NEW YORK — It wasn't long ago that Americans, if they thought of Switzerland at all, had visions of alpine meadows, chocolate and fondue. But that was before the public relations debacle unleashed by the failure by Swiss banks to return Holocaust victims' money to their families.
So the Swiss government needed something to improve its image. It embraced fiberglass cows.
Three fiberglass cow forms, mass-produced, life-size and decorated by local artists, were set up on Zurich streets as a cow parade in 1998. Tourists flocked to see them. Chicago copied the idea. New York plans to follow suit in June.
Switzerland, it seemed, was on its way to reclaiming its status as a quaint if boring paradise.
Instead, the hapless Swiss and their fiberglass cows have stumbled from one mishap to the next.
The first 50 cows, shipped over by a Swiss government foundation last fall to be painted by children in New York public schools, turned out to be made of a material that, when exposed to flame, transformed the glossy figures into roman candles.
"It flashed and was gone in an instant," said Daniel Blume, who went out to a Queens warehouse run by the city school system to break off a piece of the imported cows and burn it. "Black soot came off of it."
The cows were swiftly shipped back. "The cows will be used in other countries," said Jacques Reverdin, the Swiss consul general in New York, "but certainly not in schools."
The American partner in the firm set up to organize New York's cow parade walked out on his Swiss partners, calling the Swiss cows "junk."
"They weren't actually making them in Switzerland, but in Bosnia," said Blume, a shareholder in the Cow Parade Holdings Corp., an American company. "One smart bomb could have taken out our whole operation. The resin was of poor quality; there were no metal supports. They could fall over on people. When you flipped the reclining cow upside down it was hollow. It looked like a bathtub. Someone could get trapped inside."
So the Swiss and American companies began producing competing cows. Those for New York are made by plants in Florida and California.
The bitterness goes on. The Swiss accuse Jerome D. Elbaum, a Hartford lawyer and president of Cow Parade Holdings, of stealing the international copyright for the cow parade. He responds that the Swiss were impossible to work with and owe him money. And he accuses his Swiss rivals of placing a spy in the company, and says the spy secretly formed his own company to try to steal his business. He said he discovered the espionage in April when he hired a security officer to seize the computer used by the man he fired.
The upshot is that there are now four companies set up to run cow parades: the original Swiss and American company; the rival firms created by the Swiss and Elbaum; and the firm founded by Marcus Naef, the man Elbaum fired.
Naef, who denies spying, is now in Miami working with city officials there to create a parade with a theme of flamingos or dolphins. Cincinnati plans yet another spinoff: a "porker" parade.
"These forms like flamingos and hogs will not produce significant or lasting art, because the shapes of the animals are wrong," said Elbaum, whose company will run the New York event. "Flamingos do not have a large surface. A flamingo does not lend itself to art. Cows are benign. They immediately attract art. You speak to artists, serious artists, and they only want to paint cows."
Into the fray comes Roland Muller, the Swiss artist who designed the cows two years ago. He said this week he was considering a court order to halt the New York cow parade for failing to pay him for the use of his prototypes of cows grazing, walking and reclining.
Muller also dismissed the legitimacy of the companies that are locked in the battle to secure rights to worldwide cow parades, saying none of them have the legal authority to market his creations. The cows belong to him, he says.
"I am the only person who has the rights to these cows," said Muller, interviewed by phone from his home in Nafels, an hour from Zurich. "I gave the Zurich Chamber of Commerce the right to use the cows in their parade in Zurich and the right to comply with any contracts under negotiation at the time of the signing. They had a contract, for example, to sell four cows to Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was OK
"But I was to be notified and compensated for all future events," Muller continued. "I only learned about the Chicago cow parade from the papers and never received a cent. I did not know about the Hamburg parade until it was held, and no one has contacted me about the cow parades in Arnhem and Salzburg. The rights to these cows belong to me."
The four companies reject Muller's assertion, although the artist, who specializes in fiberglass animals, said he spent two months designing the three cow forms in use.
"I placed them in my garden and my house to make sure they would work," he said. "I made sure the curves were rounded. I gave them character. I gave them feelings. I did extensive testing around the shadows they created. I wanted people to react to them."
But to his critics a cow is a cow is a cow.
"No artist made these," Elbaum said. "They are replicas of cows. They are anatomically correct. Someone had to make the molds, but they are not stylized cows. They are Holstein dairy cows in three different positions."
All the fuss, it must be acknowledged, is not entirely about cows, art or the Swiss image. It is about the profits that come with the parades.
"This is another illustration of the failure by the Swiss to understand the Americans, how they do business and American culture," said Peter Hossli, a Swiss reporter in New York who first wrote about the cow troubles for the Swiss weekly Cash. "The Swiss do not grasp the shrewdness of the Americans and the drive they have to get things done."