I. The Boy King
Approximately 3,336 years ago, Tutankhamun, a minor king in a major Egyptian dynasty—the 18th—breathed his last. He was in his late teens, and he had reigned since he was nine years old. After a brief mourning period, the pharaoh’s acolytes swung into action, mounting an epic of funerary ceremony worthy of Cecil B. DeMille.
First came embalming. Tutankhamun’s heart was left intact, but other vital internal organs—his liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines—were removed, preserved, wrapped in cloth, and placed in four mini-coffins, each about a foot and a quarter long and made of gold inlaid with carnelian stone and colored glass.
The pharaoh’s body was washed, anointed with herbs and unguents, adorned with more than a hundred amulets, rings, and bangles, and then carefully wrapped in strips of linen. The mummy was laid in a coffin of solid gold, the delicate face on its lid fashioned in Tutankhamun’s image and framed by the customary pharaonic nemes, or striped headdress. Before the lid went on, the pharaoh’s undertakers gently placed over his head a magnificent 22-pound portrait mask in burnished gold: the nose pointed, the cheeks smooth, and the lips and chin fleshy, with wide eyes outlined in lapis lazuli.
The gold coffin was placed inside a larger coffin of gilded wood, which was housed, nesting-doll-style, inside a still-larger coffin, also of gilded wood. The nested coffins were then lowered into a heavy, rectangular sarcophagus of yellow quartzite, its sides etched with hieroglyphs, its corners featuring relief carvings of the protective goddesses Isis, Nephthys, Selket, and Neith. For good measure, the sarcophagus was itself nested in four ornately decorated chests known as shrines, each bigger than the last. The outermost shrine, made of gilded cedar, was 16 1/2 feet long and 9 feet high. Tutankhamun’s preserved viscera got their own gilded shrine, its four sides guarded by the same four goddesses—this time spectacularly rendered as fully three-dimensional sculptures of gold-painted wood, each about three feet high, with arms outstretched and heads turned sideways, as if on the lookout for intruders.
The pharaoh’s remains were carried down into a tomb west of the Upper Nile, in the vast royal necropolis known as the Valley of the Kings. So, too, were all manner of mementos and goods from Tutankhamun’s life: disassembled chariots, a childhood gaming board, furniture, lamps, sculpture, weapons, jewelry. The tomb, a mini-labyrinth of tunnels, chambers, and blocked passageways, was sealed. And that was that. Tutankhamun’s followers had done what they could to equip the pharaoh for a safe journey through the underworld to a joyful afterlife.
Approximately 3,299 years later, in the summer of 1976, many of these same items, including the gold mask, lay swaddled and packed in one of the holds of the U.S.S. Sylvania, a navy ship bound for Norfolk, Virginia. This had not been the original transport plan. The American organizers of the six-city “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibition, which was to run from late 1976 to early 1979, believed that the most prudent course was to bring the ancient artifacts over to the United States by airplane. But Gamal Mokhtar, the chairman of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, was fearful of a crash or a hijacking. He demanded, more or less at the last minute, that the artifacts travel to America in secrecy, aboard a U.S. naval vessel. The Sylvania was what is known in U.S. Navy parlance as a combat-stores ship, its job to supply provisions, among them fresh and frozen foods, to warships out at sea. And so, the precious Tutankhamun artifacts made their way across the Mediterranean sharing cargo space with refrigerated boxes of hamburger patties.
In America, the boy king would at last encounter his real afterlife, albeit a rather different one than the ancient Egyptians had imagined. Here, Tutankhamun became King Tut, and King Tut became one of the most all-encompassing cultural phenomena of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition broke museum attendance records, with hours-long waits and Studio 54-like queues to get in. (It was seen by eight million people, a million more than Tut had ruled as king.) The show significantly boosted the economy of every city it passed through—no small thing in the fiscally straitened 1970s. It sustained several cottage industries’ worth of collectibles, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upscale line of souvenirs (which included a life-size replica of Selket, in resin coated with gold leaf, yours for $1,500) to cheap, unlicensed ladies’ T-shirts (HANDS OFF MY TUTS), and inspired a Steve Martin novelty single that made its debut in 1978 on Saturday Night Live and went platinum. Tut-mania was a bona fide late-70s thing, like disco and Halston and Roots, and with many of the same gawkers, participants, and champions: Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Kissinger, Billy Carter. When the exhibition reached its final stop, in New York City, an unnamed Metropolitan Museum executive told the Associated Press, “Seeing Tut is the status symbol right now in this city. It’s even superseded sex.” (Again, no small thing in the 70s.)
That “Treasures of Tutankhamun” got to America was extraordinary in and of itself: the unlikely outcome of a variety of intertwined political and personal agendas, among them Richard Nixon’s desire to salvage his legacy as his presidency unraveled, the image-building campaign of a dynamic new Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, and the rivalry between two of America’s foremost museum directors, Thomas Hoving and J. Carter Brown. The confluence of these narratives, plus the simple fact that the objects on display were very old and very beautiful, ensured that “Treasures of Tutankhamun” would cut a swath like no museum exhibition before it ever had.
II. Bluebloods and Rivals
In a file in his desk drawer labeled “Speech Material,” Thomas P. F. Hoving kept a photocopied page from Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence—specifically, a passage in which the novel’s frustrated would-be lovers, Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska, conspire to meet furtively in late-19th-century New York. Hoving had underlined certain words for emphasis:
“Tomorrow I must see you—somewhere where we can be alone,” he said, in a voice that sounded almost angry to his own ears.
She wavered, and moved toward the carriage.
“But I shall be at Granny’s—for the present, that is,” she added, as if conscious that her change of plans required some explanation.
“Somewhere where we can be alone,” he insisted.
She gave a faint laugh that grated on him.
“In New York? But there are no churches … no monuments.”
“There’s the Art Museum—in the Park,” he explained.
That museum, described by Wharton as a place where treasured antiquities “mouldered in unvisited loneliness,” was Hoving’s domain: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the moment he became the director, in 1967, Hoving made it his mission to upend the perception that had held fast since Wharton’s day, that the Met was a drab, echoey place visited only by highfalutin aficionados of the fine arts. “My ideal museum is not an overstuffed storehouse,” he wrote in his notebook. “It isn’t one of those pompous Temples of Silence you hear some experts pant for—so properly quiet, so awesome in the quietude of its monied atmosphere that you feel you want to reach for your Dramamine.”
Hoving was a self-styled provocateur, a man who would title his memoir of life at the Met Making the Mummies Dance. (Its working title had been Troublemaker.) But he was also knowledgeable and skilled, with master’s and doctoral degrees in art history from Princeton University and an innate gift for showmanship that he had inherited from his marketing-maestro father, Walter Hoving, the head of Tiffany & Co.
The younger Hoving was only 36 when he took the reins at the Metropolitan, after having run the Met-administered Cloisters museum of medieval art, in upper Manhattan, and after serving briefly as New York City parks commissioner under Mayor John V. Lindsay. Hoving wasted no time in trying to make an impression. For the special exhibition that kicked off his regime, “In the Presence of Kings,” a wide-ranging survey of items of royal provenance from the Met’s holdings—including one of Marie Antoinette’s velvet-covered dog kennels—Hoving ordered galleries to be repainted, re-lit, and generally reconceived, a radical departure from museum norms of the day. He opened a museum gift shop—a first in the annals of the Met, and of art museums in general. He tapped Stuart Silver, a junior member of the design department, to be his director of exhibition design, “effectively mandating the creation of a new discipline,” Silver says. “Later, he really started cranking it up, throwing exhibitions at us in quantity, up to over 50 a year. But what he wanted for ‘In the Presence of Kings’ was an exhibition that, right off the bat, was a whizbang.”
Two years after Hoving’s ascension, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., got its own boy director: 34-year-old J. Carter Brown. Like Hoving, Brown was an American aristocrat, only more so. A scion of the Browns who had endowed Brown University, he could claim an educational pedigree that encompassed Groton, Harvard College, and Harvard Business School. Both Hoving and Brown were rangy, handsome men with fancy hobbies—Hoving a pilot, Brown a yachtsman. But, temperamentally, they could not have been more different. Hoving was extroverted, fun-loving, and occasionally exasperating in his penchant for self-promotion. Brown was reserved, scholarly, and inscrutable. What they had in common was intelligence and big vision. Hoving pulled off the acquisition of Egypt’s Roman-era Temple of Dendur and the construction of the Met’s glass-walled Sackler Wing to house it. Brown oversaw the construction of the National Gallery’s I. M. Pei-designed East Building, which effectively doubled his museum’s size.
The two men spent much of the 70s in competition for the same works of art, not to mention the same resources and benefactors, yet they were occasionally compelled to work together—arranging loans of artworks, coordinating exhibitions, and pooling expertise. They had a polite, if uneasy, relationship. Hoving, in his memoir, admitted that he often “screamed about” Brown’s competitiveness “in private with my staff,” while Brown, late in his life, reflected that he preferred working with Hoving’s deputy and eventual successor, Philippe de Montebello, because “here we had a rational human being.”
“It was hilarious, in a way, the competition between Tom and Carter,” says Silver. “They were both lean, all angles, and the two of them represented a certain facet of American aristocracy. To see them go at each other, in the most petty ways, was amusing, like watching Javanese shadow puppets kicking each other.”
One way in which both directors gave their institutions a jolt in the 70s was to rely less on their permanent holdings to draw crowds and far more on limited-run shows, particularly those involving objects and art from overseas. Hoving and Brown kept a keen eye on developments abroad to see what treasures might be pried loose from their native lands for a U.S. visit: the Book of Kells from Ireland, say, or Bronze Age archaeological finds from China. As privileged men of the world, Hoving and Brown were uninhibited about working their connections at the White House and the State Department to get what they wanted.
One person both men got to know well was Peter Solmssen, who, in the early 1970s, held the unlikely title of “adviser on the arts” to the State Department. In the Nixon era, the department was populated, to a degree that seems inconceivable now, with foreign-policy hands who genuinely believed in the value of cultural exchange as a means of fostering better understanding between peoples. As Solmssen recalls it, Nixon’s assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, John Richardson Jr., tapped him for the specific purpose of facilitating such exchanges between the United States and countries with which it had strained relations. “He called me into his office,” Solmssen remembers, “and said, ‘We’re really trying to get talks going with the Soviet Union, with China, with Egypt. Do you think you could find a way to get something going with these countries in the arts?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’ll try. How do you want me to do it?’ And John Richardson said, ‘Well, that’s your problem.’ Basically, he let me invent my own job.”
Of the same generation as Hoving and Brown, and yet another tall, dashing Ivy Leaguer (Harvard ’52), Solmssen had a C.V. atypical for a diplomat. Before joining the foreign service, he had been a photographer for Life magazine, learning at the feet of the masters Alfred Eisenstaedt and David Douglas Duncan. He continued shooting even while working as a U.S. cultural attaché in Brazil in the 60s, immersing himself in its music scene and becoming friends with Antônio Carlos Jobim, the godfather of bossa nova. Solmssen was as fluent in art talk as he was in bureaucratese, and Hoving and Brown were among the first figures to whom he reached out for cultural-exchange ideas. At the top of both men’s lists was a Tut tour of America.
III. “Everywhere the Glint of Gold”
Egypt had been on Washington’s “strained relations” list since 1967, the year of the Six-Day War, a humiliating chapter in Egyptian history. In that conflict, Israel scored a quick, decisive military victory over Egypt, taking control of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. In the climate of the Cold War, with Israel as America’s proxy and Egypt as the Soviet Union’s, Egypt broke off formal diplomatic relations with the U.S., and the American Embassy in Cairo was shuttered.
Only six years earlier, Jacqueline Kennedy, as First Lady, had stood with Egypt’s then minister of culture, Sarwat Okasha, at the opening of a small exhibition of minor artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb at the National Gallery, in Washington—the kickoff of a two-year tour that hopscotched its way across the United States and Canada. In 1972, a bigger, flashier Tut show in London, featuring the famous gold mask, proved to be the most popular in the British Museum’s history, drawing 1.6 million visitors over five months. Yet Hoving and Brown could only look on in envy—this collection of Tut artifacts was next scheduled to travel to Egypt’s military sponsor, the Soviet Union, with stops in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.
For Hoving, the inaccessibility of the Tut treasures was especially irritating because his museum, the Metropolitan, had a distinguished department of Egyptian art, founded in 1906. Just five weeks before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, and only a few days after Hoving had formally assumed his duties as director, the Met was awarded custody of the Temple of Dendur, which Egypt had presented to the United States as a gift of friendship. (The temple had been disassembled, stone by stone, because the spot by the Nile where it stood was about to be flooded by Egypt’s biggest-ever public-works project, the Aswan High Dam.) Above all, Hoving wanted Tutankhamun because the Metropolitan had an institutional history with the pharaoh. When the entrance to the boy king’s tomb was first uncovered, by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in November of 1922, it was Harry Burton, a photographer working with a Met-sponsored excavation group nearby, who hurried to Carter’s site to document the discoveries. The 1,400 photos that Burton took, in adverse conditions with unwieldy equipment, are stunning in their quality and composition, and did as much to generate worldwide excitement as the news of Carter’s find itself.
The original wave of Tut-mania, over the winter of 1922–23, represented archaeology’s apex as a glamorous profession, at least until Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies came along. Carter had been digging, literally, for years. Since 1907, he had worked under the auspices of an affluent benefactor, George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. Lord Carnarvon had begun spending winters in Egypt at the turn of the century for health reasons. An early motoring enthusiast, he had a habit of driving too fast and getting into car crashes; as a result, he had damaged his lungs, making it harder for him to endure the cold, damp winters at Highclere, his huge, drafty estate in England. (Highclere now doubles as the title character in television’s Downton Abbey.) An intellectually curious man, Carnarvon took up Egyptology as a hobby and, upon meeting Carter, agreed to finance his digs.
In 1922, Carter, now 49 years old, set out to re-explore a parcel of land in the Valley of the Kings that he had examined two seasons earlier, close to the tomb of Ramses VI, a 20th Dynasty pharaoh who had lived and died roughly 200 years after Tut. The original excavation of this tomb had left an area piled high with ancient rubble, and, near it, a series of huts built by and for the tomb’s laborers. Carter had uncovered the huts, but it had not occurred to him until 1922 that the huts and excavated rock for Ramses VI’s tomb might themselves be covering up an older tomb. On November 4, just a few days into the new digging season, Carter’s crew of Egyptian workmen, digging near the huts, found a staircase descending into the earth, and, at its base, a sealed door.
Carter was elated, but, rather than forge ahead, he gathered his patience, had the stairway re-filled, and cabled his patron, Lord Carnarvon, urging him to come down. It took Carnarvon and his daughter, the 21-year-old Lady Evelyn Herbert, two and a half weeks to make the journey by train and boat from Highclere to Luxor, the city across the Nile from the Valley of the Kings. The earl and his daughter then crossed the river by ferry and rode donkeys to Carter’s excavation site. On November 25, as Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn anxiously waited, Carter’s crew once again uncovered the staircase. The door at its bottom, the excavation team discovered, opened onto a 25-foot-long rubble-filled passageway, which, once cleared, was revealed to end with another door.
The next day, November 26, produced the most famous verbal exchange in the annals of archaeology. Carter, with Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn standing behind him, drilled a hole in an upper corner of the second door and peered through, using a candle to illuminate the space within. What he saw, once his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, left him speechless. Carnarvon, growing impatient, finally said, “Can you see anything?” To which Carter, jolted from what felt like a dream state, beatifically replied, “Yes, wonderful things.”
The view through the hole was of a room piled haphazardly, in a manner evoking a latter-day garage or storage unit, with exquisitely crafted 18th Dynasty artifacts: as Carter put it, “strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.” This turned out to be just the antechamber of the tomb, which Tutankhamun’s buriers had filled with furnishings from his life: beds, baskets, sculpture, games, weapons, chariot wheels. It would take several weeks, with Harry Burton capturing the process moment by moment on film, for the antechamber’s contents to be painstakingly untangled, catalogued, and put into safe storage. A smaller room off the antechamber, which Carter called the annex, was found to contain a similar jumble of objects. Not until February 1923 did Carter and his team chip through a second door off the antechamber, which led to Tut’s burial chamber.
Word of the “Tut-Ankh-Amen” discoveries, as they were called in the papers, spread quickly around the globe, triggering daily reports from a ravenous press corps, Egyptianchic collections from fashion houses, and the first American wave of Tut-related kitsch, including Tut-branded California lemons, a Hollywood two-reeler comedy called Tut-Tut and His Terrible Tomb, and the Tin Pan Alley ditty “Old King Tut Was a Wise Old Nut,” which contained the couplet “He got into his royal bed, three thousand years B.C. / And left a call for twelve o’clock in nineteen twenty-three.” (For more on the 1920s outburst of American Egyptophilia, including the vogue for Egypt-inspired movie houses, see Bruce Handy’s VF.com article “Watch Like an Egyptian,” January 29, 2008.)
Another year would pass before Carter, ever patient and thorough, opened up the shrines and coffins, getting his first glimpse of the gold mask and of Tut’s desiccated, not particularly well-preserved body. Clearing Tut’s tomb would, in fact, more or less see out the remainder of Carter’s career. He died in 1939, at the age of 64, after having at last retired full-time to England. Carnarvon was less fortunate. At the very end of his and Carter’s triumphal 1922–23 season, he was bitten by a mosquito while relaxing on a Nile riverboat, and the bite became infected when it was nicked by a shaving razor. The infection overwhelmed his immune system, and he died in Cairo of sepsis-abetted pneumonia on April 5, 1923. Carnarvon’s death became worldwide news—and the basis for theories, enduring to this day, of a “mummy’s curse” that befalls those who dare disturb the tomb of an ancient pharaoh.
IV. The Deal Is Done
Richard Nixon was himself in a compromised state of health in June 1974, when, like Lord Carnarvon before him, he set out for Egypt in pursuit of one last moment of glory. His chronic phlebitis had subsided during the first term of his presidency, but with the Watergate scandal reaching its climax and the House Judiciary Committee in the process of drafting formal articles of impeachment, the flare-ups in his left leg recurred. Dr. Walter Tkach, the White House physician, strongly advised Nixon not to make the trip, but the president would not be deterred.
The event that set the trip in motion was the October War of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria simultaneously launched attacks on Israel. Israel beat back the Egyptians, to the point where Israeli forces completely encircled Egypt’s Third Army in the Sinai Peninsula. Though a cease-fire had been agreed upon, it was repeatedly broken in the days to follow, with both sides pointing fingers and the U.S. and the Soviet Union drawn into the fray. On the brink of what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a “superpower crisis,” there was a feverish round of diplomacy in which Armageddon was averted, the U.S. talked Israel down from laying waste to the Third Army, and Egypt’s newish president, Anwar Sadat, indicated to Kissinger his desire to shift his loyalties away from the Soviets and toward the United States.
Kissinger’s initial visit to Egypt, in November 1973, commenced the “shuttle diplomacy” era, in which Kissinger traveled back and forth between Jerusalem and Cairo as an intermediary in the peace process. Though trust was slow to build between the Egyptians and the Israelis, the Egyptian-American lovefest began almost immediately. Sadat confided to Kissinger in their very first meeting that he was disenchanted with the Soviet Union and tired of its condescension; Kissinger, for his part, departed Cairo certain he was “dealing with a great man.” By the time Nixon arrived the following year, he was greeted by crowds cheering “Yehya Nixon!” (“Long live Nixon!”), and Sadat went on the record to say that the American president’s impeachment “would be a tragedy.”
Carter Brown, alert to the good vibes between the U.S. and Egypt, saw an opening to make a bid for what he’d long coveted: a Tutankhamun show at the National Gallery. In January 1974, even before the two countries had restored diplomatic relations, and before Nixon’s visit, Brown flew to Cairo to propose the idea to Gamal Mokhtar. Mokhtar was amenable, and Brown, recognizing that he would need partners in other American cities to close the deal, reached out to Hoving. In Brown’s telling, Hoving initially turned him down. “He didn’t want to take it, I think, thinking that he could go ’round and do his own negotiating and get it first and do it his way and have a feather in his cap,” Brown recalled in an interview recorded in 1998, four years before his death, for the National Gallery’s oral-history program. “But after his research he found we had an absolute lock on this show. So he then calls up in a totally different mood, saying ‘Please, please, what does it take? How can I get back into this?’ ”
The two museum directors eventually agreed that Hoving would handle the commercial side of the operation—the catalogue, the promotion, the gift-shop items—and that the exhibition, however many cities it passed through, would open at the National Gallery and close at the Metropolitan. Hoving was not thrilled that Brown was getting first dibs; he complained bitterly to Ron Berman, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the mediator in the matter, that his counterpart in Washington was “doing nothing, taking no responsibility.” Brown, for his part, lamented for the rest of his life that Tut came to be so identified with Hoving. “In spite of a lot of the propaganda from New York, it had been a show that the National Gallery had negotiated and had originated and grew out of a trip I’d made to Egypt and a meeting I’d had with the head of antiquities,” he said. “Then it languished for a while until the Nixon visit, and it got going again.”
Nixon’s decision to visit Egypt set off a flurry of activity at the State Department, not just among the heavy-duty policy teams but also in Solmssen’s office. Shortly before the trip, the arts adviser took an urgent call from the White House. “They literally said, ‘We want something that the president and Sadat can sign. He needs to sign something,’ ” Solmssen says. “They asked, ‘What could you produce that would be appropriate?’—that wasn’t, you know, a new treaty with Israel or something. Something non-controversial, easy to sign, that you could make a ceremony of.” Recalling his conversations a couple of years earlier with Brown and Hoving, Solmssen suggested a traveling exhibition of the Tutankhamun treasures. “And they said, ‘Whatever. Have it here in the morning.’ ”
On June 14, Nixon’s last day in Egypt, he and Sadat issued a joint communiqué announcing that the people of the United States would get a chance, on their own turf, to see the treasures of King Tut. Tut-mania, as silly as it got, grew out of the heady sense of possibility that June ’74 produced.
V. The Rita Hayworth of Egypt
The arrangement that came to be made was that “Treasures of Tutankhamun” would tour six cities between November 1976 and April 1979: Washington, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. The Metropolitan, with its strong Egyptian-antiquities department and its dynamic, shameless, pushy director, would serve as the manager of the six-museum consortium. Hoving initially thought that procuring the Tut items would be a breeze, but what he hadn’t prepared for was the languidly paced culture of Egyptian negotiation. Arriving in Cairo in 1975 to meet Mokhtar for the first time, he discovered a byzantine receiving system. You entered Mokhtar’s enormous, ramshackle office on Rameses Street, took your seat among the many chairs and couches arranged along the sides of the room, and waited your turn to meet with the great man—lurching forward one seat at a time, carousel-style, as Mokhtar, roosting imperially at his desk, conducted individual meetings in full view and earshot of those waiting.
“We would call those meetings one-cup-of-coffee, two-cup-of-coffee, three-cup-of-coffee meetings,” says Christine Roussel, who ran the Metropolitan Museum’s reproduction studio and accompanied Hoving on several trips that followed. “Because every half-hour or so a servant would come in with a tray of demitasse cups of Turkish-style coffee for us while we waited, until we finally got to talk with Mokhtar.” And even when one’s moment with Mokhtar arrived, he would, if favorably disposed toward his petitioner, suggest that the meeting continue later over dinner at the high-rise Sheraton overlooking the Nile, where his favorite belly dancer, Nagwa Fouad—a titan of her craft, known as “the Rita Hayworth of Egypt,” and also a favorite of Kissinger’s as he became a Cairo regular—performed nightly.
Hoving, recognizing a fellow hustler when he saw one, came to like Mokhtar, whom he described in his memoir as a sort of real-life Sydney Greenstreet character: “a short, plump man with a cherub’s face, a sly smile—with most of the teeth in front missing—and a bald pate.” It took several Nagwa Fouad floor shows’ worth of negotiation, but finally they hammered out a deal: Egypt would receive 100 percent of the profits from all gift-shop sales of books, posters, replicas, jewelry, and so on for the duration of the exhibition’s run in the United States. It was a good deal for Egypt, which was officially guaranteed a minimum $2.6 million payout from the show—the final tally would prove to be more than twice that amount—and a good deal for the Met, which would thereafter retain worldwide rights in perpetuity to the Egypt-related product developed in conjunction with the show.
The next step, arranging sufficient preparation time in the Egyptian Museum, in Tahrir Square, where the Tut artifacts were housed, presented its own challenges. To Hoving and his Met retinue, viewing the artifacts for the first time was a mixed experience: part awe—“everywhere the glint of gold”—but also part shock at the shoddy conditions in which the treasures were displayed. The Egyptian Museum was in disrepair, with display cases covered in dirt and paint splatters from some botched spruce-up job. Birds flew in and out of the galleries through a broken skylight.
The Metropolitan had shipped two and a half tons of equipment to Cairo for the purpose of lighting and photographing the Tut items (to produce pictures for the catalogue) and taking molds of those same items (to make reproductions for the gift shop). The situation at the Egyptian Museum was untenable. There wasn’t sufficient electrical power for the lighting rigs that Lee Boltin, the Met’s photographer, needed to capture the items in their full-color glory. What’s more, the Met staff was informed that it could work only mornings, since the museum, lacking funds to pay its guards for full days, was closed in the afternoons.
Roussel, well traveled and worldly, became the operation’s de facto fixer and operations chief. When Abdul Quader Selim, the Egyptian Museum’s director, informed her that the Met gang could get in a full day’s work if the Met paid the guards to stay on for the afternoons, she worked out the terms and found a money changer in Cairo’s main souk who gave her a favorable return on the Met’s dollars—via suitcases stuffed with Egyptian pounds. Hoving himself solved the electricity problem by paying off the director of lighting at the Great Pyramids, Fouad el-Orabi (later Egypt’s undersecretary of culture), who, accompanied by some minions, drove up to Cairo late one night and hot-spliced a huge spool of electrical cable into a streetlight near the back wall of the Egyptian Museum, thereby supplying the Met team with the voltage it required.
VI. A Narrative Masterstroke
It’s surprising, given how massive the Tut phenomenon came to be, how modest in physical scale the exhibition was. It totaled a mere 55 objects, most of them on the small side. Hoving later wrote, “I recognized that the finest Tut things were the more intimate objects.” Actually, says Christine Lilyquist, who was then the Met’s young curator of Egyptian art, this was really a practical choice; given the six-city itinerary, the exhibited items needed to be lightweight and easily transportable. “The objects are fragile, mostly wood, pottery, and gold—sheet gold at that, rarely solid,” she says. “With a large item like a coffin, you’d have harmed it every time you moved it.”
Still, the pharaoh’s relatively heavy gold mask was a no-brainer. Carter Brown was certain that it should be the show’s capper, the thing to which the exhibition built up. But Hoving, with nudging from Lilyquist, argued that the 55 objects should be displayed in the order in which Howard Carter discovered them, along with blowups of the corresponding Harry Burton photographs—a narrative masterstroke that even Brown acknowledged as such. “Give Tom his due,” he later said. “He and I didn’t agree at the beginning about how you should put the objects, because I felt the gold mask was the big climax and should be at the end. He convinced me that the story—since you don’t have a chronology of the art, the way you do in so many other art exhibitions—the chronology is only the chronology of discovery, and you should put it in the order in which it was discovered. So I really give him credit for that. And it worked.”
Of the 55 objects that Hoving and Lilyquist selected, 18 had never before been seen outside of Egypt. Hoving’s favorite was the gilded-wood statue of the goddess Selket, which had guarded the chest containing Tut’s organs, known as the canopic shrine, and no wonder: she is exquisitely and almost erotically rendered, in a transparent sheath that simultaneously drapes elegantly off her shoulders and clings close enough to her body to reveal in detail the shape of her breasts, the indent of her navel, and a slight puffiness to her abdomen, possibly a signifier of fertility.
In August 1976, the moment arrived for the 55 items to be transported from Cairo to the Port of Alexandria, where a U.S. naval vessel, the U.S.S. Milwaukee, would pick up the goods for the first leg of their journey to America. (In Naples, Italy, the items would be transferred from the Milwaukee to the Virginia-bound Sylvania.) Mokhtar was adamant that both he and a representative from the U.S. Embassy escort the items to the port. Tom Homan, a young cultural attaché, was the American deputized to join the antiquities chief. He remembers being surprised at both the modest size of the boxed-up exhibition—the U.S. Navy had readied a forklift, wholly unnecessarily, as it turned out, to load the crates—and the informal mode of transport that Mokhtar had arranged for the three-hour ride.
“It was just one open flatbed truck, with the boxes tied down with rope, and two ordinary taxis,” he says. Homan and Mokhtar rode in one taxi, and security personnel in the other. Everything in the show went on the truck except the box containing Selket, which was packed into the trunk of Homan and Mokhtar’s taxi. Homan’s equanimity was put to the test when Mokhtar had the mini-motorcade stop in his hometown, a village along the way, for a drink. The taxi’s driver also happened to be from the town. “We were dropped off at some watering hole, and I watched Selket disappear with the taxi,” Homan says. “I said, ‘Dr. Mokhtar! Selket is driving away!’ He calmly said, ‘Yes, yes, he’s going to have tea with his wife.’ ” Immediately upon the driver’s return, Homan asked to have the trunk opened so he could be reassured of Selket’s presence. She was still there, and, not long thereafter, she, the gold mask, and the other 53 items were safely en route to America.
VII. “The Necrobilia Collection”
The “Treasures of Tutankhamun” show was unveiled on November 15, 1976, at a gala dinner at the National Gallery hosted by the museum’s president and foremost benefactor, Paul Mellon, and his wife, Bunny. Writing about the event, John Sherwood, a reporter for The Washington Star, observed of the gathered swells, “The amazing thing was what overcomes everyone who enters this exhibit. They shut up. They whisper at first, just the way Howard Carter did.”
The show was installed in the windowless Central Gallery of the West Building, which the museum’s director of design, Gil Ravenel, turned into a dimly lit, dramatically tomb-like space. Ravenel had the gallery’s walls painted a shade of gray, Brown recalled “that tuned in with the silver bromide color” in the enlargements of Harry Burton's 1920s photographs and “just happened to be the perfect color for gold objects to be seen against.”
The exhibition was busy from the get-go, but, in its initial weeks, it was merely crowded, not thronged. As word of its magnificence got out, however, along with heavy print-and-television promotion by the show’s corporate sponsor, Exxon, would-be museum-goers began to anticipate epic waits. “Some kids assumed there would be a long line, so they pitched their pup tents in front of the National Gallery,” says Solmssen. “And the TV stations covered that, so everyone else thought, Hey, we gotta go. And, all of a sudden, there were lines. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
While mere civilians waited and waited, V.I.P.’s pulled strings to get in. Among those charged with serving as their guide was the National Gallery’s current director, Earl A. Powell III. Then a newly hatched junior curator at the museum, he recalls escorting President Jimmy Carter’s devout and homespun mother, Miss Lillian Carter, through the exhibition. “When Mrs. Carter came into the gold-mask room,” Powell says, “she held firm to my arm and said, ‘You can feel the spirit!’ ” Other V.I.P. visitors included the future senator John Warner and his then wife, Elizabeth Taylor; First Daughter Amy Carter; former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson; future First Lady Nancy Reagan; and such arts-and-letters figures as Andy Warhol, Robert Redford, Mike Nichols, and Lillian Hellman.
Accordingly, the remaining five museums in the consortium geared up for unprecedented foot traffic. In the days between the National Gallery’s run and that of the next institution up, the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, an official from the latter admitted, “The Washington experience scared us. There’s been lots of panic planning here.” It was the Tut show that compelled the museums, for the first time, to issue show tickets separate from the lapel pins that came with general admission. Depending on the museum, these tickets were either free or cost only a nominal fee, but demand was so high that even some ticketed visitors faced snaking lines and all-day waits. Scalpers got in on the action, hoarding $2 tickets and reselling them for 15 to 20 times that amount. In Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York, the tickets were put on sale in advance, their respective four-month runs selling out in a matter of hours.
The Metropolitan Museum, by virtue of being the last stop, had the most time to plan. Richard Morsches, the museum’s vice president for operations, packed off a group of Met staff members to Disneyland to observe and analyze how real pros handled crowd control. “Morsches called us his Tut Ops people,” says Stuart Silver, the Hoving-era design director. “I heard ‘It’s a Small World’ so many times that I still can’t bear to hear it.”
All the planning in the world, though, could not prevent crowds from packing the Metropolitan Museum’s steps, not to mention the blocks on Fifth Avenue running south from the museum along Central Park. The New York Times published an “About New York” column that led with the story of a woman whose husband began to suffer chest pains as they were on the verge of gaining admittance to the exhibition. Before bundling into an ambulance with him, she sought assurance from museum officials—priorities!—that she could retake her place in line when her spouse’s medical emergency was resolved.
The wryly reported dispatch from the waiting-to-see Tut line became a staple of late-70s newspapers and magazines, as did jaded commentary from the hype-averse; in Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau portrayed a museum guard boasting, “The Boy King Necrobilia Collection is the hottest ticket since Elvis!” But Tut-mania also begat an exuberant return of 1920s-style Egyptophilia, though of a more glammy strain. Bloomingdale’s, then at the height of its taste-making pomp, unveiled lines of Tut-inspired jewelry and housewares, including linens and a tote bag bearing the I ♥ NEW YORK slogan spelled out in hieroglyphics. Candy Pratts Price, who at the time designed the store’s window and floor displays (and is now a contributing editor at Vogue), ordered a life-size knockoff of the masked Tut in his tomb, surrounded it with sand, and put her faux pharaoh on display in the home-furnishings section. The heiress turned bank robber Patty Hearst, before she was packed off to jail, caught the Tut show with her parents at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she ran into Cher. Linda Ronstadt, admiring the statue of Selket at the New Orleans Museum of Art, remarked, “Just look at her—that pose just tells men to stay away. I could use that with my drummer.”
The Tut phenomenon was so all-encompassing that it became a prism through which pundits and pontificators discussed whatever they felt like discussing. Time’s longtime White House correspondent Hugh Sidey used the fact that Jimmy Carter had worn a sweater rather than a jacket and tie when he viewed the show in March 1977 as a telling commentary on the then new president’s folksy appeal. While “his retinue of white-shirted ambassadors, National Gallery factotums and Secret Service agents looked faintly uneasy,” Sidey wrote, “Jimmy was like the tourists, who gave up neckties a long time ago.” Meanwhile, an Afro-centric magazine called Sepia complained, “Most of the viewers who wait hours for a chance to glance admiringly at the priceless collection do not realize that King Tut was black!” Quoting African-American historians, among them one who declared that Egypt’s 18th Dynasty “was of almost unmixed Negro strain,” Sepia concluded that the organizers of “Treasures of Tutankhamun” had willfully neglected to educate the public about the pharaoh’s race: “What other name is appropriate for their road show of borrowed trinkets and treasures that, mislabeled, wows a nation? We call it the big Tut ripoff!”
As for Steve Martin, he preceded his lavish, willfully tacky Saturday Night Live production number—the most elaborate in the young show’s history—with a speech in which he mock-solemnly lamented, “It’s a national disgrace the way we’ve commercialized [Tut] with trinkets and toys, T-shirts and posters Maybe we can all learn something from this.”
VIII. Blockbusters Forever
In keeping with Hoving’s iconoclasm, the Metropolitan Museum mounted the Tut show in a fashion different from that of any of the other institutions. Just a few months prior to the December 1978 opening at the Met of “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” the museum had installed the Temple of Dendur in its new, glass-skinned, 48-foot-high, 200-foot-long Sackler Wing. The Tut show was placed in the mezzanine-level Egyptian galleries on the museum’s north side, some of which overlooked the temple, balcony-style, thereby allowing in some natural light. (This balcony has since been sealed off, and only a single small window overlooks the temple now.) Silver had studied the previous installations of the show and come away persuaded, he says, that “we were not going to do the nightclub, caveman, ooga-booga darkness approach like everybody else. You can light the shit out of something, but you’re always going to lose something. These objects just glistened in the daylight, and it was beautiful to see. And they glistened at night, but in a different way.”
Brown, predictably, was dismissive of the Metropolitan’s anti-tomb approach. The Met visitor, he said, “came out onto a mezzanine overlooking the Temple of Dendur space, which you’d think would be logical because it was Egyptian, but the whole point of the Tut show was that this stuff came from underground. You got into this dark atmosphere, and the spookiness of it was part of the appeal. Suddenly, at the Met, when you were two-thirds through, you turned a corner and you were out in that blaze of gray New York north light looking out onto Central Park. It just changed the whole mood and took away the whole sense of concentration on an imaginative, fictive experience.”
Regardless of Brown’s criticisms, the Met experience was the smoothest in terms of crowd flow, even with as many as 40,000 visitors a day, and Brown and Hoving could take pride not only in realizing their mutually held dream of a Tut show in America but also in pulling it off beyond anyone’s expectations. A survey commissioned by the Met concluded that “Treasures of Tutankhamun” had pumped $111 million into the New York City economy, taking into account money spent by Tut-goers on hotels, restaurants, shopping, and transportation. Chicago officials estimated a $42 million municipal boost over their four months with Tut, while New Orleans estimated its Tut stimulus to be an astonishing (for a small city) $70 million.
As for Hoving, he was already gone from the Met by the time “Treasures of Tutankhamun” actually made its way to the museum, having moved on to start his own consulting firm and to serve as an arts correspondent for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20. With the tour’s itinerary all set, he relinquished his post in mid-1977. Says Silver, “Coming as the culmination of over a decade of Hoving extravaganzas, Tut left nowhere else for Tom to go but up or out.”
Hoving died of lung cancer in December 2009, with the term “blockbuster exhibition” inevitably appearing in the first paragraph of his obituaries. To some, this was and remains a tragic term, akin to the movie Jaws’ emergence in 1975 as the first blockbuster movie—a delineation between a time when art museums were governed primarily by artistic concerns and the more box-office-obsessed reality to which we are now accustomed. But to Hoving and his acolytes, getting great masses of people into art museums was the whole point. “He told me long afterwards that his finest achievement as director of the Metropolitan was Tut,” says Silver. “It wasn’t. His finest achievement was creating the crowds in the halls.”