One Cent Magenta Page 2

  “According to the story,” Redden said, “he lit a cigar and used the same match to light the stamp and burn it. Part of the delight of the story is the cigar and the plutocrat. The image that creates in one’s mind is indelible. Nobody knows if it’s true.”

  Redden also told me at the cocktail party that he wanted to have this one-cent magenta “expertized” in London. Redden is the son of an American diplomat and spent much of his childhood in London, and he pronounced it the British way, or so I assumed—“exper-teased.” But there was, um, a negotiation. He said this with an inflection that conveyed the notion of “a problem.”

  And then he said the negotiation was about the benzene.

  I laughed.

  Benzene—the word, not the chemical itself—was a madeleine. Almost any mention of benzene that hasn’t exploded and hurt or killed somebody brings back a memory of the apartment I lived in when I was a year out of college. It was a find: spacious, distinctive, and almost affordable, and the brownstone next door belonged to a man with a thunderous Orson Welles—like voice. He said that when he was in the OSS in World War II and assigned to drive the magazine publisher Henry Luce around, he had made up the answers to every question Luce asked—and that, in time, every made-up answer appeared in Time.

  That left me wondering what to believe when he began insisting that my landlord was storing benzene in the basement in a fifty-five gallon drum. Whenever we ran into each other, the neighbor would talk about the benzene in the basement and how it was going to blow us all up. Sometimes, after a particularly dramatic pause, he would whisper, “To smithereens.” He had Welles’ profundity, Welles’s gravitas, and in my mind, “benzene” became the takeaway, the “Rosebud” of West Seventy-fifth Street.

  Nobody really keeps benzene in the basement, right? But there are alligators in the sewers, aren’t there? Why not benzene in the basement?

  Hearing Redden say “benzene” took me back not to childhood, as “Rosebud” did for Charles Foster Kane, but to that moment of absurdity in my early twenties—and, inevitably, to other memories from those days, when, it seemed, you could still keep track of the world in time-honored ways. It was a world with newspapers, though not as many as there once were, and television networks, though not as many as there soon would be. And it was still a world with old-fashioned stamps.

  But now “benzene” was carrying me to a new place, Stamp World. Redden’s mention of benzene would send me hunting down the story of the one-cent magenta— and the resourcefulness of the local postmaster who commissioned it, the charming boyhood dreams of the men who chased after it, and the fulfillment, as adults, for the few who owned it, including du Pont, who bought it sixteen years before he shot Dave Schultz.

  Redden didn’t see anything funny about my benzene story. Of course he didn’t. He was preoccupied with getting what he wanted, a certificate from the Royal Philatelic Society London attesting to the stamp’s authenticity. The Royal, as it is known, is the world’s foremost body of stamp collectors. On questions of whether a stamp is what it appears to be, the Royal has had the final say for generations. It was the Royal that had vouched for the one-cent magenta in the 1930s. And, in the 1990s, when another one-cent magenta was discovered in Romania, it was the Royal that declared the second one-cent magenta to be bogus.

  For Redden, the issue was whether officials of the Royal would insist on dunking the one-cent magenta in benzene, which, he said, stamp collectors sometimes do when they want to check the paper on which a stamp was printed. A benzene bath, really little more than a dip in a few drops of the stuff, would show more than watermarks on the paper that are hard to see any other way. If a stamp had been tampered with, the ink would run and the fake markings would disappear. The risk of dipping a one-of-a-kind stamp in what is basically lighter fluid is that, authentic or not, it could be destroyed. Dunk. Poof. No more stamp.

  It was not a risk Redden could afford. Not if he was to sell the stamp for at least $10 million.

  TWO

  Travels with David

  David Redden is a master of the aristocratic soft sell, urbane and airily entertaining in his pinstripe suits, shuttling between potential sellers and potential buyers, operating quietly, stoking interest. He arranged the Magna Carta auction so quietly that Sotheby’s did not tell its own employees why it was rescheduling other auctions. James Zemaitis, the director of Sotheby’s 20th-century design department, was asked to give up a room at Sotheby’s headquarters that he had reserved for a pre-auction exhibition of his own. “All they told me was: ‘David Redden is selling this really important document, the most important document of all. Can you give up this room for us?’” he recalled. “‘And I’m like, ‘Sure, but what is he selling, the Magna Carta?’”

  Redden was thrilled to be selling the one-cent magenta. “I was born a collector,” he said in a voice that masks ambition, determination, and, sometimes, the extreme patience needed to convince the owners of some rare object to part with it. He told me that he spent years courting the elders of the Boston church that owned the Bay Psalm Book, the first bound volume printed in the North American colonies. In 2013 it became the most expensive book ever sold at auction, when he gaveled down a bid of $14.165 million (equivalent to $14.4 million today).

  How much effort he had to put into corralling the one-cent magenta is unclear. Redden said he approached Taras M. Wochok, John E. du Pont’s lawyer, who was charged with selling du Pont’s holdings after he died in prison. Redden told me that he pursued the one-cent magenta because of the emotional pull. He had collected stamps when he was a boy.

  When I told Wochok about that, he said flatly, “We called him.”

  Later I would also learn that no one uses benzene in authenticating stamps anymore. And that every schoolboy does not know about the stamp he was pursuing.

  That pursuit took Redden to Pennsylvania to inspect the one-cent magenta in the bank vault where it had lain during du Pont’s years in prison—and take it away, on consignment. It was mounted on an album page. Redden realized how unlikely the scene was: five or six people— Redden, Wochok, a couple of bank employees, and a couple of assistants—were hunched over a dot of paper, the rarest stamp in the world. Redden told me later that he had been “terrified of damaging it in some way” as he prepared a condition report, a routine auction-house document describing an item that was anything but routine. “You’re looking at a tiny, tiny slip of paper which is worth millions of dollars with the obvious concern that any little scratch or nick is highly consequential,” Redden said.

  Gently, Redden put the stamp in a box that he had brought along, and put the box in his briefcase. He walked out of the bank and climbed into a car-service car that drove him to the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, where he boarded a train for New York, accompanied by a security guard.

  Redden went to London a few weeks later for one reason. He wanted a piece of paper about the piece of paper in his briefcase—the one-cent magenta. He got the piece of paper he wanted in an afternoon, far faster than anyone thought he would. What it said, though, was more than he wanted. With its careful language, that piece of paper would put experts on one side of the Atlantic at odds with experts on the other—and cause headaches for Redden later on.

  Redden traveled light, as he usually does. He carried nothing more than his briefcase and a small suitcase with a change of clothes. At John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, he stowed the briefcase above his seat and settled in. A couple of hours later, as the plane bucked against the late-winter wind above the North Atlantic, he realized that the in-flight movie was about an elaborate caper to steal $20 million—Ridley Scott’s thriller The Counselor, about a corrupt Texas lawyer and a drug cartel. Redden chuckled at the thought that, right there on the plane, he had something in his briefcase that could be worth that much.

  Only one other person on the plane knew that: the taciturn guy in the seat across the aisle, the security guard Sotheby’s had hired to safeguard th
e stamp (as well as Redden).

  The nine people with the power to issue the piece of paper Redden wanted were eager to see the one-cent magenta, if only to be able to say they had examined something that had been out of view for so long. These nine people were the Expert Committee of the Royal Philatelic Society London, a best-of-the-best group that gathers about nine times a year to pass judgment on stamps. The Royal traces its roots to a stamp group founded in 1869 and is a peculiarly British institution; both eccentricity and good manners are the norm in its corridors. The Royal’s library is a haven for active-duty research. Some of the books on its shelves are scarcer than a rare stamp. It has writing tables and dark wood, and as they enter, visitors might suspect that they are crossing the threshold of a private club.

  But the Royal’s members know that appearances could backfire on them. They know that an outsider could see them as cantankerous, wacky, and quaint types with bad teeth whose lives are invested in obscure books like Swaziland Philately to 1968 or Sudan: The Postal Markings, 1867—1970. They know how lucky they were that Monty Python’s Flying Circus did not mock the Royal the way it mocked so much else in British life.

  Perhaps that is why the Royal had a “mission statement” that read, “We may be venerable … but we are not stuffy.” Still, the Royal’s history is formidable. Its president from 1896 to 1910 was the Duke of York (who was also the Prince of Wales from 1901 on). The historian David Can-nadine writes that the Duke of York had been pointed toward philately when he was in his thirties by his uncle, the Duke of Edinburgh, who sold his own stamp collection to his brother, who was the Prince of Wales at the time and was known in the royal family as “Bertie.” And Bertie passed the stamps along to his son, the Duke of York. Another biographer, John Gore, wrote that “it was in this hobby that he found the most effective means” of escape from World War I. He was serious about philately and serious about not being disturbed while he was tending to his stamps. “For some thirty years or more, whenever in London he devoted around three afternoons a week to his collection,” according to a monograph from the Royal Philatelic Collection. He “is said to have been interrupted by his page on only two or three occasions.”

  He was the royal who was a regular at the Royal. He attended the society’s meetings and once read a paper on “postal issues of the United Kingdom during the present reign,” the reign at that moment being Bertie’s, who was King Edward VII. The society reported that he “showed a most interesting and valuable display of essays, proofs and specimens.”

  He relinquished his position with the Royal to take on a somewhat larger one, as King George V, but his passion for stamps did not diminish with his ascension to the throne. The biographer Kenneth Rose wrote that “courtiers … were pressed into service” to track down stamps and send them back to London. Rose quoted a note from one royal attendant to another: “The King is delighted to hear that you are endeavouring to pinch as many stamps for him as you can during your travels.” During World War I, a young diplomat named Harold Nicolson was assigned to obtain a rare batch of stamps on which the word “Levant” had been misprinted. Nicolson—who was elected to the House of Commons after quitting the Foreign Office and who later proved to be a prolific author, turning out everything from political disquisitions to murder mysteries—thought that he (and the king) had more important things to do while the Tommies were in the trenches. Nicolson dismissed stamps as “mere scraps of paper” and complained in his Diaries and Letters, published in the mid-1960s, that for years “George V did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.”

  One young diplomat even worried that stamps could kill the king. After a case of smallpox was reported in a Mideast printing plant, Rose wrote that the anxious attaché was scared that “the royal tongue might be contaminated,” presumably if George V licked the stamps, which he was unlikely to do. Still, the diplomat “assiduously boiled his entire offering of four hundred stamps in a saucepan” before sending them to London. Reading about the episode when I was deep in Stamp World, I imagined the diplomat reciting the witches’ chant from Macbeth. But he probably landed in hot water himself, if only briefly. Sterilizing stamps in a stove-top cauldron would be as destructive as the benzene dip that would so trouble Redden in 2014.

  While still the Duke of York, the would-be king had acquired the penny and two-pence Post Office Mauritius stamps of 1847, the first stamps issued by a colonial post office. That fact is often mentioned in the same breath as a delightful anecdote as dubious as the one about Arthur Hind and the cigar: The Duke was asked if he had heard that “some damned fool” had paid £1,400 for one of those stamps. “Yes,” he said. “I was that damned fool.”

  The Royal celebrated King George’s jubilee in 1935 as only it could, with an exhibition of seven hundred pages of rarities assembled by ninety of its members. The Royal still enthusiastically describes it as “the greatest gathering of rare material of the British Empire to be shown together in a single exhibition.”

  For all the pride the members radiated as they hung their pages on the Royal’s display boards and all the pomp and pageantry that went with the king’s tour, there was one stamp that he did not see: the one-cent magenta. It would not arrive until several months after his death, and then only for the same kind of validation that Redden would seek nearly eighty years later. Indeed, it was the Expert Committee’s verdict in the fall of 1935 that set the stage for the stamp’s return, in Redden’s briefcase, in the spring of 2014.

  One person on the Expert Committee in 1935 had examined the one-cent magenta decades earlier, before the Expert Committee had even been established. The British philatelic pioneer Sir Edward Denny Bacon had confirmed the stamp’s one-of-a-kind status in 1891. That would complicate the Expert Committee’s work later on, because anyone who questioned the stamp’s authenticity would be questioning the authority of one of the Royal’s most respected members.

  Bacon had a nose for forgeries. He had been so troubled by the proliferation of fake stamps in the 1890s that he had proposed setting up the Expert Committee to decide what was real and what was not. He even made the use of technology, such as it was in the late nineteenth century, a part of the Expert Committee’s mandate, directing the committee to photograph each and every specimen it analyzed.

  But the one-cent magenta was not photographed in 1891 because it didn’t officially go before the committee. Bacon saw it in Paris, where it resided at the time. The question was whether it was genuine. “Doubts have more than once been expressed about the ‘face’ value of this stamp,” Sir Edward wrote, “but after a most careful inspection, I have no hesitation whatever in pronouncing it a thoroughly genuine specimen.” But in the next sentence of his account, Sir Edward created a problem for later Expert Committees: he recorded that it was “somewhat rubbed,” which left open the possibility that it had been altered. That possibility would plague the stamp for generations. Even after World War II, the collector Maurice Burrus argued that the one-cent magenta had been created from a somewhat less rare four-cent stamp. In other words, someone had “doctored” the stamp.”

  Sir Edward, though, was adamant: “This was never done,” he declared.

  There is no way to know what Sir Edward himself believed was the cause of the “rubbing”—he didn’t say—but in 1935, Sir John Wilson was well aware of Burrus’s claim and “took extreme precautions in vetting the specimen.” He had it photographed by Colonel W.R. Mansfield, another stalwart of the Royal. Wilson wrote that he “warned Colonel Mansfield of the suggestion that the ‘FOUR CENTS’ label could have been altered, and [Mansfield] was very definitely of the opinion that no such thing had been done.” Wilson reached the same conclusion after a close look at the little stamp: “[T]he magenta-surface paper of British Guiana is material extremely difficult to handle from the faker’s point of view,” he wrote, “and it is quite impossible to take out a letter, alter two more, take out another letter and, what Monsieur Burrus seems to have forgotten, the full po
int after it, without creating tremendous abrasion of the surface which should readily be observed by any trained eye[.]” The stamp had to be the real thing.

  Redden was determined to have the Expert Committee repeat that finding.

  First, though, he took the stamp to the one place in London that mattered more than the Royal: a room in St. James’s Palace, built by Henry VIII as he was breaking with the Roman Catholic Church and establishing a more flexible alternative so he could divorce and remarry as he pleased. Inside St. James’s, over two fireplaces, are the initials ‘HA,’ for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. This is where she spent the night of her coronation.

  Prince Charles (the Prince of Wales) and the Duchess of Cornwall (the former Camilla Parker Bowles) live within the grounds of St. James’s. Its Chapel Royal is where Prince William paid his last respects to his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997, and where William’s son, Prince George, was baptized in 2013. And that’s only the recent history.

  But St. James’s is considered a “working palace,” with offices for the Royal Household. The Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps works there (and the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom is, officially, the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s). The Yeomen of the Guard have their headquarters there. And it is home to the Royal Philatelic Collection, the most complete collection of British postage stamps in the world. The albums contain every stamp ever issued by Great Britain and its colonies except one—the one-cent magenta.