In the late afternoon of October 23, 1929, a small crew of riggers gathered inside the unfinished crown of a steel tower at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. For weeks they had quietly fabricated an ornament in pieces inside the building’s fire shaft, working on the orders of an architect who had told almost no one. The rival tower at 40 Wall Street had just claimed the title of the world’s tallest building. William Van Allen waited until it had topped out, watched it take the record in the morning papers, and then, in ninety minutes that afternoon, hoisted the secret spire through the roof of the Chrysler Building.
When the riveters finished, the structure stood at 1,046 feet. In a single afternoon it had become the tallest man-made structure on Earth and the first super-tall skyscraper ever built. Six days later, on October 29, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed. The man who had paid for the tower out of his own pocket, expressly so that it could be inherited by his children rather than absorbed into a corporation, watched his country fall into the Great Depression with the world’s tallest skyscraper standing in his name.
Walter Percy Chrysler had grown up in a railroad town in Kansas, married a shopkeeper’s daughter on three dollars a day, and left General Motors a decade earlier with ten million dollars in his pocket. By 1929 he had built an automobile company, bought Dodge for $170 million in what was then the largest corporate transaction in American history, and capped Manhattan with a seventy-seven-story art deco trophy he intended to leave to four children he believed would carry the name forward. Within fifty years of his death, every one of those four children would be gone. The building would be sold.
The corporation would pass to professional management, then to a German conglomerate, then to a private equity firm, then to bankruptcy court, then to the Italians, then to a Dutch holding company headquartered in Amsterdam. The art collection assembled by his eldest son would be partially exposed in 1962 as one of the most spectacular forgery scandals in American museum history, with Pablo Picasso himself writing the word “fake” across photographs of works the son had bought as authentic. Walter Chrysler was born on April 2, 1875, in Wamego, Kansas, the son of a Civil War veteran and locomotive engineer. He grew up in the small railroad town of Ellis, Kansas, met Dela Viola Forker, the daughter of a local shopkeeper, during his school years, and married her on June 2, 1901, when his pay had reached three dollars a day.
They began their marriage with sixty dollars between them. He apprenticed as a machinist on the railroads, took correspondence courses to earn a mechanical degree, and worked his way across Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Texas before becoming works manager of the largest locomotive plant in the United States, earning $8,000 a year. In 1911, a meeting was arranged between Chrysler and Charles W. Nash, then president of Buick Motor Company, a General Motors division.
Walter resigned from the railroad and accepted a $6,000 salary at Buick in Flint, Michigan, taking a deliberate $2,000 pay cut to enter the automobile industry he had been studying privately for five years. He rose at Buick the way he had risen on the railroads, by attacking production costs. By 1916, William C. Durant, the founder of General Motors, was paying him $10,000 a month plus an annual bonus of $500,000.
In 1919, after disagreeing with Durant’s expansionary vision, Walter resigned. Durant paid him $10 million for his General Motors stock, and Walter Chrysler walked out of the corporation as one of the wealthiest men in the United States. What followed was the construction of an automobile company in his own name. Hired to turn around the failing Willys-Overland Motor Company in Toledo, he left in 1921, was brought in to reorganize the Maxwell Motor Company, acquired controlling interest, and on January 5, 1924, in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel during the New York Auto Show, debuted the Chrysler 6.
The car was unveiled in the lobby because Chrysler was not yet a recognized manufacturer and could not get official floor space. It sold 32,000 units in its first year, an industry record for a new model. The Chrysler Corporation was formally incorporated in 1925. By 1927 it was the third largest automobile manufacturer in the United States, behind Ford and General Motors, and Walter Chrysler was Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
On May 28–30, 1928, he purchased the Dodge Brothers Company in a $170 million stock swap, then the largest corporate transaction in American history. In early October 1928 he offered to buy a half-built skyscraper project on the corner of 42nd and Lexington from developer William H. Reynolds. The purchase closed on October 15, 1928, for more than $2.
5 million, paid out of his personal income rather than corporate funds, on his explicit insistence that it be inheritable by his children. Construction of the building proper began on January 21, 1929. The spire was raised in secret on October 23, 1929, taking the world’s tallest title from 40 Wall Street. The Chrysler Building opened in 1930 and held the title for eleven months, until the Empire State Building topped out at 1,250 feet on May 1, 1931.
Walter senior stepped down from active management of the corporation in 1936 at age sixty-one, handing the presidency to a longtime lieutenant who would run the company for the next fourteen years. Dela Chrysler died on August 8, 1938, of a cerebral hemorrhage at the family’s estate on Long Island. She was sixty-six. Walter never recovered.
He suffered a stroke shortly after her funeral, lost most of his physical mobility, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 18, 1940. He was sixty-five. His will was probated that August. The estate totaled approximately $9 million, divided equally among his four children.
Each received roughly $2. 25 million immediately, with a portion held in trust for life. None of them, however, was given a single executive role inside the corporation that bore their name. The four children inherited stock, real estate, the Maryland farm, and the building on 42nd Street.
They did not inherit the corporation. From the day of the funeral, the Chrysler Corporation and the Chrysler family began moving in different directions. The eldest, Thelma Chrysler, married a Chrysler Corporation executive in 1924. The couple settled into a grand apartment at 740 Park Avenue, kept a country house on Long Island and a mansion on East 93rd Street, and Thelma was repeatedly voted among the world’s ten best-dressed women.
Her two-volume couture wardrobe, including jewel-encrusted Christian Dior gowns, was eventually bequeathed to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She owned the pear-shaped 62-carat stone that would later be sold by Christie’s in 2021 as the Chrysler Diamond. She sickened in 1954 with leukemia and died on August 20, 1957. In 1959, Parke-Bernet Galleries auctioned her estate in two parts totaling 772 lots, emptying the 740 Park apartment.
The collection was dispersed and never reassembled. The second daughter, Bernice Chrysler, married Edgar William Garbisch on January 4, 1930. Edgar was a West Point football celebrity who had kicked four field goals to give Army a 12–0 victory over Navy in the 1924 Army-Navy game, with President Calvin Coolidge in attendance. The couple settled at Pokeati, a country estate in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore that Bernice had inherited from her father.
From there they assembled the largest private collection of American naive folk art ever compiled, more than 2,600 paintings plus furniture, glass, ironwork, and porcelain, accumulated through the 1940s and 1950s. In 1949 alone they bought 477 paintings. The first major gift went to the National Gallery of Art in 1954, roughly 300 paintings and 200 miniatures, the foundation of a collection that has never been equaled. They eventually gave to 23 institutions in total, including 162 works directly to the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk between 1974 and 1981.
Their collection elevated American folk art in a single generation from the margins of antique dealer curiosity to a serious scholarly category. Where Walter Jr. had bought thousands of European canvases at high speed and been embarrassed in public over the result, Bernice and Edgar had bought slowly, donated steadily, and produced a collection no one ever questioned. On December 13, 1979, Edgar died of a stroke at Dorchester County General Hospital.
He was eighty. Several hours later, at the Pokeati estate, Bernice died at home. They were buried in the Chrysler family mausoleum at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the same church where they had been married nearly fifty years earlier. The youngest, John Forker Chrysler, known as Jack, was born May 30, 1912.
He was the only one of the four children to enter business and finance directly. He served as a director of the Chrysler Building Corporation, held board positions at several companies, and in October 1953 was instrumental in the sale of the Chrysler Building, the Chrysler Building East, and the Greybar Building for $52 million, the largest real estate transaction in New York City history at the time. The proceeds were distributed to the family stockholders. Five years later, on November 7, 1958, Jack died of a heart attack at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
He was forty-six. He was the only one of the four to die before fifty, and the only one whose son would inherit the bulk of the family money. The third child, born May 27, 1909, was the strangest case of the four. Walter Percy Chrysler Jr.
attended the Browning School in Manhattan, then the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, where at age fourteen he used a $350 birthday gift from his parents to buy a small watercolor later identified as a Renoir. A corridor master found it in his room, declared it inappropriate for a fourteen-year-old boy’s wall, and destroyed it. He proceeded to Dartmouth in 1929, co-founded a campus literary magazine with classmate and future collector Nelson Rockefeller, and withdrew before the end of his junior year. His mother sent him on a grand tour of Europe in 1931.
In Paris he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Gertrude Stein. He spent the next decade buying, by his own count, 347 works by Picasso alone, plus the central modernists of the School of Paris and a chain of European old masters. By the middle 1930s, he held what may have been the largest collection of Parisian modernist art in America. He served as the first chairman of the Museum of Modern Art’s Library Committee, opened a commercial gallery on the ground floor of the Chrysler Building in 1932, produced Broadway plays, and served as president of the Chrysler Building Corporation from 1936 to 1953.
Of the four siblings, he would live the longest, collect the most, marry the most carefully, and conceal the most. The Chrysler Museum’s own institutional history states plainly that he was gay, one of the most directly stated institutional acknowledgements of a collector’s sexuality on any American museum’s website. On April 29, 1938, he married Margarite Prince Sykes, a 25-year-old Manhattan socialite the press described as the most sought-after girl in New York society. Peggy found modern art incomprehensible.
When Walter proposed having Picasso paint her portrait, she joked about ending up with five noses and six eyes and refused. The marriage was likely never consummated. The couple separated quickly, and a divorce was granted on December 4, 1939. In April 1942, Walter Jr.
received a Navy commission as Lieutenant Junior Grade and served as an avionics officer. The museum’s account is candid about how that commission was obtained: almost certainly the family did a deal and got him in. He was stationed first in Norfolk, Virginia, then in Key West. In December 1944 he abruptly resigned his commission while under investigation by the Washington Office of Naval Intelligence.
Rumors flew about raucous, possibly gay parties in his rooms off base. The Navy file on the matter simply disappeared. He had met Gene Esther Outland, a Norfolk school teacher, at a Cavalier Hotel party in Virginia Beach during his Norfolk posting. Less than a month after his Navy resignation, on January 13, 1945, he married her in a quiet ceremony in Norfolk.
Like Peggy Sykes, Gene must have discovered the truth soon enough about Walter’s sexual orientation. Yet she resolved to stay in the marriage. She remained his wife for 37 years, his genuine partner in collecting, and the reason his museum eventually came to Norfolk rather than to one of the fifty-plus other cities competing for it. In July 1955, Confidential magazine published an exposé on Walter Chrysler Jr.
, followed in January 1956 by another claiming the Navy had ousted him. The articles produced no public response from Walter and no successful legal action. In 2021, historian Andrew Lownie’s book Traitor King alleged that Walter Jr. and Edward, Duke of Windsor, the abdicated king, had a sexual relationship and were present together at a wartime gathering.
That claim rests on Lownie’s own research and is attributed to that book rather than stated as established fact. What is established is that Walter Jr. lived a closeted life across two marriages, two tabloid exposés, an FBI investigation, and a vanished Navy file. By the early 1960s, Walter P.
Chrysler Jr. had assembled by his own count roughly 3,800 paintings and drawings and 1,000 sculptures and other objects. He had bought in bulk, often at velocity, often from small dealers who handled obscure inventory. He held works of unquestionable importance, including Picasso’s The Charnel House of 1944–45, which he later sold to MoMA, and Matisse’s Dance, Bather, and Model of 1939, now at the Norton Simon Museum.
He had developed over three decades an outsized confidence in his own ability to spot a masterwork that other people had missed. In late 1961, the Museum of Modern Art invited him to lend several Picassos for its forthcoming exhibition celebrating the artist’s eightieth birthday. Walter offered six. MoMA’s curators, following standard practice, sent photographs of the offered works to Picasso in Paris for his approval.
Picasso wrote “faux,” French for fake, across two of the photographs in his own hand. MoMA asked Walter to withdraw those two paintings. Walter refused. He demanded that MoMA display all six as authentic or none at all.
MoMA rejected the ultimatum. Walter withdrew everything. The Picasso exhibition opened on May 14, 1962 without a single Chrysler loan on the walls. Three weeks later, on June 17, 1962, Walter’s own museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts opened an exhibition of 187 paintings and 90 sculptures drawn from his collection.
Manhattan lawyer and collector Ralph F. Colin, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and executive vice president of the newly founded Art Dealers Association of America, walked the galleries and realized almost immediately that a large number of paintings in the show, perhaps as many as 80, were fakes, many alleged to be by major masters like Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh. His verdict on the quality of the forgeries was withering: they weren’t even good fakes. The exhibition catalog exposed its own provenance problem.
Where Walter’s acknowledged masterpieces had detailed provenance paragraphs running to a full page, the suspect works simply had a couple of lines giving date and gallery of purchase. Most of those purchases traced to two small Manhattan dealers, one of whom would later defend himself by saying his shop guaranteed the period but never the authenticity. The other dealer’s son was identified by specialists as the actual hand behind the forgeries. Time reported that between 60 and 70 of the 187 paintings were under critical indictment as phony.
The ADAA’s final tally was that 90 of the 187 exhibited paintings were inauthentic. Newsweek, Time, and Life covered the controversy as an art scandal of international proportions. The IRS contemplated revoking the museum’s tax-exempt status. The ADAA petitioned the New York County District Attorney.
US Customs put the works on watch. Walter’s response was defiance and a shrug. “I am satisfied with all the pictures,” he told reporters. “I don’t make any claim for there being the greatest examples of each artist, but we can’t look at masterpieces all the time.
I think that would be rather dull. ” He refused to press legal action against the dealers, reportedly because suing them might jeopardize the tax-exempt status of his museum. The fakes were quietly removed from the collection. The IRS did not revoke the museum’s status.
The dealer closed his gallery. The other faded from view. In December 1979, the New York Times reported that the same dealer identified in 1962 had been accused of selling 23 additional forgeries for $1. 1 million.
The FBI seized 23 artworks from a storage facility, plus 800 additional pieces at the same location. Federal art experts identified the work as the same son’s. The dealer’s defense was identical to his 1962 defense: he never guaranteed anything. The forgery line that had embarrassed Walter Chrysler in 1962 had been operating undisturbed ever since.
The Chrysler Museum’s own retrospective on the affair frames Walter’s culpability in language no biographer working in his lifetime would have been allowed to publish. The very qualities that had otherwise made him such a formidable and effective collector, his boundless self-confidence, outsized ego, and even his arrogance, had finally betrayed him. Walter, in the museum’s reading, had not been duped. He had, more often than not, told the dealers what the works were.
The dealers had merely failed to disagree. By the late 1960s, the Provincetown Museum was failing. Local authorities had refused tax abatements, and it has been suggested he was asked to leave Provincetown, though the museum officially gave other reasons for the move. Walter negotiated with the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1933, to accept his collection.
Gene, a Norfolk native, helped direct him there. In 1971, the Norfolk institution was renamed the Chrysler Museum of Art. Walter served as director from 1971 to 1976, then chaired the board of trustees until 1984. By the time he stopped collecting, he had given more than 10,000 works to the museum, including a glass collection of approximately 8,000 pieces.
After the 1962 scandal, his collecting strategy changed. He began trading away most of his Picassos in exchange for European old masters, on the calculation that they were more thoroughly cataloged, more difficult to forge convincingly, and more permanently valuable. By 2014, when the Chrysler Museum completed its most recent renovation, only one Picasso remained on the walls. Walter P.
Chrysler Jr. died on September 17, 1988, of prostate cancer at Norfolk General Hospital. He was seventy-nine. He had drafted in his last months a new will that would have left the bulk of his estate to the Chrysler Museum of Art.
He died two days before his scheduled signing of the new will. The 1979 will, with subsequent modifications, controlled the estate. It was valued at approximately $33 million, including 751 artworks appraised at roughly $15 million. The Chrysler Museum received an unrestricted endowment of $600,000, approximately $3.
6 million from a family trust, and 17 artworks valued over $7 million. The bulk of the estate, 751 paintings, two residences, a Manhattan apartment, and family trust funds in excess of $2. 6 million that would have gone to the museum, passed instead to Jack Forker Chrysler Jr. , the nephew named in the older document.
The Chrysler Corporation followed a similar trajectory. KT Keller’s professional managers ran it through the post-war period. By the late 1970s it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Lee Iacocca, recently fired from Ford, took the chairmanship in late 1978, persuaded Congress to pass the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, and accepted $1.
5 billion in federal loan guarantees from President Jimmy Carter on January 7, 1980, the largest government rescue of a private American company at that point. Chrysler repaid the loans seven years early. In 1998, the company merged with Daimler-Benz in a $36 billion deal billed as a merger of equals, which turned out, by the admission of the German CEO two years later, to have been an acquisition. In 2007, Daimler sold 80.
1% of Chrysler to Cerberus Capital Management for $7. 4 billion. On April 30, 2009, Chrysler filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On June 10, 2009, it emerged with Fiat holding an initial 20% stake.
In 2014, Fiat acquired the remainder. On January 16, 2021, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles merged with Peugeot’s PSA Group to form Stellantis NV, a Dutch holding company headquartered in Amsterdam. The Chrysler Building, by then out of family hands for 36 years, had passed through a succession of real estate investors. In 2019, it changed hands again at a price of $150 million, less than its 1953 sale price adjusted for inflation, and a fraction of its cultural value.
The 1,046-foot art deco trophy that Walter Senior had paid for out of his own pocket, expressly so that it could be inherited by his children, had become a Manhattan office property like any other. The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk has more than 35,000 objects. The single Picasso left in the building is the 1928 mural that hung again in 2014 after twenty years in storage. The ninety contested canvases that drew Ralph Colin’s eye in the summer of 1962 are gone.
The Garbisch folk art is in 23 institutions, the largest portion at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The Chrysler Diamond passed through Christie’s in 2021. The Foy couture is at the Costume Institute. The spire is still there.
Six men hauled it through the roof of an unfinished building in ninety minutes on the afternoon of October 23, 1929, in the last week before the country fell apart. It was raised on the explicit instructions of a man who believed his children would carry the name forward. The mechanic from Wamego, Kansas, who insisted on paying for the building out of his own pocket, has the longest surviving inheritance of all of them, and it is the part he never expected to leave behind.