Struggle for Control Shakes Foundation of Historic Home : Architecture: Directors say a former owner who lives in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house is standing in the way of its proper restoration.

Twenty-one years ago, August Brown bought a neglected white elephant of a Frank Lloyd Wright house and, with his own money and a flair for promotion, gave it a future.

His monumental home on a cliff in Los Feliz is known worldwide, but its future is again threatened. Only this time, prominent supporters of the house say, the threat may be Brown himself.

The board of directors of the nonprofit trust that Brown formed to raise money for the upkeep of the Mayan-inspired home known as the Ennis-Brown has asked the 78-year-old Brown to resign as executive director.

But if that means Brown may have to move out of the house, he said, he is not about to budge.

“What would you say if you donated something as magnificent as this with the condition that you live in the house for the rest of your life and then someone asked you to move out?” Brown said in a recent interview. “Do you think that’s right?”

A former union leader and businessman who moved into the house with his family in 1968 when it was still a neglected and unrecognized treasure, Brown donated the property to the trust 12 years later.

A devotee of the house, he retained the right to live there and control its future, and he acts as tour guide for visitors who make their way up winding roads to gaze at the singular, fortress-like structure at 2607-2655 Glendower Ave.

“We have just loved living in this house. It’s like living inside a work of art,” Brown said. “Every inch of it draws your eye, doesn’t it?”

But current and former members of the Trust for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage are increasingly questioning the wisdom of Brown’s dual role as resident of the house and executive director of the trust. The blurring of the two roles has affected Brown’s management of the house, they say, and hindered the organization’s efforts to get grants to restore it.

Some have even expressed doubts that Brown is properly channeling the funds he does raise into restoration of the house.

“It turns out that he’s such a dynamic and forceful personality that he has kept control of not only the house but the funds,” said Eric Lloyd Wright, grandson of the architect who in 1987 resigned after seven years as a member of the board.

“The board never really knew how much money was coming in, but we knew it wasn’t going out for restoration. Only Gus knows where it’s going, and Gus isn’t talking.”

In the past three years, at least six members of the trust’s board have resigned, aggravated, they say, by Brown’s role.

Brown has agreed to step down as executive director--on the condition that he be permitted to remain in the house and approve the selection of his successor.

Board members say they are not asking Brown to move out of the house, just to let someone else run it. They accuse him of dragging his feet on his promise to resign.

Brown said he is merely waiting to see who is chosen to take over his position and what his status would be under a new agreement before stepping down.

As self-appointed bookkeeper, he controls the money donated for the home’s upkeep, records its expenses and presents to the board each month financial statements that he alone prepares.

Jay Rounds, director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, is calling for Brown’s removal and said he has told city officials that he believes Brown is not properly accounting for money raised for restoration.

Meanwhile, the intricately molded concrete blocks of which the home is made are falling off, and the structure underneath them is crumbling.

The discontent with Brown came to a head last summer when Los Angeles city officials ordered a stop to Brown’s practice of renting the house for private affairs without the proper city permits.

In a separate action, the Los Angeles Board of Zoning Appeals ruled in August that the rentals violate the city’s building code.

George Delianedis, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Social Service Department, said that while Brown has told people renting the house and paying for tours that their contributions will be spent on restoration, little of the money has actually been spent to refurbish the house.

Delianedis said he also has found discrepancies in documents filed by Brown with the state. A report Brown filed with the California attorney general’s office in June, 1988, showed the trust took in $72,580 in revenue in fiscal 1988 and spent $65,215 for what Brown listed as “restoration and maintenance” of the house.

In fiscal 1989, a financial statement prepared by Brown shows that the trust took in $186,528 and spent $4,132 on “restoration and maintenance.”

Delianedis said Wednesday he has asked the Los Angeles city clerk’s office to conduct an independent audit of the trust’s coffers. He said that if the audit turns up similar discrepancies, a criminal investigation could be initiated.

In an interview, Brown said the bulk of the difference in fiscal 1989 was used to pay salaries to a secretary and a groundskeeper.

Board members said they have ordered an independent audit of the foundation’s finances to determine the extent to which the money taken in from the rental of the house--estimated by Brown at more than $127,000 this year--is being used for restoration.

As the controversy swirls around him, Brown remains detached, living quietly alone behind the massive gates and imposing walls of his sweeping home. His relations with his neighbors in the affluent, hillside enclave are strained, but he said he does not mind the solitude.

He often spends afternoons reading, listening to operatic arias and gazing through towering windows at the Ennis-Brown house grounds. Among preservationists, he is considered an amateur failing at a professional’s job.

“There is a kind of complexity that is terribly awkward about the whole thing,” said Robert Harris, dean of the USC School of Architecture. “On the one hand, Gus is really quite responsible for having brought the house back to public attention. . . . On the other hand, there are questions whether his personal involvement is best for the house.”

It was not that way in the beginning. Brown, former vice president of the United Furniture Workers of America and the president of two health-benefit companies, bought the house in 1968, he said, because it was huge and fascinating and cost only $119,000.

The 8,200-square-foot estate, built in 1924 for clothing retailer Charles Ennis, is of grand proportions and lofty beauty. But in the years before Brown took it over, the home had fallen into disrepair and a movie filmed there, “The House on Haunted Hill,” had earned it a reputation as spooked.

Taking over the dilapidated home, Brown said he and his family spent more than $200,000 making repairs. They fixed leaking roofs, overhauled the plumbing and electrical wiring, weatherproofed the house and the servants quarters, removed a bedroom and bath that a previous owner had built on top of a rock garden designed by Wright, replaced several ceilings, installed a sprinkler system and refinished many of the home’s teak floors and cabinets, Brown said.

After his wife died in 1975 and Brown’s two daughters grew up and moved away, Brown established the trust as a way to solicit donations for its maintenance.

“Brown is a private individual who fell in love with the house and within the limits of his knowledge has made a sincere effort to restore it from the really deplorable state it was in when he first bought it,” Rounds said. “But the simple fact is, he has not been successful in raising the money necessary to restore the house. To go to the next step, we really do need a technical expert who can cope with the really fundamental problems facing the house.”