Forget Abscam — this was the ultimate American hustle.
In the early 1960s, flamboyant Bay Area artist Walter Keane was an art-world smash, hawking kitschy “big eyes” paintings on everything from wall-sized posters to post ards and making a mint in the process.
But it turned out that Keane and the big-peepered kids were part of a massive heist . His wife, Margaret, was the real painter; Walter never touched a brush.
Now the largely forgotten sliver of American pop culture is getting the Hollywood treatment with “Big Eyes,” eccentric master and rabid Keane collector Tim Burton’s film starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz.
The story might never have come to light without a bold stand by a long-suffering wife.
“It just got to the point where I absolutely couldn’t stand it. It was just tearing me apart, and had been for years,” Margaret Keane, 87, tells the Daily News.
Not only had someone stolen her life’s work — but the guy who did it was the charming husband who swept her off her feet with a carnival barker’s brio and a lust for life.
The two spent a tumultuous decade together before splitting up in the mid-’60s, after a drunken Walter tossed lit matches at Margaret and their daughter during a fight, setting her home studio ablaze.
The real conflagration was yet to come. Walter had long claimed that he created the “big eyes” paintings as a depiction of ghostly orphans he encountered as an art student in Europe after World War II.
Highbrow critics hated the “waifs,” as they were called. “A classic example of non-art,” one New York scribe wrote in 1961, sniffing at the “pathetic gimmick.”
But the public gobbled them up as Walter proved to be a Picasso at mass marketing.
“(Keane’s work) has to be good,” Andy Warhol quipped. “If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.”
Margaret finally revealed the truth in 1970 during a radio interview in Honolulu, where she and daughter Jane had fled.
“I was scared to death,” Keane says, recalling the moment. “I thought, ‘They probably won’t believe me.’ “
Many didn’t, and the dispute lasted 16 years before the couple met again in a California courtroom after Margaret sued for slander.
Walter didn’t have a lawyer, so he cross-examined himself — a you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up routine featuring Walter dashing back and forth to the witness stand to answer his own questions. It’s one of the movie’s best scenes.
Finally, the fed-up judge plunked a canvas in front of the warring parties and ordered them to reproduce a “big eyes” painting. Margaret did so easily. Walter could not.
Adams says she knew the paintings but didn’t know the stranger-than-fiction story behind them until she read the script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.
The dazzling actress, who has her own 4-year-old daughter, says it was Margaret’s relationship with her daughter that really caught her eye.
“It helped me understand why she stayed with him,” says Adams, who snagged a Golden Globe nomination for the role.
“She was told, ‘If you tell the truth, they will take your daughter away.’ I can only imagine what that would feel like.”
Walter died broke and alone in 2000 at 85. He insisted until the end that the paintings were his.
And what would he have thought of the film? That’s easy.
“He often said, ‘I don’t care what they say as long as they spell the name right,’ ” Keane says.
