By the time the body of the stone dealer was discovered in his Upper West Side apartment, it had been decomposing for several weeks. The summer of 1969 was a scorcher, and the smell was so repellent that city officials ordered the building’s superintendent, Stanley, to dispose of everything in the unit. Stanley thought he might make some money off the man’s antique furniture, so he called Wally Gibbs, an antiques dealer, who called his friend and peer Vito Giallo for an appraisal.
Giallo, now 91, told this story during an interview at his home in Brooklyn.
Here is what he found in the dead man’s apartment: a table, a dresser, a desk, a trunk, a chair missing an arm, a stack of uncashed checks and no will. The city had tried to find the deceased’s relatives but came up short. There were no heirs.
At first, Giallo doubted any of the items would sell at his tony antiques store on the Upper East Side. But when he opened the small trunk, he gasped. Inside, he said, there were thousands of gems — amethysts, rubies, emeralds, topaz, opals, moonstones — nearly every kind of precious and semiprecious stone aside from diamonds, in turn-of-the-century cuts. They ranged in size from “pinhead to thumbnail,” he said, and were organized in hundreds of disintegrating envelopes. It wasn’t until Giallo examined the stack of checks that he realized the stones had been the man’s livelihood.
“I know absolutely nothing about him,” Giallo, said. “Absolutely nothing. I don’t even know if he had a business open to the public.” The super didn’t believe the stones were real, so he told Giallo that he could keep them. Giallo could not believe his luck; he had simply been in the right place at the right time and insisted on splitting any earnings with Stanley.
He sold a handful of stones to choice customers, including Andy Warhol. But for the last five decades, most of the gems have been in a storage unit. During the pandemic, Giallo’s great-grand-niece Tara Marrale, a founder of a sustainability startup called Grooted, suggested he put them to use. They decided to approach an established jeweler to collaborate on a line of cocktail rings, necklaces and earrings.
“I must have looked at 20 or so jewelers,” Marrale, 33, said, before reaching out to Catbird, a Brooklyn brand with stores in Williamsburg and SoHo that uses recycled stones in its designs. She sent an email to the company and explained that Giallo had been an antiques dealer “to the who’s who,” including Elton John, André Leon Talley, Greta Garbo and Mark Rothko, and that he “put on Andy Warhol’s first show in 1954.”
“This might be a totally far-fetched idea,” Marrale wrote, hedging in case Catbird’s team didn’t take kindly to the pitch. Obviously, they did.
Giallo has regaled the brand’s executives with stories about the midcentury art world in New York. He even gave Leigh Batnick Plessner, creative director of Catbird, a copy of his unpublished memoir, which traces his serendipitous path to Madison Avenue.
“His New York, and he says this in his memoir, is a city vanished,” Plessner said. That is, a city where nobody cared about being world famous for 15 minutes — at least not yet.
How Vito Met Andy
Giallo grew up in Brewster, New York. His father, he said, was a bootlegger who operated 19 stills hidden in various associates’ mansions. “We had to be very careful on the phone. It was always tapped,” Giallo said. “We couldn’t say where he was. When he was ready to come home, he would always say, ‘Put the water on to boil.’” When Vito was 12, his father taped several $100 bills to his son’s body and instructed him to deliver them to a relative via train. The FBI was watching the house, his father told him.
At 19, Giallo moved to New York to attend the Franklin School of Professional Arts, having won a scholarship through an illustration contest. On the first day, he met Ebby Weaver, who would become his life partner for the next 51 years.
After graduation, he illustrated for “Mad Men”-style ad agencies such as Young & Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson. In 1954, at the age of 23, Giallo opened the Loft Gallery at the studio of graphic designer Jack Wolfgang Beck. “By word-of-mouth, it leaked that we were looking for artists, and they came to us,” Giallo said. A friend named Nathan Gluck connected the gallery to a young artist named Andy Warhol, who contributed a collection of origami to the inaugural group exhibition.
“It was one of Andy’s first shows,” Giallo said. Warhol’s origami wouldn’t stay affixed to the wall, with pieces dropping like snowflakes every few minutes. Finally, Giallo recalled, the artist said, “‘Just leave it on the floor and let people walk around them.’ So that’s what we did. He always had a solution, a simple solution to every problem.”
Within a year, Warhol invited Giallo to be his first paid assistant, working out of his railroad apartment on East 34th Street, which the artist shared with his mother. (Giallo lived a block away, in a two-bedroom apartment he and Weaver rented from Bert Carpenter, an art professor at Columbia, for $85 a month.) Warhol and Giallo collaborated on much of Warhol’s early work — except, he said, for “the shoe drawings.”
Giallo stopped working for Warhol in 1957, after the two had a falling out. (Gluck, his replacement, became Warhol’s most significant assistant.) In 1961, Giallo opened his first antiques shop, on Third Avenue, where he drew a clientele of abstract expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Lee Krasner. “When they bought something, I delivered it to Rothko’s apartment, which was just around the corner,” Giallo said.
Mary Gabriel, an art historian, noted that those artists often welcomed strangers into their work spaces. “If you wanted to see an artist’s work, you would go to their studio, and you would talk to them,” she said, adding that today, “It pains me to think that people look at a 10-foot painting on the internet.”
Decades later, after Giallo moved his store to Madison Avenue, Warhol popped in and said, “‘Wow, you must be on Easy Street.’ He just loved the idea I was on Madison Avenue. And then he came every single day for the last eight years of his life.”
After they reconciled, Giallo told Warhol about the trunk of gems, and offered to sell some for the pop artist’s upcoming foray into jewelry design. “He looked at one box of 35 to 40 stones and said, ‘I’ll take them all.’” But Warhol died of complications from surgery before he was able to use them, and the gems sold at his estate sale in 1988 for about $10,000, according to Sotheby’s. — NYT
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