A Big Business Tries to Quash a Tiny Business

Armand Hammer’s Epic Nastiness Lives On

October 2007 By Denny Hatch

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On Oct. 5, 2007 two stories ran in The Wall Street Journal—and on its Web site—about the huge Los Angeles Hammer Museum’s effort to bury Dave Pahl’s Hammer Museum, which displays his collection of 1700 hammers in a tiny house in Haines, Alaska, 3,098 miles to the north.

The top brass at the Los Angeles museum is following slavishly the brutal, bully-boy tactics of its founder, Occidental Petroleum President Armand Hammer (1898-1990), whose philosophy of life was codified on a plaque in his office that proclaimed, “He who hath the gold makes the rules.”

In any publication or broadcast news story, what the L.A. Hammer Museum is doing to Dave Pahl’s teeny museum of hammers in the boonies of Alaska would generate outrage.

Yet The Wall Street Journal treated this David vs. Goliath struggle as a giggle—”a fun Page-One WSJ story on a bubbling trademark spat” is how law blogger Peter Lattman describes it in his oh-so-cleverly-titled story, “Will The Hammer Bring Down the Hammer on The Hammer?”

On page 1 of the Journal that day, Laura Meckler titles her smarty-pants story, “Why Two Museums Are Now Going at it Hammer and Tongs.”

Her subhead—equally cutesy-poo: “One in Alaska Shows Tools, One in Los Angeles, Art; Will Mr. Pahl Get Nailed?”

I only wish I were 40 years younger with plenty of money so I could engineer a PR campaign—pro bono for Dave Pahl, who has no money—that would dump so much manure on the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles that visitors will want a hot shower when they exit.

I cannot wait until Rupert Murdoch gets deeply involved in the newsroom of the Journal—his newest acquisition—and brings the snotty little elitists who are, laughingly, journalists, back into the real world, or better, out the door.

Dave Pahl Opts Out
In 1973, Dave Pahl decided to chuck life in Cleveland’s fast lane and moved to Haines, Alaska, 775 miles south of Anchorage in the Chilkat Valley on the shores of the longest, deepest fjord in North America. Pahl and his wife, Carol, homesteaded for a number of years with no electricity or indoor plumbing.

Fascinated by humankind’s oldest tool, Pahl began acquiring hammers until he had amassed a formidable collection of 900 of them, ranging from a prehistoric warrior’s pick to the modern implement sold by The Home Depot.

In 2000, the Pahls bought a wee, fixer-upper house on Main Street in Haines (pop. 1,811) and the following year opened the Hammer Museum where he displays his tool collection in four tiny rooms.

Recently the Armand Hammer Museum in L.A. decided to drop the “Armand” and call itself the Hammer Museum, and applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a trademark. The application listed 26 lawyers who claimed that it first called itself the Hammer Museum back in 1999.

“Actually, the LA Hammer is still officially named the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center,” writes The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, “although it uses The Hammer in most contexts.” Myriad entries on the Internet throughout this century up to today refer to it as the Armand Hammer Museum.

When he heard about the Los Angeles giant trying to trademark his name, Dave Pahl, now 57, filed his own trademark application—with no help from even one lawyer. Both applications are pending.

Dave Pahl erred when he allowed his hammermuseum.com domain to expire; the L.A. people promptly snapped it up and are using it. They offered Pahl money for his www.hammermuseum.org domain, and he turned them down.

Clearly, this is a case of a bunch of rich bullies—with an income of $10 million-plus last year—trying to steamroller a dedicated educator whose tiny nonprofit museum took in just $8,104 in 2006.

Why the Armand Hammer Museum is Looking at a PR Catastrophe
First of all, Dave Pahl’s plight—and tiny museum—landed on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, which is read by 2 million-plus of the most influential men and women in the U.S. Despite the Journal’s patronizing slant, every person who saw the story will sympathize with the Alaskan.

A good PR consultant—if Dave Pahl could afford one—could easily amass an arsenal of scuzz to unload all over the Los Angeles museum, which was founded by one of the most despicable characters in 20th century business. The mother lode of dirt on Armand Hammer—his sleazy business practices and disgusting personal life—is found in two places:

* The FBI’s 658-page dossier on Hammer’s dealings with the Russians and his Communist affiliations going back to his friendship with Vladimir Lenin in the 1920s all the way through the Cold War.

* Edward J. Epstein’s 1996 glorious muckraking exposé, “Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer.”

A glimpse at the sordid life of Armand Hammer:

Anyone who ever paid the old, steep ($9, if memory serves) admission to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles knows what it was like to be cheated by the master himself. Despite dabbling in the art business for more than half a century, dipping into the deep pockets of his company, Occidental Petroleum, and hiring a former director of the National Gallery as a consultant, Hammer’s effort to be immortalized as a latter-day de Medici fell flat: The museum’s collection was weak and spotty. Even the highlights had a distasteful whiff to them: The DaVinci manuscript that the oil magnate renamed the “Codex Hammer” (current owner Bill Gates has restored its old name, the “Leicester Codex”) was sliced up like a loaf of bread for display, and the treasure trove of Daumier lithographs had been practically stolen from the L.A. County Museum of Art, where Hammer had been a trustee before reneging on a promise to leave his collection to the institution.
—Michael Ybarra, Washington Monthly, March 1999

Epstein’s charges against Hammer are vast: performing illegal abortions at his father’s “clinic” (a fatal operation that Hammer performed while a medical student at Columbia sent his father to Sing Sing for manslaughter); laundering money that financed espionage for the Soviets in the 1920s and ’30s; being a bad businessman (for the laundering to work, his ventures in the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. had to appear to be money-makers); peddling fraudulent “Romanoff treasures” and fake Faberge Easter eggs through his art gallery; bribing his way to success both in the oil business and at the White House; blackmailing enemies and fabricating friendships with people in high places; bilking the rich widow who was his third wife; reneging on financial commitments he made to several mistresses and an illegitimate daughter; hiding his Jewishness until he was at death’s door; and, finally, mounting a shameless, self-serving and unsuccessful publicity campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
—Publishers Weekly

Hammer spent a fortune (usually Occidental’s money) acquiring paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Gauguin, Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh, among others. Out of love of art? “Hammer knew and cared as much about art,” one expert observed, “as Al Capone.” As Hammer unabashedly explained, his collection was to be his “ticket to immortality.” Hammer’s personal life was of a piece with his business ethic. One mistress was five months pregnant with his child and expecting to marry him when he married a rich widow instead. He shipped the girlfriend, who spoke not a word of Spanish, to live in Mexico, and arranged a quickie marriage and divorce for her to legitimize the child. Hammer promised to take care of mother and daughter, but the child was never to be told who her father was. A later mistress, whom Hammer put on the Occidental payroll as his personal art consultant, was pressured to change her name, wear wigs and make herself look older to defuse his wife’s suspicions that he was having an affair. In 1988, he insisted on a DNA test to confirm the paternity of Julian, his son by his first wife. Julian was then 59.
—Joseph E. Persico, “The Last Tycoon,” The New York Times, Oct. 13, 1996

How Would a Gunfighter of a PR Consultant Use This Material?
* Order several thousand reprints of The Wall Street Journal front-page story.

* Put together a media contact list of newspapers and Web sites that love dirt.

* With each development in the trademark case, send out a press release with the latest information. Midway down each press release, have a paragraph that begins, “Armand Hammer, you will recall [insert a new batch of dirt from one of the dossiers—Epstein’s or the FBI’s—that discredits Hammer himself and his collection].”

* Include one of the Journal reprints as backup to remind editors the world’s most important newspaper considered this to be page-one material.

* Always paint Dave Pahl as the victim and Armand Hammer as the villain.

* Be sure to remind editors that Pahl’s hammer collection is unique in the world while the Armand Hammer collection is ordinary.

Get Dave Pahl a series of TV gigs—Letterman, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight, Oprah, Don Imus’s new ABC radio show, etc.