One Cent Magenta Page 13

  Weinberg’s investors were not so sure. A couple of them threatened to force a distress sale and buy the stamp out from under him if Weinberg did not get the kind of price he was talking about, which was anything above $500,000. Weinberg dissuaded them and took the stamp to Robert A. Siegel, whose New York auction house had handled the 1970 sale.

  Weinberg seemed to lurch from one nail-biting encounter to another. The night before the sale, Siegel, obviously upset, tracked him down: “What am I going to do? We don’t have a bid.” Weinberg told Siegel to sell the stamp no matter what. Siegel replied, “My God, it will be a disaster, wreck my reputation.” Weinberg shrugged: “Nothing I can do about it.”

  Weinberg told me that Siegel’s mood had turned sunny by the time they saw each other on the morning of the auction. Siegel told him: “Irwin, everything I said to you last night, forget it. He, the man, showed up.”

  Weinberg did not ask who “the man” was, and Siegel did not tell him. And if Weinberg saw a thin man in his early thirties slip into the second or third row as the bidding began, Weinberg did not notice.

  Stamps were one of John E. du Pont’s passions. He loved buying them, loved assembling them into first-rate collections: stamps from Canada, stamps from the early days of the American postal system on cover, stamps from obscure places like Samoa, stamps that were the kinds of rarities that unlimited wealth could buy. He had other early stamps from British Guiana: du Pont amassed cottonreels, lots of cottonreels, as if he were assembling the most complete collection of cottonreels in private hands. “The queen had only twenty cottonreels,” du Pont’s onetime business manager, Victor Krievins, told me when I called him in early 2015. “John had thirty-three.”

  Du Pont was thrilled to own the one-cent magenta. He beamed when he whispered to insiders that he had bought it even as he used a pseudonym to use at stamp shows—Rae Maeder, an anagram of Demerara, the region in which the one-cent had been printed and issued. But du Pont did not see the stamp or handle it for the last fourteen years of his life, the fourteen years he spent in prison after killing the wrestler Dave Schultz. The one-cent magenta languished in one vault or another, in one bank or another, seen by almost no one—and after du Pont died in a prison hospital, could not be found.

  But only for seventy-two hours or so. Someone had put it in the wrong box.

  On the surface, the 2014 film Foxcatcher is about one man’s obsession with wrestling, but it is also about extreme wealth—and about who can afford expensive possessions like rare stamps. With its purchase by du Pont, the one-cent magenta had passed back into a world of money and privilege, and into the odd life of someone who used the fortune he inherited to purchase what he lacked: friendship, respect, and self-esteem.

  The title of the film referred to the estate on the Main Line outside Philadelphia where du Pont lived with his mother. The mansion itself was a work of art, an exact copy of Montpelier, the Virginia plantation that belonged to James and Dolley Madison. Du Pont’s grandfather had bought the original Montpelier as the twentieth century was dawning. Montpelier’s last private owner was du Pont’s aunt Marion duPont Scott [her preferred spelling]; after her death, du Pont joined his brother Henry in a lawsuit that they won. She had stipulated that Montpelier would go to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They moved to block the transfer unless they received compensation. Under the settlement that was worked out, they sold Montpelier to the National Trust for $2 million each—$4.57 million each in today’s dollars. The money to pay them came from a separate multimillion-dollar fund for upkeep of the house that she had also bequeathed to the National Trust.

  Du Pont’s early life had been a curious blend of overwhelming privilege and emotional isolation. Du Pont himself was born in 1938, the fourth and youngest child of Jean Liseter Austin and William du Pont Jr., the great-grandson of Éleuthère Iréneé du Pont, who had built the Delaware gunpowder mill that was the cornerstone of the world’s largest chemical company. William left when John was two and had little to do with the family. As du Pont acknowledged to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1986, William’s absence left a lasting scar. “I spent a lifetime looking for a father,” he declared. He claimed to have found one in Villanova’s legendary track-and-field coach, Jumbo Elliott. But that was before Villanova repudiated du Pont, shutting down the wrestling program he had underwritten with donations totaling more than $15 million.

  Du Pont also considered himself an athlete despite his lack of special talent. He had one great victory when he was in his late twenties, in the 1965 Australian national pentathlon. It was “a triumph that was essentially bought,” the New York Times said.

  The closest he came to the 1968 Olympics was in the comic pages of newspapers. He was the model for “Jeff Newtown, Olympic athlete” in the action-adventure comic strip Steve Canyon that year. Du Pont finally went to the Olympics in person in 1976, when he was thirty-eight, but not as a competitor on the pentathlon team. He was the team manager.

  His mother—an heiress to another old-money fortune, from a company that had built railroad locomotives—was competitive, and she passed that trait along to her son. She won more than three thousand ribbons, cups, trophies, and awards at horse shows, cattle shows, and dog shows. Du Pont said she encouraged his interest in collecting—Victor Krievins told me he saw invoices in Mrs. du Pont’s name for stamp purchases made by du Pont—but stamps were not his only fascination.

  Du Pont also assembled world-renowned collections of seashells and birds; he is credited with discovering some twenty species, including a Philippine parrot and a Mexican sparrow. He built the Delaware Museum of Natural History outside Wilmington to house his trove. He assembled enormous collections of everything from expensive silverware to tin toys to fine Staffordshire china. He also had an impressive cache of weapons, including a Civil War—era Gatling gun that he kept in the library of the family mansion. And then he focused on stamps and wrestling. Of all the rarities he owned, the centerpiece was the little red stamp he called the “magenta lady.”

  Some philatelists worried that he would damage it. Warwick Paterson, a New Zealand stamp dealer who knew du Pont, visited him once and “noted with dismay du Pont’s tendency to smoke whilst looking at his prize stamp,” Paterson’s son wrote after his father’s death. Warwick Paterson “feared that [the smoke] would further cause deterioration” to the stamp.

  He fancied himself a modern renaissance man but lived mostly out of the limelight. The Sunday papers did not show him in the boldface-name crowds at society parties and charity balls. He spent his money in other ways. He provided the local police department with equipment, including bulletproof vests and body armor developed by his family’s company. For more than thirty years, he let officers train at his private shooting range. He invited some of them to live on the estate. He gave one a second job raising quail and pheasant. Du Pont allowed the officer to sell the eggs—and a certain number of quail and pheasant—so long as he provided some for the house.

  In return, du Pont was permitted to play police officer, driving around with a badge and a siren as an honorary, unpaid officer. He even had a uniform. The organizations he financed mostly dismissed him as harmless. Officers regarded problems like excessive drinking as private matters.

  Du Pont took a seat in the audience at the 1980 auction, but he was so concerned about preserving his anonymity that he did not place his bid himself. The man sitting next to him did that—Krievins, who would later go to work for du Pont but who was on the auction-house staff at the time. One of Krievins’s jobs was to represent “secretive people who bought things quietly.” And du Pont was secretive. He wanted to grin inscrutably when asked if he was the owner—not saying yes, but not saying no, either—so Krievins acted as a surrogate who was under orders to be equally tight-lipped. “I bid on the stamp, and people said, ‘Who bought the stamp?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Krievins told me. Krievins kept the secret for years. “I never disclosed it, not even to my ex-father-in
-law, who was a stamp collector,” he told me.

  Du Pont hired Krievins away from the Siegel auction house in 1984. Krievins told me he functioned as a business manager, reviewing bills and approving payments, among other things: “It was a curse to be a du Pont. People saw that name and thought right away it was a license to steal. People were trying to double- and triple-bill him.” But most of all, Krievins had a hand in du Pont’s stamp purchases, two million dollars’ worth in the ten years he worked for him. When the stamps were sold after du Pont’s death, they went for a total of $17 million. “I always bought the best of the best,” Krievens told me, proudly.

  The bidding on the one-cent magenta opened at $325,000. The auctioneer this time was Robert A. Siegel himself. Andrew Levitt, the auctioneer in 1970, had left Siegel’s firm several years earlier. Weinberg, fretting that he and his partners would not see a big payday, relaxed as the bidding heated up. He had planned a gathering in his suite no matter what happened. Very soon he knew there would be nothing funereal about it. In less than a minute—fifty seconds—the sale was over. It sold for $935,000, a 337 percent profit for Weinberg and his partners. As the stamp was gaveled down, he sent his son to call the front desk and double the order of champagne.

  With forty-some stiffly formal rooms, du Pont’s mansion was, as the Philadelphia reporters Bill Ordine and Ralph Vigoda wrote in their book about du Pont, “more fief-dom than home.” It had its serfs and vassals, its peasants and knights, buzzing around a temperamental master. Of the people who came to surround du Pont as he bought more and more stamps, two—Robert P. Odenweller and Taras M. Wochok—had toyed with philately as boys. They did not grow up with du Pont’s unlimited cash. They scrimped and saved nickels and dimes from their allowances. They spent their dollars on a stamp they could mount on a page in an album, and then they would stare at the empty spaces on the rest of the page and long to buy another stamp, and another, and another. But there was something about philately—the near-obsessive joy of inquiring about obscure stamps and acquiring them—that would continue to captivate one of them as an adult: Odenweller, the would-be astronaut.

  The son of a West Pointer whose love of the Army ran so deep that he was buried on the grounds of the United States Military Academy, Odenweller graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1960. His ambition was to be an astronaut, and he had his sights set on the astronaut-training program. He was too young for the Project Mercury flights—the first seven astronauts had been chosen while he was in school, and he was thirteen years younger than the youngest of them, Gordon Cooper. But the wait was long. Years earlier, he had been treated to a flight with the record-setting test pilot Chuck Yeager. That only served to make him more determined. But there was a problem. He was too tall.

  The original seven astronauts were only five feet eight inches tall. The second group was two inches taller, and eventually six-footers joined the space program. Odenweller stands six feet two inches tall. A space suit is not a tank top or a hoodie—one size will not fit all, and he could not have squeezed into the first space suits, which were custom-made for the first astronauts (although the astronauts could swap suits if necessary). Odenweller knew all this, and hoped for another two-inch step, but it never happened. Faced with that reality—and a gallbladder operation—he resigned from the Air Force and became a pilot with Trans World Airlines.

  The career choice was deliberate. Flying for TWA would let him visit the far-off places whose stamps had intrigued him since childhood. “When I was seven years old,” he recalled when I met him in 2014, when he was in his seventies, “I was told by a guy who was at least triple my age, ‘If you ever want to be a success in stamp collecting, you have to pick a country you like, learn everything you can about it, get everything you can from it and, in short, become an expert.’” This was the path not taken by Arthur Hind. But Odenweller decided to specialize. “A year or so before that, I had spent the princely sum of two dollars on one New Zealand stamp. And my allowance was twenty-five cents a week, so I figured, with that much capital invested in New Zealand, I was committed for life.”

  Not until years later did he realize the difficulty of that commitment. It is considered particularly challenging to collect stamps from New Zealand because of the papers its stamps were printed on, the watermarks that were embedded in the papers, the inks that the printers used and the perforations—minutiae to someone mailing a letter, but matters of paramount importance to someone like Odenweller, who went on to spend his life analyzing and categorizing the differences in extreme detail. And he branched out beyond New Zealand.

  Life as an airline captain provided time during layovers for him to explore such things—and to meet and make friends with local experts and top exhibitors. Over the years, he immersed himself in what amounted to a decades-long graduate-level course in stamps from places like British Guiana: British colonies, or former colonies, with philatelic histories that dated to the earliest days of stamps. He edited a three-volume encyclopedia of nineteenth-century mail from Hawaii, whose history has enough of a British flavor that the state flag incorporates the Union Jack. He also assembled a prize-winning collection of stamps from the Australian island-state of Tasmania, which, after a long flight across the Pacific, is little more than a short hop from Sydney.

  There were other destinations, with other stamps and other postal histories to explore, and by the time Odenweller encountered du Pont, Odenweller had become a recognized expert. He joined the Royal Philatelic Society London, whose Expert Committee had declared the one-cent magenta to be real when Hind’s widow tried to sell it in the 1930s, and eventually was appointed to its governing council. And the Royal published two books that he wrote—in its usual limited editions. Odenweller had suggested that the Royal print six hundred fifty copies of his massively detailed study of nineteenth-century Samoan postal history and stamps. The chairman of the Royal’s publications committee was willing to allow only three hundred. But he stepped down before the book went to press, and after working through the manuscript, his replacement told Odenweller that the Royal would raise the print order, to five hundred copies. They sold out within a month.

  Each copy was numbered. No. 1 was sent to the queen and deposited in the Royal Philatelic Collection at St. James’s Palace. No. 2 went to someone who owned many of the stamps that Odenweller described in the book, a man who was in prison at the time it came out—John E. du Pont.

  Odenweller had met du Pont in 1980, not long after du Pont bought the one-cent magenta, when du Pont agreed to be a courier for Odenweller, or, more precisely, to be a courier for Odenweller’s insurance agent. Du Pont had taken his proud new purchase to a stamp collectors’ exhibition in New Zealand—under a pseudonym, of course. At the show, du Pont stopped at Odenweller’s exhibit, which won the top prize, and a dealer who was accompanying du Pont was explaining a page of stamps in Odenweller’s display.

  “How much is something like that worth?” du Pont asked.

  “Oh, about a quarter of a million dollars,” the dealer answered.

  Odenweller, recalling the conversation for me, added, “That got John’s attention.”

  Odenweller planned to leave his collection in place for the rest of the show. His insurance agent, who had policies on a number of philatelists, said he might or might not be able to take Odenweller’s stamps home. But the agent decided to go to Australia instead of the United States, and approached du Pont about returning the collection to its owner.

  Du Pont’s response was: “Sure, who does it belong to?”

  The insurance agent told him, and du Pont said, “Odenweller. Does he have a brother named Charlie?”

  He did. Du Pont remembered Charlie Odenweller from pistol shoots they had conducted a few years earlier in eastern Pennsylvania. And so du Pont agreed to carry Robert Odenweller’s stamps home.

  Du Pont soon invited Odenweller to Pennsylvania, sending a helicopter for him, and showed Odenweller around. It was Odenweller’s introducti
on to the world du Pont inhabited when he was not trying to be an athlete. It was the world of du Pont the collector.

  The mansion du Pont and his mother shared may have looked like Madison’s Montpelier, but Madison never installed a bank-vault door just off the main floor. Du Pont did, to seal off a large room that held a museum-quality diorama that looked like a slice of unspoiled Pennsylvania woods, with stuffed deer and other items not sent to the museum that housed his seashells and birds. The room also had a movie screen that dropped from the ceiling when du Pont wanted to watch first-run movies from Hollywood.

  The walls were lined with reminders of du Pont’s successes in philately. While his mother’s horsemanship trophies were downstairs for everyone to see, the ribbons and certificates that du Pont accumulated were relegated to this room. He only had to look up to see how good he was, how well he had done at this stamp show or that exhibition. Over the years, he did very well indeed: he won more grand prix awards than anyone in the United States. The grand prix awards are the best of the best of the best; only collectors who have won multiple gold medals in international exhibitions are eligible for grand prix awards.

  But even with the bank-vault door, du Pont did not keep the one-cent magenta in the mansion. It lay in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in which du Pont was the largest safe-deposit customer, and he drove Odenweller there to look at the stamp. Just outside the vault, at a narrow counter, du Pont opened his safe-deposit box. There, on a card, sat the rarest, most expensive stamp in the world. Du Pont picked it up, but the one-cent magenta fell to the floor. Du Pont offhandedly reached to retrieve it with his bare fingers. Odenweller blanched, careful collector that he is, and distressing thoughts flashed through his mind: What if dirt or sweat from du Pont’s hands damaged it? Worse, what if it tore?