Solid Gold Scrooge

GULBENKIAN (289 pp.)--John Lodwick, in collaborafion with D. H. Young--Doubleday ($4).

MR FIVE PER CENT (261 pp.)--Ralph Hewins--Rinehart ($4).

At seven. Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian got a Turkish five-shilling piece as a present and promptly rushed to the bazaar with it to buy an old coin. The boy's father unprophetically chided Calouste on his earliest recorded financial deal: "If that's the way you're going to use your money, you'll end up in the gutter."

In the remaining 79 years of his life, Calouste Gulbenkian caught precious few glimpses of gutters, particularly since in young manhood he developed the habit of sprinting from a rented limousine to the door of his destination in morbid fear of assassination. As he became a legendary oil financier and fabled art collector, Gulbenkian also kept on collecting what he most loved: money. When he died in 1955. his five-shilling piece had grown to an estimated $420 million, his annual income to $14 million.

While he lived he seemed to have little more than a Sunday-supplement existence as the world's richest "mystery man," a tag arising from his genuine passion for obscurity. Death, with an assist from two biographers, now appears to be restoring Calouste Gulbenkian to the living.

No man was close to Gulbenkian. but a few men were near him. In Gulbenkian, Biographer Lodwick draws on the slightly embittered memories of David Young, for 26 years Gulbenkian's secretary. In Mr Five Per Cent, Biographer Hewins relies on the even-tempered viewpoint of Gulbenkian's only son. Nubar. now 62 and described as a flamboyantly bearded and monocled devotee of fox hunts, orchids and Rolls-Royces. Both books are unevenly written and a shade hero-worshipful. What emerges from each is a curiously fascinating bifocal vision that combines moments of startling intimacy with impersonal middle-distance reporting of Middle Eastern oil developments.

Magic Money. Gulbenkian was an Armenian, but he did not rise from rugs to riches. His father. Sarkis. was a prosperous kerosene importer in suburban Constantinople. Calouste adopted an old Arab proverb as his first business maxim while palm-priming the sultan's retinue with baksheesh: "The hand you dare not bite, kiss it." Priming himself with a civil engineering degree at London's King's College, Calouste visited the Baku oilfields in 1888, and in his 20th year wrote an authoritative book on the Baku petroleum industry. It was the overture to decades of what Gulbenkian called "orchestrations" --concessions, mergers, consortia, nervy negotiations, adamantine patience. The conclusion consisted of the words "to C. S. Gulbenkian ... in perpetuity, 5%" of the Iraq Petroleum Co., Ltd.

As both biographies suggest, money on a big scale becomes a kind of magic potion. Common crotchets are taken for the stigmata of genius; petty fears mushroom to paranoia. A Gulbenkian day began with setting-up exercises. Swedish massage and a bowl of yoghurt. Mr Five Per Cent was a health faddist, and for a time lived on a massive diet of carrots washed down with turnip juice. His father had lived to 106. and Gulbenkian fully expected to reach 120. To avoid dust, he sat only on leather cushions, slept on a leather mattress, and had the air of his Paris mansion filtered through silk screens and fine sprays of water. He reduced his handshake, proffering only the index and middle fingers. For reasons known only to the great mystery man, he preferred cotton to toilet paper. He slept exactly six hours per night, and declared that he permitted himself no dreams. He once spoke of Freud as a great talent gone to waste.

The Rhythm Section. To feel Gulbenkian's anger, an acquaintance once said, was "to know the electric chair without death." The danger signal was an open-palmed slap, slap, slap on the bald dome, often followed by the saliva-flecked roar, "You are a broken reed I" If Gulbenkian was something of a solid gold Scrooge, he also had Scroogian fears. According to Young, the sordid 1920 murder of a Manhattan pawnbroker named Gulbenkian, no kin, scared him out of ever visiting the U.S. He reputedly kept a ton and a half of gold in his London safes, presumably against a rainy day. An electrified barricade surrounded his Paris home, together with innumerable burglar alarms, watchdogs and a platoon of private guards and spies. Life with father was a perpetual war of nerves for wife Nevarte, son Nubar and daughter Rita. At 8 a.m.. Papa Gulbenkian arranged a series of staggered telephone calls so he could keep tabs on their whereabouts throughout the day. The entire family had to beg him for money with Oriental humility. He once snorted during a murder play, "Ridiculous! In my house the purchase of the poison would be noticed at once in the household accounts."

If the everlasting detail of work was Gulbenkian's religion, art and women were his sports. In art, Gulbenkian polished his own tastes, finally acquired by shrewd trading what was one of the finest private collections in the world, ranging from Rembrandts and Rubenses to Paul Chabas' famed September Morn. As for women, "a varied sexual experience is necessary to the rhythm of life," he once told Secretary Young. "It quietens, it deadens, and it diverts." For the rhythm section of his life, Gulbenkian required a new girl about once every three months. He seemed to prefer the Eliza Doolittle type. There was a discreet "mistress of the mistresses' wardrobes" who handled the social polishing as well as the farewell sobs, frequently stifled by generous sums (average: $30,000).

Children in the Museum. During the last 13 years of his life. Gulbenkian lived in a drearily furnished suite of Lisbon's posh little Hotel Aviz, voluntarily separated from his wife and family and the paintings which he sentimentally called "my children." When an old friend pressed him to enliven the bare walls of his rooms with at least one painting, Gulbenkian replied in a rare moment of embitterment, "Do you honestly suppose that besides myself there are fifty men in the world who look at my collection other than through a mist of dollars?" Lost in the mist of millions himself, Gulbenkian fashioned an heir after his own heart, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which is preparing to house the art collection in Lisbon. On July 20, 1955, alone save for a nurse and secretary, Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, 86, kissed the last hand he could not bite--death's.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.