THE KEY PLAYERS : ‘The Right Place at the Right Time’ : Arts activist Elaine Redfield, former board president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, tells how the dream to create a major performing arts facility in the county became a reality

I came to Los Angeles in 1941 from New York City, where I used to say that I’d arranged to be born three blocks from Carnegie Hall. Like many children growing up in the city, when the weather was bad we’d go to museums or to the theater. I do feel that had a big influence on me. I came to Orange County in 1950, when the office of my first husband, Edward Mittelman, was moved to Fullerton. At the time I really thought we were going down to the salt mines, but now I feel that it was a tremendous privilege to have come when I did and to have had the chance to grow with the county.

It all came together in Orange County with the combination of studio musicians eager to play and Frieda Belinfante--a splendid conductor--who had just come to Orange County. Of course, the world was not ready in the early 1950s to accept a female conductor , but she had started a group in Los Angeles called the Vine Street Musical Workshop, which mounted the first major concert at the Irvine Bowl on Aug. 22, 1954.

That led to the formation of the Orange County Philharmonic Society. My husband had been asked to serve as treasurer of the organization, so when I heard the Vine Street orchestra, I got really excited. We held the first steering committee meeting Sept. 8, 1954, at which we decided that we would try to present a series of concerts that winter. The orchestra was the Vine Street players, but by that time they were billing themselves as the Orange County Philharmonic Orchestra.

We became quite successful--so much so that the musicians’ union started demanding rehearsal pay. And when that happened, it killed us, because there was no way we could afford it. We had always paid musicians for the concerts, but not for rehearsals. Frieda was struggling with it, but you can’t maintain quality with only one or two rehearsals. So the audiences drifted away.

Then, about 1965, the L.A. Philharmonic in a sense took over our season and started coming out five or six times a year. It isn’t often that you have delicious poetic justice, but there’s a story about the last concert that Zubin Mehta conducted here. When the performance was finished, Mehta reputedly turned to the audience and said: “For God’s sake, build yourselves a decent music center. I’m not coming back until you do.” Something like that. So, I was delighted to hear that he is to have the honor of leading the first concert in the new center .

We in the society knew from the problems we had in setting up our performances that we needed to establish a regular location. We had been playing all around the county, doing concerts at the beach and using whatever high schools were available. For a long time we played in Crawford Hall at UC Irvine, until we settled on Santa Ana High School. And in 1965, from studies done for the remodeling of Plummer Auditorium (of Fullerton College), the county’s need for a major auditorium became clear. There were about 37 different auditorium facilities in Orange County, but each had a deficiency. So here we were with almost 2 million people and not a single public facility in the county.

Then the Newport Harbor Foundation was established, and its people wanted to build a cultural center in Newport Beach. They went so far as to hire the Brakeley Co. to do feasibility studies on the whole project; the response Brakeley came back with was: “Ladies and gentlemen, no way. We simply cannot build a major facility of the nature you are contemplating with 180 degrees of your audience out in the ocean.”

At about the same time, a couple of guys from the performing arts department of what was then Santa Ana College (now Rancho Santiago College), Stewart Case and Robert Blaustone, started agitating for better facilities for performances. They asked Catherine Quick, who had done a really good job as building committee chairman for the library in Santa Ana, to start a committee to try to push for developing what they called the Cultural Arts Center for the county. And that development work started probably in late 1972 or early 1973, and I was invited to serve on that board almost from the start.

We started out as the Orange County Cultural Center, and then a few of us on the board believed that (the name) sounded as if we were making too much of it, so we changed the name to the Orange County Music Center. But then the Los Angeles Music Center approached us and said they would rather not risk the possibility of any confusion. We felt they’d been so decent--L.A. has been supportive of this from the beginning--that the least we could do was be agreeable.

We checked out about 19 different sites in the county, but we became very seriously involved in an excellent site, near The City shopping center in Orange. We had agreed as a board that we had two basic requirements: First, we had to have a donated site (there was no way we could buy land and then start all over again for the building), and second, the donated site had to be near a confluence of freeways. The City site fulfilled those criteria, and we were working very hard with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. and the Tishman Co. in particular. The upshot was that Tishman had problems, and after we really sweated it out for three years, the deal collapsed.

But nothing in life is ever wasted. Because we were working so seriously on it, we started raising money and developing support groups in the beach area, and it is my judgment that had I not walked into Henry Segerstrom’s office when the time came (though he’s never told me this), with a balance sheet in my hand showing that we had more than $600,000 in the bank for this project, I don’t think he would have given me the time of day.

I was already one of the trustees at South Coast Repertory at that point, and I knew from my work with SCR what Henry Segerstrom’s role had been: He had given them the land and was very supportive. I didn’t know him personally at the time, but driving down Newport Freeway I had noticed the new South Coast Repertory Theatre rising in Costa Mesa and all those bean fields stretching behind it. It was just a logical thought: Why not have the music center on the bean fields as well? So I actually wrote to him, in February, 1979, saying--a bit more politely, of course--”Wouldn’t you just love to have a music center?” In about two weeks’ time I got a response, and what it said in essence was, “You came to the right place at the right time.” We had spent three years struggling with the Tishmans, and all it took was three meetings to button this whole thing up.

I became president of the center as a result of that, I guess, and semi-retired from my own work in interior design. I’d been on the Philharmonic Society board for 15 years before that. When my first husband, who had gotten me into this in the beginning, died in 1960, I decided I didn’t want to be on the bridge-playing circuit, and I became an interior designer. And I was working really very hard until I was tapped to become president.

After the land was offered, we went ahead to make sure that our plan would work. We ran three feasibility studies: The first was about the land, the second was a market-research study and the third was on fund raising. We learned that you could raise big money in Orange County and could draw an audience from San Diego and Los Angeles. And that the point on the graph where acoustics and economics cross is at about 3,250 seats--that’s how many seats you need in a house to make it work. So the three studies had come out positive; next was the matter of finding the right architects.

We hired Caudill Rowlett Scott of Houston, because we would actually be the fourth performing arts facility that firm had designed. They had designed Jones Hall in Houston, Thomas Hall in Akron, Ohio, and the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville. We interviewed a number of local architects--Becket, Pereira--but found, for example, that the people who had been involved with the L.A. Music Center were no longer with Becket; they were retired or gone. With CRS we knew we had part of the group that had been actively involved in arts-facility design, which was invaluable. And we brought aboard Harold Marshall (professor at the University of Auckland, who had designed concert halls in New Zealand) to join the acoustics team. The Orange County center, unlike any other building, has actually been built based on what the acousticians required.

And then, of course, we had to raise the money, and we really have Henry to thank for much of that. He’s worked like a dog, doing a major amount of the delicate arm-twisting. And it’s not just a matter of dollars and cents; he’s really put his heart and soul into this. For instance, I happen to have a thing about telephone poles, and I said, “Look, we can’t have a gorgeous building messed up with a bunch of telephone poles.” So Henry and I put our heads together and spoke to County Supervisor Tom Riley, and we finally got the Board of Supervisors to agree that they’d put it all underground. That took quite a lot of angling, because I think we were talking close to $300,000 to get that job done. But, thank God, there’s nothing making the landscape ugly. And another wonderful thing was done: Town Center Drive was a perfectly straight street, so SCR and the center made sort of a deal on the property--and the city of Costa Mesa went along with it--to curve the street so that you would have the grand portal directly in front of you when you approach the center. You can see the difference in impact, making the turn and seeing it there as against it being shunted off to the other side.

I’m basically not a religious person, but this center has been so blessed. I’ve never heard a word against it. Everybody wants it; no matter what the goofs are we land on our feet. We’ve made our own statement in our own way. I think it’s worth repeating what I said at ground breaking: “It isn’t given to many people to dream and dream and, having dreamed it, to live to see it come to pass.”