Rogues' Gallery: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed, and Betrayals that Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art »

Provocative cultural journalist and New York Times bestselling author Michael Gross is currently a contributing editor at Travel & Leisure. He has previously held positions at the New York Times, New York, Radar, George, and Esquire. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Interview, Details, Elle, Architectural Digest, American Photo,
Town & Country, and Cosmopolitan, and he has also written for the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. He has profiled subjects from John F. Kennedy Jr. to Greta Garbo, from Richard Gere to Ivana Trump, and he has written on subjects such as divorce, plastic surgery, Greenwich Village, and sex in the nineties. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (1995), which was published in eight countries; My Generation (2000), a biography of the Baby Boom generation; Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren (2003); and 740 Park (2005). He currently lives in New York City.

Michael Gross brings us an unprecedented, unauthorized look inside the nation's greatest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in this endlessly entertaining follow-up to his bestselling social history 740 Park. Gross pulls back the shades on the world of cultural philanthropy and paints a portrait of the hidden face of American wealth and power so frank and revealing that it provoked what Liz Smith called "a firestorm of controversy."

Rogues' Gallery covers the entire history of the Met, focusing on the museum's most colorful characters such as directors Tom Hoving and Philippe de Montebello, the great capitalists J. Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller Jr., Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland, the philanthropist Brooke Astor, and mother-daughter trustees Jane Engelhard and Annette de la Renta. A rich, satisfying, alternately hilarious and horrifying look at America's upper class, it proves that "behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime."

New York Observer - Reid Pillifant

Provocative.

Leaders of the Metropolitan Museum xi

Introduction 1

Archaeologist 1870-1904 Luigi Palma di Cesnola 21

Capitalist 1904-1912 J. Pierpont Morgan 65

Philanthropist 1912-1938 John D. Rockefeller Jr 113

Catalyst 1938-1960 Robert Moses 171

Exhibitionist 1959-1977 Thomas P. F. Hoving 237

Arrivistes 1974-2009 Jane Annette Engelhard 373

Afterword 487

Acknowleldgments 497

Notes 501

Bibliogoraphy 533

Index 539