Forever Young : Art: In a rare public appearance, ceramist Beatrice Wood, 99, works her ageless magic on her legion of admirers.

Almost 80 years ago Henri-Pierre Roche made a prediction about Beatrice Wood.

“When you are an old lady, you will talk just like you do now,” Roche told his young lover. “You will never age, and I will never tire of listening to you. You have something untouchable.”

Roche, who later wrote Wood into the heart of his novel, “Jules and Jim,” was right.

Wood, who was 99 on March 3, is old enough to have chatted with Sarah Bernhardt in her backstage dressing room and to have spied on Monet as he painted in his garden in Giverny, France.

But the celebrated ceramist is also productive, irreverent, opinionated and still remarkably beautiful, perhaps even lovelier than she was when Roche and his dear friend, artist Marcel Duchamp, both fell in love with her.

Last week, Wood left her home in Ojai and made a rare public appearance in Los Angeles. The occasion was sponsored by Friends of Hollyhock House, a volunteer organization committed to the preservation of the city’s Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hollywood’s Barnsdall Art Park. A tiny, sari-clad woman wearing a burdensome amount of jewelry, Wood worked her ageless magic on 200 admirers, who howled with approving laughter as she talked about her remarkable life.

Of her first great love, she said, “Roche was a very charming Frenchman.” And then, with timing Steve Martin might envy, she added: “It’s too bad when young girls meet very charming Frenchmen.”

In fact, Roche changed Wood’s life forever. Wood was a child of her time, an age when proper young ladies feared that a kiss could make you pregnant. “I wanted to escape the prison of respectability in which I was raised,” said Wood, whose mother regularly threatened suicide to keep her rebellious daughter in line. Roche, a worldly, older man, was an ideal escape route. With great tenderness, Roche took her to bed, a place she obviously relished. And then he did something that really changed her life. He broke her heart.

Wood talks about the moment as if it happened yesterday. She asked Roche how many women he had loved, expecting, even of her sophisticated lover, a number you could count on one hand. Roche answered that he had had affairs, many of them casual, with perhaps a hundred women.

“I was shattered,” said Wood. She left Roche’s bed and soon began her liaison with Duchamp, whose “Nude Descending a Staircase” was the most discussed, if not the most admired, painting of the time. Duchamp encouraged Wood as an artist. And, she recounted, when she told him that she had no room at home to work, “he made the beautiful remark, ‘Why don’t you come to my studio and draw?’ ”

But if Duchamp was Wood’s mentor as an artist, Roche was her heartbreaking muse. It was only a few years ago, she said, that she realized that Roche’s devastating confession had inspired the bawdy, highly regarded little men and women she makes from clay. A broken heart led to a lifelong obsession with bordellos that has proved both profitable and artistically satisfying. Sex is funny in Wood’s work, which may be the inevitable conclusion of someone whose lover has disabused her forever of the notion that it is eternally linked with love.

Greatly admired by women, Wood sometimes says things that would make Gloria Steinem cringe. When a visitor to Ojai asked her what her passions were, she didn’t hesitate a nanosecond before answering, “Chocolates and young men.” Such flirtatiousness could be embarrassing in someone her age, if it were not so brave.

Wood, who was born in San Francisco, moved to Los Angeles in 1928. It was here she began to do pottery--at the age of 40. As she explained to the audience, she was about to marry again (“he was a jerk”), and she bought six lusterware plates in an antique store for the marital homestead. When she couldn’t find a teapot to go with them, she enrolled in an adult education course at Hollywood High School, expecting to make one over the weekend. She rolls her wonderfully expressive dark eyes at her naivete. Later she studied ceramics with Glen Lukens and Gertrud and Otto Natzler.

Obviously, Wood does not live by chocolate and young men alone. At 99, she often works barefoot at her potter’s wheel until 11 at night. She may say that every woman artist needs a man, but the truth is that her commitment to her work has shaped her life for half a century. When asked what she sees as the connection between sex and her work, she answers, “I think all energy is sexual.” But the lover she now dreams about is what she will create the next day in her studio.

“I’ve just finished 16 bowls for my dealer,” she said. Tomorrow, she said, she planned to have fun: “I’m making three figures for myself.”

Critics have said unkind things about Wood’s fascination with theosophy and Krishnamurti and her rather simplistic views on world peace and other weighty issues. But others realize that she is a miracle: a woman who has earned the world’s respect on her own terms, a person who seems not to know that old age is supposed to be a curse.

“Living itself is a joy for her,” said Eric Wright, a Malibu architect who was in the audience. Wright, the grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright, has known Beato, as her friends often call her, since he was a child (she made him a little tea set). Actress Tippi Hedren said Wood was her role model.

Wood once wrote to a friend that she doesn’t feel old. “The only mentor to bring one up to heel is the mirror. I wrestle with it every morning, and say to it, ‘No. No.’ Then I walk away from it and dance on the hilltops.”

After Wood signed hundreds of copies of her books, including her autobiography, “I Shock Myself,” the audience crowded around her in Hollyhock House, which was once owned by her art collector friends, Walter and Louise Arensberg.

Everyone sang “Happy birthday, dear Beato,” and then one man voiced the universal hope:

”. . . And many more.”