After 40 Years, County Comes Through With TLC for William S. Hart Museum : Dusting Off Memories of the Old West

When silent-film star William S. Hart bequeathed his Spanish villa and its surrounding 233-acre Newhall estate to Los Angeles County in 1946, the county had to fight in probate court for more than a decade to gain possession.

But over the years, the county’s interest in the villa, which is filled with Hart’s invaluable Western art and artifacts collection, waned. In the 1960s, during a county bureaucratic shuffle, the villa-turned-museum lost its curators.

Since then, some of the museum’s artifacts have deteriorated to the point that county museum experts consider the vast collection’s general condition to be only fair.

A cherished Charles Russell painting is beginning to buckle, and other oil paintings are bleeding. Beads that decorated ornate Indian clothing and other tribal treasures have been discovered on the floor. Hart’s stockpile of Westerns shot on nitrate film is feared to be deteriorating.

In a lengthy report last year, a consultant chided the county for being remiss in caring for Hart’s heirlooms.

“The county has had possession of this fine collection for over 40 years, but has taken no real steps toward maintaining accountability for it,” wrote Susan J. Buchel, a former curator with Scotty’s Castle at Death Valley National Monument. “Other museums that have failed to maintain objects properly have been taken to task by donors or families of donors and, in some cases, have had to give the collections back!”

Mark Rodriguez, chief deputy director at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, says the Newhall facility “captures a portion of history, especially in the Los Angeles basin and the West Coast. It has a lot of meaning as to how Los Angeles developed in the initial years of Hollywood.”

Many early Westerns were filmed near the villa in the Santa Clarita Valley’s rugged hills, dotted with scrub brush and crawling with rattlesnakes. Memories of the real Wild West and Hollywood’s version of it are captured at the museum in signed photographs, letters and mementos from the likes of Wyatt Earp, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill and Will Rogers.

Hart was truly an urban cowboy. Born in New York, he started his career as a Shakespearean actor and didn’t leave Broadway until he was 49. He made 70 cowboy movies during his Hollywood career. He lived in a large home on De Longpre Avenue in Hollywood until he retired to the Newhall ranch, where he died at 81.

About 50,000 people annually walk through the cool, spacious villa that Hart dubbed La Loma de Los Vientos, or Hill of the Winds. Some still visit because they adored Hart as a stern villain-turned hero who usually got the girl. But as the memory of his film aura fades, more visitors are lured by the fabulous collection of art and memorabilia.

Perhaps the museum’s most famous painting, Russell’s “Buffalo Hunt No. 14,” hangs in the huge living room near a grizzly bear rug, a gift from Will Rogers. The Smithsonian Institute issued the painting’s number to differentiate it from other paintings Russell did to commemorate buffalo hunts.

Bronzes by Frederic Remington and Charles Christadoro decorate the house’s shelves and tables. Paintings and drawings by James Montgomery Flagg, who drew the famous military recruiting poster of Uncle Sam, are generously represented.

Hart’s extensive weapons collection includes a Colt revolver once brandished by train robber Al Jennings, and an ax head autographed by Kit Carson. But there is an impostor in the collection: Hart thought that one of his revolvers belonged to Billy the Kid, but someone later traced the serial number and discovered that the gun was forged four months after the notorious outlaw died.

The Hart mansion is the only county-owned museum that makes do without curators. Since the staff from the county’s Museum of Natural History departed in the 1960s, the museum has been under the jurisdiction of the county’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which many agree has done its best under difficult circumstances.

“The parks department isn’t set up to run a museum,” explained Katherine Child, a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Natural History who has been directing an inventory of the museum’s holdings. “They don’t have people trained to take care of artifacts or identify artifacts.”

John Weber, the park department’s regional director, said his staff has tried hard to maintain the museum over the years and to follow the experts’ suggestions.

“I think the county parks department has done an excellent job in that facility, given the resources we’ve had,” he said.

And Norm Phillips, the park’s recreational supervisor for the past year, has been taking crash courses in museum management. Phillips, the park’s recreational supervisor, figures that he has almost learned enough about museums to qualify for a curator’s job. “I’ve had to become the jack of all trades,” he said.

Volunteer Support Group

The Friends of Hart Park Museum, a group of supporters who have worried about the facility for years, believe that it is on the verge of a renaissance. It was the Friends who raised the money to hire consultant Buchel to assess the condition of the Hart collection, and the group has pressed county officials to devote more attention and resources to the museum.

“It’s not the bright, busy place it used to be. But I have great hopes we’ll be able to turn the corner and get it shaped up,” said Jim Yaple of Newhall, the group’s president.

As a first step, $223,000 in county and state money has been invested in recent months in physical improvements at the villa, the ranch and bunkhouses, which were featured in Hart’s Western potboilers. Security alarms have been installed, and climate control devices have been added to protect the buildings’ contents.

The museum also might get back its curatorial staff.

County Funding Requested

Museum of Natural History officials, who would like to have the facility returned to their jurisdiction, have asked the Board of Supervisors for $358,000 in next year’s budget to pay for a professional staff and supplies. A similar request for money, however, was turned down in 1986.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who supports revitalizing the museum, made his own pitch last year to raise funds for the Hart museum. He approached, among others, Hollywood cowboys Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, as well as the J. Paul Getty Museum. But all he got was an offer from Autry to showcase some of Hart’s possessions in Autry’s planned Western museum in Griffith Park.

Meanwhile, the Friends of Hart Museum have been raising funds and searching for museum tour guides. The group was able to match a $2,500 donation from Aetna Life & Casualty to finance an inventory of the museum’s holdings--a necessary first step toward documenting and preserving the collection.

Time-Consuming Inventory

The inventory is a grueling, tedious exercise that began last month and, Child says, will require at least a year to complete.

So far, volunteers conducting the inventory have not made it out of the villa’s dining room. They are measuring each crystal goblet, all the silverware and china, the rugs and each stick of furniture that Hart bought all at once before he moved here in 1928. The measurements and description of each item are jotted in a book, and every article is numbered in India ink.

Minor challenges have broken some of the monotony. A locked cabinet sent Phillips hunting through a box of the mansion’s keys. (The cabinet contained a number of empty sacks.)

A photograph of Hart’s favorite horse, Fritz, at its 25th birthday party, set off a discussion about whether another animal in the picture should be described as a mule or a horse.

Navajo rugs are scattered in almost every room. It is one of the largest collections of Navajo rugs outside Hearst Castle, Phillips notes.

The care of the 67 rugs illustrates one of the subtler reasons for curators to take over the museum’s reins. The Friends of Hart and the parks department have kept the museum clean, but Buchel, in her report, suggests that they went overboard.

The volunteer housekeepers planned to dry-clean the Navajo rugs twice a year. But that regimen is too harsh on the valuable rugs, Buchel concluded, and cleanings should be limited to every five to 10 years--and then only if necessary. She advised the group to stop dusting the surfaces of paintings and to curtail polishing of the silverware.

The practice of displaying Indian clothing on hangers also was halted; the weight of the leather had caused rips along some seams. One of the damaged items, a Sioux dress decorated with elks’ teeth and intricate beadwork, now lies on a couch in a bedroom once shared by Hart’s two 190-pound Great Danes.