Rebels in Paradise (28 page)

Frank Gehry

Photograph courtesy of Frank Gehry

Born in 1929, as Frank Goldberg, in Toronto, Canada, he moved with his Polish Jewish parents to Los Angeles in 1947 because of his father's poor health. Gehry drove a truck part-time to pay for his classes at L.A. City College and then at USC, where he took a course in ceramics. The instructor, Glen Lukens, suggested he enter the school of architecture. He got an A in his first course but a teacher said, “This isn't for you.” Gehry recalled, “I was devastated but I didn't give up.”
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Gehry was trained by the reigning Modernists who dominated the architecture department and was duly influenced by the city's exceptional residential architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, and others. Many had built homes under the impetus of the Case Study House Program devised by John Entenza for
Art and Architecture
magazine between 1945 and 1966.

For the first decade of his career, Gehry toed the Modernist line but, at age thirty-five, he found himself in the throes of a fundamental shift. In 1964, he divorced his wife of twelve years, Anita Snyder. It had been her suggestion that he change his name from Goldberg to Gehry to avoid confronting the anti-Semitism that was rumored to percolate through the ranks of the Los Angeles establishment. Having been married since the age of twenty-two, he was ready for a new chapter. “I was let out of the cage,” he said.
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The 1964 Danziger Studio was commissioned by designer Lou Danziger and his wife Dorothy. Danziger, who had studied with Alvin Lustig at Art Center School, as it was then called, in Pasadena, had built his considerable reputation by applying the principles of Modernism to graphics. Gehry designed a pair of two-story buildings, for living and for work, that faced each other and were protected from the street by a high wall. The three elements were covered in blue-gray stucco that appeared industrial yet elegant. Inside, Gehry left wood framing and ventilation ducts exposed for the first time in his career.

The building earned little praise from fellow architects but seized the attention of the Ferus artists, who became his new friends. “I was in awe of what they were doing,” he said.
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Like them, he decided to embrace the creative possibilities unique to Southern California. “California was about freedom because it wasn't burdened with history. The economy was booming because of the aircraft industry and movie business, and things were going up quickly. Everybody could make whatever they wanted.… That's what democracy is about. Democracy didn't say everybody has to have taste.”
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Learning of Gehry's anxiety over his pending divorce, Ed Moses introduced him to the famed psychoanalyst Milton Wexler. Wexler was renowned in Hollywood for treating actors John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk, as well as artists such as Moses himself and John Altoon. He had prescribed a medication for Altoon that stabilized his bipolar condition to the point where he had remarried and was painting regularly. Wexler's approach to group therapy was so successful that many of his patients became friends with one another. Producer and director Sidney Pollack, who befriended Gehry at Wexler's, made the 2005 documentary
Sketches of Frank Gehry
. According to Gehry, Wexler helped him complete his divorce. “She wanted out of it as much as I did but neither of us knew how to. You're in limbo.… Milton taught me how to do it, how to split.”
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Gehry left his wife and two daughters and moved into a building that he owned on Highland Avenue in Ocean Park near many of the artists. He began visiting them in their studios and incorporating some of their ideas in his architecture. While designing the Joseph Magnin store in Costa Mesa, he started experimenting with light and the use of glass around a central skylight-atrium. “Larry [Bell] helped me with how to hang it so it wouldn't break, how to film it, how to light it. We were on the same wavelength.”
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Other influences came from Bengston. “Billy Al would change his studio, it seemed like, every other week,” Gehry said. “He moved the bedroom somewhere and built desks and chairs. Bell was doing some of that and Irwin.… It wasn't something they would sit down and design. It was just stream of consciousness and I loved that. I was looking at how to express that immediacy in architecture.”
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Bell had not covered the plumbing pipes in his bathroom with plaster but with glass. Moses had applied a similar solution to the dining room of art collector Laura Stearns by extending the glass of a window over the exposed studs in a wall. These examples led Gehry to leave the studs exposed in his work and to start using chain-link fence as a building material.

Through the art world, he met collector Ed Janss Jr., who commissioned the first house that Gehry designed on his own. Not unlike the Danziger Studio, high-ceiling rooms opened onto a courtyard and garden at the back. Gehry honored Janss's two great passions by maximizing kitchen space for cooking and major walls for paintings.

The artists became Gehry's new family. Lonely during the first months after his divorce, he would have dinner on Thursday nights at the Hollywood home of John Altoon and his second wife, Babs. Billy Al Bengston and Penny Little would join them and afterward, they would go to Barney's to meet the other artists.

Gehry was not new to Barney's. Gehry's uncle Willy had worked for the gangster Mickey Cohen, who was a regular. When Gehry had moved to Los Angeles as a young man, Willy had brought him to Barney's to drink. One memorable night, Willy got into a fight with Lawrence Tierney, the actor who played the title character in the 1945 movie
Dillinger
. (Willy also took Gehry to his first brothel when still a virgin.)

Babs Altoon was a good cook and loved to entertain crowds of hungry friends. When the Altoons rented a disused Laundromat on the boardwalk in Venice, Gehry renovated the interior but could not remove the concrete median where the machines had been installed, so he transformed it. “We used it as a stage,” he said. “Ben Gazzara came over and read the cookbook as though he were doing
Othello.
We had phenomenal times.”
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Not averse to the occasional joint, Gehry joined Bell, Altoon, and Moses in an impromptu rock band, Five Bags of Shit. The fifth artist might be Ken Price or Sam Francis. James Turrell hung out but did not play. Gehry said, “My instrument was bicycle handlebars that had a ringy-ding bell, then I graduated to a toilet plunger in a pail.”
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Gehry was short, with a wild array of curly black hair. His obvious intelligence was modified by a self-deprecating sense of humor and a generous nature. He soon became the newly available bachelor in town and went out a few times with Ann Marshall. Then he fell hard for the striking blonde Donna O'Neill, who was married to Richard O'Neill, scion of an established Southern California family and owner of a vast land-grant property south of Los Angeles. “I was madly in love with her,” Gehry admitted.
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The O'Neills kept an apartment in Hollywood behind the Blarney Castle, a bar and restaurant that they owned. During a party there, “everybody got drunk as skunks.” Gehry recalled. “Donna was dressed in black like Carmen from the opera.”
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The group decided to have dinner at Martoni's, a short drive west on Cahuenga Boulevard. Donna chased after Gehry and asked, “Can I ride with you?”
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Her husband drove on in his own car.

At the restaurant, as everyone started to sit down, Donna said she felt sick. She asked Gehry to drive her home. “I was innocent. I looked around and thought her husband should drive her home. She said, no, she wanted me to drive her,” he explained.
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When they got back to the apartment, she told Gehry, “I don't feel good. You better carry me in.” Once inside, according to Gehry, she pulled him down on the bed and started kissing him. As they wrestled on the bed, Gehry was thinking that any minute her husband would be walking in the door. He carried on with no regrets. “It was one of those life-changing experiences and I got out of there before he got home,” he said. “I was freaked out the next day because we were going to go down to their ranch and look at a site. They wanted me to do something.” Gehry called Moses at dawn and told him the story. The artist laughed and told him not to worry about Richard O'Neill: “They do that, those guys,” Moses chuckled knowingly.
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The next day, Gehry sheepishly went to the ranch to meet them. They discussed the building project and Richard O'Neill left. “She grabbed me again,” Gehry said. “We became really close. She came along at a time when I needed that desperately. We hung out for about six months. I fell hopelessly in love with her and I didn't know what to do. So I pulled myself out of it, but as I pulled out, she came for more. It got really complicated. She was a free spirit.”
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His passion was made manifest in the O'Neills' hay barn, one of his first buildings to break free from orthogonal form. Telephone poles supported a corrugated steel trapezoidal roof tilted between two diagonal corners. Despite the simplicity, the metal reflected the color of the sky while the angles echoed the shape of the terrain. It inspired a similar design for a house Gehry later created for artist Ron Davis in the hills of Malibu. (When Davis could not qualify for a loan, Janss underwrote the mortgage and the artist paid him back.)

Gehry had designed the barn as part of an ambitious overhaul of the O'Neills' main house, guesthouse, stable, and pool at their ranch. “It was a labor of love,” Gehry conceded.
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By the time the barn was completed in 1968, however, Richard must have learned of their affair since the rest of the project was canceled without explanation. The barn remained a lonely testament to love. Gehry said, “He would make fun of me. He said it was too expensive, though it cost two thousand dollars to build. He didn't want to pay me. He must have known what was going on. He had me by the shorts and he loved that. But we never talked about it.”
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

London Calling, L.A. Answers

In 1966, Irving Blum brought the London art dealer Robert Fraser to the Pop art–laden home of Dennis and Brooke Hopper. Fraser stayed for a couple of weeks and then went with them to Tijuana because Dennis wanted to show him the Mexican folk art that he believed was the equivalent of the African art collected by Picasso and other early modern artists. Fraser and Dennis were snorting cocaine, which had not yet become popular. On the trip, Brooke recalled, Fraser also gave them speed. “We all got crazy, completely raving mad, and were unable to go to sleep for about three days.… The drug scene was beginning but it hadn't hit the mescaline stage, and certainly hadn't hit the cocaine stage. Robert had a lot to do with that, in my opinion. He was a very seductive character.”
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Fraser was impressed by the Ferus artists and from January 29 to February 19, 1966, mounted Los Angeles Now at his Mayfair gallery featuring Ruscha, Hopper, Bell, Berman, Foulkes, and Kauffman, along with Bruce Conner and Jess Collins, who lived in San Francisco. It was quite an advanced show for the London of that era.

Ruscha recalled that Fraser had come to his studio and bought a number of drawings that he then sold to John Lennon. “I was just floored that someone from so far away would come and buy my work,” he said.
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Yet, he had few illusions that Fraser was a businessman. “It wasn't his interest. He wanted the fun and games of it, means to the end, to be in the hoopla.”
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Some of the artists went over for the opening. Hopper, who promptly had an affair with designer Pauline Fordham, was stunned by the atmosphere in London, saying it was “the most exciting time I'd ever seen, or have seen since.”
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After a few days, however, he grew noticeably paranoid, looking out Fordham's windows for evidence that the FBI was following him.

Hopper, along with Conner, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and actor Sid Caesar, dropped acid with Fraser at his flat while watching their experimental films. Fraser's drug use escalated. Close to two years later, at Keith Richards's house, Fraser and Mick Jagger were arrested for possession of heroin, a stunning event given their fame and status. Richard Hamilton turned the newspaper photograph of the pair, handcuffed and trying to hide their faces while in the back of the squad car, into a print called
Swingeing London.
(It was Hamilton who did the image-free cover of the Beatles' so-called White Album.)

While in London, Larry Bell became friendly with the artist Peter Blake, who was codesigning, with his wife Jann Haworth, the unforgettable cover for the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper's
album. Superficially, it appeared to be a collage but in fact was a wildly elaborate stage set composed of cutout photographs of figures and actual people, plants, and props. Blake took a photograph of Bell wearing black-and-white striped trousers and inserted it into the crowd of people. He added Los Angeles characters Wallace Berman, Lenny Bruce, Simon Rodia, and Aldous Huxley.

Two years later, it was Ken Price's turn to enjoy the limey limelight when he had a show at Kasmin Gallery. He stayed for six months at a flat owned by Don Factor and experienced European museums for the first time. When he returned to Los Angeles, instead of joining the increasingly frenzied scene, he married a woman who lived up to her name: Happy. Though he maintained a studio in the Mildred Avenue building where Bengston lived, the couple moved to Taos in 1971.

Back in Los Angeles, the Sunset Strip may not have been as wild as London's Kings Road but there was plenty of action. In 1966 Ruscha documented every seedy and seductive detail in his book of photographs
Every Building on the Sunset Strip
. Mary Lynch Kienholz was friendly with members of the Byrds through their manager Jim Dickson, who had married Diane Varsi, the actress who had hitchhiked south with her to a new destiny. Though divorced from Ed, Mary retained friendships with the Ferus artists, and many became part of the Byrds' dedicated fan base. “We danced until we were dripping with sweat,” Mary said. “It was the first time that thing had happened in that everybody was physically involved in music as opposed to jazz clubs where you would sit on a chair with scotch and a cigarette.”
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