The Stiff Arm

At an auction in Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries seven years ago, Showman Billy Rose thought that a Frans Hals painting was his for $20,000. But from the auctioneer's pulpitlike rostrum, Parke-Bernet's President Hiram H. Parke sedately cajoled more bids. "What's the matter," called Rose, "you got a stiff arm?" Not until the price had risen another $10,000 did Parke's arm loosen up enough to bring down the hammer and sell the painting to Rose.

With such genteel stiff-arming of the buyer, white-haired Hiram Parke, 76, who looks more like a bank president than an auctioneer, has pleased most of the sellers who have come to him.* In eleven years he has built Parke-Bernet (rhymes with "in debt") into the largest U.S. auction house, lured buyers from as far away as Europe and South America, and sold more than $50 million worth of paintings, books, furniture, tapestries, etc. At commissions ranging from 10% (plus expenses) up to 20%, he has always shown a tidy profit (last year's take: about $560,000).

Diamond Jim's Gems. Fortnight ago, Hiram Parke popped champagne for a housewarming in the galleries' new $1,500,000 home, a squat, block-long modern building on upper Madison Avenue, 20 blocks away from his old store adjoining 57th Street's famed antique shops. Over the galleries' door, to symbolize art and industry, is a 14-by-10-foot sculpture of Venus and Manhattan, a reclining male. (Because Venus' bosom protrudes more than the permissible 18 inches over the sidewalk, Parke-Bernet pays $25 a year to the city for the privilege.)

At Hiram Parke's party were such art patrons as Gypsy Rose Lee, Actress Madeleine Carroll, and International Business Machines' Chairman Thomas J. Watson. Last week many of the guests returned for the first sale in Parke-Bernet's new auction room (seating capacity 600). Up on the stage went 61 paintings by Rubens, Romney, Hobbema and others; when the hammer fell on the last of them, a total of $46,690 had been paid out. On succeeding days there were sales of jewelry once worn by James B. ("Diamond Jim") Brady, paintings and sculpture collected by Cinema Director Josef von Sternberg.

Gettysburg & Gainsborough. Though Hiram Parke now does little auctioneering himself, he still has a quick eye for the furtive lapel-clutching, pamphlet-waving, nose-pulling signals that can mean a bid. And he has not lost the ability to keep bidding at the fever pitch that he first showed more than 50 years ago in his first auction, when he sold a $20 gold piece for $100. In his galleries the hammer has swung on such fabled items as the fifth and final manuscript of the Gettysburg Address ($54,000), the Bay Psalm Book, first book published In the U.S. ($151,000), the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland ($50,000), and a lock of George Washington's hair. His biggest sale was in 1928, when Lord Duveen, British dealer and collector, paid $360,000 for Gainsborough's The Harvest Waggon. That auction, from the estate of U.S. Steel's Judge Elbert Gary, brought a whopping $2.3 million, the alltime U.S. record.

Such huge estates are now few & far between, but there are plenty of small collections. Talk of recession does not worry Parke-Bernet. In the '30s, what was lost because of lower prices was gained back by the bigger volume of distress selling. Parke-Bernet's chief concern now, as in the past, is trying to please both consigner and buyer. "When you run a business be-between the hammer and the anvil," said one of Parke's colleagues, "you're certain to get plenty of knocks."

* Among them: William Randolph Hearst, and the J. P. Morgan Ogden Mills and Conde Nast estates

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