NEW YORK—In the introduction to his new book, Rogues’ Gallery, author Michael Gross recounts a meeting with former Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe de Montebello. Sitting in de Montebello’s office in early 2006, Gross explained his plan to write an unauthorized history of the Met. After he had finished, de Montebello “straightened up defensively,” Gross writes, and countered, “You are laboring under a misimpression. The museum has no secrets.”

What follows from this anecdote are 483 pages that suggest otherwise. Rogues’ Gallery is the result of three years of intensive research into the history and leadership of the Met — all without its cooperation or approval. It is the story of the people who have made and shaped the museum, with each of six sections centered around a key figure in the institution’s history, and it is a fascinating read — by turns funny, outrageous, and disconcerting — that makes public what arguably should have been public knowledge long ago. Gross’s coup is not only in the vast amounts of information he has obtained but also in his ability to tell a story about the rich and powerful people of New York nearly effortlessly and without disdain.

Gross, who characterizes himself as “somewhere between a journalist and a historian,” is no stranger to well-to-do New Yorkers. His previous book, 740 Park, followed the players in “the world’s richest apartment building,” among them Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Chryslers. Rogues’ Gallery is his 11th book, the latest in a line of works that tackle such subjects as Bob Dylan, Ralph Lauren, and the modeling business.

In anticipation of Rogues’ Gallery, which hits bookstores today, ARTINFO called up Gross to ask him a few questions. We ended up discussing the Met at length, with the author speaking his mind about its inaccessibility, its public/private dilemma, and the why the museum is not the people who run it.

How did you conceive of Rogues’ Gallery?

Having done 740 Park, people said, What are you going to do next, 820 Fifth? The last thing I wanted to do was another residential building, which would have basically been telling the same story, only with the names changed. So I thought, How do I define myself? I don’t write about real estate; I write social history, and this last book was about a great institution of the New York aristocracy…. What are the other great institutions of the New York aristocracy? The library, the opera, the Colony Club, the art museum … and my editor stopped me there and said, I think that’s it!

I had read Tom Hoving’s book about the Met and thought it was terrific; I had read Calvin Tomkins’s semi-authorized history of the Met; and my wife, curiously, had read this ancient biography of Luigi di Cesnola, who was the first director of the Met, and she raved about it. So I thought, This will probably have a cast of characters at least as interesting as 740 Park, and even though it’s in New York, it’s really a bigger subject, because it’s America’s greatest art museum.

Do you have any kind of art background?

Absolutely none. One of the most wonderful things about what I do is that every new book gets to be an education in another subject. You get to spend a year or two — or in this case, three — immersed in a subject. Have I been going to art museums since I was a kid? Yes, absolutely. Am I an art historian or a museographer? Absolutely not. But I didn’t intend this to be a work of art history or museography. In the same way that I’ve always resisted being a beat reporter, I’ve always seen myself as being in worlds but not of them.

It sounds like quite an epic undertaking, especially because the Met, as you say, was so hostile to you.

Precisely. It’s the single hardest thing I have ever done. I’ve done books where people were uncooperative or even hostile, but here the effort to impede me was constant. I had to find ways to report while enduring phone call after phone call where people yelled at me. People were going around New York calling me a sleaze — apparently you’re sleazy if you dare to think that you have a right to write about a public institution. Eventually it got to be funny, but even boxers who can take a punch feel them. And in the end it made it a much more rewarding experience, because the harder you have to work for information, the better the information is. I’m not sure whether it was ironically rewarding or rewardingly ironic, but it was one of those.