Profile of an Art Patron on the Go : Builder Eli Broad Seeks New Challenges, More Successes

Eli Broad has the manner of a man who has lucked out, who has worked hard but made it a lot bigger than he ever expected and now, well, it was really fun to be able to write a check for $1 million to kick off the fund-raising campaign that eventually produced the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Just getting involved in the museum; he liked that. Realizing “there was all this talk, but no real action” about developing a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, and as an entrepreneur, businessman and a man who enjoyed a good challenge--he could make a difference. After all, he was the same fellow who with the late Don Kaufman transformed in just a few years a small Detroit construction company into a New York Stock Exchange-listed firm specializing in housing, financial services and life insurance and with assets of $1 billion.

Making something from nothing--that’s what Eli Broad (rhymes with road) likes: building a new residence every decade or so, founding Kaufman & Broad Inc. and expanding its clientele to worldwide, co-founding MOCA and becoming its first chairman of the board, aiming for a world-class reputation there also.

Broad liked it when New York Times art critic John Russell called to confirm that this upstart museum in Los Angeles would have then-director of Paris’ Pompidou National Center of Art Pontus Hulton, a Swede, as its director, and Japanese superstar Arata Isozaki as its architect, and that Broad had negotiated the sale of 75 works from the famed contemporary art collection of Count Giuseppe Panza de Piumo.

“Then Russell asked me who I was, what’s my involvement in the arts?” Broad said, grinning almost like a mischievous kid who’s pulled a fast one on the adults.

New Challenges He likes being recognized, being mentioned in the press. He liked being so young when he made it big, 23 when he co-founded Kaufman & Broad on $25,000 borrowed from his in-laws, 28 when the company went public and the money started rolling in. And now that he’s 51, he likes being able to indulge himself in new challenges, new visions.

Art, for example. It was the interest of his wife, Edye Broad. In 1968, he immersed himself in it, too, and now here they are with a curator of their own, going to New York once a month ostensibly to visit the Kaufman & Broad offices there, but also to check out the galleries, to contemplate purchases for one of their three collections--the private collection in the Broad home, the collection of young, unshown artists at the office, or the newest, the Broad Family Foundation collection that will be available for loan to museums.

Anniversary Surprise Broad also liked his 30th anniversary surprise for his wife, arranging for their hotel room at Caneel Bay on St. John in the Virgin Islands to be so filled with flowers that a delighted Edye Broad said afterward: “There was no room for our luggage. I mean, there were eight bougainvillea plants.”

Eli and Edye Broad are having a good time. Their two sons are grown: Jeff, 28, worked for the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange until recently and now is traveling around the country in a VW van, and 26-year-old Gary lives in West Los Angeles where, his father said, he coaches young kids and does some investing. The couple’s large wood and glass contemporary home in Brentwood Park is so easy to live in that Broad admitted he’s feeling challenged and restless to build if he could find a site. Aside from an occasional dinner with a few close friends or family, they never entertain at home. Nor do they run the party circuit. “We become social when I or we have to,” Broad said.

Theirs is a comfortable life with, as Broad said, “as much money as we could ever spend--except for art. There’s never enough money for that.”

At ease with themselves and with each other, they’re settled in. There’s Eli Broad going strong, allowing that he’s a workaholic, “but an eclectic workaholic,” who reads five newspapers a day, brings work home with him, eats dinner while watching the network news and, “no, we don’t have a videocassette recorder. That would bug me, just one more stack of things I feel I have to see.” He’s fit, feeling better than he did 10 years ago, skiing better and playing a better game of tennis.

Edye Broad watches, enjoying her husband enjoying himself. Her style is quiet. Not that she’s shy, just private. Her world is her family, and now that her sons are out of the house, she’s decided she prefers lunching with friends, then bringing her husband dinner on a tray as he watches the news. She’s never been much for volunteer work, although she is a member of the Amazing Blue Ribbon of the Music Center and a trustee of the Archives for American Art. She likes traveling with her husband, both on the business trips and those for pleasure, particularly to primitive places like the Galapagos Islands, New Guinea, East Africa. She reads, often several books a week, most always nonfiction.

She looks at her husband with his non-stop energy and the way he gets so passionate about his interests and laughs affectionately. “At home he’s different than he is in business. I mean, he’s quiet. And because he’s the way he is allows me an arena in which to grow.

“I know when he has an interest; he really pursues it. I’m interested in flowers, architecture. But I don’t take them to the ultimate. If Eli were to become interested in flowers, well, he’d be taking trips down the Amazon looking for unknown ones. Or he’d be developing new ones.”

Tour of House The Broads at home: He conducts a tour of the house, pointing out both the art (lots of Frank Stellas, Rauchenbergs, a Giacommetti sculpture and graffiti art by Jean Michel Basquiat) and architecture (he did the site plan, giving it to architect Paul Thork, “who has a great sense of mass.”) Edye Broad comes in after a visit to the dentist, then quickly disappears. Broad’s explanation: “I have a much bigger ego than she does.”

Later, leaning back on a leather couch in a sitting area overlooking a forest-like garden, Broad spoke about his youth: how he was born in New York City and raised in Detroit where his father was a house painter who eventually owned two variety stores and his mother a seamstress; how he collected stamps and by 11 or 12 was dealing in stamps; how he went to college “as part of this whole ethic” and majored in pre-law at Michigan State University; how “in those days I was very materially minded,” wanting to “get out and get started in life, unlike many young people today.” So he changed his major and became the youngest certified public accountant in Michigan at that time. Two years later, he went into business with Kaufman, who was his wife’s cousin, building moderately priced homes in the Michigan area. Their ideas apparently were revolutionary at the time and “we might have flopped.”

‘You Just Feel Good’ Except they didn’t. Even now, Broad grins at the telling of how the first weekend their first housing development opened, there were 17 deposits. A few years later when the company went public, Broad’s reaction was typical of how he approaches everything else in life. “It was exciting. You just feel good. It gets the adrenaline going. It’s like you’ve won the game.

“I go from challenge to challenge. First my life, the family, then the company. Anything I do, I spend a lot of time. I do it with passion and intensity. I want to be in charge. I love learning new things.”

In 1962, Kaufman and Broad allowed themselves to be lured by warmer weather to California and as Kaufman pulled away from the business to spend more time with his family, Broad expanded his involvement. In 1964, he ran Alan Cranston’s first primary campaign for senator. In 1972, he was requested by Pitzer College’s President Robert Atwood to join that Claremont school’s board of trustees as its president.

“I was flattered,” he explained. “I never had a president call me.” (Now he’s life trustee, which is fun, he says, because he gets to know all the faculty members.)

Later, he would become a member of the board of trustees of the California State University system. But that was short-lived. “I gave that up. I wasn’t making any difference.”

‘You Give Up Something’ Living with a dynamo? Edye Broad said her father was the same way and if her husband isn’t at his job or involved in the community, he’s with her--so fine. Broad, however, acknowledged: “I think you give up something. I didn’t spend enough time with them (his family). For a while, I was insisting on everyone being together for one meal a day, dinner. That wasn’t too popular. . . . But there’s no doubt in my mind, Edye was a better mother than I was a father.”

But what about art, MOCA? Broad asks. “Aren’t we going to talk about that?” It’s with art that he’s now on the cutting edge of what’s happening, where he’s building and making a difference. Let Michele DeAngelus, curator of the three Broad collections, give the tour of the office. She’s really best at it, he noted; then he’ll indulge in some thoughts on art and entrepreneurship.

The office collection consists of pieces by young Southern California artists who’ve not yet had a retrospective. It serves the dual purpose of allowing Broad to get their work at affordable prices, while also encouraging their careers.

Just about everything in this collection is large, some of it overwhelming and many pieces not easy to take at first glance. But, said DeAngelus--who besides cataloguing the collection acts as Broad’s “eyes and legs” in seeking out art for possible purchase--”Broad wanted controversy. He wanted the pieces to be challenging.”

Later, Broad joked that when he got involved in art, the family’s acquisition budget went up considerably. But it was less his wife and more a friend, Taft Schreiber, then director and senior officer at MCA, who was Broad’s bridge to collecting.

“I began collecting seriously in 1972. Initially it was the Impressionists and post-Impressionists. We’ve kept most, but not all. Then we moved forward in time, to the art produced in the ‘50s and from there, I don’t know why, it’s just evolved. I think you get self-confidence over a number of years. At first, you buy things that are historically approved. But then you find yourself on the cutting edge of recent work, where the public has not made judgments, and that’s fun.”

Collecting, as Broad and DeAngelus talk about it, is different from simply buying art. Collecting has a pattern, a goal. It is not merely the act of acquiring something that pleases you.

Broad said he would never buy anything he wasn’t passionate about, but “what you want to do is define in some matter what a collection should be. All we’re doing now (for the personal and foundation collection) is trying to upgrade, trying to find a better work by the artist or by that school of art. . . . I would never buy at first glance. You’re often then just buying a decoration. . . . Art evokes emotion. It doesn’t have to be a thing of beauty.

“An investment?” He laughed. “I don’t sell anything. Well, I think of 400 to 500 works, I’ve sold or exchanged four. But it was because there were better works. We want to own the best of an artist. But art is not a good investment. When art goes up, you pay more insurance. So what’s the difference?”

As for MOCA, he’s stepped down from the chairmanship of the trustees--but only because it was time for a new type of leadership, Broad stressed. “Bill (his successor, William Kieschnick) has a different style. He can work out a consensus with everyone loving him. I operate in a Gen. Patton style and just charge ahead.”

He sighed, leaned back in his chair, rubbed the cold bottle of cola between his hands.

“Listen, life’s been good to me. I’ve accomplished more than my family and I had a right to dream of. I’d like to give something back. I could just write a check to United Way, but I like to put my emotions, my efforts into a project.

“I want to keep accomplishing things, things that I can’t define but that always come along.”