Daily News from New York, New York • 506

I A BIG TOWN BIOGRAPHY By JAY MAEDER Daily News Staff Writer rr 1 THE DEGREE that the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick ever thought much about irony, perhaps he found it amusing that the nation's coal miners were striking again on the very day of his death in December 1919 and that troops were readying to thrash them. He had already been charmed to note that he had outlived by several months his crusty erstwhile friend and -business partner Andrew Carnegie, who in his final days had sought a reconciliation that Frick took great pleasure in rebuffing. "Tell Carnegie," he snarled when the feeble old laird's olive branch was delivered to him, "that I will see him in hell, where we are both going." No man to harbor illusions was Henry Frick. Neither, really, was Carnegie, who understood that Frick lived in a much larger and finer house than he did. Frick's astonishing "V- il I palatial mansion at Fifth Ave.

and 51st St, which the Vanderbilts agreed to lease to him after they discovered themselves to be financially pressed, he was resolved to spend many of those millions on the grandest art treasures of Europe. For pieces for hours on end, and this is how he ended his life. The heiress some years it was hard to know whether it was he or J.P Morgan who poured more incalculably bottomless buckets of money into the oils and porcelains and tapestries and enamels in pursuit of which their agents regularly ransacked the Continent Soon, Frick owned choice examples of practically everything: Rembrandt's 1658 self-portrait, Titian's portrait of Pietro Aretino, mansion at Fifth Ave. and 70th St survived him, as did Mrs. Adelaide Frick, upon whose eventual death, it was made known, the fabulous palazzo and the millions of dollars' worth of treasures therein would be deeded to the City of New York.

Thereafter did everyone politely sit around waiting for the widow Frick to go on to her reward as well Actually, she was still quite hale, and it took years yet Nice old Adelaide lived on and on and on, and it Helen Clay Frick, who was 43 years old when her mother died and had long since pledged never to marry, now dedicated all her spinsterly days to the Frick Collection, which opened its doors to the public on Monday the 16th of December 1935 and was from the beginning so fustily conservative that it didn't acquire another piece for 25 years. Miss Frick was the sort of lady who, as late as World War II, was still driving about in a 1914 Pierce-Arrow. In 1948, she testily refused John D. Rockefeller offer of several Botticellis and Goyas on the grounds that they would "pollute" her father's legacy, and Rockefeller immediately resigned his Collection trusteeship in embarrassment was not until October 1931 that she finally gasped out her last, at age 72, somewhere in the bowels of her 90-room hideaway in Massachusetts. AND ON AND ON lived Helen Clay (0) Frick, who in 1965 was horrified to 1 discover that a historian named Sylvester Stevens had written a less-than-flattering account of her sainted father's career.

The coke king, Stevens reported, had mercilessly crushed his workers at every opportunity, forced them to slave in his mines, watched them get shot down by guards during the coalfield strikes of 1892. All this was entirely true in every respect and academics fretted as Miss Frick's indignant libel suit against Stevens became a landmark action that threatened to cripple the future of history gathering. In fact Miss Frick came to court as just a silly old woman; she had never read a biography of her father, she admitted; she could not dispute the facts of the matter, she merely thought that these were dreadful things to say. Cumberland County, Common Pleas Court Judge Clinton Weidner had little patience with her. "It is not defamatory," he ruled in May 1967, "to say that a man built a monopoly in his business; that he was successful in beating down efforts at unionization; that he made extensive use of immigrant labor; that he cut wages; that he extracted the longest hours of work physically possible; that he broke the power of the union; that he was stern, brusque, autocratic." Indeed, Weidner speculated, Henry Clay Frick himself "would be proud" of everything Stevens had to say about him.

"At most" the judge concluded, "Miss Frick states that her feelings have been hurt" Thus did Henry Clay Frick's gifts to mankind come to include not only his art collection but also case law establishing history's right to reflect upon the lives and times of such souls as he. On and on and on lived his daughter, until November 1984, when she died at age 96. At this time, automatically, one of America's most important private art collections formally passed into the public realm. But not without the all but eternal trusteeship of the late Mr. Frick's devoted daughter, a maiden lady named Helen, whose life-long mission it would be to oversee the fortunes of the great Frick Collection and to ferociously and indefatigably preserve and protect her father's memory unto the moment of her own dying breath, which, even as her sturdy mother's, would be a long time coming.

FULLY A CENTURY later, one may reasonably regard Henry Clay Frick as having been really no more or less odious than many another practicing robber baron of his day. Granted, he might have caused the great Johnstown Flood that drowned thousands of unfortunates, but accidents happen, and the chronicles otherwise record him as having been among the 19th century's most notable industrial visionaries, in his particular case the man who so early recognized that control of America's coalfields and coke ovens would render him so vital to the new steel industry that steelman Carnegie would essentially have no choice but to take him in as a partner. This pivotal amalgamation came to pass in Pittsburgh in 1882, and the relationship ended quite badly, literally in fisticuffs, but by then Frick was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. By 1905, when Frick moved his family to New York City and took up residence then in one of the world's great wonders, old William H. Vanderbilt's Holbein's Sir Thomas More, Velasquez' Philip IV, Bellini's "St Francis in the Desert," three Vermeers, six Van Dycks, a Gainesborough and an Ingres and three Halses, the 14 Fragonard panels commissioned by Louis XV for Madame du Barry, dozens and dozens more.

His collecting sensibilities were not without taste. Nor were they without passion. Nor, indeed, were they without genuine humility: "I pan make money," he said; "I cannot make pictures." Clouding this serenity of his autumnal years was the fact that the hated Andrew Carnegie also had moved to New York and had, at Fifth Ave. and 90th St, built a house even more dazzling than the famous Vanderbilt showplace. It was said to have cost $1 million.

This was not acceptable. ACCORDINGLY, HENRY FRICK in 1913 began building a magnificent limestone temple 20 blocks to Carnegie's south. It cost $5 million, which showed Carnegie a thing or two, and it was never a home so much as it was a great vaulted hall suitable for the display of Frick's $50 million collection, a place that would endure forever, Frick's permanent testament to his own passage through this life, a monument for all the ages no less than Tutankhamen's tomb. The Fricks actually lived in this grim mausoleum for a few years, which the old man spent wandering the cold and silent corridors, smoking a cigar, gazing raptly at his priceless.