The Quiet Man Behind the Getty Center

One Friday afternoon in January 1980, Stephen D. Rountree faced a decision. Preparing to leave his administrative position at Occidental College, he had to choose between two job offers: vice president of Scripps College, a prestigious women’s school in Claremont, and deputy director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“Scripps was something I really knew and understood. I could get a nice little house in Claremont and be very comfortable,” Rountree said. The Getty, which at the time consisted only of an eccentric museum in Malibu, was a mystery.

“The museum had a $50-million endowment, which J. Paul had established during his lifetime, and I knew more money was tied up in his estate. But the word from the staff was: ‘Who knows? This is a crazy family, and you really don’t know what’s going to happen.’ ”

Still, the oil baron’s will was going through probate, and the Getty’s board of trustees had created the deputy director’s position, anticipating a need for a manager of operations. Furthermore, Rountree was intrigued by the notion of joining such an odd, fledgling organization.

“The curators, Burton Fredericksen, Gillian Wilson and Jiri Frel, were so passionate and dynamic and committed. They were very eccentric people,” Rountree said. “I looked around at them and the situation, and decided something was probably going to shake loose there.”

Rountree took the plunge, and his professional life has been shaking ever since. But no one would guess that from his easy smile and unflappable demeanor. Even more surprising, given his 17-year tenure and steadily rising stature at the Getty, is that relatively few outsiders have even heard of him.

Working largely behind the scenes, Rountree has acquired a staggering amount of responsibility as the Getty Center has taken shape in Brentwood, in preparation for its Dec. 16 opening. He was recently appointed vice president of the Getty Trust--second only to retiring President Harold M. Williams, who will be succeeded in January by Barry Munitz, chancellor of the California State University system.

“In many ways, I am the Getty Center’s ultimate client, but it is really Steve’s project,” Williams said. “He has made my life easy.” Characterizing Rountree as “a consensus builder who always has the big picture in mind,” Williams said Rountree’s star has risen at the Getty because “he’s very articulate, very persuasive and very fair; everyone trusts his judgment, motivation and objectivity.”

In his capacity as director of the Getty Center building program since 1984 and, more recently, as director of the trust’s operations and planning, Rountree has worked with architect Richard Meier and community leaders, served as the point person for Getty staff and greased the wheels that keep the $1-billion Getty Center project on track.

Rountree’s colleagues say he makes things happen and quietly bows out, leaving others to take the credit. Calling himself “a translator,” he often functions as a diplomat, putting out fires, mending fences and preventing high-powered people from killing each other.

“My whole career has been spent as a facilitator,” he said. “My job is to help creative people do their jobs. I guess it’s just a personality type. I was the same way in college and even in high school, when I got into student government. I was secretary of finance; I never wanted to be president. Isn’t that weird?”

Maybe so, but Rountree’s personality and talents are the Getty’s great good fortune, in the opinion of more visible players.

“I can’t imagine doing the project without him,” Meier said. “As chief spokesman for the trust, the trustees and the staff, he has not only listened to everyone, he has understood them. That’s what’s unusual.”

Trustee emeritus Rocco Siciliano, who found the Getty Center site and has chaired the board’s building committee, praises Rountree’s “gift for explaining in lay terms very complex issues” and marvels at his “patience and imperturbability.” “He simply doesn’t raise his voice,” Siciliano said.

Rountree, 48, is a fifth-generation Californian who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. He did his undergraduate work at Occidental in Eagle Rock, where he later worked as director of personnel and assistant executive vice president and where his wife, Carol, now a homemaker, was assistant dean. He earned a master’s degree in management at the Claremont Graduate School in 1976. When he joined the Getty Museum in Malibu, it had about 75 employees, most of whom were security officers. Now he works for a trust with a $4.2-billion endowment and a staff of about 1,000.

“I was here before Harold and before the money,” Rountree said, looking back over his eventful career. “Since then, I’ve just been sitting on a mushroom and growing with it and keeping up with it.”

Upon joining the Getty, he worked with museum director Stephen Garrett for about a year and half before Williams was appointed president of the trust, in 1981. Garrett left the museum in 1982; the following year John Walsh became the museum’s director. As Williams began to conceptualize the trust and establish new programs, Rountree became involved in the formation of institutes for research, conservation, education and information and worked with Walsh to write a program for a new museum.

“In the spring or summer of 1984, Harold asked me to take charge of the Getty Center building project,” Rountree said. “The key issue in his mind was planning, to help him create the kind of place he wanted it to be, and to figure out what kind of spaces we needed, how people would work together, how the buildings should be shaped and how to tell all this to Richard Meier, who was named the architect in October 1984.”

On a flight from New York to Los Angeles, after his initial meeting with Meier, Rountree drew up a list of the top 10 things he needed to do.

“No. 2 was community relations,” he said. “Harold said, ‘Nah, that’s pretty well settled,’ but it was just the bare beginning.” To date Rountree has logged some 150 meetings with community groups.

Although the Brentwood property had been zoned for a subdivision, many neighbors questioned the Getty’s plans. He began holding meetings to address their concerns about the building’s size, traffic, noise, sight lines, drainage, landscape and privacy.

“It’s very, very difficult to get a place like this built in the city of Los Angeles,” Rountree said. “The real struggle here, particularly during the program and development phase of the project, was to represent six or seven different programs and Harold and the board of trustees and make sure we delivered for all of them within the box that we could negotiate with the community.”

Long after most of the troublesome issues had been settled, a crisis arose over the addition of a large garden designed by artist Robert Irwin. Neighbors who feared it would attract noisy crowds had to be persuaded that Irwin had planned a quiet, contemplative place. Meier was none too happy with the garden either, but Rountree has expedited the project.

“I’m still trying to get the two of them to have some rapport and understanding of each other,” Rountree said.

In the case of the new museum’s paintings galleries, he brought in Thierry Despont, a New York-based French designer, to work out differences between Meier’s vision of a thoroughly modern building and Walsh’s desire for traditional, European-style interiors to complement the artworks.

“Thierry played a shuttle role by working one on one with Meier in New York, getting Richard to soften and become more sympathetic to John’s desire for saturated colors and fabrics,” Rountree said. “Then he came to L.A. and helped John understand the appropriateness of a simpler, more austere vocabulary, that we couldn’t have ornate moldings and really lavish fabrics and colors that were too dark or elements that were just too foreign to the building.”

With Rountree listening to both sides, Meier won a battle to add “feature stones” named for Getty people, as a personal touch on the building. But he lost an effort to remove trees and other plants from a courtyard when the staff objected.

“Richard is always right in terms of aesthetics,” Rountree said. “But there are times when I just have to say, ‘We’ve got a public purpose.’ The most beautiful thing may not give the public the right sign to find the restroom or it may restrict what a program needs to accomplish.”

But physical details are not the point at the Getty Center, he said:

“This project is all about people. It’s not about steel and concrete and stone. It’s just this enormous human effort to succeed in this vision Harold has laid out for us. The challenge for me has been to work with these very, very strong, very independent, very creative people who head the Getty programs, to help them articulate their needs and, at the same time, not lose sight of unity, coherence and synergy on the campus.”

Rountree will not be looking for another job after the Getty Center opens.

“We’ve got enough to deal with, just to make this place operate, but Barry Munitz is definitely going to keep me excited and engaged and involved,” he said. “I really don’t know what he will bring, but it will be something new and fresh and very different.”*

Suzanne Muchnic is The Times’ art writer.