Legends of Leisure

If you happen to visit Malaysia’s fanciest new hotel and find yourself looking at the walls and wondering . . . well, you’re not crazy. Those wall brackets at the Palace of the Golden Horses are shaped like monkeys. Here’s why:

A half a world away, a man named Gerald L. Allison imagined that once upon a time, great floods threatened the home of a Malaysian peasant couple named Abdul and Normala. Then he imagined how 100 of the local primates might have rescued their human friends, by hoisting their hut above the surging water.

And then he rewarded those heroic monkeys by placing plaster castings shaped just like them in a hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

That’s how it goes with Jerry Allison, a 66-year-old architect in Newport Beach who makes up bedtime stories for his grandkids, then turns them into resorts for the world’s elite.

He did it first with the astonishing Lost City in South Africa, which looks like the ruins of an empire centuries old, except for a few features of modernity--like a casino and golf course. From its Cheetah Fountain to Elephant Walk Atrium, every inch tells the tale of a tribe that wandered south and created a new realm based on its memories of a grand architectural past.

Some called it a “white man’s fantasy of Africa.” Never mind. Tourists have flocked there since it opened in 1993.

Then Malaysia requested a Jerry Allison special and got the hotel that opened there last year. Then Taiwan wanted one, so the Promised Land--with two hotels--is now under construction. Its fable? Long, long ago, there was a couple who set off from mainland China with only the secret writing on an amulet to guide them to a land where “all good wishes are granted . . .”

Hotel Designs Have Sparked Controversy

You get a lot of debate these days over “Disney-fication.” Is musical theater going Disney? Is Times Square? What about shopping malls? Radio, even?

Allison’s work extends the debate to hotels.

One of the principal partners in the firm Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo, he has designed two hotels right at Disney parks: the Grand Floridian Beach Resort at Walt Disney World in Orlando, and the Disneyland Hotel in the Euro Disneyland resort in France. But it’s with his projects in Africa, Malaysia and Taiwan that he truly has turned “Imagineer” of sorts, designing resorts that are theme parks in themselves.

The fables on which they are based are painstakingly grounded, he says, in “the unique physical, social and cultural environment of their locale.” Authentic fables, though, can’t guarantee happy endings--like the best art, they often prod and irritate, making their audiences uncomfortable.

Allison’s fables include a moral dimension, to be sure--drawn right from the Golden Rule--but in the end embrace the essence of comfort. They generate the same combination of feelings--of awe yet warmth--that help drive Disney’s animated films, such as “The Lion King,” to box office heights.

Allison’s fans include science fiction master Ray Bradbury and music impresario Quincy Jones, for whom he is designing a 20,000-square-foot home in the hills of Bel-Air. Allison also has made an ornament for the White House Christmas tree.

But when the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood exhibited Disney designs last year and brought in architects to discuss the genre, Allison’s work became a lightning rod. One panelist, Eric Owen Moss, did not hide his derision.

“Nobody is saying this doesn’t take talent,” Moss said later. “But talent in the service of what? You sometimes hear that the winners write the history. I think this one is the bankers write the history, the PR people.

“It’s a kind of mercantile pastiche . . . an attempt to tie into pseudo-history and create a sense of grandeur and power and opulence that people selling hotel rooms or gambling casinos think will convince, induce or seduce their clientele to come running with their checkbooks and ATM cards.”

Moss is a different breed of architect, who embraces the role of artist-as-critic. He helped transform Culver City’s defunct rail corridor with dramatic open spaces that use panels of brick, metal and scraps of machinery, even sewer pipes. It’s an attempt to integrate the new L.A. with a history Moss sees as gritty--one of old brick and corrugated metal warehouses--not the charming Spanish Mission style many cling to.

Moss and others like him have little use for fellow architects they see as pandering to mass tastes, whether it’s Allison or Jon Jerde (the Westside Pavilion, Universal CityWalk) or Vegas folks who sell ancient Rome as a Caesar’s Palace where “women are getting chased and white wine is flowing . . . a kind of ‘Animal House’ representation.”

Another panelist, UCLA professor Barton Phelps, noted that Allison’s “architecture of escapism and fantasy” inevitably will be contrasted with the “romantic notion of the architecture of idiosyncratic genius” as embodied, say, by Frank Gehry’s acclaimed sculpture-like museum in Bilbao, Spain.

“Intellectuals tend to react negatively,” Phelps said, “but the architecture of fantasy probably has an older history than that of a morally pure architecture.”

Allison shrugs off the purists. He says right out: I’m not Frank Gehry.

The purpose of a resort, he says, “is not to please the architect . . . but the customer.” His standard of success? “When the client says, ‘That’s neat.’ ”

His Approach Dates Back to Sojourn in Hawaii

Yet such self-effacing comments belie how much pride Allison takes in his fable hotels.

His inspiration goes back decades, to his days as a fledgling architect in Hawaii. A 1955 graduate of the University of Washington, he began his career in Seattle but discovered there were “more architects than projects.” So he headed for the “very romantic sounding” islands and stayed 25 years.

He joined the firm of George “Pete” Wimberly, who converted Waikiki’s famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel back from military to civilian use after World War II--and who assigned Allison, in the ‘60s, to expand the Coco Palms Hotel on Kauai.

The hotel owner, Grace Busher Guslander, found that guests liked “native” stories, preferably with a colorful ceremony.

“At night she had what she called the Legends of Coco Palms, [where] they would do chants,” Allison recalls. “They were adjacent to a coco palm grove, and a runner would light torches while she told the story of ancient Hawaii, a huge drum beating. Then an outrigger canoe came down the canal. All very romantic and all very fictional--but everyone loved it.”

He and Guslander would walk the grounds to “find an object we could give a story to. Maybe this was where a queen was born or a great warrior died.”

Allison proved a natural storyteller, writing columns called “Beach Boy Architect” for local newspapers and architect publications, on everything from turtle watching to the plight of boat people. He also made up bedtime stories for his two girls and, later, his grandkids. When his daughters enrolled at USC, he returned to the mainland, opening a California branch of the firm in 1982.

Allison met Disney’s brand of storytelling when hired to design its upscale Grand Floridian. He set out to create a “seamless fantasy” of turn-of-the-century life, including “grandma’s attic” rooms with sloping ceilings.

At the opening of his next Disney hotel, in Paris, he befriended novelist Bradbury. The author of “The Martian Chronicles” hates modern architecture (“Have you looked at that crap?”) and considers the Grand Floridian “the best hotel in the world . . . incredibly lovely, incredibly social . . . the color scheme, the warmth . . . the interior grand salon, five to six stories tall, where kids can get on the top and spit down below.”

Bradbury’s recent passion has been teaching creativity (“helping people open themselves up”), and he views Allison as a model of it. Let the critics say what they want. “He creates beauty.”

Quincy Jones was a fan of Allison before he realized they had been high school classmates in Seattle.

“Man, he’s a genius, are you kidding?” says the man who has produced music for figures as diverse as Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson. “Out of the 100 hotels I love in the world, Jerry’s done 84. The Lost City . . . it’s almost a surrealist fairy tale. That suite there--I literally stayed up all night in the front room, enjoying it.”

Making Up a Heritage

It was casino mogul Sol Kerzner who hired Allison a decade ago to create that resort in Sun City, 115 miles from Johannesburg, and later to work on his Atlantis resort in the Bahamas.

“There wasn’t any architectural heritage in this [Sun City] region,” he says. “So I made up a story.”

Actually, he came up with 28 “legends” outlining how a lost tribe restored an architectural past out of, if not Disney, a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza. At the center of the complex was a honey-colored palace, patinated to look ages old.

Allison said the challenge was “to re-create an authentic architecture that never existed.” If that sounds head-spinning, consider the skylights: They had to be framed by elephant tusks, Allison reasoned, because that’s how “the Ancients Ones” would have done it if they’d had skylights. (Of course, he had to use artificial tusks wrapped around steel framing.)

There’s a rain forest watered by remote control and a beach washed by man-made waves. The Ancient Ones’ golf course (OK, Gary Player helped them create it) has hazards protected by crocodiles. The water slide? It once had been a “Temple of Courage.”

“The guests just love this sort of thing,” Allison says. “And, of course, the client loved it--because it increased the room rate and the occupancy rate.”

In the Malaysian city of Kuala Lumpur, though, his 481-room Palace of the Golden Horses opened at a bad time, with the Asian fiscal crisis brewing. Nevertheless, it played host in November to world diplomatic leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. President Clinton was detained by domestic pressures and couldn’t join the gathering at the complex, where--between talk of tariff reductions--guests could choose between sunbathing on a beach and playing in (artificial) snow.

The equine theme is everywhere, from the painted ceiling to the marble floors: horse chandeliers, horse ashtrays, carpets adorned with horseshoes--and the huge sculpture showing a tangle of golden horses rushing across a swollen river.

The sculpture comes right out of the fable of Abdul and Normala. Sometime after she has been rescued from the floods, Normala is in an oxcart being pulled by the golden horses. With her is a golden sun bear she has saved and the monkey that was her house pet, pointing the way to a tree that yields a magic elixir.

Allison’s commitment to “authenticity” got a test here: Horses are not native to Malaysia. But Lee Kim Yew, whose firm owns the resort complex, insisted. The love of horses, he argued, transcends national boundaries. And he was the client.

“I had to find a way to make the horses work,” Allison reports.

New Projects and New Stories to Tell

Since the Malaysian project, Allison’s firm has designed the $1.5-billion Venetian hotel-casino in Las Vegas that opens officially this month. Allison himself was behind the MGM Grand’s new palace-like wing for its biggest gamblers. At first, he wasn’t going to share his story line for the MGM Grand structure (yes, he had one), figuring “high rollers are probably not that interested.” But just in case, there’s a 10-page fable about an Italian clan, the Leones, who date to the Roman empire and built this magnifico mansion. . . .

Next up?

Allison is designing a ranch community in Colorado, based on the story of “a guy coming from the mountains of Austria.” In Taiwan, meanwhile, he wants guests to “live out” his Promised Land legend of the Chinese couple using the amulet to find the special place. So he’s designing actual amulets with secret writing to give visitors.

“The first person to decode it gets a prize.” he says.

And then there’s Jones’ “dream house” on a hillside, a project likely to take two years and that well may gain Allison cache among the show biz elite.

Jones, like Bradbury, sloughs off the architect’s critics, saying: “The rappers call them player-haters. Somebody’s successful and somebody’s jealous.”

This design, Allison swears, will not have one of his fables behind it. Not when the client--for a change--is the “true legend.”

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Paul Lieberman can be reached by e-mail at paul.lieberman@latimes.com.

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Times staff writer Evelyn Iritani contributed to this report from Malaysia.