Rallying for Phoenix House
A former gang member, a survivor of the streets and several heroine addicts were mingling with the rich and famous--including architect Richard Meier and former NBC chairman Grant Tinker--Sunday night at the Holmby Hills home of Falcon Cable TV chairman Marc Nathanson and his wife Jane.
Social consciousness overtook this social set. Gone were the formal clothes, gone were the expensive wines. The chili, bean and hot dog dinner was strictly help yourself. Many couples and singles brought their teen-age children.
This wasn’t really even a fund-raiser. The gathering for the long-term drug-abuse treatment centers known as Phoenix House was more like a nice way of saying, “Get real, people, drug abuse is eroding families, fueling adolescent violence, devaluing life.”
“Anyone’s kid, no matter how wonderful a home they come from, can get into a bad group,” said Liz Familian. Her son’s stay at Phoenix House, she added, saved his life, and her daughter is going to work there.
“This is a message that doesn’t know any one group,” said Nancy Vreeland, who helped organize the event. Apparently the message is getting through, because about 150 people attended despite heavy competition from graduations, weddings and the Playboy Jazz Festival.
When last in the news locally, Phoenix House, which has 14 facilities in New York, New Jersey and California, was reverberating from the pullout in 1989 of former First Lady Nancy Reagan, for whom a planned Phoenix House center in the San Fernando Valley was to be named.
The project was postponed when Lake View Terrace residents opposed locating the center in their neighborhood. Last month, the nonprofit organization signed a contract to purchase the former Lake View Medical Center, where the dissension occurred, and try again.
“There’s never been an incident near a site,” said Tinker, who is chairman of the board of Phoenix Houses of California. “Phoenix Houses are the best neighbors there can be.”
Some current residents and “live-outs” (the post-residential phase before graduation) spoke of their struggles as Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, Phoenix House president, prodded them on.
They all sat beneath a behemoth Guy Dill sculpture and the family basketball hoop in the carport behind the Nathansons’ quite grand house.
Incongruous? Not really.
“L.A. isn’t a pretty place to grow up in,” said 15-year-old David Nathanson. “Kids have been through all the problems, and we’ve got to know how to deal with it.”
