Dossier: The Secret History Of Armand Hammer.

• Author: Ybarra, Michael

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.

But in a sense it was the perfect memorial for Hammer: a hugely expensive, forbidding marble edifice built with other people's money and serving little purpose but the glorification of an extraordinary ego. As Edward Jay Epstein makes clear in his fascinating book Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, the story behind the man is a study in almost breathtaking deceit, cruelty, and megalomania.

Epstein had the good fortune to draw on sources unavailable to previous Hammer biographers: Soviet archives, FBI and SEC records, and Hammer's own tapes of his misdeeds, which he sometimes recorded through microphones in his cuff links. The author paints a brisk, engrossing portrait of Hammer in barely 350 pages. And although the writing is almost journalistic (news is grim, messages terse) and the man himself never quite crackles to life, the story is so spectacular and the reporting so thorough that one can hardly quibble with the result.

Hammer reads like a character out of Balzac. He dumped one wife and married a rich widow, while simultaneously shipping off a pregnant mistress to Mexico and forcing her into a sham marriage so that the child would not have the Hammer name (although he insisted on naming her after his grandmother). When his second wife became suspicious of his young art adviser, Hammer ordered the adviser/mistress to legally change her name and wear a disguise so that the two could continue seeing one another. He had a paternity test performed on his 59-year-old son Julian--who...