ART : Rising From the Flames : Plagued by two major fires, Tony Duquette still creates magic with his eclectic, eccentric art.

First-time visitors to Tony Duquette’s house up Benedict Canyon in the hills above Sunset Boulevard invariably do a double take when they pass through the front door--and this is exactly the effect Duquette intends.

A sophisticated outsider artist with an eccentric sensibility that combines Oriental design motifs with elements of the Baroque, primitive art and original artworks made from unorthodox materials, Duquette has fashioned an environment of shameless opulence that’s distinctly out of step with the postmodern ‘90s. Frescoes, murals and mirrors abound, and no surface is left unembellished in this gilded palace of whimsy Duquette calls Dawnridge. Now 80, he sums up the house, and his life work, as a quest for magic.

What is magic? “Magic,” he says, “is fireworks, charm, a turn of phrase, a lovely garden. My garden is not a lawn,” he wryly points out.

No, it certainly is not. An enchanted jungle that rambles over the land stretching behind the house, it’s a labyrinthine network of pathways, bridges, Balinese pavilions, cottages, lush vegetation, pools and statuary.

“It took about 30 years to create this garden, and I’m always renewing it--an environment that never changes is death,” says Duquette, whose work will be the subject of “Phoenix Rising From His Flames,” an exhibition opening Tuesday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center.

“Phoenix” is Duquette’s first local exhibition since 1983 when his tribute to the City of Los Angeles, “Our Lady Queen of Angels,” was installed at the Museum of Science and Industry. “Tony Duquette: The Phoenix Rising From His Flames” includes three tapestries, 50 pieces of jewelry and 11 massive sculptures. Modernist totems with a faint perfume of kitsch, Duquette’s giant tiki forms are cobbled together out of various metals, stones, jewels, plastic, paint and anything else that catches his eye. A few of them presently sit in his back yard at Dawnridge.

A compulsively creative man who worked as a consultant on several of Vincente Minnelli’s films, contributed to the interiors of L.A.’s legendary nightclub of the ‘40s, the Mocambo, and did interiors for Elizabeth Arden’s castle in Ireland and Mary Pickford’s mansion, Pickfair, Duquette has a wildly exotic resume. He won a Tony Award in 1961 for costuming the Broadway musical “Camelot,” did sets and costumes for operas and ballets and did interior design work for the Duchess of Windsor, J. Paul Getty and Norton Simon.

He was also pals with leading figures of Hollywood’s golden era, including Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo. “Garbo was adorable, although she was frightfully shy at first,” Duquette recalls. “And she had the most marvelous speaking voice! She could say, ‘It’s cold outside,’ and you felt as if she were making love to you.”

While Duquette wanders down memory lane, a steady stream of people pass through the study where he sits. Some are volunteers working on a huge tapestry on the floor of his drawing room; one is a disoriented workman who delivers a sewing machine, then gets lost while attempting to leave and almost walks into a closet. Two different assistants come in with questions, a florist delivers a massive orchid, and three friends drop by. Duquette seems to lead a very jam-packed life.

Born in 1914, the eldest in a family of four children, Duquette recalls that “my father was a businessman, and my mother’s family were highly educated hippies--her grandmother, Jane Marshall, was one of the pre-Raphaelites. They left England in the late 1800s for the wilds of Canada with their opera glasses and libraries in tow, but the forest fires and Indians there eventually drove them south and they relocated to San Francisco, where the earthquake of 1906 drove them further south again. They arrived in L.A. in 1907, and we lived in a house on Rampart Street until I was 4, when my grandfather died and my father took us back to his hometown of Three Rivers, Michigan, to run the family business.

“I’ve always created fantasy worlds,” he continues. “Next to our house in Three Rivers was a vacant lot where I was always staging Chinese coronations or crossing the Great Plains in a covered wagon. I don’t know where that impulse came from, unless it was the stories my family told--the discussions at our house were always about ancient and international things, and I read a great deal as well.”

After graduating from high school in Michigan, Duquette returned to L.A. in 1931 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. “L.A. was a little town then, but I loved it because it smelled of eucalyptus, and the weather was divine,” he recalls. “Hollywood was like a separate town from L.A. then, but I had contact with it because one of my aunts worked as an accompanist, and our next-door neighbor was the gossip columnist for the Herald Examiner.

“Early on, I was influenced by Matisse, the Baroque, Oriental design and African art--and, needless to say, I didn’t fit in at art school,” he continues. “I struggled to go along with the current thing, which was the Bauhaus, but I have a romantic sensibility and I’ve never liked Minimalism in any form. I tried, but I always ended up tossing in a baroque mirror, or putting a headdress on my figures. After three years of art school I quit, in 1934, when I was offered a job at Robinson’s doing promotional designs, and after three years there, I went to work for Bullock’s.”

While working at Bullock’s, Duquette was taken under the wing of Elsie de Wolfe, then America’s reigning arbiter of taste. De Wolfe’s patronage introduced Duquette to the film community, and he did work for George Cukor and David O. Selznick, among others. On the verge of the big time, Duquette found his progress interrupted by World War II. He enlisted in the Army in 1941 and was stationed at Ft. McArthur in San Pedro.

“Being in the Army wasn’t traumatic--it was just unbelievably boring,” he recalls. “I’d already sown the seeds for my career by then, so whenever I got a leave I’d rush back to L.A. and do work for the movies. I made screens, chandeliers, furniture, sets, costumes and worked with every material imaginable. I stopped working in movies because they’re no longer doing my kind of thing--no director needs me.”

While on leave, Duquette also courted Elizabeth Johnstone, whom he’d met while at Chouinard. “She was a marvelous painter,” says Duquette of Johnstone, whom he married in 1949 at Pickfair in a wedding given to them by Mary Pickford. “We became a total team and did everything collaboratively.” His wife died three months ago, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease; every table in the house seems to be crowded with framed photographs of her, and among them is a portrait of her by Surrealist photographer Man Ray.

Leaving the Army in 1945, Duquette toured Europe in 1946 and the next year had his first solo show, at the Mitch Leison Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. In 1951 he had a one-man show at the Louvre Museum in Paris, which traveled to the L.A. County Museum of Art (then located in Exposition Park) the next year.

In 1954, Duquette bought the space on Robertson Boulevard that was once Norma Talmadge’s studio and now houses the Margo Leavin Gallery. Two years later, he opened a gallery there but quickly discovered that “running a gallery took too much time, so we converted it into a salon where we entertained brilliantly. The Europeans were in L.A. because of the war, and everybody came--Arthur Rubinstein, Aldous Huxley, Jascha Heifetz--all of them.

“The art of entertaining as we did then is finished,” adds Duquette of his salon, which closed in 1981. “We spent hours dressing for the evening, but everybody went to that much trouble, so going out was beautiful. It’s now reached the point where you come as you are, get a drink yourself and flop down in a chair. It isn’t fun anymore, and although people are much wealthier now, I don’t think they get as much out of life.”

The year the Duquettes opened their salon, they acquired 175 acres in Malibu and began to develop a fantasy environment they dubbed Sortilegium, which is Latin for “enchantment.” Including 11 structures and several gardens, Sortilegium was a treasure trove of ancient artifacts, (a Venetian gondola, 16th-Century wrought-iron Spanish gates), bits of Hollywood history (a window from Greta Garbo and John Gilbert’s love nest) and original artworks by the Duquettes. Tragically, it all went up in smoke in the Malibu fire of 1993.

Just four years earlier, another fire destroyed “The Duquette Pavilion of Saint Francis,” a tribute to San Francisco’s patron saint composed of massive sculpted angels and jewel-studded mosaic tapestries that were installed in an abandoned synagogue Duquette bought and restored.

“Fire is perhaps a curse I’ve been afflicted with,” says Duquette, who continues to maintain a house in San Francisco and a workroom on Washington Boulevard here. “There’s absolutely nothing left in Malibu. At first I couldn’t face it, but I’ve slowly started cleaning and trying to save some of the plants. It’s a hideous thing. In fact, it was the fire in San Francisco that first prompted me to start making jewelry--I wanted to work with something smaller.

“The stones I use all have specific functions, and most of them were used by shamans or royalty as a source of power,” says Duquette, who then picks up a massive necklace that looks as though it weighs 10 pounds and puts it on over the wildly colorful sweater he’s wearing.

“I don’t think it’s too much, do you?” he innocently inquires.

* “Tony Duquette: The Phoenix Rising From His Flames,” UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center; 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood; Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Thursday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Ends June 11. (310) 443-7000.