BONANZA FROM BILLY

SHOWMAN Billy Rose likes to describe himself as the "Sixth Avenue Medici." Last week he could prove that the statement was no idle boast. In one magnificent gesture, he had given $1,000,000 worth of sculpture to the Bezalel National Museum of Israel.

The modern Medici has stocked his 45-room Manhattan mansion on East 93rd Street with sculptures, now owns some 50-odd pieces that form a handsome compendium of sculpture over the past 130 years. Rose had no plans for parting with any of it until last year, when he got a letter from the mayor of Jerusalem, inquiring about his ideas for the collection and informing him that a local art show had drawn 600,000 visitors. "That spelled hunger," Billy says, "real hunger for art. Why, the total population is only around 2,000,000. It's like 60 million people showing up at the Metropolitan!"

Last fall the America-Israel Cultural Foundation helped arrange a meeting between Rose and Bezalel's boyish, brilliant director, Karl Katz. Katz agreed that the hunger was there, and gave one cogent reason: there is hardly any modern art displayed in the Middle East. Argued Katz: "From Jerusalem you'd have to go west as far as Rome, east as far as Tokyo, and south forever, to find a decent modern collection. This one will fill a tremendous gap." He added that the museum owns 25 acres of barren ground in the geographic center of expanding Jerusalem. "When Katz told me that," Rose recalls, "quick like a train I said, 'Give me five acres for my sculpture.' "

Maze for Money. Once committed, Rose plunged into the project with characteristic energy, planned to make his sculpture's new home in Jerusalem the best money could buy. He retained Isamu Noguchi, a sculptor who doubles in landscape design, to lay out a sloping, five-acre garden adjoining the National Museum where the collection will be displayed on natural rock pedestals in a maze of stone walls, cypresses and jasmine bushes. "When Isamu came up with the maze idea," Billy says, "I knew what he meant right away. I'm an old carney man myself."

In Manhattan last week, Billy happily gave Director Katz a conducted tour of the treasures that will soon be his. The statues dwarf their diminutive owner. In the entry Hugo Robus' green bronze Song seemed about to chirp a childish "May I take your coat?" At one side of the powder room stood Nadelman's painted bronze Woman, attentive as a lady-in-waiting. At the other side arched Robus' rainbowlike, semi-abstract Woman Washing Her Hair. The washroom offered a brace of sporting dogs by Hunt Diederich, and in its paneled lounge stood Epstein's mournful, supplicating Hannah.

The main hall opposite the broad winding stairway held Rodin's mighty and miserable Adam, an 8-ft.-high study in human splendor and spiritual loss. Opposite him, Maillol's Chained Liberty strainingly strode. Scattered about the palatial apartments were figures by Archipenko, Zadkine, Zorach, Jose de Creeft, Koren Der Harootian, Nathaniel Kaz, Viani, and Reg Butler. The study contained a miniature judges' bench in rosewood, serving as a pedestal for eleven Judges and Advocates by Daumier. In the garden Antoine Bourdelle's huge, agonized bronze Warrior hacked and thrust.

The only main room entirely bare of sculpture was the busy one fitted up as a one-man stock exchange, complete with both Dow-Jones and N.Y. Stock Exchange tickers, where Billy speculates in regal solitude (Rose began his career at 17 as a shorthand stenographer for that dean of speculators, Bernard Baruch). Shrugging back the shawl collar of his bulky white cardigan to expose the embroidered red "B.R." on the breast of his black polo shirt, Rose said he hoped to fill the empty places in his mansion with more antique furniture. As for his garden: "I may glass that in and build a swimming pool, if it's not too expensive, for warming my old bones. Nobody pampers me; I got to pamper myself."

Quick to admit that his collection is far from comprehensive, Billy plans to augment it with new purchases. He has his eye on works by Picasso, Arp, Moore, Lehmbruck and Brancusi. Last week he announced another collector's gift of Chaim Gross's The Performers, said he would "adore to get more contributions." He concedes that he will miss his host of silent, carved and cast friends. But at 60, Billy is thinking of posterity and has no regrets. Says he: "What was I going to do with these two-ton knickknacks--leave them to my sister Polly?"

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