Mark Taper, Financier and Philanthropist, Dies at 92 : Charity: Music Center theater bears his name. He also gave large donations to the county art museum and UCLA.

S. Mark Taper, the immigrant financier and philanthropist who gave $1.5 million and his name to the Los Angeles Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum, died Thursday of a massive heart attack. He was 92.

Taper’s sudden death at his Beverly Hills home was announced at the rededication Thursday evening of Downtown’s Ahmanson Theatre. The audience gasped as Gordon Davidson, artistic director for the Taper Forum and the Ahmanson, read the news from a note he had been handed moments earlier.

“It’s ironic,” Davidson said later, “that in that moment of celebration . . . I had to announce that the patron from across the way had died.”

Barry and Louise Taper, Taper’s son and daughter-in-law, said that despite Taper’s advanced age, his passing was unexpected.

“Christmas Day was going to be his 93rd birthday,” Louise Taper said, “and we had just been planning the party.”

Barry Taper said that although his father rarely spoke of his contributions to Los Angeles, he probably would have wanted to be remembered best “for putting back into the community more than he took out of it.”

Taper, a European who originally came to California to retire, instead built a housing development that became Lakewood. He segued to savings and loan associations, creating First Charter Financial Corp. By the late 1960s, First Charter had become the nation’s biggest publicly held savings and loan holding company.

As he made money, Taper gave much away, mostly through the Mark Taper Foundation, which he established in 1952.

When Dorothy Buffum Chandler solicited funds to build the Music Center, Taper gave her $1 million. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to reward Taper’s philanthropy by putting his name on the 750-seat theater in the Music Center complex designated for experimental productions.

Then Taper gave more. When Mrs. Chandler organized her “Buck Bag” gift campaign encouraging small donations, Taper told her he would anonymously match everything she collected up to $500,000. She got the $500,000.

Taper’s largess extended to art and education, as well as to theater. He funded the original modern art gallery of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a memorial to his wife, Amelia, who died in 1958. He also became a major donor to UCLA.

A longtime naturalized American citizen, Taper was born Dec. 25, 1901, in Poland. He soon moved with his family to England, where he spent 36 years.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Taper was a schoolboy and was quickly assigned to teach first- and second-graders after their teachers left to fight. He quit school when he was 14 and began working for his father manufacturing officers’ uniforms.

Two years later, the teen-ager took over management of the plant after his father was injured in a Zeppelin raid on London.

In 1920, the young Taper acquired a shoe store and within five years had a chain of five stores. In 1926, he was able to retire. He was 25.

Looking around for something to do, Taper remembered that what he had enjoyed most about his business was expanding it. So he went back to school to study surveying and appraising, and in 1929 bought a real estate business from two partners who were retiring.

Until then, British real estate agents rode bicycles to reach customers, who then found addresses and looked at the property on their own. But Taper sent his agents around in cars and had them personally show property to prospective buyers. It was the first of many innovations he made throughout his career.

Taper also began building houses. In a development he created in Southeast London, he named one street Millmark Road in honor of his wife, whose nickname was Milly, and another Barrydale for his young son, Barry.

By the late 1930s, Taper was a successful builder and active in savings and loans. He decided to retire again, this time by moving his family to Southern California.

“I thought I ought to spend more time with my family,” he told The Times years later. “And I was looking for the secret paradise we all seek, free from pressure and care.”

Halfway to Santa Monica after a cross-country train ride that ended at Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles, an enterprising cabdriver convinced the Tapers that Long Beach was the nearest place to find sand and sun. For six months, Taper and his family, which by then included daughters Carolyn Mary and Janice Ann, lived in the penthouse of Long Beach’s Huntington Hotel (for $80 a month) and played in the sand.

By that time the Jewish couple was also bringing hundreds of Catholic and Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to Britain and the United States, saving them from persecution.

But work interrupted Taper’s days in the sun when two landowners offered him 20-acre slices of Long Beach for $6,000 and $5,700. He engineered 400 lots and, unable to find a builder, decided to build the homes himself.

“I suppose that is the story of my life,” Taper said in 1965. “Whenever I thought of retiring, some new need appeared, some job that had to be done.”

A veteran of England’s subsidized mass housing programs of the 1930s, Taper responded to the housing shortage that World War II created in Southern California. He won one of the first five wartime priority orders granted to marshal critical materials for areas where people had relocated because of the war. He built vast tracts of middle- and low-income homes for returning servicemen south of Los Angeles. They could buy the houses with low-interest Federal Housing Administration-backed GI loans.

“The bank told me they thought this would be a ghost town once the war ended,” and that an oversupply of homes existed in Southern California in 1942, Taper said, recalling one financier who denied him a loan.

In addition to Lakewood, which he developed around a shopping center with Ben Weingart and Lou Boyar in 1949, Taper constructed large chunks of Long Beach, Norwalk and Compton.

He sold the houses for as little as $3,000 with no down payment, and included free refrigerators, stoves and carpeting, and then-innovative garbage disposals.

In 1950, Taper founded the Pacific National Bank of Long Beach, and typically added an individual touch--a drive-by cashier window.

“I was told it was an innovation,” Taper said later, “but I don’t know that it was the first of its kind. There just seemed to be a need for it.”

By 1955, after building more than 35,000 homes, Taper decided to switch to full-time financing. He had acquired a Whittier savings and loan in 1948 and took over the American Savings & Loan Assn. in 1950.

“I felt it was more important to finance and encourage other builders than to continue in building myself,” he said. “I thought I could be of greater service.”

Although Taper became something of a world traveler as an avocation, his philanthropy as well as his work continued to involve Southern California.

“All my travel has done is convince me that this West Coast is the greatest center of civilization in modern times, not only as far as the U.S. is concerned, but for the world,” Taper said in 1965. “We are the mecca, the paradise and the dream of the world, and it is a wonderful thing to share in the fabulous life we are living here.”

Publicists for the smallest theater of the three-theater Music Center complex on the edge of Los Angeles’ Civic Center are hard-pressed to describe Taper. He was a quiet man who displayed no particular interest in theater or music, as one might expect of a man who had a theater named for him.

“Most of all, I am interested in people,” he said when asked why he donated the $1.5 million to the Music Center. “I felt this was a means of bringing to them something that was not here. It would benefit more people than anything else I could think of, not only of this generation, but of generations to come.

“I see it (the forum) as a laboratory and workshop of the performing arts in which our talented young people can find themselves,” he said. “If we are to maintain our world leadership, we’ve got to give our young people opportunities to express themselves. I believe the forum will provide such opportunities.”

Four years after the death of his first wife, Taper married actress Roberta Gale, 28 years his junior. But he sued for divorce after eight months, contending that she had married him “for the sole and exclusive purpose of obtaining monetary gain.”

He lived alone, then, and continued his 18-hour work days until late in his life.

“I’ve never found a formula for getting my work done in eight hours,” he said at an age when most people are long retired. “People I know who are accomplishing anything are at it 12 to 18 hours a day.”

Twitted about his original 1939 plans to “retire” to Southern California, Taper insisted his entire life was “one long vacation.”

Times staff writer Shawn Hubler contributed to this story.