Old Money’s New Generation

The difference between the vice president and the CEO of a corporation is that the CEO has an art collection.

--Judy Baca, artistic director, Social and Public Art Resource Center, and former board member, Museum of Contemporary Art

Arts patronage has never been solely a case of art for art’s sake. While arts backers often share a history of dabbling in the arts, many donate as a steppingstone to business and social prestige.

Chandler. Ahmanson. Taper. Getty. The names of the families who invested their fortunes in building Los Angeles’ arts showplaces are enshrined above the doors of the city’s museums, theaters and pavilions. A new name, Disney, is soon to join the ranks with the $100-million Walt Disney Concert Hall, new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

But are younger generations of Chandlers--as well as those of other prominent Los Angeles families that invested in building arts institutions--keeping the flame alive?

Some such descendants remain shrouded in secrecy. Gordon P. Getty--son of the late Jean Paul Getty I, billionaire founder of the Getty oil empire and Malibu’s wealthy Getty Museum--did not respond to a written request for information on the activities of younger family members. A source close to the family, however, said Jean Paul I’s grandchildren have taken up environmental causes instead of artistic ones.

An exception is granddaughter Aileen Getty, an AIDS activist who was also a major backer of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent Karen Finley exhibit. Finley is a member of the controversial “NEA Four,” a group of avant-garde performance artists who became embroiled in a legal battle with the National Endowment for the Arts when it overturned grant recommendations to those artists made by a peer panel.

Barry Taper, son of financier and philanthropist Mark Taper (namesake of the Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum), said young members of that family are involved in various community activities “and do not wish to be identified.”

Marilyn Brant Chandler Stuart, 61, ex-wife of former Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler (son of Dorothy and Norman), says her own commitment to the Music Center waned in the 1970s, when she began to pursue environmental causes. She is president and founder of the Population Education Committee.

“I gave the arts up because I was very worried about the survival of Earth and the human species,” Stuart said. “And I think the younger people feel the same way. They are more jaded about serving on boards that have less meaning to the future of the world.”

Stuart’s five children, she said, are busy with career, family and causes unrelated to the arts. Her youngest daughter, Carolyn Chandler Barr, works for the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy. Another daughter, Cathleen Chandler Eckhardt, serves on the boards of organizations concerned with homelessness and family planning in Santa Cruz County.

Son Harry Chandler, 39, a graduate of UCLA Film School who recently launched a new company, Morningstar Productions, sat on the board of the Music Center’s Center Theater Group/Mark Taper Forum, about five years ago, but left when family and career concerns took over. “What I learned is it doesn’t do any good to sit on a board if you don’t have time to follow through with it,” he said.

Chandler added that he was younger than the rest of board by “about a decade” and that family connections did not net him the fund-raising power of older members more established in the business community. “They’d rather hit the CEO crowd,” he acknowledged.

But “I loved it,” Chandler said. “I think the kind of plays the Taper puts on are challenging, and will always be, to the younger crowd. When I was on the board, I tried to work with the management there . . . to open it up beyond the senior citizen crowd. I don’t think it’s entirely successful yet, but it certainly is achievable.”

Caroline Ahmanson, 71, wife of Howard Ahmanson, president of Ahmanson Savings and Loan, aided Dorothy Chandler in developing the Music Center’s education division in the 1980s and has remained involved in the organization.

“Before, there were these wonderful philanthropists who wanted to give back to their community, because they had been so successful,” she said. “I remember my husband always said: ‘I am so grateful because this community has been so benign to my success, and I want to give back in some way.’

“I think there are others who will become successful in new businesses, new technological companies; there will be young ones who will rise--and not just descendants of the old-timers,” she continued. “They don’t have to (build arts facilities); all we’re looking for is support.”

Robert Gottlieb, a faculty member in UCLA’s department of urban planning and co-author of “Thinking Big,” a history of the Los Angeles Times, said in an interview that, by the 1970s, the financial power behind the arts institutions had become more diffuse.

“Some of it became more explicitly corporate-oriented, rather than working around the series of individuals who played key roles,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a Dorothy Chandler playing the same kind of role, or an Asa Call (the late business and community leader who was once state chairman of the Republican Party’s finance committee and served on the Music Center’s finance committee) or even an upstart like Ahmanson or Taper. The traditional levers of fund-raising are not what they used to be.

“It is in the interest of the elite too to bring in a broader cross section of the community (to donate money),” Gottlieb said. “But that still leaves open the question: To what end? And serving what constituency? . . . We have a world city, a very diverse multicultural city. Do the cultural institutions, particularly the established cultural institutions, reflect that kind of change?

“(The question) has to be not simply who you can go to to get the support. It has to be: What are the institutions going to become?”