Retirement

In 1989, at fifty-five, Barney sat down and made a plan to sell every company he owned before his sixty-fifth birthday on July 14, 1999. The reason was characteristically decent: “I didn't want to be responsible for so many employees” past that date. The art world already had most of his attention, and he was never going to spend retirement in a deck chair. He was glad, too, that he'd named the business INTRAV and not Ebsworth Travel — “INTRAV could be run by anyone,” while a company with his name on it would have been yoked to him forever.

A Bear Named Build-A-Bear

In 1997 he read a St. Louis Business Journal piece about Maxine Clark, the former president of Payless ShoeSource — a woman who had once been responsible for selling a fifth of all the shoes in America, had burned out, and was starting something new: a store where children built their own stuffed animals in front of them. Barney's instinct was immediate. “I like that gal,” he told his people. “Get her business plan, and if you like it, I'll interview her.” He put several million dollars into Build-A-Bear Workshop. On opening day there were lines out the door of the shop in the St. Louis Galleria, and the company nearly doubled its first-year sales projections. That investment would compound for the rest of his life — and, as we'll see, it would both promise and then refuse to pay for his one great unbuilt dream.

Selling to Kuoni

In September 1999 Barney sold INTRAV — the tours, the Clipper ships, the customer database — to Kuoni Reisen Holding AG, the Swiss travel multinational, for a reported $115 million. Thirty years after buying half of a wig-shop travel agency on a $5,000 cosigned loan, he was out of the travel business. When the September 11 attacks came two years later and the industry changed forever, friends told him he'd “gotten out just in time.” He waved it off; his only timing logic, he insisted, had been turning sixty-five.

An American Place

The house was the real project of his retirement, because the house was where the paintings would live. On the Hunts Point peninsula on Lake Washington, east of Seattle, Barney and his third wife, Pam — a serious collector in her own right, later a board member of the Seattle Art Museum and the World Wildlife Fund, and credited alongside him when the National Gallery showed the collection in 2000 — built a home designed from the first sketch around the collection. His architect was Jim Olson of Olson Kundig, and the brief was exact: “There should be a wall for every major work of art.” The floor plan borrowed from the Louisiana Museum outside Copenhagen; the materials were Portuguese limestone, cedar, and marble; automatic blinds kept the sun off the pictures; and a Gaston Lachaise bronze stood at the door to greet you. He called the place “An American Place,” after Alfred Stieglitz's gallery.

He found the lot because he loved its trees — some two hundred and twenty mature ones — and in building took down only three. The house that had stood there before, a beautiful 1918 mansion once owned by Craig McCaw, was so fine “you could have eaten off the floor,” but it had “room for about two pictures,” so Barney gave it to Habitat for Humanity for salvage. What he wanted instead was something plainer and truer:

The one indulgence was the shower — a full glass wall opening onto a private Japanese garden, an idea he'd carried home from a thunderstorm he once watched through a shower window at the Villa San Michele outside Florence. It was not his first watery joke in a bathroom. At his earlier house in St. Louis, the architect had refused to build him a square window in the shower and installed a round chrome porthole instead — which delighted Barney exactly because of what it would do to his legend:

His neighbor at Hunts Point was Bill Gates. Barney, ever the contrarian optimist, once told him: “Newspapers are ruining us, because everybody thinks the world's going to hell in a hand basket. The truth of the matter is, the world has never been in better shape than it is right now.” For the winters there was a townhouse at La Pietra, below Diamond Head in Honolulu, where he wintered for the better part of thirty years near his best friend Sam Cooke and served as a trustee of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

The Chapel That Wasn't

The dream he wanted most in retirement he never got. Barney commissioned the great Japanese architect Tadao Ando — a Pritzker laureate — to design a small public Anglican chapel: a place of meditation seating about a hundred and forty-five, with a memorial garden and six family burial sites, scaled down from a design Ando had made for the Vatican's competition to build a chapel for the two-thousandth anniversary of Christianity. Barney meant to pay for it by selling two million of his Build-A-Bear shares, worth some sixty million dollars at their peak.

Then the stock collapsed — to around nine million. So he sold his Warhol instead, the Big Campbell's Soup Can with Can Opener, at Christie's in 2010. Experts predicted sixty to eighty million; a run of bad luck at the sale brought only about twenty-two. It still wasn't enough, and four sites fell through. Barney, who had willed himself to France and built two cruise lines out of nothing, finally read the returns and laughed at heaven:

Ando's model and drawings went to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is the closest the chapel ever came to being built.

Three Marriages, and a Fourth to Come

Pam did not, in the end, move into the house designed around their life. After twelve years of marriage she told him she was leaving, just a couple of months before they were due to move in, in 2003. Barney reported it without a trace of bitterness — noting only, in the driest possible aside, that “she had been married and divorced four times before.” He looked back on all of it the same generous way:

He wrote that in 2012, and it was true when he wrote it. But the tally would change. Five years later, in his eighties, there would be a fourth marriage — and that story belongs to the very end of this one.