One Cent Magenta Read online

  They did not see Weitzman. Neither did I, and I wouldn’t have recognized him—I’m not a regular at fashion shows or Oscar-night after-parties. But he was there, above it all. Weitzman told me on the phone from Spain that he had sat through the auction behind the curtains of a skybox at Sotheby’s, which is why no one in the crowd noticed him. And he told me that it was not his first time in a skybox there. He told me about being outbid at another Redden auction, and I wondered if he was the mystery owner of a 1933 “double eagle” gold coin. Like the one-cent magenta, it was one of a kind, the only 1933 double eagle that was not melted down and disposed of when the United States went off the gold standard. Redden sold it for $7.59 million in 2002, at the time the highest price ever paid for a coin.

  A unique object, sold by Redden to an anonymous bidder. It sounded like something that would appeal to the buyer of the one-cent magenta. And Weitzman knew too much about the lengths to which the New-York Historical Society had gone to display the precious coin.

  Weitzman told me that he pretty much gave up stamp collecting in his late teens. In college he studied real estate and accounting, and aspired to be what he called “one of these geniuses on Wall Street.” But drawing and painting had been a hobby, and he sketched some shoes when he was an undergraduate that got noticed—first by a classmate, who showed the sketches to his father, a shoe manufacturer. The father called Weitzman in and asked where Weitzman had copied them from.

  “Nowhere,” Weitzman said. “I didn’t copy them.”

  The father ripped up one of the sketches and told Weitzman to draw it. He did. The father bought the rest of Weitzman’s sketches at $25 apiece and started making shoes from Weitzman’s designs. Weitzman figures that he made $12,000 drawing shoes while he was in college—although, as he told the story nearly fifty years later, he was still annoyed he had never been paid for the sketch he had to redraw.

  He forgot about the Wall Street career, but he never forgot about the one-cent magenta. He heard about the coming sale from Redden. They knew each other from past auctions, none involving stamps. Redden said the one-cent magenta was being consigned from, as Weitzman described it later, “the estate of this guy who was in prison”—du Pont—and eventually it would be put up for sale. Was Weitzman interested? “Of course I was,” Weitzman said. He lined up some partners, but after they dropped out, he decided to go all in and bid on his own.

  And then Redden showed him the stamp. “It took me back to my childhood,” Weitzman told me. “It was sort of like going back to the house I grew up in”—which he did once, in the 1990s. “I thought I grew up in this giant house—when you’re six, you’re seven, it’s all you know, but of course it wasn’t when I was fifty and I took my kids to see it.”

  The stamp also looked tiny. He took in the color, and dismissed the naysayers who complained that the stamp had faded almost beyond recognition. “I expected to see magenta, and I saw magenta, darkened over time, but it was magenta,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it bordeaux, burgundy, red, or fuchsia. It was magenta, it is magenta.”

  From past auctions, he had learned to play down Redden’s numbers. “He puts out these estimates. I said to him, ‘David, it’s not going to get close to ten million.’ He said, ‘No, it’s at least fifteen, it may go to twenty.’” This was Redden’s pre-auction salesmanship, trying to get likely bidders so excited that they would send more than they were inclined to spend.

  In the end, Weitzman’s calculus was better than Redden’s—the price was not that far from $10 million, but nowhere near $15 million. “When it hit eight, there were only two people left, and that guy didn’t want it as much as I did,” Weitzman told me.

  “Or he didn’t have that childhood album that had stuck with him for sixty years.”

  His older brother had tried stamp collecting, and Weitzman picked up where he had left off, using the same albums, “partially filled up with easy-to-find stamps.” His hobby took on an urgency when he broke his leg playing baseball in the street. “I made a really fantastic catch on a deep fly ball off the handle of a shovel—that’s how you got your best bats, you cut off your father’s snow shovel hoping he never found out,” he said. “I caught this ball one-handed, and when I landed, my foot landed on the curb but my heel went down to street level. That snapped the bone that connects the ankle to the shin, but I held on to the ball. I was so proud of hanging on to that ball.”

  It was such a bad break that he finished the school year at home. He was not going to live out the cliché about all work and no play, but he could not play in the street, so he played with stamps, even sending his mother to the post office to buy whole sheets of new issues. “I started filling albums with things I could find—once in a while, things you thought were worth a penny were worth fifty dollars,” he said.

  He knew what the one-cent magenta looked like from the image in his hand-me-down album. He knew what it was from a comic book.

  Donald Duck and the Gilded Man was published in 1952, when Weitzman was ten. It had an operatically complicated plot that sent Donald Duck and his nephews to Guiana in search of the one-cent magenta. There they hired a helicopter to take them into the jungle, where, a reliable source had told them, they would find the man who had the stamp, Mr. El Dorado, the gilded man. Young comic-book readers might or might not have understood the playful twist on the name of the rich and surprisingly forgetful stamp collector Philo T. Ellic, whose name was a clumsy play on philatelic. But surely they were rooting against a conniving rival of Donald’s who turned out to be the sole heir of Miss Susiebell Gander. And of course the envelope bearing the stamp had been addressed to her.

  Every page had some development that could induce a fresh fantasy in a boy’s mind, but Weitzman was realistic. He figured the comics were as close as he would ever come to the one-cent magenta. Years later, an art history professor in college said much the same thing to him about post-Impressionist paintings: “You will not own any of these, museums will. You will never get to own them.”

  Weitzman was not interested in owning post-Impressionist paintings. But he took the words “you will never get to own them” as a challenge. Someday, he had to own the one-cent magenta.

  Once he did, two things happened: he went looking for his boyhood stamp albums, and the overtures began—the overtures from museums that wanted to display the one-cent magenta.

  He could not find the album with the blank space for that stamp, but he found his other album, which had had a blank space for the Inverted Jenny. Filling that space now presented a problem for Weitzman. It could hold only one Inverted Jenny, and not long after Weitzman bought the one-cent magenta, he acquired four, not just any four, but the plate block, a four-stamp square, the quartet from the original sheet that was next to the serial number of the printing plate—8493. On most plate blocks, the number is marginalia. Philatelists are passionate about marginalia, which they call selvage, but anyone can see its importance on this plate block. The digits, in blue, like the little airplanes, are upside down.

  As for the feelers from museums about the one-cent magenta, Weitzman was secretive, just as he had been at the auction. He told Redden to tell officials at each museum nothing more than, “You’ll be getting a call from the owner’s representative.”

  So Allen R. Kane, the director of the National Postal Museum in Washington, scheduled a meeting with a deep-voiced caller who gave his name as “Stuart Alan.” Kane told me he believed Stuart Alan was an adviser to the owner—an adviser no one at the museum had heard of. Maybe he was more of a business adviser than a philatelist, maybe a marketing type who could evaluate a plan for displaying the one-cent magenta and generating the publicity to bring in crowds. “I was told a team was going to come down,” Kane said. “I didn’t put one and one together.”

  The museum occupies a block-square building built just before World War I as part of a master plan to revive sleepy Washington in ways that suggested Rome and Paris. Those were the days when post offices were
temples—grand structures that imparted confidence in government. And the Washington post office was one of the grandest. As a museum, its collection includes six million objects, from tiny stamps to full-size mail trucks to the anthrax-laced letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in 2001.

  Stuart Alan passed through the metal detectors inside the tall brass doors, and Kane led him into the main gallery. It was a fast-food restaurant after the building was decommissioned as a post office—philatelists marvel that Kane managed to reclaim it—and it is named for the hedge-fund billionaire William Gross, a stamp collector who was the major donor to the fund for its remodeling. The first time I visited the museum, in 2014, Kane was ebullient, racing through the gallery, showing me President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sketches for stamps. Those sketches, now brown ink on brownish paper, reminded me that I had read that FDR, a lifelong stamp collector, had “assumed complete control over stamp issues.” One year when he was in office, the Post Office even reported a million-dollar profit.

  Kane also demonstrated a computer that took my photograph and put it on a replica of a stamp—my face, right-side up, where the Inverted Jenny belonged—and he asked me a question he had asked Weitzman: “What do you think was the biggest-selling American commemorative stamp?” On the wall was a poster of the thirty-two-cent Marilyn Monroe stamp from 1995. The power of suggestion being what it is, I gamely gave the same answer as Weitzman: Marilyn Monroe.

  Wrong, Kane told me, probably with the same glee as when Weitzman had stood in the same spot. The record belongs to the twenty-nine-cent Elvis Presleys from 1993. (Two versions were issued. The portrait of Presley holding a microphone was the same on both. One said “Elvis Presley,” the other simply “Elvis.”)

  Kane showed Weitzman an alcove where he wanted to install the one-cent magenta in a case with special lighting and special glass to keep the stamp from fading. Kane’s team talked about promoting the exhibition online. They talked about the museum’s technical specialists and, as Kane put it, “what we could do to clean it up or whatever.” Kane was succinct. “It’s kind of dark. We have the best paper conservators in town, and they’re ready to go.”

  Kane’s team was puzzled about Stuart Alan and why he seemed preoccupied with shoes. “We have this one interactive display in the museum where you can do a search for any topic,” Ted Wilson, the museum’s registrar, told me. “He does a search for shoes—stamps with shoes on them. We’re looking at each other like, what’s with the shoes?” The top officials at the museum, Wilson said, were “a bunch of guys who have a limited knowledge of women’s shoes.”

  Stuart Alan listened to their pitch and said he wanted the other person on his team—his executive vice president, Barbara Kreger—brought in. Someone asked where she was, and Stuart Alan instructed them to go to the street corner in front of the museum. A staffer went outside, and there she was, a stylish-looking woman carrying a small hard-shell case.

  Just as they were clueless about Stuart Alan, they did not realize that she was the woman who had launched more than a million shoes, Weitzman’s output since he hired her in the late 1970s. “She has a model’s foot,” Weitzman told me, explaining that his designs don’t go into production without her approval. (In 2015 Weitzman’s company was owned by Coach, but he retained creative control over the shoes.)

  Kane’s people found a chair and seated her next to Stuart Alan, who said, “You won.” Now Kane’s people were even more puzzled, until Ms. Kreger put the case on the table and they saw what was inside. She had had the one-cent magenta the whole time, and Stuart Alan— Stuart Alan Weitzman—finally came clean and identified himself as the owner.

  Weitzman told me later that he had considered lending it to the British Museum. He said the curators there had offered to display the one-cent magenta in a gallery with an original copy of Magna Carta that drew 250,000 visitors a year, but London was too far away. Patriotism also tugged at him. “I’m American,” he said.

  Besides, with 400,000 visitors a year, the postal museum packs in more people.

  These days, stamps are museum exhibits, relics of a world that knew the world from stamps. Once, stamps were tantalizing because they had gone places. And they depicted places most people would never see: exotic destinations. “We can capture a giraffe stamp from Tanganyika, even if we cannot go there and shoot one, and we can trap a kookaburra bird for our stamp album even if we never see Australia,” Ellis Parker Butler observed in 1933. The writer William Styron recalled that “[d]uring the philatelic period of my late childhood,” he thrilled to the stamps from Greece and Guatemala in his album, but “none so arrested my imagination or so whetted my longing for faraway places” as Elobey, Annobón, and Corsico. He used the names of those far-off colonies in the Gulf of Guinea as the title of a short story that invoked a boyhood stamp album whose trophy was a stamp from those very islands. The story was about how the owner of a such a stamp album grew up to be “an unwilling visitor to one of those faraway places” as a soldier in World War II, how the dread of wartime drowned out the past, and how he longed to be back in his parents’ living room, “merely dreaming of one of those places rather than actually being in one.” The world conjured by stamps, the world of the imagination, was a better place.

  Styron’s generation came of age when the United States had a philatelist-in-chief who, as a young man, “came to think of himself as cosmopolitan, and not just because his extensive stamp collection made him a whiz at geography.” As president, FDR’s stamp albums weighed down his luggage. And from 1910 to 1936, Britain had a king who longed to spend three afternoons a week with his stamp collection. Ivory soap sponsored a radio program for stamp collectors, and a few colleges added courses in philately to the curriculum. Those were the days, too, when New York City still had a stamp district, a short walk from City Hall and the church where George Washington began his first Inauguration Day in 1789. But the stamp dealers who populated Nassau Street (and advertised in magazines as seemingly unrelated as The New Yorker and Popular Mechanics) have disappeared. In 1994, the Subway Stamp Shop hauled away 250 tons of stamps and reinvented itself in Altoona, Pennsylvania. It has been 280 miles from the New York subway ever since.

  Stamp collecting was once so popular that whole magazines devoted to stamps rolled off the presses, week after week or month after month, with articles that sounded as if they should have been master’s theses: “The Head of Queen Victoria on the Penny and Two-Penny Stamps” or “Winter Mail Service Across the Straits of Northumberland, From Prince Edward Island to the Mainland of New Brunswick.” Some sounded less abstruse. In 1941 a Los Angeles schoolteacher who was a well-known philatelist moved to Holton, Kansas—population three hundred—to take charge of a publication called Weekly Philatelic Gossip. Holton was “a very strategic place” for such a publication. Why? His explanation had the kind of complicated precision that a stamp lover would appreciate. Holton, Kansas, stood at “the intersection point of the diagonals of the United States, 1,700 miles from each corner—the northwest, the northeast, the southwest and the southeast.”

  Stamp magazines hardly had the circulation or advertising base of the Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s. But like the Internet a couple of generations later, they reached the eyeballs their advertisers wanted to reach, even if they were tired eyeballs, eyeballs in need of magnifying glasses, and there were fewer and fewer of them. Weekly Philatelic Gossip went out of business in 1961; membership in the American Philatelic Society peaked in 1988 at nearly fifty-eight thousand. By the time Redden was selling the one-cent magenta, the society counted only thirty-two thousand members. “The ranks of hardcore collectors … are thinning,” The New Yorker magazine wrote in 2015. “For the young, postage stamps can hardly compete with smart phones.”

  Kids don’t collect stamps the way they did in the 1950s and 1960s, when Weitzman was growing up. And no wonder. Stamps don’t deliver the action-adventure high of video games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown or Mass Effect 3. Stamp
s don’t come with sci-fi suits of armor or alien pals or command of your own spaceship, and stamps don’t let you rack up points for bashing what’s left of the human population with a supercharged wrench.

  That may be. But the why-collect-stamps question was the wrong question because the one-cent magenta is different from other stamps and has been since the experts affirmed its uniqueness toward the end of the nineteenth century.

  With that affirmation came a transformation. It was no longer an ordinary stamp, a disposable element on a newspaper that was itself disposable. From the 1870s on, the one-cent magenta was prized, tucked away in closely watched storage cabinets in palaces or vaults in banks. It fit the definition for collected objects prescribed by the cultural historian Philipp Blom in 2011. Such things “are like holy relics,” he wrote. “They have shed their original function and become totems, fetishes.” Whoever buys an object like the one-cent magenta is not seeking status, Blom added: “Real collectors are after something else … The real value of a piece lies not in its auction price, but in the importance it has in the collection.”

  But what kind of collector is Stuart Weitzman? Surely, the one-cent magenta had an emotional pull—the boyhood story about the blank spot in his album was true— but Weitzman repeated what Redden had said about him just after the auction, that he was “not really” a stamp collector but a collector of one-of-a-kind objects. He favors Americana, but he is, above all, pragmatic. He found the one-cent magenta’s rarity compelling.