After entering the house from a side door in the garage, Gerald asked Anita to turn off the alarms and the laser beams in the basement, and he told me that his sports collection down there was valued at $15 million. He then led me through the dining area into a large living room with mahogany furniture and an eighty-inch television screen and several tall cabinets along the walls containing some of the eighty dolls that he and Anita had collected during their almost thirty years of marriage. I remember reading his notes describing his boyhood attraction to the dolls he saw in his aunt Katheryn’s bedroom, and how his mother diverted his interest from dolls to collecting baseball cards; but it occurred to me that after his marriage to Anita, the latter served as his proxy in drawing him back to dolls and acquiring some of these models I was now seeing in the living-room cabinets and elsewhere in the house.
As I stood next to him, he removed from a glass shelf a red-haired, green-eyed doll wearing a white lace dress and white shoes, and he said, “Anita and I were in Florida, and I had a picture of Anita when she was very young, and they made this doll right off that picture.” He went on to explain, “Every one of these dolls you see is totally porcelain, from the feet, through the body, everything,” and then he took in hand a pretty blue-eyed, blonde-haired doll measuring nearly three feet and said it was a one-of-a-kind product designed by the German doll maker Hildegard Günzel, who was known to collectors around the world. “We paid over $10,000 for this one,” he said.
At my request he pointed out some pictures of his aunt Katheryn that were among the framed photos of family members hanging along the walls. In one photo she is shown standing in a farmyard with her hands on her hips smiling at the camera.
Although she wore floppy trousers and a loose-fitting black lace blouse, the outlines of her curvaceous body were quite evident. There was also a photo near it showing Gerald as a farm boy, holding his dog within view of his aunt’s bedroom window. In addition, there were photos of his parents, Natalie and Jake, standing in front of the office of the Manor House Motel; and of Gerald and Anita in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria during a holiday visit to New York in 1991.
Upstairs, hanging on the walls of his office, were the license plates of some of the automobiles he used to drive—his Cadillacs, Lincolns, Thunderbirds. Encased in one corner of the room, next to his desk, was his gun collection—several rifles, shotguns, and boyhood BB guns; and on a shelf nearby were two German Lugers that he claimed to have gotten from an American colonel who had taken them from the home of the Nazi commander Hermann G?ring. There was also a Japanese sword and scabbard that Gerald said he acquired at a home sale.
In a guest room next to his office were more of Anita’s porcelain dolls, a doll carriage, several of her Avanti-made stuffed animals, and dozens of glass figurines representing cats and other creatures—a menagerie occasionally joined by Anita’s two pet cats. All the women that Gerald Foos had been personally associated with were collectors, he said, adding that his first wife, Donna, had a very large stamp collection and “paid as high as a thousand dollars for one stamp.” Anita’s interests were not restricted to dolls, he went on, but included a coin collection as well as an accumulation of bottles of Velvet Collection wine from the Napa Valley bearing images of Marilyn Monroe on every bottle.
Ever since the couple had sold their motels, Anita devoted much of her free time to alphabetizing his millions of sports cards (ranging from one depicting Troy Aikman, former quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, to that of Chris Zorich, a onetime lineman with the Chicago Bears)—an “act of labor and love” on her part that Gerald proudly pointed out to me after we had stepped down into the basement.
Some of the sports cards were placed within the hundreds of photo albums that stood side by side along the multiple rows of bookshelves that lined all four walls of the subdivided basement, which had an eleven-feet-high ceiling and measured seventy-five by forty-five feet in total floor space.
In addition to those in the photo albums, there were hundreds of other cards exhibited individually within small stand-up acrylic frames that rested on or within the room’s many display cases.
As Gerald Foos slowly led me past the cases, he would sometimes pause, take hold of a certain card, and make comments about it.