COVER STORY : In Both of His Worlds, It’s Truly The Art of The Deal : Douglas Cramer woos dealers and artists in the way he woos stars for his TV films

Just inside Douglas Schoolfield Cramer’s front door, a few feet from the Mark Rothko and the Jasper Johns, there’s a life-size portrait of Cramer and his son, Douglas III, painted by Julian Schnabel. Cramer, co-executive producer of such TV shows as “Hotel,” “Dynasty” and “The Love Boat,” traded a vintage Mercedes convertible for that painting.

Cramer, 59, does not think small. His Cramer Co. and NBC are currently turning Danielle Steel’s novels into TV movies, and the producer is already on his third art collection.

President of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cramer owns more than 500 paintings, drawings and sculpture, primarily by major artists working from the ‘60s to the present. Works by such artists as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly and Jim Dine are scattered among his Bel-Air home, his Santa Barbara-area ranch, his New York apartment and his villa on the island of St. Martin.

At the Bel-Air house, for instance, art is everywhere. Living room walls are blanketed with huge Kellys and Stellas, and covering nearly every inch of space up the stairway are prints, sketches and watercolors by everyone from Johns and Matisse to Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and David Hockney. There’s even a room packed with ceramic dogs in apparent homage to Cramer’s three Cavalier King Charles spaniels.

A good chunk of his collection is also housed at his Santa Ynez Valley ranch. Next door to producer Ray Stark’s art-filled ranch, Cramer’s place has 29 telephones and just over 10,000 square feet of gallery space. The galleries--which he has expanded three times already--are open to art groups by appointment.

Cramer is attempting to focus in-depth--meaning more than a dozen examples each--on work by artists Roy Lichtenstein, Joel Shapiro, David Salle, Donald Sultan, Dine, Schnabel, Kelly and Stella. He’s also collecting work by Susan Rothenberg, Eric Fischl and Johns but concedes that because they have smaller output, it is more difficult to get their work.

He employs a curator and a part-time registrar/conservator who, he says, oversee the collection and its care, feeding and travel. At one point recently, he had 20 pieces traveling and says he never has fewer than eight pieces out on loan to museums or galleries. His new Johns painting, for instance, occupies a prime spot in the dining room left bare first when he loaned an Ed Ruscha painting to MOCA, then when a Salle painting recently went to New York for the Whitney Biennial.

The collector says that aside from selling all his work by German artists a while ago, he “virtually never sells.” He does occasionally add new artists and says in those cases he may buy a drawing first, “live with it a while, and if doesn’t work, trade.” His last two acquisitions, he says, were Lichtenstein’s sculpture of an airplane, now on the front lawn, and the Johns painting (“Montez”).

“Douglas Cramer’s collection is extraordinary,” says MOCA director Richard Koshalek. “He’s been working with it over a very long period of time and he’s very careful about selecting work of the highest quality. He has made the commitment that a major collector must make.”

Gallery visits are frequent, both here and in New York. And although soft-spoken and seemingly low key in manner, the TV executive admits to stalking his art prey. Aware that whoever arrives first generally gets the pick of the lot, he has been known to have staffers watch local galleries for trucks unloading paintings by key artists.

He has, in fact, likened the art market to an arena where “the madness of collecting, the frenzy, (can be) like so many piranha fish snapping and biting. I feel somebody has stuck a stake in my heart when I hear (Los Angeles or New York collectors) got out to Roy (Lichtenstein) and Eric (Fischl) and Julian’s (Schnabel) studios on Long Island before I got there.”

He woos dealers and artists like he woos film stars for his TV movies. Access to the work of major artists is only half the battle, he explains: “The other half is making sure you get the best work you can from each particular group of work. Whether (you’re talking) Steve Spielberg or Roy Lichtenstein, there are high points and less-than-high points.”

High-rollers such as show business mogul David Geffen or real estate developer Donald Bren are in a different league, says Cramer, because they’re just too willing and able to spend incredible sums of money on individual pieces. Neighbor Stark put together an Impressionist collection at a time when that work was still somewhat affordable. And as for super-agent Michael Ovitz, Cramer says, “Michael’s beyond competition. As with everything Michael does, he’s so swift that nobody sees him. He’s come and gone and gotten his first choice. I sometimes think of him as the Ninja master of art.”

Cramer holds an annual Barn Dance at the ranch, an event that drew 180 people last year, including one-third industry people and one-third from the art world. The event is social, he says, recalling how “one Los Angeles dealer got positively livid and almost started a fistfight when a New York dealer brought out transparencies and started discussing work for sale over dinner. As a result, I never seated two dealers at the same table again.”

Most of the artists whose work Cramer collects have come to the ranch for weekends, he says, and he regularly hosts in-town dinner parties mixing stars and artists. Ellsworth Kelly and Faye Dunaway were at one dinner party, and, a few years ago, he introduced the late Andy Warhol to Joan Collins and Linda Evans; Warhol “had a vision of them getting into a cat fight,” Cramer says with a laugh.

He weaves his art obsession into his work, using Hockney backdrops or developing characters who deal in art or own galleries. Fake Stellas lined the walls for one show, fake Monets and Rothkos another. He even persuaded Warhol to appear on “Love Boat” and to do a portrait of the show’s 1,000th guest star; when the star, Lana Turner, didn’t like the portrait, says Cramer, Warhol kept that portrait and did another of her.

Formerly executive vice president of Aaron Spelling Productions, Cramer started the Cramer Co. in the fall of 1989. In addition to its deal with NBC, the Cramer Co. is developing a play based on the “Grand Guignol,” which Cramer hopes to produce as a workshop here before a possible New York run in the spring.