COVER STORY : The Arts, Money and the New Patrons : Call them the <i> new</i> old guard--a group of young, influential and often wealthy arts patrons rising to power in L.A. Their mission: no less than ensuring the survival of the work they love in tough times and an increasingly diverse city

Steven D. Lavine, president of CalArts, once went to the opera in San Francisco wearing shorts and a bathrobe. It was not a fashion statement; he was trying to make a point.

“People looked at me with such disdain--some people whispered: ‘How could you ruin this for us?’ ” said Lavine, 45. “I was trying to make the statement that they’re smothering the music that I love in something that is unattractive.

“The stuffiness that surrounds the arts--what is it about? We have sort of smothered these institutions in a social style that is representative of a certain generation. Let’s get rid of the trappings, and get to what the real thing is.”

At first glance, there might seem to be no connection between Lavine’s weird night at the opera and the future of the arts. But Lavine’s protest reflects a widespread feeling among younger patrons of the arts, people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, that the arts world just doesn’t get it.

There is a strong perception among young, influential and often wealthy supporters of the opera, ballet, the symphony and museums that the institutions that present the work they love have not kept up with the times. The formal dress, dangling chandeliers and dated etiquette cover the actual artistic experience like a thick layer of dust.

It is the difference, say, between George Bush’s era and Bill Clinton’s, a generation gap between those who built the arts institutions and those who now must keep them alive.

“It is our concern that the audience base, literally and figuratively, is dying,” said Michael Blachly, 45, new director of the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts. “The audiences haven’t necessarily gone away, but they’ve gotten older.”

Blachly, Lavine and other Los Angeles arts leaders are equally concerned about the aging of the arts donor pool. In an era of decreasing government support for the arts, they are scrambling to make the arts more attractive to those able to support them with a much bigger contribution than the purchase of a ticket.

Arts leaders observe that systems of raising money are breaking down as the city’s demographics change. They say the arts institutions can no longer rely on a handful of wealthy, white, male donors whose wives toil tirelessly as volunteers as their main source of support. They recognize that their future donors are two-career families with no time for the traditional niceties of fund-raising; they also know that eventually the patron base must reflect the city’s ethnically diverse population.

They know that relying on the “old money” won’t work. They need new old money.

Gai Gherardi, co-owner of L.A. Eyeworks, internationally known for its eye-wear designs and with stores on Melrose and in Orange County’s South Coast Plaza, put it more bluntly: “It just doesn’t feel good to go into White Anglomania, and indulge in some kind of mutual stroking.” Gherardi, who is in her 40s, cultivates young local artists by using their work to promote the eye wear. “It’s not a good thing. Come on. Wake up.”

While Los Angeles has already experienced an influx of young arts leadership--note the Los Angeles Festival’s artistic director, Peter Sellars, 35, and the Philharmonic’s much-heralded new music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, 34--directors of the main arts venues are hoping for a similar youthful revolution on institutions’ boards of directors and in circles of major donors.

Ticket sales and admissions cover only a small percentage of operating costs; dwindling government arts support picks up only a fraction of the tab. So, while these organizations are locked in a much-publicized effort to attract new audiences, an even more frantic battle is being waged over young arts patrons.

The term young is relative. Because the price is steep, major donors, board members and trustees in their 40s and 50s are considered young in that venerable network. No one expects the bulk of that group to be in their 30s, let alone their 20s.

But arts institutions realize they need to cultivate potential donors before they reach middle age. Some representatives of these organizations say the job is particularly difficult with today’s under-40s, who went to school or launched careers during the Reagan era, when philanthropy was not a key concern.

“The tone set in the 1980s was a lethal time,” said Gordon Davidson, producer-director of the Music Center’s Center Theater Group. “It’s not a cliche to talk about the Me Generation.”

Despite those pressures, a handful from the under-40 crowd are already venturing onto the Los Angeles arts scene. For these members of the business community, ambitions range from occasional monetary support to joining boards, from using their business contacts for fund-raising to lofty plans to found a performance hall or a performing arts company someday.

After interviews with Los Angeles arts leaders, Calendar has identified a handful of up-and-coming patrons who represent this new old guard. (Biographies begin on opposite page.) Though they have so far resisted Lavine’s bathrobe tactic, the young arts patrons are voicing concern about the survival of the arts. They reject the concept of social elitism in the arts in favor of a more egalitarian approach.

Some are following a family tradition. Mark Foster, 35, a vice president with Seidler Amdec Securities and a Music Center backer, is a fifth-generation Californian with a long family tradition of civic service. Others represent the first in their families to cultivate an interest in arts sponsorship, such as Holly Echols, 33, an AT&T; public relations executive raised in South-Central, who finds a working knowledge of the arts essential to the social life necessary to build her career.

Alhambra business executive Roland Hernandez, 35, who serves as president of Plaza de la Raza, said youthful appeal in the arts goes beyond dress or formality. “I wouldn’t characterize it as . . . whether it’s black-tie or casual,” he said. “I’m comfortable with both, and I go to both with some regularity. What I find at least as inviting to me is those organizations that have a fresh approach to their discipline, that are open to suggestions, open to looking at new artists. That’s what L.A. is all about.

“I love Handel and Bach, but I also love Philip Glass. I like the Philharmonic because I see they are really making an effort to open up all their programs. Organizations that are rooted in the history of what they are doing, I don’t find them attractive.”

Alan Feldstein, 37, a Westside entertainment attorney who supports the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, offered that “the challenge for the Music Center, and UCLA, is to find creative ways to bring new people in. Not the same old ways, creative ways. . . . We’re not New York or Chicago or Detroit. Let’s do it a different way.”

Richard Weintraub of Malibu, a 26-year-old investment counselor and self-made millionaire, said he and his wife, Liane, 24, decided to become the youngest members, respectively, of Fraternity of Friends and Blue Ribbon, the Music Center’s prestigious support groups, to “shake things up.” The organizations have membership dues of $2,000; Richard and Liane are also Music Center Associates--individuals or couples who donate $25,000 or more to the center.

And, Richard added, his peers cannot provide what the Music Center can: “At the Blue Ribbon, and in the Fraternity of Friends, you have the top people, the presidents of almost every major company in Los Angeles. The tops. And by being able to be in a group like that, being able to pull from a group like that--there isn’t a resource like it in the world. It’s like the equivalent of New York’s Lincoln Center. And that’s where it’s all at.”

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Richard and Liane Weintraub

“It shouldn’t be a cultural group only for the wealthy,” Richard Weintraub says of the Music Center. “There isn’t nearly enough being done to expose the underprivileged to the arts. But to do that, you have to have money. We have to find a comfortable balance.”

Richard, 26, a 1989 Pepperdine graduate, is the son of school board member Roberta Weintraub and Dr. Lewis Weintraub, a colon cancer specialist.

His maternal grandfather is Charles Goldring, president and founder of Beverly Hills’ Charles Goldring Co. business management firm. The family of Roberta Weintraub’s stepmother owns Ordin Enterprises, which controls a number of downtown office buildings.

Richard’s late uncle, Los Angeles developer Ronald Barry Ordin, made headlines in May, 1991, when he was shot and killed while driving on the Santa Monica Freeway by two motorcyclists who had been hired by a business associate.

Despite the healthy flow of money through his bloodlines, Richard built his own fortune. “I never had any help from my family,” he said. He first went to work in real estate when he was 16, and before he was 20, he was making considerable money at it.

“I was buying property and remodeling it and selling for profit,” Weintraub said. “I was very fortunate--I got into real estate at the upswing of the best real estate market that L.A. has ever had.”

Two years ago, Weintraub started his own company, Weintraub Financial Services--first out of a Century City high-rise, now at an office closer to home in Malibu, where the young entrepreneur gutted and rebuilt a decrepit home into an ocean-view dream house in 1990--complete with a Japanese koi pond.

He and his wife, Liane, 24, have been married for less than a year. They met on a blind date in New York, where Liane had completed her bachelor’s degree at Columbia and Richard was doing business on a visit from Los Angeles.

The former Liane Manshel is the daughter of the late Warren D. Manshel, ambassador to Denmark during the Carter Administration, and the late Anita Coleman Manshel, founder of the Hansa Gallery in Manattan.

“Richard will say I moved out here because I was madly in love with him, but actually I met him a few days before I was planning to move out here,” Liane said, laughing. “It had nothing to do with him.” Liane, who just completed a stint as production coordinator for KNBC’s recently canceled “Fight Back! With David Horowitz,” is currently enrolled in the master’s degree program in journalism at USC.

Liane studied ballet at the Royal Danish Ballet School during her father’s tenure as ambassador, with serious intent to becoming a dancer. Then, she started growing. “I’m 5 foot . . . 12,” she said.

While a student in New York, Liane became involved in working with a dance program for inner-city children sponsored by dancer-choreographer Jacques D’Amboise’s National Dance Institute.

Liane’s interest in Blue Ribbon, one of the Music Center’s support groups, was triggered by her mother-in-law, Roberta Weintraub, a Blue Ribbon member. Liane said the group attracted her because of its involvement with the Music Center’s Children’s Holiday Festival, which introduces more than 30,000 local fifth-graders to the performing arts each year.

She suggested that a change in style would go far in creating diversity in the arts: “It’s a stereotype that the arts and the groups that support the arts have bogged themselves into that is not fresh, not young. One identifies oneself by the way one celebrates the arts, and black-tie events are kind of dreary.

“I’m an example of the loosening of the boundaries. I think it is fairly uncommon that an organization like (Blue Ribbon) would have someone as young as I am, though my exposure is somewhat different than that of some of my peers.”

Liane said she might like to be involved in establishing a ballet company in Los Angeles to fill the void created by the termination of the Joffrey Ballet’s contract with the Music Center. And Richard offered that he wouldn’t mind seeing the couple become the financial force behind a new pavilion or concert hall someday.

“But if we did, though, we wouldn’t have our name on it,” he insisted. “We’re not doing this so our name can be on a wall or on a plaque somewhere.”

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Rick and Roland Hernandez

Rick Hernandez, 37, and brother Roland, 35, are presidents of two branches of a group of family businesses based in Alhambra and founded by father Hank Hernandez, a first-generation Mexican-American.

Rick is president of Inter-Con Security Systems Inc., which provides high-end security systems for clients including government organizations, nuclear power plants, U.S. industries overseas and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Roland heads Interspan Communications Ltd., which has various arms in Spanish-language media, including a Telemundo affiliate TV station in Dallas.

Both brothers are Harvard graduates; one of their college classmates was Peter Sellars. Each has chosen a different path into the Los Angeles arts community: Rick is the youngest member of the board for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Roland is president of Plaza de la Raza, a nonprofit cultural center in Lincoln Heights devoted to the preservation of Latino culture and providing underprivileged children in the community their first exposure to the arts.

Rick, who also sits on the board at public TV station KCET Channel 28 as well as the board of Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, said he joined the Philharmonic board at the encouragement of the board’s past chairman, Sid Peterson, former chairman of Getty Oil. Rick calls the family’s involvement in the arts a “team effort.”

“I think the idea is to really try to ensure, number one, that there are arts here in the future, with the economic restraints that are being placed on organizations now,” he said.

“I want to see that they are doing what they are here for--which is, as I see it, to enrich the lives of all of us as a community, to make it a very together, cohesive kind of thing. My concern is to shape the Phil in that direction, something that will be perceived by the entire community as a treasure of art in Los Angeles. One of the things we’re trying to do on the board is make it a very accessible thing, regardless of economic position.”

While Rick opts to make the prestigious Philharmonic more accessible to the general public, Roland hopes to build the 23-year-old Plaza de la Raza into a cultural entity of equal prestige. “We are growing still,” he said. “People are recognizing that there is a need for cultural organizations like Plaza, which on the one hand concentrate on a theme such as Hispanic culture, but conversely are very receptive and encourage other cultural backgrounds to come together and mix.

“I think there is a group of young Hispanic professionals in L.A. who recognize the importance of their cultural heritage,” said Roland, who recently added to his credits membership on the board of the New York-based Beneficial Corp. “It’s very easy to move on in your corporate life, but there are also a lot of people saying: ‘Hey, there is a lot of cultural life behind us, and we need to preserve it.”

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Holly Echols

Holly Echols, 33, a former reporter and news writer for Fox Broadcasting station KTTV Channel 11, and now manager of media relations for AT&T;, said her position with the corporation led to her recent interest in the arts. “I realized how important the arts were in the corporate world; I was going to quite a few functions and feeling like I really didn’t belong,” she said.

That uneasiness led Echols to enroll in Arts Inc.’s recently established Arts Leadership Initiative. She is one of the first graduates of 14-week program, in which participants meet with Los Angeles arts leaders and learn the structure of nonprofit arts organizations. As part of the program, Echols aided in reviewing grant applications for riot recovery funds from the city’s Cultural Affairs Department.

Echols, born in East Los Angeles and raised in South-Central, said she received little exposure to “European art, traditional art, the ‘highbrow’ arts.”

“I had the mistaken impression that it was only for the affluent, and that’s not true. Los Angeles has many cultures, and if we’re all going to live together in some kind of harmony, the best way is to learn about each other’s cultures through art forms.”

Echols, now a resident of Leimert Park near the Crenshaw District, plans to start her volunteer involvement at the grass-roots level with a community arts organization, rather than at the traditional arts centers.

But she adds that she would like to see greater ethnic diversity on the boards of the larger organizations as well: “The backers help to determine what’s going to play and what’s not going to play, and so definitely it has an impact. That’s why the leadership has to be as diverse as the audience.”

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Reed Manville

Reed Manville, 39, made a quantum career leap: from a position as chief financial officer of an East Coast museum to a 12-year career at NBC that has led to his current position as president and general manager of KNBC Channel 4.

Manville, a Skidmore College art major with an MBA in museum administration from the State University of New York at Binghamton, quickly climbed the ranks to become chief of finance and administration for the Hudson River Museum in Westchester County, N.Y. At 23, he was hired by Richard Koshalek, then director of that museum and now president of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art (and also the godfather of one of Manville’s three children).

But, Manville said, he rose to the top of the museum hierarchy too fast; he was also disillusioned by the low salaries offered to even the highest officials: “I did it for three years but then decided, ‘What am I going to do with the rest of my career?’ . . . The pyramid was too steep, and I was too close to the top. So I got out.”

Intrigued by the entertainment business, Manville began sending out resumes to motion picture and TV studios but encountered blanket rejection. “I was tainted by the arts,” he said. “They overlooked my MBA and said: ‘Why do we want a person from a museum working in entertainment?’ ”

Then Manville took another tack: he approached an NBC executive who was a member of the board at the Whitney. “When I made that connection, I had three offers from NBC right away.”

At NBC, Manville encourages the staff to partake of the arts, and the station has created several promotional spots for local arts organizations featuring KNBC news anchors, as well as spots without KNBC personalities for use on other stations and Spanish-language versions.

This year, for the first time, the station is also including MOCA on its list of charities. Manville acknowledges that the arts are a hard sell.

“We are under such tremendous pressure to deliver a bottom line,” he said. “They need a positive community affiliation, a giveback factor. They have to prove to me that they have some educational component to them that is of benefit to the next generation. I don’t need to change 40-year-olds, I need to change 6-year-olds, and get them into the pipeline.”

Despite his “kitchen cabinet” relationship with MOCA, Manville is uncomfortable with being termed a ‘patron of the arts’: “I am not the Medici. I’m not in that league--I’m not a player on that level. On the other hand, I have an asset called air time. I have an FCC license that says I have to do something positive and proactive for the community with that air time. Well, now you are talking my language.”

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Peggy Liu

Twenty-four-year-old Peggy Liu, a graduate of the Mas sachusetts Institute of Technology, is the third-party marketing programs manager for Santa Monica’s Symantec Corp., a fast-growing computer software company. Side interests include roller dancing, psychic phenomena and the arts.

Liu, a community activist whose involvement includes board membership of the Organization of Chinese-American Women, served as a consultant to the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of a pro bono project of her former employer, McKinsey & Co., a downtown Los Angeles management consulting firm that had been advising the Chandler family on Music Center matters since the 1950s. She also was a member of the advisory committee for the Arts Leadership Initiative at Arts Inc., which trains young business community members to become active volunteers.

When it comes to attracting her generation to the arts, Liu sees bugs in the system. She describes her job as selling Symantec software products to other computer companies, which in turn bundle that software into a package with other products--thus increasing the market value of the bundle.

“As a result, we have to sell them our products at a much lower value than we would sell it for retail, but the benefit is we get an increased market share,” she said. “I liken that to involving people in their 20s in the arts--if the arts organizations promote awareness in that generation, they have to offer their product at a lower price, but they increase their market share.”

And, Liu said, arts fund-raisers just might have to package themselves with another “product” if they are to attract young donors.

“I think if they combined it with some other trendy charity, such as AIDS, the environment or education, then people would be more willing to go to their events,” she said. “Make it a politically correct charity.”

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Alan Feldstein

Alan Feldstein, 37, a Century City entertainment attor ney, became arts minded while an undergraduate at UCLA, where he served as chairman of the Student Committee for the Arts. After graduating, Feldstein joined the Royce Two-Seventy, the principal support group for the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts. He became a member of the board in 1990.

“It was intimidating--you don’t want to sit on the board and be 20 years younger than everyone else,” Feldstein said. Although he left the board after a year, Feldstein remains an avid supporter of the center and encourages younger people “who never wore mink and pearls to a cultural event” to participate in the process.

“Traditionally, our fund-raising has been a very narrow slice of our demographics here in Southern California,” he said. “We need to broaden that base. The old money is dying out; the people themselves are dying. How are you going to attract not only new people but cultural diversity as well? What kind of music is being played? Is it dead European composers, or something that might be of more interest to different ethnic groups?”

A single father of two, Feldstein also suggested that arts centers become more user-friendly to parents by providing more family programming, on-site day care or children’s activities--or simply developing a tolerance for basic kid etiquette.

“One idea might be to hire people who are getting their degrees in performing arts to run a day-care center,” he said. “I remember going to opera as a kid and being smacked with a program by some old lady in white gloves because I wasn’t sitting up straight. I wasn’t real wild about going to the opera after that. . . . If I can bring my 6-year-old daughter to an event and no one is going to worry if she walks up and down the aisle once or twice, then I think that’s great, because she is the next generation of people who are going to be interested in the arts.”

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Mark and Claudia Foster

Mark Foster, 35, a vice president at Seidler Amdec Securities, and his wife, Claudia, 36, a medical technologist, are looking for a new house for themselves and new son Patrick. Now living in Beverlywood, they say a main requirement for their new home is proximity to the Music Center. “Our commute now is 30 minutes; we can just make 8 o’clock curtain,” Claudia said.

The Fosters head to the Music Center for more than performances. Mark sits on the Music Center board, as well as the executive committee of the Master Chorale, one of the center’s resident companies, and is active in a support group for the Music Center Opera. Claudia recently joined the Blue Ribbon.

Mark, a fifth-generation Californian, says his family migrated West during the Gold Rush; his mother’s side of the family are descendants of Irish nationalist Peter Christopher Byrne. The family tree is littered with legal professionals: His grandfather was William M. Byrne, nicknamed “Federal Bill,” who served for 24 years as a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles. Federal Bill’s son is Matt Byrne, a current federal judge and former Music Center board member. In all, six Byrnes have been federal or state judges or commissioners.

Mark said his family’s deep roots in the city formed the basis for his interest in community development through the arts. “One of my memories is going to the Philharmonic for one of their youth concerts,” he said. “I played the trumpet in my grade-school band, and I sang in the chorus, but I was never real talented. I decided that my talent might lie in support of the arts.

“I feel very bad that the schools no longer provide arts programs; that’s one of the reasons I am so involved now. A significant portion of increased giving goes to outreach and educational support programs. . . . With the situation after the riots, there are clearly terrible problems that need to be addressed, and the arts provide nourishment for the soul. What really bothers me--I run into it in the fund-raising--is the perception that the Music Center is really for the rich people of Los Angeles.

“We continue to do multicultural programming to appeal to the city’s different cultures, but I also feel that we need to do programming that doesn’t cater to a particular culture . . . you have to make the classical arts available to all the diverse groups in the city.”

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Mark Eshman

Mark Eshman, 34, is a senior vice president with Dabney/Resnick and Wagner Inc., a Beverly Hills investment banking and stock brokerage firm, where he manages investments for “high-net-worth individuals.” He is also the founder of MOCA Contemporaries, a support group for young professionals who could be of high net worth to the museum someday.

A 1980 graduate of North Carolina’s Duke University, Eshman also spent a year at the University of London studying economics and art history, with intent to “cover my bases--I could either go into the art world or the money business.”

Eshman chose money. But, his love of art led him to become involved in the local art scene when he returned home after college. Eshman contacted Eli Broad, chairman and chief executive officer of the financial services company Broad Inc. and a founding chairman of MOCA, and told him he wanted to get younger people involved.

“The idea was to put together a support group of young professionals who would not only raise money, but get people less interested in what kind of car they were going to drive and what kind of Italian suit they were going to wear, and in something more connected to reality,” Eshman said.

Eshman said the group started with a small board of six to eight members; when the museum opened in 1986, membership climbed to 250, and it has remained somewhere between 250 and 350 ever since. Though the group kept its events low-priced, Eshman said, it still managed to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the museum during its fledgling years.

Family and career pressures, as well as other charities, have left Eshman little time to remain involved with MOCA. An avid photography collector, Eshman said he would like to be on the board of trustees for a major museum later in life. “Right now, I don’t have a million dollars to give,” he said.

“The arts are in a tough position. On the one hand they want everyone to be exposed to the arts; on the other hand, they have to appeal to people with money. They can nurture people who are going to support them by showing up and buying a ticket, but that’s not where they’re going to get the big bucks. That’s going to come from CEOs and corporations.

“I think we really hooked a lot of people (with MOCA Contemporaries). Especially if they start buying art, even a little bit, it can really pique their curiosity. You can buy a Roy Lichtenstein photo for $5,000--we got a lot of people involved in that. Art is sort of like the movies--it’s entertaining, it’s fun, it’s visual, and you don’t have to pick up a book to enjoy it.”

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Jamie Fleming

Jamie Fleming, 38, marketing director for Universal City Studios, is chairman of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Decorative Arts Council. “I was brought into the museum because of my business background, but also my youth,” said Fleming. “The museum has taken a very conscientious effort to build a base of people who can ‘follow in the footsteps.’ ” Fleming added that the effort has worked: More than 60% of the council’s board is under 40.

Fleming, a San Marino native who grew up a “few houses away” from the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, is also a member of the Junior Fellows of the Huntington.

He said the key to attracting young members to both organizations is events that emphasize families, the outdoors and a chance to socialize. He said LACMA has lured young people to membership in its junior division by offering such events as outdoor jazz concerts at the museum, horse shows and polo matches at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center (where the events are combined with lectures on decorative arts) and a black-tie dinner and treasure hunt fund-raiser that takes the participants through the museum’s galleries. The biggest Huntington Junior Fellows event, he said, is the annual Arabella Ball, named after Henry Huntington’s wife--an elaborate formal fete with a different theme each year.

Fleming said his interest in the two organizations has spread to some of his young colleagues at Universal. “One of the elements is young professionals meeting other young professionals,” he said. “So far, everyone has mixed very nicely, and the same people keep coming back. If they’re not having fun, what would they come back for? The word fun is what we emphasize the most.”