Boobis’s sudden death was an enormous blow to his family. Mr. Chanin, then an impressionable and admiring teenager, felt it profoundly, as if the life force of his universe had been extinguished.
“He was kind of like a god,” Mr. Chanin, 66, said recently. “We all kind of grew up thinking we were part of, like, the royal family or something. We just felt special.” This sense of exceptionalism, he explained, emanated from Boobis. “We felt like we came from this extraordinary background and had extraordinary genes, or whatever it was,” he said, “mostly by dint of my uncle Brad.”
The disappearance of the paintings only compounded this sense of loss for Mr. Chanin. It was a feeling that would calcify over time into an obsession.
Rise of the artist
Bradford Boobis was born in 1927 with the name Milton Boobis. He was the sixth of seven children of Pearl and Benjamin, a pair of immigrants from what is now Ukraine who moved to New York in the early 1900s. Benjamin, a jeweler, eventually went blind and, unable to do his work, died in 1960 after taking cyanide, Mr. Chanin said. At 3, Milton survived a bout with rheumatic fever but complications from the condition left him with an accelerated heartbeat. He grew up with a sense that time is fragile, the sand in his hourglass falling at a faster rate than that of most. “He knew he might die young,” his son, Barry, recalled.
Young Boobis spoke quickly and confidently, often in bold, declarative statements. While his siblings despised their last name and later pushed to legally change it, Barry said, Milton instead changed his first name. By the time he moved out of his parents’ house, at age 27, he would be Bradford Boobis.
Not long after his 18th birthday, with the United States embroiled in World War II, Boobis enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he formed a friendship with a man named Larry Chanin. After the war, Chanin started dating Boobis’s sister Zelda (she later changed her name to Barbara). Bradford, who planned to marry his girlfriend Sylvia Dworkin (she later changed her name to Shawn), encouraged Larry to marry Zelda. Once both couples were married, the four of them moved in together into a sprawling apartment on Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
Both couples had children and eventually moved into separate apartments. Lester Chanin was born in 1956 to Larry and Barbara. In 1961, Bradford’s youngest son, Billy, died of spinal meningitis at age 3 and, in his grief, Bradford moved his family to Los Angeles.
