CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Between Form and Function: Frank Gehry

In 1964, architect Frank Gehry walked out of the Danziger Studio that he had designed and saw a tall, muscular character wearing dark glasses and staring intently at the gray concrete structure. Though the architect had met Ed Moses before, he greeted him with surprise. The artist had come to pay compliments to Gehry for the radical elegance of the graphic design studio, which stood like a grace note of Modernism along a stretch of Melrose Avenue crowded with old Spanish buildings and low-rise stucco shops.

The building was a breakthrough for Gehry, completed just two years after he had started his own firm. Off and on in the 1950s and early 1960s, he worked for Gruen and Associates. Gehry described Victor Gruen, who designed many of the postwar shopping centers in Southern California, as “a Viennese guy who trained me to be perfect.”1

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.”2

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.3

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.4 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.”5

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.”6

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.”7

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.”8

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.”9

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.”10

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.11

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.”12 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?”13 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.14 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.15

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.”16

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.17 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.”18