regretted it,” Forbes asserted later, “because it was a slow news moment, and it did get huge amounts of publicity.”
At the Forbes Galleries, curator Margaret Kelly took over. She had learned of the price paid for the acquisition from the radio. The Jefferson table already stood against an angled wood-paneled wall in the narrow Carrère gallery on the ground floor. Recessed in the wall above the table was a diorama containing a miniature replica of Jefferson’s bedroom and study at Monticello. On the table, Kelly had draped a tacky wood crate with salmon-colored velvet, and she now positioned the bottle at an angle, nestled in the fabric, with the engraving showing. Next to it, under glass, were the three Jefferson letters.
Upstairs, in the company offices, there were a lot of raised eyebrows. Malcolm was known to do crazy things, but this set a new bar. Kip’s siblings, however, understood. Their father had wanted something. There really hadn’t been any choice.
Years later, Len Yablon, who had a wine cellar at home but was partial to a good cocktail, would recall that at the time he thought it was “meshuggah”—
this was a bottle of wine, not a Rolls Royce!
—“but it ended up genius.” Still, he acknowledged, a public company could never have gotten away with such an expenditure. That was the joy of working at Forbes—business and fun were never far apart, whether it was owning a motorcycle distributorship or a bottle of wine that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Yablon never knew what was next: A party in Morocco? A balloon trip across the ocean? But of his forty-one years at the company, the purchase of the bottle still ranked, two decades later, as his most unusual experience working for a very unusual man. It reminded him of a great naval battle that lasts only an hour but goes down in history.
O N THE NIGHT of the auction, in the northern German city of Hamburg, a telephone rang in a house east of Lake Alster. It was answered by Hanns Janssen, a Monte Carlo Rally driver turned wine writer who had been present when Michael Broadbent persuaded Hardy Rodenstock to let him auction the bottle. Rodenstock was calling now. What, he wanted to know, did Janssen think the bottle had sold for?
J ANSSEN: Twenty thousand marks.
R ODENSTOCK: No.
J ANSSEN: Twenty thousand francs.
R ODENSTOCK: Don’t talk in francs or marks. Guess in dollars.
J ANSSEN: Okay, ten thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: No, more.
J ANSSEN: Fifty thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: More.
J ANSSEN: You’re crazy.
R ODENSTOCK: More.
J ANSSEN: One hundred thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: More.
J ANSSEN: One hundred fifty thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: One hundred fifty-six thousand.
J ANSSEN: Now, what do you think of that bottle that we drank? Was it worth one hundred fifty-six thousand?
C HAPTER 7
I MAGINARY V ALUE
I MMEDIATELY AFTER THE F ORBES PURCHASE , L UCIA Goodwin appeared on TV for the first time in her life, driving from Charlottesville, Virginia, to the National Agricultural Library in Maryland to tape an interview. Goodwin was, in 1985, the closest thing to a full-time generalist scholar at Monticello. A research associate whom everyone called Cinder, she had a wry and studious nature. She had been at Monticello off and on since 1968, shortly after she graduated from Harvard with a degree in American history and literature. For the last five years she had been consumed with editing the Memorandum Books, Jefferson’s financial diary, a project begun by her coeditor thirty years earlier. She and the coeditor had finally finished the manuscript the year before. Now she had time on her hands.
When news of Rodenstock’s discovery had broken two months earlier, the staff at Monticello was instinctively skeptical. Some poor widow or other attic-rummaging type was always showing up there bearing an “original” copy of the Declaration of Independence, found in a shoebox in a closet, that turned out to be a 1944 reproduction. The
At the Forbes Galleries, curator Margaret Kelly took over. She had learned of the price paid for the acquisition from the radio. The Jefferson table already stood against an angled wood-paneled wall in the narrow Carrère gallery on the ground floor. Recessed in the wall above the table was a diorama containing a miniature replica of Jefferson’s bedroom and study at Monticello. On the table, Kelly had draped a tacky wood crate with salmon-colored velvet, and she now positioned the bottle at an angle, nestled in the fabric, with the engraving showing. Next to it, under glass, were the three Jefferson letters.
Upstairs, in the company offices, there were a lot of raised eyebrows. Malcolm was known to do crazy things, but this set a new bar. Kip’s siblings, however, understood. Their father had wanted something. There really hadn’t been any choice.
Years later, Len Yablon, who had a wine cellar at home but was partial to a good cocktail, would recall that at the time he thought it was “meshuggah”—
this was a bottle of wine, not a Rolls Royce!
—“but it ended up genius.” Still, he acknowledged, a public company could never have gotten away with such an expenditure. That was the joy of working at Forbes—business and fun were never far apart, whether it was owning a motorcycle distributorship or a bottle of wine that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Yablon never knew what was next: A party in Morocco? A balloon trip across the ocean? But of his forty-one years at the company, the purchase of the bottle still ranked, two decades later, as his most unusual experience working for a very unusual man. It reminded him of a great naval battle that lasts only an hour but goes down in history.
O N THE NIGHT of the auction, in the northern German city of Hamburg, a telephone rang in a house east of Lake Alster. It was answered by Hanns Janssen, a Monte Carlo Rally driver turned wine writer who had been present when Michael Broadbent persuaded Hardy Rodenstock to let him auction the bottle. Rodenstock was calling now. What, he wanted to know, did Janssen think the bottle had sold for?
J ANSSEN: Twenty thousand marks.
R ODENSTOCK: No.
J ANSSEN: Twenty thousand francs.
R ODENSTOCK: Don’t talk in francs or marks. Guess in dollars.
J ANSSEN: Okay, ten thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: No, more.
J ANSSEN: Fifty thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: More.
J ANSSEN: You’re crazy.
R ODENSTOCK: More.
J ANSSEN: One hundred thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: More.
J ANSSEN: One hundred fifty thousand.
R ODENSTOCK: One hundred fifty-six thousand.
J ANSSEN: Now, what do you think of that bottle that we drank? Was it worth one hundred fifty-six thousand?
C HAPTER 7
I MAGINARY V ALUE
I MMEDIATELY AFTER THE F ORBES PURCHASE , L UCIA Goodwin appeared on TV for the first time in her life, driving from Charlottesville, Virginia, to the National Agricultural Library in Maryland to tape an interview. Goodwin was, in 1985, the closest thing to a full-time generalist scholar at Monticello. A research associate whom everyone called Cinder, she had a wry and studious nature. She had been at Monticello off and on since 1968, shortly after she graduated from Harvard with a degree in American history and literature. For the last five years she had been consumed with editing the Memorandum Books, Jefferson’s financial diary, a project begun by her coeditor thirty years earlier. She and the coeditor had finally finished the manuscript the year before. Now she had time on her hands.
When news of Rodenstock’s discovery had broken two months earlier, the staff at Monticello was instinctively skeptical. Some poor widow or other attic-rummaging type was always showing up there bearing an “original” copy of the Declaration of Independence, found in a shoebox in a closet, that turned out to be a 1944 reproduction. The
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