ENCORE! CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF THE MUSIC CENTER : YESTERDAY : THE PIONEERS

The white columns that encircle the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion speak to more than architecture alone. As the columns seem to shoulder the graceful height of the building, so did ranks of men and women shoulder a hopeful notion, and then advanced it into something of steel and marble and music.

Volunteers, workers: hundreds, eventually, came within the Music Center’s orbit, through small contributions or brief efforts. The seats in the Pavilion would hardly be adequate to hold them all.

But a core of them stayed the course for years. They were the pioneers, people who enlisted on the strength of an entrancing idea proposed at a luncheon or a meeting, and who saw it through to reality.

Some were people with money, some were people with optimism and ability, and a few had both. Their talents were artistic vision, or a skill at management, but most of all a love of city and of culture that made the occasional genteel arm-twisting for contributions an act of civic virtue.

Twenty-five years later, some of the movers and shakers have moved into retirement, and some have died.

Of those who remain, ask one about his or her contribution, and the likelihood is that he will modestly say, I didn’t do all that much--suggesting you talk to this man or that woman. And then this man or that woman will say, No, I didn’t really do much at all--and suggest that you speak instead with the person who deferred to them in the first place.

In the backward glance of recall, the task may seem more daunting, the millions an even vaster sum than they had at the time. Some speak of the Music Center as an organic inevitability, given the size and strength that Los Angeles was growing into. But for none of them, in the quarter-century since they saw their efforts rewarded by reality, has it dimmed to anything less than splendid.

Following are some of their stories:

JASCHA HEIFETZ AND William Severns were prowling through the unfinished Music Center in hard hats when Severns “heard a funny noise.” It was Heifetz, blowing a tin whistle. “He kept walking around, blowing that little tin whistle. Finally he came back and said, ‘Yes, it’s going to be all right.’ He could tell the acoustics just from that little whistle.”

Yet at the first rehearsal, Severns still wasn’t sure, and Dorothy Chandler “was afraid to come down; she was so nervous” about the acoustics. They stood at the doorway, and as the orchestra began, “I think we both broke into tears--just the idea that it worked.”

Severns, now 75, was the project’s majordomo, general manager of the Music Center’s operating company. He had managed the Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl before signing on at the Music Center, which some people had ridiculed as no more likely than, oh, a moon landing.

Says Severns: “Frankly, nobody thought it could be done--not the construction of the building or anything like that, that was fairly simple. It was the funding.” A tease crept into his voice. “I don’t know what we’d have done without the rubber hose.”

Born to a show-business family in the Midwest, Severns came to Los Angeles for the 1932 Olympics, and stayed. The city had a score of legitimate theaters, but by the time the Music Center project began, most had folded, the Hollywood Bowl had nearly gone belly-up and three Music Center bond issues had failed.

“There was a big schism in society,” between the West Side and “movie group” and the California Club-Pasadena contingent, who “really laid the foundation” for the Music Center. Once the project was underway, “then the movie people began to say, ‘Yeah, sure, of course we want it.’ But they didn’t even know where downtown was, except when they came downtown for a divorce.”

Most everyone became a believer; “it was something the town wanted, no ands, ifs or buts.” When the doors did open, so proprietary were those who worked to create it that, Severns says, “if anybody so much as dared to spill (a drink), put a cigarette out on the carpet, the ushers never had to say anything. Somebody in the public came up and reprimanded them.”

On opening night, a well-to-do lady who had devoted much time to the project rushed up to Severns in dismay. “Oh, Bill, this is awful,” she said. “They have the wrong color toilet paper in the ladies’ room.”

The place some had once considered “for the swells” sought democracy; new citizens by the hundreds were sworn in in the splendid auditorium, where the California State Bar held its admission ceremonies--for a while. “The only problem with that was after all those new lawyers got sworn in, somebody would always sue,” finding malice in a carpet seam or a flight of stairs.

Two things made the Music Center possible, Severns says: Mrs. Chandler, who “got to like raising money.” And “as more money came in, the concept got grander and grander and grander . . . she just never stopped dreaming.”

And the second was “the Board of Supervisors. Nobody gives those poor old bastards credit. If it hadn’t been for their willingness to set up a joint powers agreement, we’d never have had it . . . no matter how much money she raised.”

EDWIN LESTER’S OFFICE at the Music Center--the one he keeps “just to feel I’m still alive”--is something like the keystone of an arch, a reminder that without Lester and the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera that he founded, the Music Center might not be there, at least not as it stands, nor for as long as it has.

Lester is now 94. The Prometheus of West Coast musical theater, the founding genius behind LACLO and for 40 years its director, suffers from an ear problem that renders his beloved music an auditory mishmash that “annoys me as much as I used to love it.” If surgery would help, and there was a 5% chance he could hear music again and a 95% chance he could die, he would tell his doctor to operate.

Thirty years ago, Lester was about to move the profitable and the popular LACLO to the Pantages Theatre when Dorothy Chandler “came to me and said, ‘We need you to make this opera house thing work’ ” to fill out a yearlong schedule and persuade the county to join the project.

On his desk, Lester still keeps a copy of a report that predicts the LACLO would initially be making “65% of all the revenue” at the Music Center. He had a reputation for commercial as well as artistic success. “I knew how to operate and not go out begging for money.

“If a thing couldn’t support itself, it wasn’t worth doing.” But he adds, “That’s not true of symphonies or grand operas anywhere in the world--none of them support themselves or anywhere close to it.”

So LACLO joined the grand cause and donated $250,000; “We could well afford it.” The money, soon outstripped by larger donations, was critical. Without it, Mrs. Chandler “would have managed some way, but the Music Center might have been a few years later. . . . The first two years, our rental really kept them alive. We often advanced our six months’ rental to help them out of various spots,” Lester says.

Lester was “a frustrated singer” whose musical career halted in his youth when his voice gave way. When he moved to Los Angeles because of his wife’s tuberculosis, he opened a talent agency; “I started the light opera in order to give my singers an opportunity to work.”

The LACLO’s first Music Center show, “The King and I,” had the kind of success that its fans had come to expect.

“I always felt the Pavilion had a sacrosanct kind of atmosphere about it, which it doesn’t have any more. . . . That Pavilion is generally regarded as the best all-round theater that has been built for grand opera, for musical shows, for every use. That building--I never get tired of looking at the building.”

LET ALL THE LATECOMERS scoff and doubt--Roy Ash is a native Angeleno, born within a mile of City Hall at the end of World War I, and he knew better. He’d seen the town change, and from the moment the Music Center project began, “I knew it was going to work. I know of nobody who had real apprehensions, because there was so much of L.A.’s leading energy committed to it. If it didn’t work, the whole world wouldn’t work.”

By the end of World War II, Los Angeles was a town on its way to becoming a city, but it wasn’t there yet. “It’s hard for you to place yourself back to what L.A. felt like 25 and more years ago,” says Ash, a founder and past president of Litton Industries. “It was a little country town and the Music Center was a pretty sophisticated thing for our country mentality.

“Yet after the city grew up and especially after World War II . . . we began to learn that the world has got more to offer this little remote country town of Los Angeles. And the whole idea of the Music Center was one of the first major reflections that culture is more than having a public library.”

Ash enlisted at the ground floor, one of the early donors of founders’ money. “At that time, we thought $25,000 was a lot of money . . . and it was then.”

Beyond cash, “it took a lot of real solid management to put that thing into place,” and Ash marvels at the hours volunteers still put in. “If one were to price in the marketplace the time given freely, at its market rate, it would be millions of dollars a year.”

For those whose contribution was in cash, “virtually every element of the community was responsive to what was arm twisting, but they were responsive.”

He downplays his own effort--”a minor role as roles went”--but other big aerospace contributors, fell into line after Ash and Litton’s seed money. Contributors included Litton board Chairman Tex Thornton and firms such as Lockheed, weighing in with private and corporate contributions.

Eventually, Ash became a member of the Music Center’s operating committee, and then spent several years as chairman of the Opera Assn., presiding over opera’s “roller-coaster” growth from something of a cultural curiosity to “not quite a centerpiece but one of the main aspects” of the Music Center’s repertoire.

Of the Music Center: “I didn’t know of anybody who didn’t think it would succeed,” but “we didn’t realize it would do as well as it has done.”

As to the doubts about whether “there was enough--and I’m not sure I’m using the word properly-- sophistication in the then-Los Angeles to give the Music Center and its activities the appreciation that is their due, it turns out there is. This is not an uncultured town at all . . .”

THE TOP OF THE HILL, a clutch of condemned tumbledown houses, wasn’t even in his district.

But then-Supervisor Warren M. Dorn discussed with fellow Supervisor John Anson Ford that there might be a better use for the hilltop than the five-story parking garage that was in the works.

“I was so shocked and aghast that they’d have this parking garage on the top of Bunker Hill--it seemed like such a misuse of a precious piece of property,” says Dorn, who now lives in Morro Bay.

The county’s Civic Center expansion plan was well along, and Dorn suggested to Ford, “Why don’t we talk to Mrs. (Dorothy) Chandler about maybe doing the (Music) Center up there?

“I said: ‘Why don’t we contribute to the point we would donate the land?’ ”

When Dorn, former mayor of Pasadena, ran for county supervisor in 1956, the public was in no mood to spend bond-issue money on a music center. Dorn could not support a publicly funded arts complex either; the county “already had it (a concert hall) in Long Beach, Pasadena,” and “it didn’t seem proper” or necessary.

Once elected, Dorn got down to cases with the persuasive Mrs. Chandler, among others, and concluded that a public-private partnership might work.

“Out of all this came finally a decision that we would put up the land and maintain the buildings in perpetuity, and the city would put up $2 million and the Blue Ribbon group would raise $2 million. Well, as you know, they raised over $30 million, and the city didn’t give anything.”

The man Dorn chose from his district to study the feasibility of a joint operating agreement was Walt Disney. It was no casual selection. “Someone like Walt Disney saying, ‘Yes, this is something the people will respond to’--how can you go wrong when you have someone like this telling you it’s a good thing to do?”

In the end, “the public perception was that this was something good for the whole region, and that’s why I could wholeheartedly support our participation,” recalls Dorn, now serving as appointed chairman of the Alcoholic Beverages Control appeals board.

“I was there from 1956 through 1972, and I never had any complaints about it--and my district was probably the least (likely), the Antelope Valley, San Fernando, San Gabriel Valley,” far from the city’s center.

Each time he sees the Music Center, crowning the hill above the county buildings, that thought strikes Dorn anew. “To me, that’s where it belonged, like a showplace. You can see it flying in. It’s such a wonderful thing, to have this, and not a five-story parking garage. Wouldn’t that have been awful?”

HARRYJ. VOLK WAS on his way to becoming president of Union Bank back in the days when the manager of the strapped Philharmonic came over to the bank on occasional Friday afternoons to borrow enough money to meet the payroll on Saturday.

The bank had always taken a chance on Los Angeles; its founder donated his old homestead for the original Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. “The town was struggling, but there was a spark here and a desire to make it a great city.”

The proof came anew some years later when Volk joined Dorothy Chandler in her Music Center fund-raising effort. “There would be no Music Center--certainly it would’ve been delayed many years--if it hadn’t been for Buff . . . You don’t need too big a package (of stories). All you need to say is that Buff Chandler did it.”

But Volk’s own effort came to more than Perino’s lunches, where they “would try to convince some recalcitrant they really owed it to the community to give support to the project.”

“There came a time when they had a lot of pledges but no money, and construction was in danger of stopping,” recalls Volk, now 84 and head of the Weingart Foundation. So Union Bank evaluated each pledge for the likelihood of payment and took the plunge. “We advanced the construction money secured by those pledges” that ran “in the millions.”

The day that bank officers assured Volk, then the president, that the bank could safely advance 85% on the pledges was “the day when I breathed most easily.”

“I think that was the point that gave me the greatest relief, and I think the greatest relief to Buff. I think something would have happened had we not done it--I don’t mean the thing would completely sustain or fail on that issue, some other way might have been found to do it. But at least we found the answer to the problem at that time.”

There were, inevitably, doom-sayers who “said the whole thing was screwy. . . . You’ve always had people like that, people against the B-2 bomber. . . . But despite the dragging of feet, (there are) those who believe in a goal that’s worthwhile and are willing to devote effort and time and heart to accomplish it.”

For himself, “I never had any doubt but what it was going to work. I believed in the concept and I believed in the people.” And when it was no longer concept, but reality, “it was almost like winning a ball game . . . I was part of a much larger team, and our captain and coach was certainly Buff.”

The sports metaphor suits: “When I came here, there were no professional ball teams, only minor league. But now we’ve got the Dodgers, Raiders, all those wonderful teams, the stadiums.” And where nothing stood, there stands now the Music Center.

ONE EVENING IN 1959, Charles E. Ducommun was to act as emcee at a Hollywood Bowl fund-raising gala “before 20,000 of my most intimate friends” and to accept a pump-priming contribution from piano Wunderkind Van Cliburn.

“Van Cliburn got up and gave me this envelope, and I thought, ‘Well, this is his check for the performance.’ Then I walk offstage, and there’s nothing in the envelope!”

It was merely a prop, but no matter. Van Cliburn’s check arrived in good time, as hundreds of others would. For Ducommun, who had made a second career of fund raising--for the symphony (“I’d be sent out to ladies’ teas”), the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, the American Cancer Society--the Music Center’s building fund was one more worthy cause.

Ducommun’s grandfather came here in 1849 and sold hardware--from miners’ tools to glass eyes. In time, a family metals business flourished. Ninety years after the first Ducommun arrived, his grandson felt that the city had matured. But others thought “culture” and “Los Angeles” were an oxymoron.

As then-president of the prosperous Light Opera, Ducommun, now 76, was asked by Dorothy Chandler to be a fund-raising co-chairman for the Music Center. The Light Opera, whose 1959 season ticket subscriptions totaled $1.4 million, was looking for a new home, about to lose the church auditorium it shared with the symphony.

So the light opera was invited to join the Music Center. Of grand opera, symphony and light opera, according to a Stanford study, light opera would be the sure-fire moneymaker. “There was some argument” about the report, but the light opera signed on.”

“The worst thing that happened” during his Music Center years, Ducommun says lightly, was when he accepted a United Nations flag on Mrs. Chandler’s behalf. His brief speech noted that the flag “will be flown over the Music Center according to a protocol to be established by the Board of Supervisors.”

The next day’s Times headline--”UN Flag to Fly Over Music Center,” inaccurate in its brevity--unleashed a John Birch Society letter-writing campaign. Ducommun, who in 1960 was acting local chairman of Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, still keeps a box of the letters, all in the vein of “how could we let these Communists infiltrate such a grand idea as the Music Center?”

Ducommun eventually left the Music Center. He was an early board member and is still a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . Both, he believes, are effort and money well spent. “It’s still expensive,” he says, “but what part of the art world isn’t?”