ARMAND HAMMER : Man and the Myth

If Armand Hammer, who died Monday at 92, could have had his life story told the way his ego would have preferred, it no doubt would have been a sprawling novel, not to mention a TV miniseries. And--a man of extraordinary wealth and ambition--his only condition would not have been this: that he would have to be the novelist.

Indeed, so much of his life’s work was an effort to tell the Armand Hammer story the way a major Hollywood studio would like an adoring public to regard one of its most bankable stars: with more illusion than reality.

Yes, it’s true: This globe-trotting, headline-hunting Occidental Petroleum Corp. magnate was not to everyone’s taste. He multiplied his wealth on the controversial margins of an oil deal made with the Kadafi government in Libya; he weathered a huge legal storm because of illegal campaign contributions to then-President Richard M. Nixon; he was the subject of investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he and his company angered many environmentalists and West Side residents by aggressively pursuing oil drilling in Pacific Palisades.

He was not a saint.

But--here’s the paradox--he sometimes did saintly work. Take his extraordinary contributions to the war on cancer, to museums, schools and clinics; and the sometimes mysterious but nevertheless wholly notable personal campaign, long prefiguring the end of the Cold War, to end the West’s enmity with Moscow.

In truth no novel is needed to tell the Armand Hammer story. Nonfiction will do.