800 Wine, Dine at New Hammer Museum

Industrialist/philanthropist/art collector/nonagenarian Armand Hammer drew up a list of 800 friends and threw a big, splashy dinner party Sunday night to celebrate the opening of his new Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Westwood. (It opens to the public Wednesday.)

Guests were greeted by a Christmas tree, a pianist at a white baby grand piano and a welcoming committee of waiters bearing flutes of Perrier-Jouet champagne. That was just in the white Carrara marble-sheathed lobby on Wilshire Boulevard before guests ascended the marble staircase to the five galleries. The two galleries housing the opening Kazimir Malevich exhibition were easily the most populated.

Said collector Fred Weisman: “My first take is . . . I like it very much, and I like what I see inside. I like the space. It’s very functional.”

“I would love to have seen the art go to the County Museum of Art,” offered newscaster Jess Marlow, “but he has the prerogative of displaying it the way he wants to.”

The guest list was diverse, including Metromedia chairman and president John Kluge and Orion Pictures chairman Arthur Krim (both members of the board of Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum Corp.), actress Marisa Berenson and Harvey Fields, the chief rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple where Hammer is a member of the congregation. Hammer’s son Julian and grandchildren Michael and Casey also attended.

Constantly hovering over Hammer were a cadre of Oxy executives and his private tuxedoed security battalion. At the head table he was seated between his friend, Daniele Mitterrand, the wife of French president Francois Mitterrand, and Hilary Gibson, the museum’s director of development. One seat away was Hammer’s personal physician, Dr. Rosamarie Purazo. Mayor Tom Bradley sat across the table.

“I’m sitting where the parking lot used to be,” mused Julian Hammer. “I couldn’t do something like this in 100 years working full-time--and he was also running a company.”

The museum’s spacious open-air “Leonardo” courtyard is destined, no doubt, to become a great L.A. party spot, provided one remembers not to check one’s coat, even when the radiant heating is on full blast. The area can accommodate dozens of dinner tables plus a huge dance floor. And this crowd did dance and dine, on green salad, smoked Norwegian salmon with golden caviar, tenderloin of prime beef and a buffet of dozens of cakes, tarts and cookies.

As for the man of the evening, Hammer said he was feeling great. “I think it’s superb. To think, in two and a half years,” he said of the time since his idea was transformed into reality. “It’s a miracle.”