OPINION: To get to the front door of Rannoch, the Arts and Crafts-style house always described as a mansion, you drive down a private lane. The house is shrouded from view by dense planting. It says, like the houses of any very rich person, that this is a private place, a sanctuary. As you wind up the driveway, there are glimpses of sculptures, of the house. In retrospect, given what we now know about its owner, it seems to be a shadowy place, a place where ill-kept secrets were concealed. There is an air of the Gothic about Rannoch.
In 2011, I knocked on the front door and Sir James Wallace answered. I was there to talk to him for a newspaper profile. He almost never gave personal interviews. But he was friendly, in his austere, almost aristocratic manner. He had an old-fashioned, gentlemanly manner. I liked him. But you could not describe him as effusive.
Lots of awfully rich people are elusive. They can afford to be. Money gives you immunity from scrutiny.
He had just been knighted. He wore to his investiture his clan kilt. His gong was for services to the arts. His trust, the James Wallace Arts Trust Collection – now renamed the Arts House Trust – gives about $2 million a year to various art projects.
If you knocked on the front door of Rannoch today, he couldn’t answer. He’s no longer home. He’s serving two years and four months in Auckland’s Mt Eden Prison after being found guilty of indecent assault against three men, and two charges of attempting to dissuade a witness from testifying. Perhaps fittingly, Mt Eden Prison is a Gothic pile.
At Rannoch, he lived a rich and elegant life. It was a bit Downton Abbey, but with acres of modern art. He had a brass bell, used for calling the staff, in his dining room. He had a butler. He had live-in rotating “custodians”, usually younger artists he was supporting financially in exchange for driving him places and accompanying him on outings, to the theatre or the opera. Rannoch was, like its owner, elegant and very civilised. There were elegant and civilised parties. “I bridle at bad manners, but otherwise I couldn’t be more egalitarian,” he said.
His art collection was the point of the place. There was a red-velvet couch from Knole, the family estate of famous gardener Vita Sackville-West. He let me sit on the Knole couch. I said, “Oh!” because it was very sinky. He told me the last person to sit there was the King of Tonga and that it took two people to help him up.
After the profile appeared, I went to a cafe in Auckland’s Kingsland to interview a young man who was making his way in the art world. He showed me, on his phone, pictures of another Rannoch: a Bacchanalian evening. They depicted Wallace snogging a young man who was seated in an armchair. I was horrified. Not out of any moral outrage. There is no evidence that the snog was not reciprocal. But the picture had been surreptitiously snapped by a guest, enjoying Wallace’s hospitality, in his private space, and then shown to a journalist.
The young man was gay. Perhaps his showing of the snaps was in response to this: I had asked Wallace whether he had a partner. He replied: “No, no!” What did he mean, “No, no?” “Well, I could never have afforded all of this if I had a wife dangling about.” A wife might have been an extravagance too far? “Ha, ha, yes.”
Of course I knew he was gay – and, as I had at that time been writing about the arts for over a decade – he must have known I knew it. I would never have asked. It was his business. He is in his 80s now, and so of a generation who grew up at a time when being gay was a crime.
Actor Sir Ian McKellen believes that everyone gay is under some obligation to sing it from the rooftops. Another actor, Miriam Margolyes, told me she regretted telling her parents she was gay: it “caused them enormous distress and anxiety”.
She is not at all bitter or hurt. “I just thought, you know, some people can’t handle this. This is where Ian and I disagree completely, because he thinks everybody should come out and everybody should tell everybody. Well, I don’t agree with that and it is cruel and unnecessary to put them through it if they are your parents and they love you.”
Wallace had chosen not to reveal his sexuality. Heterosexuals are not required to declare their sexuality, so why should he?
Should he be stripped of his knighthood? Yes. It’s the rules. In accepting an honour, you implicitly agree that you will not bring the honours system into disrepute. He is a convicted sexual offender.
But what becomes of his reputation for undeniably generous gestures of philanthropy to the underfunded arts community – look upon my good works over here; shut your eyes to the bad stuff over there? And people did, presumably, for years. Philanthropy can cover a multitude of sins. But whether the sins outweigh the philanthropy is another, probably unanswerable, question.
It reminds of Shelley’s sonnet about the once-powerful pharaoh whose statue is now toppled: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains.”
A Sharon Murdoch cartoon on the Stuff website depicts a naked and cowering statue of Wallace on a plinth. The cartoon was titled “Endowment”. The statue was titled “Wallace”. A visitor to the art gallery says, “Apparently, it was untitled for years.”
The cartoon is a reference to the five years in which Wallace’s legal team managed to keep his name suppressed. This was finally lifted last week. Kevin Spacey, the famous actor now before the English courts on similar charges of sexual assault, does not have name suppression.
After the exposure of Jimmy Savile, the serial rapist of children and all-round good guy who raised millions for charity and children’s hospitals – his hunting grounds – author Howard Jacobson posed this question in the Independent newspaper: “So, is philanthropy the last refuge of the scoundrel?
“When you have things to conceal – a criminal past, a ruthlessly accumulated fortune, a predilection for underage girls, or just a hankering to be better thought of than you deserve – what works better than giving to charity? Give munificently and ostentatiously – for there’s no advantage in hiding your light under the same bushel you hide your dirty secret – and a knighthood will surely come your way, to say nothing of the devotion of your beneficiaries, and therefrom, if you’re smart, ample opportunity to pursue your secret predilections even further. Crime, charity, crime: call it the perpetual motion of the immoralist.”
Wallace compounded an already ruined reputation by arranging for his manager, Mustafa Erinc Yikar, and the now surely ex-entertainer Mika X and others to attempt to bribe one victim to drop his complaint. Mika X offered the man $15,000. This was not just bafflingly criminal, it was insulting. The fight for continuing name suppression must have cost much more than $15,000.
Wallace is a millionaire many times over. He made the millions from the meat-rendering factory he inherited from his family. He once said that some people might think he led a “schizophrenic life just because I collect dead cows as well as art”.
As it turns out, he did lead a schizophrenic life.
Nothing beside remains.
