What Becomes a Legend Most?

Beatrice Wood is frustrated because I haven’t picked up on the king of Spain thing. It’s lunchtime and she’s sitting--holding court, really--at the head of a rustic, 18th century table she inherited decades ago from her parents. Filling out the party are her longtime friend and manager, Ram Pravesh Singh, and three of her young female caretakers. The plates and goblets we’re eating and drinking from are Wood’s creations--primitive forms that you’d think came out of an archeological dig were they not coated in iridescent, speckled gold and aqua luster glazes.

I had asked about what she was wearing--hunched in her wheelchair, it’s hard to tell if shehas on a sari, robe or gown--but all she says of the blue material is that “it was a gift from the king of Spain.” Her previous references to Spanish royalty had gone by without comment, but this time, Wood, her blue eyes twinkling with mischief, goads me into asking. I smell a setup, but, “OK,” I say, “why do you keep mentioning the king of Spain?”

“Spain is a republic,” she says, slyly. The table erupts in appreciative laughter.

That joke has been out of date since 1975, when King Juan Carlos ascended the Spanish throne after Francisco Franco’s death. But I just assumed that Wood, at 104, once had a connection to the pre-Republican Spanish royal family. After all, she did go to high school with President Grover Cleveland’s daughter. When Dada was all the rage in the teens and ‘20s, she began her well-documented tryst with the movement’s Wunderkind, Marcel Duchamp. She danced in front of Nijinsky, shocked Method icon Konstantin Stanislavsky with her unladylike vocabulary, acted alongside Edna St. Vincent Millay, knitted a scarf for Isadora Duncan (though not the one the dancer died in, Wood claims) and followed early theosophists Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti.

She’d be little more than the 20th century’s greatest groupie, however, were she not also a gifted potter. Her bowls, chalices, teapots and other pieces pay homage to Mediterranean, Mesoamerican and Indian forms, but the transcendent feature of Wood’s work--that which makes her one of the few contemporary potters to be considered a fine artist--are her glazes. Years of experimentation with an uncountable variety of substances--most famously, mothballs--have resulted in shimmering surfaces that a New York Times art critic described as “spectacular and subtle at the same time.” (One of the biggest collections of her work is currently on display at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.)

Her inventory of ceramic figures is filled with animal sculptures, ill-matched couples and young libertines, often frolicking in clothing-optional situations. One blue-glazed figure shows a woman sitting on a bench wearing little more than an elaborate bonnet. It’s titled “Is My Hat on Straight?”

Wood’s not bad with a pencil, either. A famous stick figure of hers adorned the poster for the 1917 Dada confab in New York, the Blindman’s Ball. In recent years, she’s created hundreds of drawings as well as a few limited-edition sketchbooks and storybooks. The Smithsonian Institution bestowed its “Esteemed American Artist” award upon her in 1994, the same year Gov. Pete Wilson declared her a “California Living Treasure.”

Added to this artistic dexterity is a quotable charm. Forget art, she’d rather talk about love. “I always think of myself as very romantic,” she says, “and I’ve had very bad luck. Two marriages in name only. And one love affair. Now, I’m a dried-up old pretzel.”

But treasure often causes ambient power struggles. And the sari and sarong set that has long surrounded Wood is not immune. A recent court battle over who controls Wood’s money, art and time has cast a lingering pall over the potter’s mountain paradise.

*

Beatrice Wood, born in San Francisco in 1893 and raised in New York City affluence, began her odyssey at 18, when she left home to study drama in Italy and at the Comedie-Franaise in Paris. An attractive and rebellious girl, she recalls spying on Monet as he painted in his garden in Giverny before holing up with brushes and canvases in a garret herself. Her mother put an end to the painting business and World War I cut short her European adventure.

She returned to Manhattan and became a fixture at the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg, early collectors of Modern art. The Dada movement, with its disillusionment with war and subversion of bourgeois values, was shaking up the art world when Wood embarked on her first love affair, with author and diplomat Henri-Pierre Roche. Not long after, she bedded Duchamp, whose “Nude Descending a Staircase” was simultaneously the most praised and reviled work of the time. Roche’s novel “Jules & Jim” was reportedly based on their romantic triangle.

She pursued acting, but garnered only tepid reviews. In 1928, Wood followed the Arensbergs to Los Angeles. Five years later, she enrolled in a pottery class at Hollywood High School. As she tells it, she had purchased some plates on a trip to Holland and “wanted a teapot to go with them.” Buoyed by some early sales, in 1937, she borrowed money and opened her first studio at the newly finished Crossroads of the World on Sunset Boulevard.

“In those days, no one was making pottery,” she wrote in her 1985 autobiography, “I Shock Myself.” “In spite of the crudeness of my pieces and bad glazes, my figures sold.” She continued experimenting with glazes and, in the early 1940s, studied with ceramicists Gertrud and Otta Natzler, two of a handful of potters credited with elevating the discipline to an art form.

Although she was slowly achieving recognition for her work, it wasn’t until the 1980s that Wood penetrated the art world stratosphere. “Dada was a very wonderful community for Beatrice,” says Garth Clark, her East Coast dealer and owner of a gallery in New York City. “But she fit into it as a personality. She never really ignited as an artist during that period.”

Clark met Wood in 1978, when he was an art historian compiling a book on modern American ceramicists. At the time, he recalls, Wood was despondent, not having sold a piece in two years. By paring her inventory down to her strongest works, Clark sparked Beato’s (as she had come to be called) art career and, in the process, launched himself as a dealer. Their first show, “Beatrice Wood: A Very Private View,” at his ceramics gallery near the L.A. County Museum of Art, was a smash.

“We sold more than half of an enormous exhibition,” he recalls. “We got a very interesting mix of crafts and fine arts people. Beatrice called me after the show and said, ‘This is the first time that I can remember where I have more money than I actually need. I’m either going to get myself a gigolo or a new vacuum cleaner.’ ”

After that, the Beatrice Wood phenomenon began to snowball. “It was like riding an out-of-control horse,” Clark says. “Of course, she has several irons in the fire. She has her age, the fact that she’s one of the top ceramicists in the world and that she’s the last surviving member of the Dada community.”

“Extraordinarily, in her 90s is when she produced her masterpieces,” he says. Where once she was content to receive $100 for a work, now her chalices and vessels fetch as much as $40,000 apiece. As a diva in a celebrity-driven market and with her output limited, the value of all her work has jumped in price--even a tiny sketch will be snapped up for $1,000.

*

The potter has slowed down considerably the past few years. She rises at 8 a.m. to shower, read the paper, eat breakfast and get a full-body massage before going back to bed around 10:30. After lunch, she’ll nap again until around 3 p.m., when she’ll work a few hours, take care of business, eat, watch Ted Koppel and retire. She is taking her morning nap when I show up.

“She won’t get up until the mail arrives,” Singh tells me. “The mail puts her in a good mood. She always asks, ‘How many love letters?’ ”

In contrast to Wood (an American in love with all things Indian), Singh, an Indian, wears gray pants, a white shirt, necktie and Hush Puppies. They met in 1961 when Wood was invited by the government of India to lecture on ceramics. Fifteen years later, Beatrice invited him to work for her as business manager and assistant. Except for a brief hiatus, Singh, now 76, has been here since. “It’s been a wonderful opportunity to know a very unusual, beautiful, strong, childlike, amazing person,” he says. “And we have fought each other like hell.”

Wood’s household includes an assistant, Nanci Martinez, and a rotating staff of 10 nurse/caretakers. Two large dogs, the latest of the many strays Wood takes in, roam the house, and a furry brown cat named Coco guards Wood’s spot on the corner sofa when she’s away. Arrayed on the shelves of the small gallery are her famous luster vessels and ceramic figures. In the adjacent room is Wood’s extensive collection of art books and predominantly Indian folk art.

Although the mail has not arrived, Wood is wheeled into the dining room. I barely get out, “Hello, nice to meet you” before she announces: “I’m going to see that all teenage men are to be sent to bordellos to learn the technique of tenderness toward women. Then their wives would never be shrews.”

It’s time to take our seats. The Beatrice Wood show has begun.

Although she abandoned the stage, Wood never really stopped acting. Most of the books and articles about her employ the same quotes; her reputation as a risque and flirtatious old potter calcified years ago. Asked the secret of her longevity, for instance, she always replies: “Young men and chocolate.” My question about whether people make too many demands of her time yields an automatic “I wish men made demands.”

“Beatrice has got her act down pat,” Clark warns me. “Now that she’s older, she relies on rehearsed stories.”

Informed that Beatrice’s time and energy for interviews are limited, I play my role of Gentlemen Caller to the hilt, even bringing a box of See’s Candies. I tease her with raunchy questions (“Come on, Beato, when was the last time you did it?”) and she, playing the coquette, bats her eyelashes and calls me “the most impertinent newspaperman I’ve ever met.” Noticing my tape recorder, she says, “Oh, I’ll have to be careful what I say,” doing a theatrical key turn over her lips. Minutes later, she shocks me by using the F-word--in its literal sense.

To reach the unscripted Beato, I try to ask questions she hadn’t thought about before. How, for instance, at her age, she deals with the photographs and images of herself as a young woman. “I . . . accept age,” she finally says. “Unfortunately--I don’t tell anybody--I’m 104 now. If I weren’t that old, I’d have a face lift. But I don’t dare have one and look 32, so I endure my looks. I don’t like them.”

At other unexpected questions, her eyes go blank for a moment, then she might say a few words before she segues back to more familiar turf.

She becomes genuinely flattered, however, when I ask to see her hands. They are small and beautiful--fingers angled slightly toward the thumbs and covered in skin amazingly soft and taut for a woman her age, especially considering they’ve spent more than 60 years molding clay.

I tell her as much. She smiles and reaches across the table for a chocolate.

*

Not long ago, a wild spray of balloons greeted visitors outside the Beatrice Wood Studio, a large, ranch-style house nestled under the Topa Topa Mountains--upon which she has requested that her ashes be scattered--in the upper Ojai Valley. This has been her home and workshop since 1974. It was listed as a must-see in the Ojai visitors information literature, and art historians, potters and tourists made pilgrimages there.

Wood is a longtime member of the Theosophical Society, believing that truth has been passed down the generations through a series of prophets such as Christ and Buddha. In 1948, Wood moved to Ojai to be closer to the society’s hand-picked avatar, Krishnamurti.

Wood is also the unstinting benefactor of the Happy Valley School--an arts-inflected, noncompetitive college prep school that was the brainchild of the Theosophical Society’s founders. In fact, her current home, although it belongs to her, is on Happy Valley Land.

But much has changed over the past three years. In 1994, a bout with bronchitis and pneumonia, and later, complications from gastrointestinal surgery nearly killed her. The ordeal left her with diminished hearing, failing energy and an impaired sense of balance--the last being the most tragic since she can no longer work the potter’s wheel.

Today, the balloons are gone. And whereas Beato would once personally greet and chat with all comers, this “living treasure” is now a carefully managed entity and access to her is rigidly controlled. Her wheel sits idle in her studio; a sign attached says, “Do Not Touch.” Jars of clay, dye and other chemicals line the walls. Scattered around are tiles, vessels and figures in various states of completion. “When these are finished,” Singh says, “she will not come here anymore.”

Later that afternoon, Wood is sitting on the sofa, Coco on her lap, discussing business with Singh and their bookkeeper. Her L.A. dealer, Frank Lloyd, apparently wants Wood to create a series of lithographs. Singh is opposed to having Beato squander her energy signing hundreds of copies.

“I have no idea whether it’s all right,” she says.

Singh tells her, “I told you how the accounts are coming out. You are making a lot of money, Beatrice. You said, ‘Who wants more money?’ ”

“I’m not really interested in making more money,” she says.

Perhaps as the result of being raised by wealthy parents, money has always “been an idea,” rather than a reality. She not only donates time, artwork and money to various causes, she’s also been known to dole out money on the spot to a hard-luck story or for no reason at all. L.A. artist Lee Waisler, a friend of Beato’s, recalls that in 1970, he offered to help Wood preserve her drawings. Wood told him he could have the whole stack--about 300 pieces, many dating back to the Dada period.

“This is after my second meeting,” he says. “I couldn’t keep any of them, because I felt she didn’t know what she was doing.”

That gift today would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“That’s why it’s bad,” says Otto Heino, an eightysomething potter with wild Einstein hair and a crackling New Hampshire accent. “She trusts people. And they all take advantage of her.” Heino is Wood’s oldest living friend. He, along with his late wife, Vivika, gave her pottery lessons in the late ‘30s. When Wood moved to her current location on Happy Valley land, the Heinos bought Wood’s previous home in the Ojai Valley. For the past three years, Heino says: “I get a funny feeling when I’m up there for lunch.”

The reason for that is an internecine squabble that goes back to 1989, when, perhaps to safeguard herself against her own impulses, Wood created the Beatrice Wood Trust Fund. It was managed, until last year, by Radha Sloss, daughter of the late Rosalind Rajagopal, one of Beato’s closest friends and a founding member of the Happy Valley School. Sloss, too, had been a lifelong friend of Wood’s. In fact, Beato is Sloss’ childhood nickname for Beatrice.

Sloss is on the board of the Happy Valley Foundation, of which her husband is chairman. The foundation will receive whatever Wood doesn’t spend in her lifetime. The documents creating the trust recognized this conflicted allegiance but Wood, “reposing great trust and confidence in Radha R. Sloss,” consented to the arrangement. That agreement was revocable until Wood became ill, when she appointed Sloss her conservator. From that point onward, Wood legally had no say in how her money was spent. Regret soon followed.

“This little girl who had been brought up by two wonderful people who never told another person what to do became like a strict Mama,” Wood says. “‘You can do this. You can’t do that.’ Unbelievable.”

Wood’s tendency to rely on the kindness of strangers left plenty of room for others to make decisions. Sloss claims she reluctantly accepted the responsibility to manage the mounting demands for Beato’s time, money and output. By her own admission, Sloss is “a bit of a tightwad” and her fiscal crackdown bred resentment and gossip, especially in light of her conflict of interest.

“Beato should have been in full control, but Radha watched the books,” Heino says. Last year, he drove up in his new Rolls-Royce to see Wood. “She said, ‘I should have one of those,’ ” Heino says. “I said, ‘Beatrice, spend. Get a nice young man chauffeur and live it up. You can’t take the money with you.’ And Radha says: ‘She doesn’t need a car.’ ”

Sloss denies the conversation ever took place.

Singh also has barely a kind word for Sloss. “She couldn’t stand me and I reciprocated,” he says, blaming Sloss in part for his 1994 firing. Singh returned to India for a year, but, he says, “I was under pressure from [Beatrice] to come back.”

Sloss denies firing Singh. “This is where the whole thing went wrong: We got through several illnesses and everything was going fine, except that, well, she didn’t know exactly what was going on,” she says. “And under doctors’ orders, I closed the studio, maybe a little too abruptly, and that got some people pretty upset. And then a kind of rebellion started.”

Details of this “rebellion” are hard to come by. What is clear is that in 1995, Beatrice Wood sued to end the conservatorship. As the lawyers stepped in and the case wound its way through a Simi Valley courtroom, the circle of friends and artists that surrounded her came asunder. And when the gavel finally came down almost a year later, Sloss was out, Singh was back, Wood had a court-appointed professional conservator named Suzanne McNeely, and the Happy Valley clan was coated with a liberal glaze of bad blood.

(Despite Wood’s ubiquity in the media, this upheaval has escaped mention, save for a few passing references in the Ojai Valley News. Perhaps this is because journalists are usually required to sign a consent form stating, among other things, that “no writing, story, photographic or other image . . . of Beatrice Wood . . . shall be produced or published without the prior approval thereof by the conservator.” The studio staff had neglected to inform me about the consent conditions and only tried to get me to sign it after the interview had taken place.)

The trouble did not end with the court decision. The studio is still haunted by the specter of former employee David Van-Gilder, whom Wood had hired to archive her writing and clippings for the Smithsonian Institution. He and his domestic partner, Kevin Settles, became the studio managers while Singh was back in India. By all accounts, including his own, VanGilder was the most ardent supporter of Wood’s suit. But when Sloss agreed to step down provided the court appoint another conservator, VanGilder found his tenure ending.

VanGilder will say little. “Beatrice is in permanent lifetime conservatorship and when that happened, everyone she knows, and their relationship to her, changed.”

Settles is more forthcoming. “[McNeely] came to us and said, ‘You cannot deal with Beatrice on legal issues. You can’t be involved with her in conversations on a whole myriad of stuff.’ So David went to Beatrice and said, ‘I can’t answer your questions or I’m fired, so I’m out of here.’ ”

Although VanGilder resigned, he did not fade quietly into Ojai’s storybook sunset. He had taken up ceramics during his association with Wood and refers to himself as her apprentice.

McNeely would not consent to be interviewed, but in a statement delivered to the court during a subsequent deposition, she charged that VanGilder’s “consistent demands for attention, increased compensation and authority, and disturbing conflicts of interest utilized an inordinate amount of the conservator’s time and complicated all studio activities.”

The mention of his name is enough to smash the eggshell tranquillity of the studio. When Nanci Martinez discovers I have spoken to VanGilder, our conversation sours.

“I’m going to make a very specific and strong request on behalf of Miss Wood that you do not put in this article any personal scandalous bulls- - - involving her previous employees, or her trust, or her conservatorship,” she says.

Martinez and others say the anxiety surrounding VanGilder stems from his persistent threats of legal action for back pay, among other things, which VanGilder dismisses as “rumors and gossip.”

“This is just so ridiculous,” Martinez says. “Everybody that has money or any type of fame has lawyers and accountants and people swarming around them, trying to pick fleas off their backs and get what they can.”

Martinez, it should be mentioned, is also a potter and owns the Milagro’s Nest Gallery in Ojai, which sells her work and that of other local artists, including Beatrice Wood. VanGilder was a partner in the venture but pulled out.

Of course, infighting and bickering are not unusual in the art world. Many, in fact, compare this situation to the morass that surrounded Georgia O’Keeffe at the end of her life. No one is divulging how much money Wood, or technically, the Beatrice Wood Trust Fund (which had been managed by Sloss’ husband) is worth. Court documents at the time of the suit placed their combined value at about $4.5 million (although Wood’s private documents seem undervalued at $1). According to her will then, no individual, including Singh, VanGilder and Sloss, was to receive more than $10,000. “What’s much more significant is the power that issues from this,” says Waisler, Wood’s friend. “In Ojai, in the different museums and in the commercial art world.”

Watching Wood serenely sitting on the sofa with her sketchbook, each flourish of her pencil bringing a few hundred dollars more into the coffers, it’s hard to imagine her as the epicenter of such turmoil.

“These are the happiest times of my life,” she says, ascribing this to “having given up men.”

Even Sloss agrees that the situation seems stable. She adds cryptically, however, that “If you were to wait, you might have more of a story.” In fact, Wood’s will has been registered with the court, a measure often taken in anticipation of a post-mortal conflict.

“I’m sad to see it happen,” Heino says. “On the other hand, maybe she’ll have the last laugh and outlive them all.”