POWER, MONEY AND ORANGE COUNTY ARTS

For a man who is Orange County’s most widely proclaimed patron of the arts, developer Henry Segerstrom seems to like things modest.

Of his role in steering the county’s biggest and most successful arts campaign--to date more than $128 million raised to construct and endow the Orange County Performing Arts Center--he said: “There are a lot of people in this campaign. I’m just one of the worker bees.”

A slight understatement.

After all, Orange County’s Segerstrom clan--which built its fortune first on sprawling agricultural holdings and later on huge shopping, office and hotel developments in Costa Mesa and Santa Ana--has made its mark in recent years on Orange County arts with swift and spectacular flourishes.

The family not only gave a five-acre site near their South Coast Plaza shopping mall in Costa Mesa to the Performing Arts Center, but also donated $6 million to the project, easily the largest contribution.

Segerstrom himself is chairman of the arts center campaign. Touted as the biggest-ever all-private fund drive for a performing arts complex in the country, the project has raised $64.1 million for construction and $64 million for an operating endowment. (The center’s 3,000-seat multipurpose theater, being built at the cost of $70.7 million, is scheduled to open Sept. 29.)

And Segerstrom personally selected all 17 sculptures the family has acquired or commissioned for public spaces in their South Coast Plaza office projects. Including works by Carl Milles and Joan Miro, the collection is considered one of the largest corporate public-art displays in the West. The cost of the six-piece sculpture garden that another international master, Isamu Noguchi, created for one office courtyard, was reportedly $2 million.

The 63-year-old Segerstrom appears cut from a classic American arts-patron mold--one of those corporate moguls who have become a late-in-life major doer of cultural good works. So good, in fact, that his firm has won a national Business in the Arts Award for three straight years.

But such quick emergence as a big art patron has left Segerstrom open to some skepticism: namely, that he is using the Performing Arts Center and other cultural projects mostly to bolster the profitability of his shopping, office, hotel and other mercantile properties that his firm owns or has developed.

The power of the Segerstrom family in Orange County is such that it is unlikely anyone would say anything but the most laudatory things for the record.

Still, in a rare interview, Segerstrom dismissed any talk of a presumed “hidden agenda” as idle gossip, adding that his cultural involvement is “totally personal and sincere.” His arts activism may be relatively new, but then--he argues--it parallels the comparatively late and swift cultural development of Orange County itself.

The thesis that Segerstrom’s arts benevolence is fostered more by his mercantile interests goes like this: The cultural center, once in full operation, could markedly boost business for the restaurants, garages and other entertainment-related ventures in the entire 112-acre South Coast Plaza Mall and Town Center sector.

The Segerstrom firm has built a 21-story Center Tower office complex--complete with ultraposh private dining club--adjacent to the Performing Arts Center. Planned in tandem with the arts project and designed by the same architect, the tower offers a 1,200-space garage that will serve as the primary paid-parking facility for patrons of the arts center.

Three years ago, there was a brief public flurry over the issue of possible conflicting interests involving the Performing Arts Center.

Segerstrom had asked the Orange County Board of Supervisors to allocate $160,000 in federal revenue-sharing funds to help pay for a Southern California Edison Co. underground power-line project for the arts center. Segerstrom, who is also a member of the utility firm’s board of directors, had told county officials he was making the request on behalf of the arts center.

But some county aides questioned whether public funds could be used for a project that might also benefit surrounding commercial properties, including those owned or under development by the Segerstrom firm. The issue was resolved when the county counsel’s office ruled that the $160,000 could be allocated, provided it is given to the arts center organization, a nonprofit body, and not--as originally proposed--to Edison, a private company.

Not only has the Segerstrom firm brought the center and the South Coast Rep Theatre into the South Coast Plaza district, the firm has also expanded other cultural possibilities. Since October, 1984, the Laguna Art Museum has operated a “satellite museum” in a rent-free storefront in Segerstroms’ South Coast Plaza shopping mall.

In a recent interview, Segerstrom acknowledged that the cultural projects--being an “inseparable element” in his firm’s commercial developments--cannot help but appear conflicting to some community observers.

“Well, sure, some people might say, ‘Well, gee, isn’t that nice it’s (arts center) located in a certain location.’ My answer would be, ‘Yes, it is nice’ . . . but that doesn’t mean because land was given, that it’s going to be successful.”

Besides, Segerstrom noted, this issue was dealt with--and successfully so, he claimed--when he took on a pivotal fund-raising role, first with the South Coast Rep’s $3.5-million construction drive and then with the Performing Arts Center.

“(At SCR) I told them I would help with fund raising but said I didn’t want a prominent role. I didn’t want the community to feel that we were doing something just to enhance South Coast Plaza. We had sincere desire to enhance the community, not the (commercial) development. . . . We saw that my own involvement in (SCR) fund raising was not taken by the community as being self-serving--it was not.

“So when the Orange County center came along, I thought to myself: I know the community doesn’t think it’s self-serving, so therefore I would like to take a leadership role--and I don’t think there will be any conflicts, and there hasn’t been.”

Of his solicitations as the arts center’s chief fund-raiser since 1980, Segerstrom said: “I don’t think that anyone I know (while soliciting donations) feels there’s an ulterior motive in it. . . . Nor have we had one rejection by that intimation. Absolutely not. People know if you’re genuinely sincere.”

Still, he admitted, one of the images that have persisted is that he and his family are out to build a cultural monument to themselves. But, he added, “If you are to be distracted or dismayed or defeated by people who are suspicious, you never start anything.”

Segerstrom’s debut as major arts donor and fund-raiser came in 1976. At the same time, C.J. Segerstrom & Sons was attempting to build its South Coast Plaza area into Orange County’s “premier downtown”--an area next to the San Diego Freeway that boasted of expanding shopping, office, hotel, restaurant and movie-house complexes but then lacked only cultural institutions.

Enter the South Coast Repertory Theatre.

Backers of the Orange County-based professional troupe were looking at various sites for a permanent complex. One prospect was the Newport Center in Newport Beach, the Irvine Co.’s showplace office and shopping development.

When Repertory backers approached him about a South Coast Plaza sector site, recalled Segerstrom, the Repertory’s bid was “a convergence of interests,” a project that came at the right place at the right time.

In a move unprecedented for C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the family not only donated a two-acre site across from the new South Coast Plaza Hotel, but also gave $50,000 to the Repertory campaign for a two-playhouse, 662-seat complex.

When the theater complex opened in 1978, the committee had raised $3.5 million, the biggest Orange County arts drive to that time and--according to Repertory backers--the first to tap the fiscal resources of the county’s now-extensive corporate community on such a large scale.

As Segerstrom depicts it, the county’s enclaves of developer firms, high-tech industries and financial services-- especially those centered in Newport Beach, Irvine and Costa Mesa--had emerged as the “new entrepreneur capital of the West.”

And the county’s well-off, leisure-seeking residents, he argues, have passed into the culturally aspiring stage--ready for the county’s own full-fledged performing and visual arts complexes.

“We’re a very superior population base (in Orange County) in the sense of being well-educated and--I hate to use that word--affluent. . . . You have to have a certain level of economic development before a community begins to support the arts.”

As this “sense of material well-being” and the “cosmopolitan atmosphere” improve, Segerstrom said, people seek a “fulfillment, enrichment, enlargement of satisfaction other than just doing our jobs.”

“That is the way society evolves,” he added. “And in Orange County, we have followed the pattern precisely of L.A.--we have built our sports complexes before our performing arts complexes.”

The Segerstroms’ 1979 land gift for the Performing Arts Center ended six years of disputes over site prospects--including those in Irvine, Santa Ana, Orange, Newport Beach and Mission Viejo. It set in motion the raising of vast sums to eventually build two major halls (including a 1,000-seat theater, estimated to cost $8.2 million, that would be built later this decade) and to establish an operating endowment.

According to Segerstrom, the campaign seems to have won nothing but plaudits. “The only things I’ve ever heard (from other Southern California arts patrons) are only words of admiration, sometimes even words of awe, that we would be attempting to do something on this scale. . . . My gosh, if someone had told me several years ago that we would raise that much (more than $128 million), I would have said, wait a minute, I’m not sure we can do it.”

Tall and still trim, Henry Segerstrom projects a carefully modulated personality: the smoothly affable and articulate arts spokesman, the cosmopolite who visits the great museums, concert halls and opera houses of America and Europe.

Once a man who seemed to shun all personal publicity, Segerstrom is now the most visible arts patron in Orange County--a predictable figure at the county’s important cultural ceremonies, a recipient of honors from every local organization from the Orange County Arts Alliance to the Orange County Business Committee for the Arts.

Yet, as Segerstrom himself notes, his cultural involvement before the 1970s had been relatively routine: Los Angeles Civic Light Opera subscriber and occasional attendee of major symphony concerts and stage plays. “Things like that were all in Los Angeles or San Francisco. There was nothing much at all here in Orange County then,” said the Santa Ana native.

(An infantry captain in World War II, he suffered severe shrapnel wounds while serving in Germany. After the war, he earned his master of business administration degree at Stanford and returned full-time to the family business. By 1967, when the South Coast Plaza Mall opened, he was considered the firm’s most influential partner. In 1978, he assumed the title of managing partner.)

But Segerstrom shows annoyance at any suggestion that his current high-level art activities came as a dramatic turnabout. “No, I can’t pinpoint it--that it happened, like at 3 o’clock on such and such a date. These things evolve.”

And he likes nothing better than to dwell on his new-found camaraderie with noted architects and artists.

For his shopping mall, office and hotel projects, Segerstrom has employed--and “worked closely with”--such architects as I.M. Pei (a commercial project still in the planning stage), Albert Martin (office projects) and Charles Lawrence (the arts center and next-door office tower).

Even among such high-powered designing talents, Segerstrom maintains he plays a role that goes beyond mere client status. “I’m a very strong-minded developer, and I influence design . . . without exception, these men (architects) respect my judgment, my feelings.”

Among sculptors, his latest collaboration is with Richard Lippold, who is creating a 60-foot-high work, “Fire Bird,” that the Segerstrom family has commissioned for installation at the Performing Arts Center entrance.

His closest tie, Segerstrom said, is with the 81-year-old Isamu Noguchi. In 1981, the artist supervised the installation of his “California Scenario” sculpture garden between high-rise offices built by C.J. Segerstrom & Sons and the Prudential Insurance Co.

“I saw one of his fountains on the cover of an art book. It is a fantastic piece of art, and after reading the article, I thought: this is exceptional, he is a wonderful master of space--I’d like to work with him,” he recalled thinking of his first exposure to the art of the Los Angeles-born Noguchi.

After several months of being courted by Segerstrom and given the promise of a free hand, Noguchi agreed to do the project, which became a 1 1/2-acre showcase for six Noguchi-designed paeans to water, desert, forest and other natural elements. One of the works, composed of 14 granite boulders sculpted in Noguchi’s studio in Japan, was originally named “The Source of Life.”

When the 10-foot-high boulder sculpture was installed in Costa Mesa, Noguchi had renamed it “The Spirit of the Lima Bean”--a reminder that the Segerstroms are pioneers who date back to turn-of-the-century Orange County and who were at one time the biggest independent grower of lima beans in the United States.

Although Segerstrom declined to talk about his personal art collection, he considers the South Coast Plaza sector sculptures--which also include works by Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder, George Rickey and Tony Smith--typical of his preferences.

A member of the board of trustees of the Los Angeles-based Museum of Contemporary Art since September, 1984, Segerstrom put it this way: “Frankly, I don’t care for 90% of what they (Museum of Contemporary Art) show. That doesn’t mean I’m going to censor what they show, or tell them what to do, or what to acquire, because there are a lot of people that like it. Some of it appeals to me, some doesn’t--I prefer modern art, not contemporary.”

He also doesn’t divulge the costs of his firm’s public-art sculptures. “That (knowing the costs) is a diversion from the enjoyment and purpose of it. That, to me, contaminates the appreciation. If it’s there, and it creates a sense of joy and enables other people to have an enhancement of their appreciation of art, then it has created great value.”