‘Beato’ Remembered for Wit and Warmth

Beatrice Wood was nine days ahead of the game when she eased into death at her home in the mountains Thursday morning.

“She made 105,” said Otto Heino, a fellow potter and longtime friend. “She always wanted to make 105. She did and then she gave up.”

She left behind the adoring fans who knew her as “Beato” and a world that knew her as a vibrant participant in 20th-century art. In the 1920s, she was an intimate of the painter Marcel Duchamp and his circle of Dadaists. Later, she went on to achieve her own phenomenal renown with pottery both whimsical and sophisticated.

No stormy genius, she served as friend and mentor to the many artists who flocked to her ranch house in the shadows of the Topatopa Mountains.

“For local artists, she was a model and inspiration,” photographer Carole Topalian said. “She was something that went beyond human form--something almost mythological.”

Many in Ojai remembered her for her warmth, generosity and relentlessly ribald wit.

Just five days before her death, she hosted a party for James Cameron, director of the movie “Titanic,” and Gloria Stuart, who played Rose, the 101-year-old passenger on the doomed luxury liner. Rose--a liberated and adventurous potter--had been modeled on Wood.

“She was feisty and happy and conversational, like always,” Topalian said. “Someone made a comment that a man was there without his wife and she said, ‘Well, of course I know that!’ ”

For decades, Wood had relished the role of the lustful spinster and played it to its comic hilt.

Photographer Donna Granata evoked that innocent lasciviousness in a famous shot of the artist.

“I wanted a definitive portrait of her--very much a narrative of her character and personality,” Granata said. “And she’d always claimed that chocolate and young men were what kept her young and vibrant.”

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In Wood’s studio, Granata posed four well-built, shirtless young men bearing plates laden with chocolates. When Wood was led in, she beamed with surprised delight.

“At last my dreams have come true!” she cried.

She flirted with the models and cracked one-liners throughout the lengthy photo session. At the time, she was 103.

News of Wood’s death spread quickly through Ojai’s shops, cafes and galleries Thursday afternoon. As they learned of the passing of the town’s most famous resident, people were somber. Some made phone calls to tell friends.

Karen Gocha was shocked. The assistant manager of Milagro’s Nest, the only Ojai gallery carrying Wood’s pieces, couldn’t speak for a few moments. As she took the news in, however, she offered a pithy summing-up of Wood’s life at the potter’s wheel: “Beatrice took pottery and turned it from a craft into a fine art.”

Wood settled in Ojai in 1948. Like numerous other artists and thinkers of the day, she was drawn by the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, who held forth at the Theosophical Society and in Ojai’s famous oak grove.

In the 1950s, she taught art at Happy Valley School, a progressive private high school founded by Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley and others. Her final home was on the rolling grounds of the school in the Upper Ojai.

“The reason people came flocking to her door is because she seemed to embody a sprit of openness and creativity,” said Dennis Rice, Happy Valley’s director.

“For many years, she always opened herself for students to come by and visit. She really liked young people better than people her own age because of their openness toward life and spirit of inquiry. She told me she was lucky she’d never been one of my students because ‘no’ never meant ‘no’ to her. It meant yes.”

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When fans would drop in unannounced, she was a gracious hostess.

Margaret Westrom, executive director of the Ojai Valley Chamber of Commerce, said her office would receive about 25 calls a week from people who wanted to see the famed potter.

“She was a huge tourist attraction,” Westrom said. “People from all over the world came to meet her. . . . She was so generous to our community, so approachable--a lovely lady.”

Over the years, her appeal grew but with her typical elan, Wood shrugged it off.

When she turned 100 and Diane Sawyer flew in for an interview, Wood told her friend Carmen Robertson: “I’m a nice little decorative artist, and it’s just because I’m so goddamned old that I’m getting so much attention.”

Robert Frankel, executive director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, would disagree.

A recent Beatrice Wood show there was extraordinarily popular, he said.

“The sculpture had a wonderful sense of irreverence and humor to it,” he said. “It was something that people responded to very strongly.”

In Ojai, those who knew her responded to Beato with the same enthusiasm as those who knew only her breathtaking glazes.

Artist Ruth Farnham loved what she called the “naive elegance” of Wood’s work, but she cherishes a snapshot taken at a local fund-raiser for the arts:

“It’s of Beato looking absolutely marvelous in all her regalia, and she’s standing with a gorgeous young woman in a belly-dancing outfit. There must be 65 or 70 years between them, but they’re definitely birds of a feather. It’s just marvelous.”

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Chawkins is a Times staff writer and Loree is a correspondent. Correspondent Nick Green contributed to this story.