APOSTLE OF ART

Sister Wendy has just convinced a Beverly Hills waiter to sing one of his songs. The patio restaurant where she is having lunch sparkles with Old Hollywood directors, Rodeo Drive shoppers and polished young faces ready for their close-up, but only one woman is being serenaded. The nun in the sensible shoes.

Somewhere between the poached salmon entree, the refills of bread and olive oil and the three glasses of wine, she elicited the young man’s dream of composing a Broadway musical. Not only that, she reassured him she wanted nothing more than to hear him sing. He can’t. He doesn’t, he’d really rather not. But here he is singing, shyly, on one knee, beside her chair.

Such close encounters of the social kind are rare. At age 68, Sister Wendy Beckett lives alone in a trailer on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, England, where she rises in the dark morning to begin a day of silent prayer.

She entered the Sisters of Notre Dame at 16 but received permission from the Vatican 25 years later to leave that order and pursue a life of solitude. Since then she has lived as a hermit in Norfolk. She knew what she wanted long before age 16. Born in South Africa, the oldest child of a medical doctor, she chose her future at an early age.

“From the time I was 2, my parents knew I would be a nun,” she says. “I always wanted to belong completely to God.”

Most days in Norfolk, the only person she sees is the one who brings her food from the monastery kitchen. She lives on skim milk, rye crackers and coffee. Seven hours of prayer, hours more spent reading and writing, account for most of her time in the last 25 years. It is mesmerizing to watch her talk. She does it so well with so little practice.

Just how well, American television audiences have only begun to discover. The recluse in black and white stole hearts with her five-part series, “The Story of Painting,” when it aired on PBS last year. A Scheherazade in a nun’s habit, she weaves biography and cultural history with bits of gossip (Van Gogh wanted to be a minister but was rejected) and a few mildly shocking asides (her description of a nude with “lovely, fluffy pubic hair” is memorable).

She is in Los Angeles to research her next television project. The empire continues to expand. Her new book, “Nativity” (HarperCollins), with art from the Vatican Museum, arrives in stores in December. And a growing stack of videos on art are finding their way into book stores, museum shops and school libraries.

For all the curiosity about her dual life as a hermit and art critic, it is her teeth that get most of the attention. Large, square and white, they have been described with a snicker as her “signature,” and compared kindly to a “varied and dispersed” family picnic. She speaks of them as if they were a technical difficulty.

Strange that no one comments on her eyes, which are accustomed to looking straight, but gently, into others, so attentively that she could make anyone feel as if he were the only other person in the room.

Her luminous face has encouraged captains of industry to tell their life’s story, and movie moguls to serve cakes shaped like castles when she is a dinner guest. But it is her hands that reveal her deepest desires. She maintains her hands, small as a child’s and unnaturally smooth, with constant prayer and the slow turning of art book pages.

As an art expert, she is completely self-taught “but seriously,” she insists. (She is an Oxford graduate; her degree is in literature.) Most of what she knows about art comes from books. She never expected to see the originals.

“She’s an extraordinary comfortable emissary for works of art,” says Graham Beal, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who gave her a tour of the museum’s highlights.

Her passion for the subject once nearly killed her.

“I have so many books, they toppled on me in the night,” she says. How a nun vowed to poverty acquired a tower of art books is a story Beal can unravel. Sister Wendy has a knack for inspiring in strangers an unusual generosity.

“Twenty years ago I received a postcard from a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, England,” Beal says. “It was asking for a George Segal catalog.” At the time, Beal was director of the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. While he was there, he sent several books to Norfolk without charge. When he moved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, postcards from Norfolk started arriving there.

When he finally met Sister Wendy at LACMA, Beal understood.

“I was impressed by the depth of her knowledge, even of artists who are not as well known,” he says. “I guess I’m not the only one she’s been writing to.”

She was sleeping on the floor when the books came tumbling down. It is only in recent years that she allows herself a foldaway bed. After the near disaster, the Carmelites built a library for her collection. Their kindness has not gone unrepaid. Most of the money Sister Wendy earns goes to the church, but a certain amount goes to the monastery. The rest goes to a pension for Sister Wendy’s older age.

It would seem people would keep their distance from a woman dressed in the formal habit of religious life, but Sister Wendy seems to set them at ease. Not only art curators but her editor, her agent and her frequent director and producer, David Wilcock, call her “Wendy.” Or just plain “Wens.”

“She is one of the guys,” he says. “The only thing she hates is being called madame.” Shopkeepers sometimes slip that way.

Wilcock came with her to Los Angeles to research their next project, “Sister Wendy’s American Collections.” Filming begins next fall. He is an Oxford-trained musician, nearly half her age, who sings German lieder and Beatles songs for her, when asked. He seems used to it and requires less coaxing than the waiters and taxi drivers she meets in her travels.

Their friendship is a testament to a quality Wilcock sees as part of her appeal on camera.

“She says what she feels. It’s ‘like me or loathe me.’ ”

“At first we were put off by each other,” he says. “Wendy said I’d be very good on the practical things, but I lacked poetry.”

They got past that hurdle; he now calls himself her “tough cop” protector. During their day at LACMA, it is Wilcock who notices that she needs a coffee break. In the painting wing, he shares the wheelchair that she uses like a golf cart, and which he uses like a director’s chair. She talks openly about her frail health. For years she has had epilepsy and a weak heart.

“If I’d known what it would entail, I wouldn’t have had enough generosity to say, ‘yes’ to television,” Sister Wendy admits. “But I see from the response that it’s working. I see it as my apostolic duty to talk about art.

“So many people live in a prison of daily life with no one to tell them to look out or look up. If you don’t know about God, art is the only thing that can set you free. It satisfies and challenges the human spirit to accept a deeper reality.”

Solitude can dull a mind, which is not an asset in an art commentator. Sister Wendy found a way to fight that. “Logical puzzles, any sort of puzzle.” Her editor at HarperCollins, Larry Ashmead, says that she is not a worldly person but that he was surprised to discover that she can be tempted.

“We have to lock everything up when she comes to the office,” he says. “She loves jigsaws, and crime stories and mysteries. I asked her how she can read so many books and pray so much. She said, ‘You can pray and read at the same time.’ ”

By noon at LACMA, Sister Wendy and Wilcock have rolled through the furniture and glass displays, the South Eastern exhibit and the gift shop where the sales women ask for her autograph. Along the way a teen in moon boots tells her, “You really have an eye.” A man on the run calls to her, “I’m always interested to hear what you have to say.”

Countless times she has held forth, then crumpled in her chair like a sail that lost the wind.

“I’m putting it on,” she says of her energy level. “Later I’ll be slumped over.”

Not as long as there is another gallery to visit. Put Sister Wendy in a room full of art, and an electric current starts to flow through her. She begins talking about the artists and their subjects as if she were on the closest personal terms.

“My dear friend, George Inness,” she says, pausing to study his sleepy landscape from the late 1800s. “It’s such a safe world, the world of Inness. They’re not great paintings but profoundly good.”

For each profoundly good one, she dismisses four or five as utterly bad. A country lord resting near the day’s hunt gets a scolding.

“Exhausted by killing off innocent creatures and expecting our admiration? No. Absolutely not.”

A dark, American portrait inspires a shrug. “Too cardboardy.”

A French Impressionist cityscape calls for a passing glance. “Too blobby.”

Museum staff members stand a few inches away. Another sort of art critic might be more discreet.

“It’s good that she says what she thinks,” Beal says. “Sister Wendy demystifies art. She shows us it’s OK not to like every master artwork.”

“Sometimes I’m too quick to judge,” she admits.

How often?

“Well, not very often.”