Looking Back

Barney opens the Afterword by admitting the practical reason he wrote the book. I've always had a mind like a steel trap — and I still do, except it's rusting, he writes. Which is why I began writing down my memories. The project, he explains, was above all for his daughter Christiane.

The illustrative story he picks is a small one. In the early travel-industry days, he had sat with Harry Pope — the cafeteria owner whose Food Service Management Guild tour had lit the fuse for INTRAV — and about ten years later, he ran into Harry again. They were both driving Rolls-Royces.

What Made Him Successful

If Barney had to pinpoint the qualities responsible for his business success, he lists four: a tendency to stay ahead of the curve and reinvent the business when it needed to be reinvented; a willingness to pay more to hire the best workers; an ability to put himself in his customers' shoes and figure out what they actually wanted; and the temperament of a problem-solver.

He thinks many businesspeople get mired in early successes and believe they can ride the same model forever. He calls that a losing bet in a smartphone- and internet-driven world. If you're not reinventing yourself, he writes, something is probably wrong.

What Made Him Happy

The quality he credits for success at life, as distinct from success at business, is simpler: a positive attitude. He preserves his attitude, he explains, by surrounding himself with people and things that make him happy. That doesn't mean he ignores the world's misfortune. He sends checks to the United Way and the Salvation Army every year. The Salvation Army has invited him to join the board several times. He can't bring himself to. The day-to-day reality of families in economic struggle is, for him, too close to the life he had escaped.

The Last Lines

Barney says he doesn't spend time thinking about death or afterlife. I'm already living in heaven, he writes. I think heaven and hell are right here on earth and we decide which one we live in. But whatever comes after death, I'm sure it will be all right.

He says he wants to be remembered as an honest, hardworking, reasonably intelligent, and loving man. His father taught him the importance of being fair, and he has tried to pass the lesson on. He hopes his daughter and grandchildren will always know how much they have enriched his life.

After

Here Barney's own words run out, and the cousin has to finish the story.

He had one more surprise in him: a fourth marriage. In his eighties he married Rebecca Layman, whom he'd been at concerts and opera galas with around Seattle since about 2015. She had a wit that matched his — for a photograph of Barney leaning in to whisper to his neighbor Bill Gates, it was Rebecca who wrote the caption: “The next big tech idea is smoke signals. Forget Windows. Think blankets.” They married in the spring of 2017.

Less than a year later it ended. On April 9, 2018, at the house on Lake Washington built to hold his paintings, Barney died of a heart attack, at eighty-three, with Rebecca and his daughter Christiane at his side. Six weeks earlier he had lost his closest friend, Bucky Bush — who happened to share Barney's July 14 birthday. He was buried from St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Medina, Washington.

What the World Paid

That November, the collection Barney had spent a lifetime assembling came to Christie's in New York under the name he'd given his Seattle house: “An American Place.” The marquee evening sale alone brought $317.8 million; the full collection totaled about $323 million — fifteen artist records in a single season, and the first major auction ever recorded on a blockchain. Chop Suey — the Hopper he'd very nearly talked himself out of buying for $180,000 — sold for $91.9 million, a world record for the artist. His de Kooning brought $68.9 million; his Pollock, $55.4 million.

The pictures scattered to collectors and museums around the world, which is not quite the ending anyone expected — for years it had been quietly assumed the collection might go, more or less whole, to the Seattle Art Museum. Barney had talked about it. But he'd never once put it in writing, and when a Smithsonian interviewer pressed him a year before he died, he gave the most Barney answer imaginable: “I'm not committing. I'm not even committing to say I'm not committing.”

The Two He Kept for Her

What he did commit to writing was small and unmistakable. Out of a collection worth a third of a billion dollars, Barney set aside two paintings for Christiane — a Walt Kuhn portrait of a clown and Hopper's The French Six-Day Bicycle Rider — chosen not for their price but because her mother, Martine, was French. Worth nothing next to Chop Suey. Worth everything next to a check. Everything else — what the auctions brought in — passed through a living trust he had set up back in 1986 to Christiane, his only child and the executor of his estate.

He had, as he always promised, stayed friends with the women he married. Trish had died in 2012. His first wife, Martine — Christiane's mother — stayed close to the family long after the marriage ended; she was still listed as a trustee of the Ebsworth Foundation as late as 2021, in her eighties. His third wife, Pam, went on collecting art around Seattle. And Rebecca, his widow, returned to the nursing career she had followed for some thirty-five years and to the small charities she now helps lead — Little Mercies and Stand For Courage — and a seat on the board of the Seattle Symphony.

The great house went, in 2019, to Jeff Bezos. The businesses had been sold long before. But one thing Barney gave away can never be sold, and it is still there in the Missouri woods: the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Ebsworth Park, deeded to the public, named for his parents — the two loving people, and the one and a half paychecks, that this whole story started with. If you want to visit Barney, that is where to go.