Her Vision Gave City Its Heart

Marshall Berges, then the Time bureau chief in Los Angeles, was researching the magazine’s cover story on Dorothy Chandler in 1964 and accompanied her to lunch at Perino’s, her favorite restaurant. She excused herself from the table three times, and each time returned chuckling that she had secured another $25,000 pledge for the Music Center from a fellow diner. Berges had no doubt whatsoever that it was true.

Returning by private jet from a University of California Board of Regents meeting in Berkeley, she waited until a fellow regent had been served a splendidly icy martini, and then advanced on him for a pledge (given, needless to say). She boasted that she had had only one absolute turndown in her extraordinary fund-raising effort, although winning some of the pledges required the patience of a saint, she admitted, and a rather devilish amount of guile, as she didn’t say.

Those of us who knew Dorothy Chandler, who died Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 96, were convinced she could have organized the invasion of Europe or run the city of Los Angeles (which is harder). She was not least a political genius who persuaded both Democratic and Republican officials, liberals and conservatives, to join the Music Center cause. She drove a gap in the wall that had traditionally kept the Hollywood elite separate from the downtown elite and, as Paul Ziffren said at the time, the Westside Jewish enclave at her urging joined the older and heavily WASP establishment in the crusade.

As people sometimes discover in later life that they have gifts as painters and writers, she discovered a gift for leadership. The arm-twisting fund-raising was one thing. Just as crucial were her talents in building a team, and--an overused but unavoidable word--her vision in understanding and working for everything a Music Center could be.

The idea of a Music Center had been floated in the late ‘30s, awkwardly conceived as part convention center, part symphony hall. The voters rejected the project at the polls three times (by diminishing margins, which was probably a straw in the wind). After the last defeat Mrs. Chandler, who had proved her calling by her dramatic rescue of the Hollywood Bowl a few years earlier, took up the Music Center idea, scrapped the convention center notion, and put a team together, which notably won over the Board of Supervisors, which provided that precious site on Bunker Hill. By 1962 the shovels were at work.

Anyone who did not live in Los Angeles 35 or 40 years ago cannot fairly or fully conceive the cultural revolution that the Music Center represented, and that can be at least roughly measured in any Sunday Calendar’s listings of the art, music, dance and theater events.

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The oldest joke about Los Angeles is that it was 60 suburbs in search of a city. The outreach was the inevitable product of open land and the automobile. What was indeed lacking was the idea of a city with a vital center. The first modern sense of cityness came with sports--the Los Angeles Rams, the Lakers and probably above all, the Dodgers.

It remained for the Music Center to give Los Angeles a cultural identity, a proud and glowing center on the Hill to which all of Southern California could relate, could come to. It dramatized the generous support for the arts in Los Angeles; it proved the existence of audiences eager for the best (and sometimes the controversial) offerings that could be found.

The Buff Chandler vision had seen beyond what was first called the Memorial Pavilion to include what are now the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre, to expand the arts menu and, she noted, provide more revenue.

My phone rang one morning and Mrs. Chandler asked what I--as The Times’ arts editor--knew about a man named Ernest Fleischmann. Having worked in London, I knew that he had done a wizard job guiding the London Symphony Orchestra to preeminence among the five symphony orchestras there. He extended the orchestra’s season and its reputation by taking it on successful world tours. He has had equal success with the Philharmonic, as he became one of the key players in the creation of the Music Center as an organism and not simply an edifice.

Bringing Zubin Mehta to town as the first of a succession of world-class conductors and installing Gordon Davidson and his Theatre Group from UCLA to perform in the Mark Taper Forum seemed to me another evidence of Dorothy Chandler’s guiding drive for excellence.

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The further triumph of the Music Center has been its impact as a catalyst for all the arts. While there were initial worries that the center’s three theaters would force the others out of business, there is now the Shubert, the Pantages (functioning primarily as a legit house for touring attractions), the lively and daring Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, the Doolittle Theatre (surviving and prospering under UCLA auspices), the Pasadena Playhouse hanging in there. And those dozens of small, creative theaters blanketing the region.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, another example of deep pockets private giving, is itself now a hub of arts activity, notably including the excellent South Coast Repertory.

The twice-expanded L.A. County Museum of Art has now been joined by the Museum of Contemporary Art, which, when Disney Hall is built, will be one end of the remarkable Bunker Hill arts area.

And indeed the shining towers of downtown Los Angeles, not least the glorious new public library, give the city a center as it has never had before. And who is to say that it was not the complex on Bunker Hill--the vision of Dorothy Chandler--that first declared, “This is where the action is, and will be.”