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She was overwhelmed by this sweeping
proposal and the confident manner in which he had delivered
it. "Why me?" she asked.
He replied that he felt himself "drawn
to her" from the moment they met. He said he could sense
that she wanted to learn from him. "I want to take care
of you," he said, embracing her like a child. He then led
her to the adjoining bedroom and began the relationship
that wold change her life.
After Hammer left the suite, Kaufman
saw that he had left five one-hundred bills on the table
for her. Insulted, she left them on the table. But his message
was clear-- if crude.
On September 22, 1974, she was put on
the payroll of Occidental at a starting salary of $22,000
per year. She nominally worked for Occidental's public relations
department, but, in reality, she could come and go as she
liked, without reporting to her superior in the department.
She reported directly to Hammer. The job provided a plausible
reason for her meetings with Hammer in forein countries--
including Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Britain and Japan. She
also found the job extremely challenging since it involved
not only arranging exhibitions for the Armand Hammer Collection
but, making sure that the officials, socialites and journalists
who Hammer wanted to cultivate favor with would be invited.
When Hammer travelled with his wife
Francis on the corporate jet, she would take a commercial
flight to the same destination. But on almost these trips,
he would then find opportunities to liaise with her. In
Paris, for example, he took her to a Russian restaurant,
which he had closed to other customers. As they sat alone
there, served by a dozen waiters and serenaded by an entire
gypsy orchestra, she marvelled at his power to magically
empty a restaurant when it suited his purposes.
She soon found that Hammer had his own
golden rule: "He Who Hath The Gold, Makes The Rules." He
had it inscribed on a plaque in his office, and pointing
it out to her, he told her "like it or not, this is the
way life is." She soon found out how serious he was about
imposing his rules on her. When, for example, she sought
a legal divource from his husband in 1976, he told her not
to seek either alimony or child support for her daughters
from him. If she did, he explained to her that her husband
might retaliate by exposing her relationship with him and
he could not risk having his name surface. Instead, he asked
her to arrange an uncontested divource and he would provide
her and her daughters with lifetime support. She followed
his instructions and was now heavily dependent on Hammer
for her employment.
In 1978, Hammer told her that he was
transferring her from Occidental to the Armand Hammer Foundation.
She would serve there as his personal art consultant at
a salary of $30,000. This change increased her dependence
on him-- which she assumed was partly his motive. Instead
of working for Occidental, where she might find some corporate
insulation, she worked directly for him from her home in
Beverly Hills-- a home he had encouraged her to buy because
it had an ally that led to a back entrance. Having his limousine
driver bring him to this alley, he could keep his visits
discreet. It was to be his private retreat. He had her decorate
it like an English cottage with furniture that had belonged
to his deceased brother, Harry. In the master bedroom was
an "Aduster" bed, so he could raise and lower in different
positions, and mirrors on the wall, so he could watch himself
perform . In the garden, he had her plant his favorite flower,
double-delight roses that changed from white to deep red.
Usually, he would arrive about noon
time take off the tie and jacket he wore to the office,
and make himself comfortable at the table in the kitchen.
She found her liked to make phone calls in her presense
to the White House, Kremlin, Buckingham Palace and other
centers of power, as if to impress her. When speaking to
lesser people, she noticed he would almost always dispense
with the usuals polite "hellos" and "good-byes. He would
tersely state his business and hang up. After lunch, he
would often put on a robe and sun himself in the garden.
He would tell her during these visits,
"You make me young." And she did what she could to restore
his youth, putting him on the low-fat Dr.Atkins diet (his
weight dropped from 206 when she first met him to 165 pounds)
and helping him "think young."
Aside from her salary, he had promised
her a lifetime income after his death that was to be paid
out of a secret bank account in Switzerland. Since he was
not in the best of health, and an octogenerian, this Swiss
Account was an important part of their deal.
It was not an easy bargain for her.
He demanded an extraordinary measure of control over her
personal life during the course of the next 12 years. She
had to be available to meet his schedule at short notice.
He gave her two beepers to alert her to his calls. He prohibited
her from seeing other men and,to make sure of her wherabouts
in Los Angeles, he had a homing device installed in her
car and a tap placed on her phone. He also frequently had
wear a disguise when they were together in public so she
would not be recognized. He also controlled her vacation
schedule-- for example, making sure she came to New York
when he had to be there overnight on business (He maintained
a town house in Greenwhich Village there that he used for
these tristes.) She had to submit to his sexual demands
even when she considered them, as she later described them,
as "extremely humiliating." She also accomodated him by
mirroring her bedroom when he told her he enjoyed watching
himself. Despite his advanced age, she found him to be physically
energetic, which he attributed to swimming laps every day
in his home indoor pool.
He went far beyond any conventional
romantic liaison by attempting to extend his domain to her
reproductive organs. Hammer wanted her to bear him an illegimate
son. He would not take no for an answer, but, though he
kept careful track of her menstrual cycle, she did not get
pregnant. He then forced her, as she later described it,
"to undergo surgical procedures to facilitate impregnation"--
procedures he had "conducted under his direct view and direction."
They also failed.
When Hammer decided to build his own
museum, he involved her in the project, raising her salary
to $70,000 in 1989. Then Francis found out that she was
Hammer's mistress. She had previously suspected a liaison,
but Hammer had managed to persaude her that she was mistaken.
Now, even though he again denied the truth, she was not
convinced. Since Francis' own fortune, which she inherited
before he married her in 1955, had helped finance the art
collection, he needed her cooperation in transferring the
art to the museum and could not risk her impeding the project.
Nor did he want to give up his mistress, as she demanded.
He therefore designed an ingenious ploy to dupe his wife.
After telling her that he had fired
his Martha Kaufman from the foundation, he had his mistress
assume a new identity under the name of "Hilary Gibson."
He then told Francis that he had hired "Gibson" as a replacement
for Kaufman. To further diminish her suspicion, he had his
mistress transform herself into a much elderly woman, telling
her that older woman pass unnoticed at social functions.
He made her, as she lated noted, "wear wigs, glasses, make-up
and attire which made her appear decades older than she
really was." When he was satsfied with his make-over, he
re-employed her both at the Foundation and Occidental, where
she had to disguise "her true identity from co-workers."
She recalled that he took immense pleasure in the success
of this deception.
Francis died that December. But by this
time the persona of Hilary Gibson was well established.
She was the director of planning, development and financial
control for the museum-- a position from which she personally
supervised all aspects of this creation of Hammer's monument.
She even oversaw the engraving in marble of the letters
of his name. By the fall, Hammer's visits to her home became
less frequent, and she put all her energies into making
sure of the success of the grand opening. She also drew
up a new contract for herself that gave her life time remuneration
from the foundation, and, a week before the opening, Hammer
had signed it.
The opening ended abruptly for Hammer
at 10 p.m. when two medical attendentants picked him, like
a rag doll, and carried him out. When he got home that night,
he had a prolonged hallucination. He saw his dead mother
in the room and, in front of his staff, he carried on a
rambling conversation with her, asking her over and over
again where his missing father was. His night nurse could
not convince him that it was only a hallucination. The next
week, two faith-healers were broiught in. They floated Hammer
on the surface of the swimming pool and, in a repition of
an ancient Aztec ceremony, they danced around him for two
days. On 7.22 p.m, on December 10, Hammer died in bed--
it was the night before his scheduled Bar Mitzvah.
The memorial service took place at the
Museum on Jauary 4, 1991. Hilary Gibson stood alone.in the
row immediately behind the Occidental Board of Directors.
She was felling very much like, as she put it, "a pariah."
Even since the funeral, the new management at Occidental
had begun to distance itself from Hammer. His pet projects,
such as Armand Hammer Film Productions, had been terminated.
His photographs, paintings and busts taken down. The framed
letters and testimonials to Hammer from world leaders also
had been removed from the sixteenth floor executive suite.
She could see "the handwriting on the wall for herself.
She had been Hammer's mistress for 17 years and the museum,
which Hammer had meant her to run, had become the subject
of huge shareholders suit. She knew the new management was
moving to distance itself from both her and the museum.
The Leonardo De Vinci book, which he had named the Hammer
Codex, would be sold to William Gates of Microsoft-- and
re-named. The museum would be turned over to UCLA to manage.
She would be put through, as she termed it, "total hell."
Throughout the following months she found
her progressively more isolated. Her title was revoked and,
finally, on June 2, 1992 two Occidental security men escorted
her out of the building. She was fired.
The foundation had also dispensed with
her services and made it clear to her that to sequibly settler
her claim against it, she would have to sue it.
She also received no money from the
secret fund he had told her he had set up for her in Switzerland.
He had ked her to believe it contained at least 10 million
dollars-- and that this was money he had diverted from oil
deals he had made in Libya. Yet, when she asked lawyers
for Hammer's estate about it, they denied it existed.
What these lawyers did not anticipate
was her extraordinary determination-- and resourcefulness.
"If I could handle Hammer for 17 years, I could handle anything."
she later reflected. She had during Hammer's visits to her
home made copies of numerous addresses she found on papers
in his pocket. Even though he often used code-names, she
was able to identify a key Swiss banker-- Felix Iselin.
In 1994, she flew to Basel and arranged a meeting with Iselin
at his office.
Iselin was very brusque and business-like.
He told her that Hammer hae made arrangments for her but
revoked them. He then took a hand-written document from
his file. It was addressed to Peter Lotz, one of his partners
and dated September 6, 1990. She could see that most of
the words on it had been meticulously blocked out with masking
tape for her viewing. The unblocked portion read: "My instructions
with regard to ... Martha Kaufman (Hilary Gibson) are revoked."
It was signed "Armand Hammer." Iselin looked at her smugly,
as if that ended the issue.
She then calculatingly asked Iselin
for some information. When he left to get it for her, she
grabbed the document and, concealing it under her shawl,
calmly left the office. By the time she had arrived at her
hotel, there was a frantic message from Iselin, begging
her to return the document. Instead, she peeled off the
masking tape and found the name of the secret account--
the Grazioza Account-- that Hammer had established for her.
The full document also showed that Hammer had secreted money
outside of the U.S. that he did not intend to pass through
his estate-- or pay taxes on. She speculated that this disclosure
could prove enormously embarrassing to the estate. She now
also knew that her lover had double-crossed her a few months
before he died by revoking his commitment. She decided to
sue his estate for his breach of promise.
Confronted with the document, the lawyers
representing Hammer's estate, living trust and Occident
settled her claim out of court. In March 1996, she received
$4.2 million.
She had also opened a pandora's box.
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