‘Would you mind if I did a story about it and took a picture?’” Weinberg told me that he had not thought about mining the mishap for publicity, but he believed that any publicity was good publicity. Weinberg remembered thinking, “This is exactly what I would want if I could dream up a thing like this.”
The firefighter, though, would not hear of it. He said the fire department had rules, and one was no publicity. The reporter pleaded: “If you let us do this, I promise you it will be world news by tomorrow.”
The fireman relented when the reporter promised to keep him out of the photograph, and went back to sawing off the handcuffs.
The reporter was right, of course. The story was picked up around the world and in People magazine (which wrote that the steel was too thick for the firefighter’s hacksaw, and that Weinberg was freed with the help of a police officer’s key).
Weinberg became a minor celebrity. The one-cent magenta became a part of Weinberg’s identity, just as it had once become a part of Hind’s identity. He appeared on the g
ame show To Tell the Truth and on Mike Douglas’s talk show.
By then, he was saying the stamp was worth between $500,000 and $1 million.
TEN
$935,000
1980: “The Man Showed Up”
Weinberg cruised through the 1970s—literally. He crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth 2 with his briefcase in tow and the stamp locked inside. But by 1980, he was ready to cash out. It was time. He had watched his predictions come true, one by one. The economy had soured, inflation had surged, and so had interest rates—the prime was heading toward 20 percent. The stock market was languishing, and suddenly the most appealing investments were collectibles like stamps, which seemed immune to the ups and downs that were causing so many headaches.
A stockbroker quoted by the New York Times said he was fighting to break even on his stocks and bonds but making money on his collectibles. New York magazine echoed that idea with a page of investment advice headlined “Better Than Blue Chips.” It was about the intangible market for tangibles like stamps and more esoteric items, from cigar-box labels to Louis XVI armoires. Salomon Brothers—ruled by one of Wall Street’s monarchs, John H. Gutfreund, who had risen to power as the preeminent bond trader of his generation—began keeping track of what it diplomatically called “nontraditional investments” that were not traded on the stock exchanges. From 1969 to 1979, Chinese ceramics led the list with compounded annual yields of 18 percent, followed by rare books at 16.5 percent, and stamps at 15.4 percent. The conventional economic indicators in those years measured misery. The Consumer Price Index charged ahead at an annual rate of 6.1 percent.
The returns from collectibles seemed limitless, but some economists wondered about a modern-day tulipomania, one of the celebrated boom-and-bust episodes in economic history. The question was, how long could the bull market for collectibles—and, in particular, stamps—continue? When Stamps magazine asked Andrew Levitt, who had brought down the gavel at the auction of the one-cent magenta ten years before, he answered, “Possibly two more years.” That was in 1979.