Remembering Thomas Hoving's Decade At The Met.

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Alice Sebold's Dark Tale Moves To The Silver Screen

DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli of tvworthwatching.com, sitting in for
Terry Gross.

"The Lovely Bones," the new Peter Jackson movie based on the novel by Alice
Sebold, comes out today. Our film critic, David Edelstein, will review the
movie later in the show, but we'd like to start out by replaying Terry's 2002
interview with the author herself.

When Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" was published seven years ago, Time
magazine called it the breakout fiction debut of the year. The story is about
the rape, murder and mutilation of a 14-year-old girl. Our own book critic,
Maureen Corrigan, said the subject matter made her reluctant to pick up the
book, but reading it gave her a singular, disturbing and even enlightening
literary experience.

Alice Sebold was herself the victim of a violent sexual assault. She was raped
during her first year in college. Her 1999 memoir about that experience is
called "Lucky." Sebold's novel, "The Lovely Bones," begins with the attack on
the girl. The rest of the novel is narrated from heaven, where the girl
observes her family and friends as they try to carry on after her death.

We'll start with a reading from the beginning of the book. The girl has taken a
shortcut home from junior high through a cornfield. She meets a neighbor,
Mr. Harvey, who forces her to take off her clothes. Before we start, I should
let you know that what you're about to hear is graphic and disturbing. It may
be upsetting to some listeners and may not be appropriate for children to hear.

Ms. ALICE SEBOLD (Author, "The Lovely Bones"): Don't, Mr. Harvey, I managed,
and I kept saying that one word a lot: don't. And I said please a lot too.
Franny told me that almost everyone begged please before dying.

I want you, Susie, he said. Please, I said. Don't, I said. Sometimes I combined
them: Please don't, or don't please. It was like insisting that a key works
when it doesn't or yelling I've got it, I've got it, I've got it as a softball
goes sailing over you into the stands.

Please don't. But he grew tired of hearing me plead. He reached into the pocket
of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my
mouth. The only sound I made after that was the weak tinkling of bells.

As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his
hands up under my shirt, I wept. I began to leave my body, I began to inhabit
the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped
open my pants, not having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully
sewn into their side. Big white panties, he said.

I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and
(bleep). I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out,
like in cat's cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He
started working himself over me.

Susie, Susie, I heard my mother calling. Dinner is ready. He was inside me. He
was grunting. We're having string beans and lamb. I was the mortar, he was the
pestle. Your brother has a new finger painting, and I made apple crumb cake.

TERRY GROSS, host:

That's Alice Sebold, reading from the opening of her new novel, "The Lovely
Bones." I'm sure a lot of listeners are wondering - why write about something
so horrible, so unthinkable, the rape of a 14 – the rape and dismemberment of a
14-year-old girl.

Ms. SEBOLD: Because it's part of life. You know, that's the simplest answer, I
think, for me. It's very much part of the experience of what it is to live in
this culture. It happens all the time.

GROSS: Now, you were raped yourself when you were a freshman in college, and
that's a subject of an earlier book you wrote, a memoir, and reading those two
books back to back, I was really struck by the difference in the descriptions
of the rape. The rape as you describe it in your memoir is very brutal, very
detailed in its brutality. It's as if you're reliving every moment and
describing it like a journalist.

Ms. SEBOLD: Uh-huh. I think they are very different books in my mind, even
though they both not only have violence but start out in violence. One of them
is factual, and I tell every detail in some way in the memoir, and the other
one is a fictive voice, and there's so much more being given in the first
chapter of "The Lovely Bones" in terms of getting to know her character and
some of the facts of her family and her background.

GROSS: I got the impression that the kind of moment-by-moment description of
the brutality that's in your memoir is something you felt didn't belong in this
new novel, in the description of the brutality that this 14-year-old faces.

Ms. SEBOLD: Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is that I did write the beginning of
"The Lovely Bones" before I wrote my memoir. So Susie, the violent crime that
occurs in Susie's life, happened in terms of writing about it, before a
description of my own rape was written by me later.

I think in order to separate the two stories, to make sure that Susie was not
doing any of my work for me when I returned to the novel, I stopped to write
"Lucky," and one of the things that was very important for me to do was to get
all the facts down of my case so they have been written, they existed whole in
a whole 'other book, and I could go back to Susie and she could lead me where
she wanted to take me and tell me her story in the way she wanted to tell it,
as opposed to me feeling perhaps that I needed to really tell the real deal
about every detail about rape and violence.

I did that in the memoir as opposed to the novel because I wanted my characters
to rule the novel, not some sort of desire to talk about rape and reveal rape
to readers.

GROSS: Your memoir ends: I live in a world where the two truths coexist, where
both hell and hope live in the palm of my hand. Is that in a way where your
novel picks up, with hell and hope, or hell and heaven being side by side?

Ms. SEBOLD: Definitely. I mean, that's one of my major motivations in terms of
how I live my life, and also, though, why I see fiction as so incredibly
important as to be able to give in a very short space the context for those two
things coexisting and coexisting in an honest way, where hope is really
springing out of something that was – is hard-won, as opposed to purchased in,
you know, a how-to-cope section at the local bookstore.

GROSS: After Susie is raped and killed and mutilated, and this is in the first
chapter, she goes to heaven, and the rest of the story is narrated by her, as
she experiences this part of heaven and looks down on her family and neighbors
as they go on without her. What interested you in this idea of your narrator
being in heaven looking down on the people she's had to leave behind?

Ms. SEBOLD: I think I needed to find a way, and first I have to say that,
again, when Susie's voice presented it to me, she presented completely, and she
was already in heaven. So that was something, when I got to the end of the
first 15 pages, which I did not know was going to be the first chapter of a
novel. I was – I had my character, I had where she was, and I had what had
happened to her, and because she was such a bossy main character, I had no
choice. I had to follow her.

So though it was not conscious a choice to place her in heaven, once I realized
that she had put me there in some way, it is a position from which she can tell
a story to a reader and bring a reader to places that they wouldn't have access
on and that she wouldn't have access on unless she were in heaven, and to see –
referring back to the previous question about heaven and hope, or hope and
hell, all those things - to see those things put together in a context that is
ultimately in some way horrible but doesn't have to be so threatening that
readers are afraid to read about the truth or about the reality that a girl
like Susie would experience.

BIANCULLI: Alice Sebold, speaking to Terry Gross in 2002. More after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's 2002 interview with Alice Sebold, author
of the novel "The Lovely Bones," which has just been made into a new film. It's
a story of a 14-year-old girl who was raped and murdered, then goes to heaven,
where she observes her family trying to carry on without her. Sebold is also
the author of a 1999 memoir about being raped called "Lucky.

GROSS: In your memoir about being raped, you write: The burden of being father
and mother to a rape victim fell very heavily on my parents. And I'm wondering
if that thought informed some of the writing of your novel, because part of the
novel is about the after-effects of the rape and murder on Susie's family.

Ms. SEBOLD: Definitely. The experience of violence, particularly a tabooed
violence like a rape in my case, and particularly like a, you know, a rape and
dismemberment in the case of Susie's family in the novel, is one of the most
alienating experiences that I think you can have, and for my parents, it proved
to be very strange sometimes, even among their close friends, even with people
who didn't intentionally mean to say things that were hurtful, for instance,
and sometimes hurtful through ignorance, which is not necessarily their fault.
And I think definitely that that transferred to the idea of Susie's family
being extremely alienated in their circumstances.

GROSS: You write about the burden of guilt on the parents in the novel. Susie
says about her father: Every day he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who
he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in.
At first he couldn't even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight, the guilt
on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying you were not there when
your daughter needed you.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the guilt you imagine the parents
feeling?

Ms. SEBOLD: It's an interesting thing. Some of the father – the father was
another character for me in the novel that was there very quickly, very
immediately, and he really to me is the heart of the family. I think
particularly with a sexual assault crime, whether the victim – if the victim is
a child, whether it's a male or a female child, fathers often feel extremely
responsible for what happens in that way to their children.

They want to be able to fix it very, very much and go out and do something, and
it has become somewhat stereotypical in movies and television that the father
wants to go and catch or kill the perpetrator, but the truth is, is that it's a
stereotype that reflects reality.

In my own experience, I can count the number of times that, you know, both my
father, but also boyfriends, male friends, particularly would say things like,
you know, I want to kill the bastard, just in this desire to do something, and
also too, great shame - because the perpetrator is male.

GROSS: After you were raped, when you were trying to figure out what you were
doing with your life and dealing with all the wounds that this rape left you
with, psychological and physical, were you at the same time watching your
parents dealing with a different set of wounds caused by the same rape?

Ms. SEBOLD: Definitely, particularly my mother, I think. You know, it just hits
the entire family like a ton of bricks, and trauma, especially when it's a
trauma that is not a well-known trauma - for the traumas that are well-known -
really there's so much to try to understand.

I remember watching television, say, with my sister, after the rape, when I was
just basically lying on the couch and trying to recover, and if anything came
on that made her maybe think about violence or whatever, she would stare back
at me, and it made me highly self-conscious. But she was deeply trying to
understand what my experience had been, and I think one of my motivations for
writing my own book, and certainly also a motivation for writing the novel, is
the desire to just put it out there on the table: This is what a rape can look
like, and if people maybe know more about it, then the victim's not as
alienated, nor is the victim's family and nor are people who live across the
street as afraid of saying something really stupid because maybe they're more
educated about what the crime is.

GROSS: Now, you said earlier that it was only after writing the beginning of
your novel, "The Lovely Bones," that you decided to go back and write a memoir
about your rape, and you said it was because you wanted to, like, tell your own
story so that your own story wasn't superimposed on your character's story.

I'm interested in how your memory functioned of the incident, because, you
know, when – after something that's about as traumatic as it gets happens to
you, on the one hand you really want to forget it so that it's not obsessing
you and haunting you all the time. On the other hand, I suppose in a lot of
ways you don't want to lose the memories that have been recorded so that you
can continue to comprehend the experience.

So did you find that you had, like vivid memories of it, vivid enough to write
an almost journalistic account of it, or did you have to work to regain
memories that you had tried to forget?

Ms. SEBOLD: I would say my memory for the rape itself and the incident
surrounding the rape, like the trial, was better five to seven years after the
actual event, even up to 10, than it was in the first three or four years
afterwards.

You know, I very directly went into therapy right after the rape, all miserable
experiences, and then I didn't do anything like that for about the next 10
years, and I found a lovely therapist who had the, you know, uniqueness of
being free in New York and worked with her. But only after, I'd say, a full 10
years away from the rape was I able to face the rape and deal with the clear
memories of it.

Luckily, one of the things I did right after the rape, because I was kind of a,
you know, morbid, poetic kid, was write verbatim accounts of exactly what had
happened to me physically and what the light had been like and things like that
in a journal of mine.

GROSS: You were already interested in writing when you were raped. You were a
freshman in college. Later in college, you were studying with the poet Tess
Gallagher, and one of the assignments she gave you after she realized about
this trauma in your life was to write a poem that started: If they caught you.

Ms. SEBOLD: Right.

GROSS: I could see you responding one of two ways to that - one way to go, oh,
give me a break, and the other to actually write a great poem.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Tell us what your response was to that.

Ms. SEBOLD: I think with Tess, who was one of those teachers – I mean, I have
taught, and I have had wonderful teachers, and I believe that atmosphere,
particularly for those students who are going through anything traumatic, can
be an incredible atmosphere, and Tess did not shy away from dealing with a
student who I am sure a lot of people just thought, like, eek, keep her away
from me, she might explode on me.

She forced my hand on that. I had written a vague kind of poem about rape. We
had a discussion in her office. She asked me if it were based on anything that
had actually happened to me in my life. I told her, and then she suggested
that.

I admired her greatly as a poet. She was an extremely empathetic teacher, and
out of that I decided okay, she's forcing me to do something, it feels a little
weird, but it was a great thing to do. So – and they caught him a week later.
So who knows? There was a little magic in that assignment.

GROSS: People often wonder if writing is therapeutic. If you're writing about a
trauma, does that help the pain of the trauma recede? I mean, Susie in the
novel says something about – oh, I forget exactly what she says, but it's
something like every time she tells her story, like, a drop of the pain goes
away?

Ms. SEBOLD: Right.

GROSS: But as a writer yourself, who's written about your own trauma and then
written a fictionalized version of a similar trauma, is writing therapeutic, or
do you think that that's really the wrong way to approach it anyway?

Ms. SEBOLD: My feeling, and it's pretty, you know, rigorous, is that therapy is
for therapy and that writing can be therapeutic, but therapeutic writing should
not be published.

My job as a writer is to go through the therapy myself, and if I manage to get
through it, and I feel I have something to share from that, to share it with my
audience or my readers, but I don't write novels and seek to have them
published so that I can get therapy from having written them. That's really the
responsibility of an individual to do outside the context of their published
work.

GROSS: Writers usually have to have some kind of empathy and understanding of
each of their characters, the good guys and the bad guys. Do you feel like in
your novel you had to have empathy for the rapist, who's a man from the
neighborhood, he's a man that the family knows?

Ms. SEBOLD: Definitely. I don't – I mean, in my own personal belief, you can't
write a good character unless you have both compassion and respect for them. So
Mr. Harvey, who is the killer in the book, yes, I have great compassion for
him. There are moments where he attempts to try to do things other than what
his drive or his instinct is telling him to do, by counting things obsessively
or building things.

So he resists up until the point where he is no longer able to resist, and you
know, that is – you can have compassion without forgiveness, and I think that's
what I would say.

GROSS: Were you able to find that kind of compassion for the man who raped you?

Ms. SEBOLD: I would say eventually. Certainly not immediately. But you know,
we're all born into this world in very different ways, and we have different
experiences of it, and I don't know a lot about him, but some of the things I
do know led me to feel compassion for him.

There are also many people who had much more – worse circumstances than he did
that have managed not to go out and rape people, but that doesn't mean you
can't have compassion for them. I don't forgive him, but you know, he's a human
being. You have to move on. You know, it's just as simple as that, and so you
find a way to move on, and having compassion for people just in general is a
good way to live in life.

GROSS: Well, Alice Sebold, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. SEBOLD: Thank you.

BIANCULLI: Alice Sebold, author of "The Lovely Bones," speaking to Terry Gross
in 2002. Our film critic, David Edelstein, will review the new movie based on
the book in the second half of the show. I'm David Bianculli and this is FRESH
AIR.
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'Hitler's Favorite Tenor' Hits A High Note

DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m David Bianculli. The great German Wagnerian tenor Max
Lorenz isn't as well remembered in this country as several of his colleagues,
maybe because he stayed in Germany during World War II and had a reputation as
Hitler's favorite tenor. But a new documentary suggests that his story is more
complicated.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz has a review.

Mr. MAX LORENZ (Tenor): (Singing in Foreign Language)

LLOYD SCHWARTZ: The German tenor Max Lorenz had several strikes against him in
Nazi Germany: he was both homosexual and married to a Jewish woman. But he had
one thing going for him — he was the greatest German-born tenor of his day.

After its bitter defeat in World War I, Germany — and the Nazi party — were
looking for heroes. Lorenz's heroic singing and size - he was more than six
feet tall - made him a national symbol. Remaining in Germany during World War
II, he not only survived the war unscathed, but he had the power to help those
close to him. This is part of his complex story in a new biographical
documentary, "Wagner's Mastersinger — Hitler's Siegfried: The Life and Times of
Max Lorenz," directed by Eric Schulz and Claus Wischmann, which is now out on
DVD, along with a thrilling CD of extended excerpts of a live 1938 performance
of his most famous role: Wagner's Siegfried.

The documentary, mostly in German but with English narration and subtitles,
weighs Lorenz's considerable artistic achievement against his poignant
biography. Max Sulzenfuss, Lorenz's real name, was the beefy but shy and
conflicted son of a butcher. Among the talking heads are a handful of important
German performers, including world-renowned baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
All of them show boundless admiration for Lorenz's performances. One compares
him to a lion pouncing on the notes, another says his voice went through you
like a red-hot sword. Alongside Lorenz, one tenor says, all the others were
wimps.

He didn't just produce the notes, Fischer-Dieskau says, he embodied them, and
sang everything to the hilt, and that you could hear his intensity and
expressive power in the clarion timbre of his voice. Here’s an exciting clip of
Lorenz as Siegfried with the legendary Wagnerian soprano Frida Leider as
Brunnhilde in the 1934 film made at the Bayreuth Festival, the annual Wagner
Festival begun by Wagner himself.

Mr. LORENZ: (Singing in Foreign Language)

Ms. FRIDA LEIDER (Soprano): (Singing in Foreign Language)

SCHWARTZ: Lorenz was the major German tenor at Bayreuth. During the war, the
festival's CEO was Winifred Wagner, who was born in England and married
Wagner's homosexual son Siegfried. She was not officially a Nazi, but she
seemed to have adored Hitler, who spent a great deal of time at Bayreuth. In an
interview, she talks about Lorenz being arrested after being caught in
flagrante with one of the Bayreuth vocal coaches.

If Lorenz were found guilty and forbidden to sing, she says, she threatened to
shut down the theater. But Hitler loved Bayreuth, and Lorenz's trial ended
without a guilty verdict. Once, the SS came to Lorenz's house to remove his
Jewish wife and her mother. But she had Goering's sister's private phone
number, and 10 minutes later the SS men left the two women unharmed. The
following night, the outraged Lorenz canceled a performance in Vienna at which
Hitler was the guest of honor. After the war, he became an Austrian citizen.
Still, the question remains why Lorenz didn't leave Germany. As one performer
says in this film, many German artists were idealists, and things in Germany
might have been different if more artists had shown greater interest in
politics.

After the war, many people assumed Lorenz had been a Nazi. Maybe he'd be better
remembered if, like the other great Wagnerian tenor of the period, the Danish-
born Lauritz Melchior - surprisingly unmentioned in this documentary, he had
shifted his career to England and the United States.

(Soundbite of documentary, "Wagner's Mastersinger — Hitler's Siegfried: The
Life and Times of Max Lorenz,")

Unidentified Man: By 1943, it was too late to leave the country. Lorenz was
lucky. Only on stage was he stabbed in the back.

Mr. LORENZ: (Singing in Foreign Language)

SCHWARTZ: Among the most moving moments of the film are the sequences in which
the interviewed singers are listening to Lorenz's extraordinary recordings,
nodding, or mouthing the words along with him with expressions of pure bliss.

BIANCULLI: Lloyd Schwartz is the classical music editor of the Boston Phoenix
and teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He reviewed the
documentary "Wagner's Mastersinger — Hitler's Siegfried: The Life and Times of
Max Lorenz."

Coming up, we remember a former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas
Hoving who died yesterday. This is FRESH AIR.
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Remembering Thomas Hoving's Decade At The Met

DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

Thomas Hoving, the influential and attention-getting director of New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977, died yesterday at his home in
Manhattan. He was 78 years old. Hoving's 10-year reign was transformational for
the museum. His ambition was to blow the dust off the place and make it into
people's cultural paradise. He opened a gift shop and brought in blockbuster
shows like "King Tut," which attracted crowds in unprecedented numbers. He
expanded the museum and bought new works with money he raised by selling old
ones. After leaving the museum, he edited Connoisseur magazine and wrote a
memoir in which revealed that when he came to the Met he saw himself as the new
guard. When Terry Gross spoke with Thomas Hoving in 1993, he told her he was
intent on getting rid of the old guard, particularly the trustees.

Mr. THOMAS HOVING (Former Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art): Well, they
talked rather like this, you know, and they didn’t like the madding herd, and
they didn’t like primitive art and they thought that contemporary art would
best be perhaps burned - like that. Until I got there, you did not have a
department of contemporary painting and sculpture.

GROSS: Why not?

Mr. HOVING: Beats me. And no one was allowed - a living artist was not allowed
to show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And the idea that this great
encyclopedia, the only one on Earth that has 50 centuries of something, of
every civilization, did not have living people. You had to die before you got
in there. It seemed to be so stultifying that we did change it and we began to
show one-man shows of living artists and it was marvelous.

GROSS: How did you change it?

Mr. HOVING: Simply said, we're going to have a department of contemporary and
if you have contemporary the chances are somebody's going to be alive. And one
of the shows we did was Francis Bacon and he actually came in and arranged the
exhibition himself. And that was stunning to watch what an artist does with his
own works - totally different from what an exhibitor or a curator would've
done, completely different.

GROSS: One of the first contemporary paintings that you showed at the Met when
you were there was James Rosenquist's “F-111.”

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Why was it so controversial?

Mr. HOVING: I can't figure it. Look at it today, it's a huge pop art painting
and it's got part of the F-111 jetfighter. It's got a baby doll under a
hairdryer and it's got some spaghetti rolling around on the floor. I mean it's
one of these kinetic images that Jim Rosenquist did then very well - still
does. And I had made the mistake of exhibiting it as a history painting. There
used to be in the academies of the 18th and 19th century, categories of
painting: portraiture, still life, history painting. And it was a history
painting. It was a modern history painting, so I showed it in the same gallery
as Jacques-Louis David's "Death of Socrates" and I showed it with a large
sketch of Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware." And the art
critics, one of them accused me of being morally turpitudinous. And I had to go
to Webster's, frankly, to find out what turpitudinous meant. It means you have
a low, sleazy and disgusting lifestyle or something. And I was morally
incorrect because I showed this picture next to Jacques-Louis David. And they
got really annoyed because of that. People got very annoyed.

GROSS: Did you like the painting?

Mr. HOVING: I adored the painting. I still do. I tried to get it for the Met.
Robert Scull and his wife Ethel owned it and they promised me they would give
it. They didn’t. They promised me they would give the great Andy Warhol Ethel
Scull 36 times and guess what? They walked out. They chintzed.

GROSS: Now why do I think that you are speaking of these people differently now
than you spoke of them, or to them, when you were the director of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Mr. HOVING: Well, when I was facing Nelson Rockefeller I kissed his feet. I
suckled his fingers. I said sir. I was a toady. Now occasionally, I would come
right to grips with some of these people, although I did, God knows, flatter
them and tried to make them very happy, I would tell them you’re wrong on this
or, you know, we're not going to do that. So I did have a couple of times when
- well, more than a couple, when I would get into fracases with potential
donors. Well, they tried to throw me out. The board tried to oust me three
times for good reason. They should've probably, but they didn’t. So it was
both. I mean I toadied sometimes and then would hit them in the face the other.

GROSS: Were you ever picky about who you took money from? Would you take it
from anybody who'd give it?

Mr. HOVING: No, we were quite, quite selective about it and it - the tobacco -
we had one brush with Philip Morris for a collection - treasures of the great
Hye Foundation, which are the American Indian things that were up at 158th
Street. It's about to go down to the Smithsonian now and there's going to be a
big American Indian museum on the mall. It was that collection. It had not been
shown. We showed extraordinary pieces from this huge collection. And we got a
grant from Philip Morris and I looked at the proofs of the catalog and there
the chairman of Philip Morris had written and signed, and he had a paragraph
starting off, it said: Because of our deep affection for the reverence that
American Indians held for tobacco. So I called him and said hold it...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HOVING: …you know, what is this? Because it's a religious - you can't do
that. So the guy said, you know, we're going to take our money away. I said
take your money away. Well they didn’t, but that paragraph was expunged and we
never dealt with the cigarette guys anymore.

GROSS: In your book "Making the Mummies Dance," you say that to be effective
and to survive as director you had to be part gunslinger, part ward healer,
legal fixer, accomplice, smuggler, anarchist and toady. I think we got to the
toady part that you were referring to.

Mr. HOVING: Right.

GROSS: Let's get to the part of your job description that you describe as
accomplice smuggler.

Mr. HOVING: Well, in the days before 1971 in the art business, there were no
rules. There was no UNESCO Treaty trying to stop the outrageous flow of
smuggled treasures from Turkey, Greece, Italy. You bought an antiquity because
it was beautiful and you didn’t have to have papers for provenance, whether it
came from this or that collection. Everybody knew it was dug up three months
before. The mud was virtually still fresh on the stuff and it cost, whatever it
cost you said great and buy it. Then it became apparent in 1970, when UNESCO
was beginning to draft its treaty that many nations have signed - America has -
that the old era of looking the other way or laughing about it was gone.

And so, I, as director, became part of the drafting team on UNESCO treaty
because I knew, A, it’s over. So, don’t try to keep the past alive. Now you got
to be respectful of what did this thing have as a history? And we began to do
that rather sharply and the Met's dealings with known hot pieces began to
diminish sharply after about 1971. And they don’t do it at all today. Virtually
no museum does. Well, a few in the United States still do.

GROSS: You said that you’ve used subterfuge in buying works and one example you
give is when you were buying the Velazquez’s painting you organized what you
described as a disinformation campaign. You say we spread rumors around, like
the disinformation section of the KGB.

Mr. HOVING: And probably we did a better job. There are several copies of the
great painting, “Juan de Pareja.” There’s one at the Hispanic Society in New
York, which is definitely a copy of about 50, 100 years later. We put out
rumors that this was the real one and the one coming up for auction must have
been one of the copies. And people believed it because you’re looking at a
painting for five millions bucks, you don’t want any doubts.

GROSS: How did you spread that rumor?

Mr. HOVING: Oh, we just told various people that I know - go to nothing but
cocktail parties and dinner parties and tell their host and hostess what they
know. And we saw to what they knew and the words spread like wild fire, wild
fire.

GROSS: Now what is the morality of spreading lies about art?

Mr. HOVING: Well, it’s part of the business. It has no morality whatsoever. It
just happens to be a technique that since it wasn’t published it was rumors, it
was an opinion. So what? You know, it was part – it's smoke-screening.

GROSS: One of the things that you are pretty famous for in the art world is
being one of the forces behind the blockbuster show. You didn’t invent the
blockbuster show but you certainly popularized it and you were one of the
people kind of responsible for its spread. Is that the - popularity…

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HOVING: We, one, focused it. The whole point of blockbusters at the Met was
to bring the public something they could never see on their own or have a very
hard time seeing. I mean, it’s not everybody who can get on a plane and go to
the Hermitage for a long weekend or go to Cairo for two days and come back
after seeing King Tut.

So, we wanted to bring to people things that, one, they could not see. Two,
they didn’t even know as art, for example, Scythian art. These are the nomad
tribes of the Ukraine who populated that part of what was then the Soviet Union
during the sixth and fifth century B.C. And not a single one of their glorious
works of art had ever been seen outside the Soviet Union because Peter the
Great had passed a law saying it should not be moved or sold or let out.

So, nobody knew about it and it's art that is equivalent to the greatest Greek
and the Hellenistic Art. And we showed that, not – we did not do paintings from
the Hermitage because we have Rembrandts, we have Poussins, we have all that.
And we decided to exchange our old masters for something that nobody even knew
about.

So, part of it was to bring to people through a temporary exhibition things you
could never have in the permanent collection. That was the main reason. We also
marketed these shows pretty well. We were the first once that ever ran ads. We
were the first ones that ever had radio and television ads and people talking
about it. We were also the first ever to have a corporation fund one of these
things. And they then picked up advertising campaigns and that had a further
impact upon the word getting out. So, in a sense we took what existed - great
art shows had been for sometime - and simply put them into the contemporary
mode and it worked wonders. I think there were some lovely ones and there were
some awful ones. I think right now the age of the blockbuster is a dinosaur. I
think it's dead. And I think they should be given the last rites.

GROSS: Why do think it's dead now?

Mr. HOVING: Well, they’re not really blockbusters anymore. They say they are.
There will be a great show of Caravaggio in which there are three Caravaggios
and the rest are followers. And you can’t afford - the point is that art prices
have risen to such ridiculously astronomical heights that nobody can afford the
cost of insurance and other things to bring the works of you name it into one
place anymore. It’s virtually impossible to do.

And even the Matisse show, that may be the last of these hugely expensive
things because people are unwilling to lend anymore. And it’s too costly. I
mean, that show is what, 68 million bucks – a thing like that. That’s amazing -
68 million bucks, my goodness. So, I think probably there are other things that
can be done instead of the standard blockbuster. They’re getting boring.

GROSS: Thomas Hoving, one last question: The health of the art world.

Mr. HOVING: Hmm.

GROSS: What’s your assessment?

Mr. HOVING: Well, if they can get over the political and religious right attack
on all art, not just the couple of performance artists or so, but all art. If
they can get over this period of creeping iconoclasm and do it courageously, I
think things would be fine. So, I think, it’s generally healthy but they've got
to solve this censorship thing. Our greatest exportable product in America
today is our freedom of our arts.

BIANCULLI: Thomas Hoving speaking to Terry Gross in 1993. The former director
of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art died yesterday at age 78. By the way,
Ethel Scull eventually donated Warhol's Ethel Scull 36 Times to the Met, shared
with the Whitney Museum.

Coming up, film critic David Edelstein on the new movie adaptation of “The
Lovely Bones.” This is FRESH AIR.
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Jackson’s 'Bones': The Furthest Thing From Lovely

DAVE BIANCULLI, host:

Alice Sebold’s best selling 2002 novel, “The Lovely Bones,” is now a movie
directed by Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of “The Lord of the
Rings” trilogy. The story opens with the rape, murder, and mutilation of a 14-
year-old girl. She becomes the story’s narrator from heaven. Film Critic David
Edelstein has a review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: Sitting through Peter Jackson’s film of Alice Sebold’s “The
Lovely Bones” is an ordeal. I’m not talking about the subject. The book opens
with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, so even a good adaptation would
be an ordeal. But Jackson’s adolescent new age computer-generated fantasyland
is an excruciating fusion of the novel’s primal trauma and his own sensibility,
which is more at home with juvenile, male-dominated “Lord of the Rings” epics.
There isn’t a second that rings true on any level.

As in the book, the narrator is Susie Salmon, played by Saoirse Ronan with her
red hair and pale, glowing blue eyes. The actress has a lyrical presence but
the movie uses her and those eyes for a kind of cheap mystical sentimentality.
Susie tells the story of her murder - rape isn’t mentioned in the film - by a
serial killer who happens to live in her neighborhood. The neighbor, Mr.
Harvey, is played by Stanley Tucci with a finicky comb-over and caterpillar
mustache. He shifts uncomfortably when he’s questioned by an oddly oblivious
detective played by “The Sopranos’” Michael Imperioli, who looks in amazement
on Harvey’s intricate homemade dollhouses.

(Soundbite of movie, “The Lovely Bones”)

Mr. MICHAEL IMPERIOLI (Actor): (As Len Fenerman) You married?

Mr. STANLEY TUCCI (Actor): (As George Harvey) I was. Yeah.

Mr. IMPERIOLI: (As Len) But you've had kids?

Mr. TUCCI: (As George) No, I wish. I wish.

Mr. IMPERIOLI: (As Len) You mind if I take a look?

Mr. TUCCI: (As George) No. I make everything myself.

Mr. IMPERIOLI: (As Len) Really.

Mr. TUCCI: (As George) Oh, yeah, all this. I (unintelligible) banisters myself
and make all the shingles and the furniture and - I used to cabinetmaking but
there’s not much call for that these days. Maybe I spend too much time on these
things, but it's the perfectionist in me, I guess.

Mr. IMPERIOLI: (As Len) Well, it shows.

Mr. TUCCI: (As George) Thank you.

Mr. IMPERIOLI: (As Len) That’s amazing craftsmanship.

Mr. TUCCI: (As George) Oh, well. I took a risk and tried something new and
discovered a talent that I didn’t know that I had.

Mr. IMPERIOLI: (As Len) What's that underneath the stairs?

Mr. TUCCI: (As George) That would be the basement.

EDELSTEIN: Sorry, this guy’s so transparent he might as well have child
molester tattooed on his forehead. At first, Susie watches as her parents,
played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, react to her disappearance and the
discovery of large amounts of her blood - no body - in a pit in a field. She
moves back and forth between worlds. In a melancholy state reinforced by Brian
Eno’s floating score, much of it borrowed from his “Music for Airports.” She
stands semitransparent watching the living, including the hunk she had a crush
on, her younger sister and even her killer.

Then she and a fellow dead girl romp around a verdant, CGI never-never land
with bits of New Zealand landscape — at times having so much fun it seems like
murder is just about the best present a teen girl could get. It’s no mystery
where Sebold's premise came from. She revealed in her subsequent memoir, with
the ironic title "Lucky," that she was raped in college, in a tunnel. The
police said she was lucky because the last woman raped there was killed. “The
Lovely Bones” can be taken as a fantasy of the death she didn’t have. And the
limbo Susie occupies is like a metaphor for Sebold’s post-rape detachment from
her own body and her haunted inner world.

The fantasy landscape might even evoke the otherworldly lightness induced by
Sebold’s turn to heroin. I think "Lucky" is the greater book. To work onscreen
- and I’m not sure it could – "The Lovely Bones" would need to have been made
by someone who could blur the line between literal and metaphorical, not, in
other words, a director whose demarcations between life and limbo are like an
illustrated storybook for six-year-olds. Toward the end, Susie drops out of the
film and Jackson seems to think he’s making a Hitchcock thriller. Then, in the
climax, he crosscuts between the dead girl’s struggle to manifest herself
physically and her killer’s attempt to dispose of her body.

Given Jackson’s technique, the outcome of the sequence is bewildering. But then
there are incongruous notes all over the place, especially the presence of
Susan Sarandon as an eccentric grandmother out of "Auntie Mame." Is “The Lovely
Bones” powerful? Yes, how could it not be given the grisly, tragic premise, but
with that power comes a responsibility to bring to life the tortured emotions
that drive Sebold’s vision. I don’t think Jackson’s tawdry sentimentality is
badly intentioned. It’s just that his cluelessness makes the atrociousness of
his movie positively supernatural.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine. You can
download podcasts of our show at freshair.npr.org. And you can follow us on
Twitter at nprfreshair. For Terry Gross, I’m David Bianculli.
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