The Autry Banks on a New Leader

It is a museum prefixed with a single-barreled name, but that one name has colored most expectations of what is inside it--the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park, founded and named after Gene Autry, the original singing cowboy of film, television and radio fame.

True, his money, some $55 million of it via the Autry Foundation, and his collection of both personal memorabilia and Western artifacts opened the museum in 1988, but museum staff are quick to point out that this is not a shrine to Gene Autry. Autry died last October at 91 after a long and glorious career both as celebrity and as businessman (he owned radio stations and the Anaheim Angels).

“Unlike some other museums,” quips Jackie Autry, his widow, “you won’t see his stuffed horse here.” In fact, four years ago his first name was dropped from the museum’s title, to try to refocus the museum’s image from the personal to the public, to make clear that it is a place with a broader mission, one that attempts to present the history of the American West--mythology, reality and all.

It is also true that from the beginning the museum was formed and run by a small, close-knit team, many of them still in place. But this year, 11 years after its opening, and with considerable achievements to its name--the 148,000-square-foot facility, a reputation as a major museum of Western history and half a million visitors a year--the museum’s founding executive director Joanne Hale is stepping down. A friend of the Autrys, she is passing the reigns to an outsider, John Gray, a banker who was hired after an extensive nationwide search.

Hale cites personal reasons for leaving the job she created--wanting to spend more time with her family--but also, she says, “I thought it would be really innovating for the museum to have a new director who will bring some exciting new ideas and a vision for the future.”

She won’t be far away, though; she remains as president of the museum’s board of directors and has agreed to weekly meetings with Gray.

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It all started with the kind of self-reliant, can-do energy that the West was founded on. In 1985, the idea was raised at a dinner Gene and Jackie Autry shared with Joanne Hale and her husband Monte (also a former movie cowboy). After Gene gave the nod, Jackie and Joanne started plowing through the masses of material stored at Autry’s Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita, which had served for years as a film studio. They bought a one-ton truck and hauled all the interesting things they could salvage to a Burbank warehouse.

“This went on forever, forever!” recalls Hale good-naturedly. “It wasn’t until the end of the year [1986] that I started to think, we need a curator.” They hired the husband-and-wife team of James and Mary Ellen Hennessey Nottage. (He is now the museum’s vice president and chief curator, and she is vice president for collections and exhibitions.)

The collection was growing by leaps and bounds. In 1986 they bought a private Western history collection in Temecula, instantly adding 11,000 objects. In 1988 they began their art collection by buying a group of 30 Western genre paintings. “It was always basically a Western history museum, not a Western art museum,” explains Hale. “Art is dispersed throughout the gallery--it has to be meaningful with our collection.”

Finally, the new museum--a massive building, architecturally a cross between Spanish Mission style and Modernism--opened in November 1988.

The Autrys continued to contribute objects, and the Autry Foundation helped pick up the shortfall in operating expenses--after admissions, shop sales and grants were tallied.

Fund-raising efforts are ongoing, especially for programming and acquisitions, though Jackie Autry admits the Autry name deters donors: “[They think] he’s got more money than God, so why should I support it?”

A direct, no-nonsense sort of lady, she has a business background and has helped run the family enterprises. She is especially comfortable talking about the nuts and bolts of things, though she clearly has opinions about the museum’s direction.

This spring the remaining 75% of Gene Autry’s share in the Anaheim Angels baseball team was sold to Disney--the total deal has been estimated at more than $120 million--and Jackie Autry has said the money will go to the museum. Asked about it now, Autry says that funds from “my husband’s estate” have been set up for the museum in an irrevocable trust. Hale confirms that an endowment, which the museum does not have now, is in the works.

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John Gray is a trim, soft-spoken man with a subdued manner honed through years of boardroom diplomacy. His lack of museum experience is notable--he spent the past two years as an associate deputy administrator at the Small Business Administration in Washington, and before that he worked 15 years for First Interstate Bank in Denver and Los Angeles.

Jackie Autry, a member of the search committee, is quick to defend his appropriateness for the job. “Having come from the business world, I realize that you need a businessperson to run a museum,” she says flatly. “Sometimes museum people have what I call ‘tunnel vision’--they can see their area of expertise, but can they see someone else’s problem in another department, for example, membership or marketing?”

“John had a lot of nonprofit experience in the city of L.A.,” says Hale, who herself was a entrepreneur before she assumed the Autry museum mantle. “I thought he would be a terrific administrator and that he would be a team player.”

Contacted about the job through the search committee, Gray was already familiar with the Autry Museum through his years in Los Angeles. “What really attracts me about the Autry is the way it integrates Western history and connects it together,” he says. “It’s really giving us the context and explaining why we have that context--why we have the Western myth and its various components.”

He’s guarded about his plans for the future, though. He says that he wants “to bring deep community involvement and expansion of the Autry’s activities in the community.” He agrees with Jackie Autry that the museum is primarily a “family-oriented one.”

In the short term, plans are to expand the education center and to prioritize the museum’s goals, and both Autry and Gray suggest that the museum’s mission statement will become more narrowly defined. (Right now the museum’s scope encompasses prehistory to the modern day and, geographically, west of the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean.)

“I’ve been given the opportunity to take a functioning, exciting, stimulating place and expand it,” Gray says. “It is a growth opportunity, managerially and aesthetically and intellectually.”

The museum’s holdings now number about 45,000 pieces of art and artifacts, some displayed in the seven permanent, thematically arranged galleries. The objects emphasize America’s frontier history of the 19th and early 20th centuries--cowboys and Indians, lawmen and outlaws, of course, but also all those other people who built the West--Chinese and Mexican Americans included.

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To celebrate the Western myth or to explode it: The Autry seems to stand astride both missions. The contrast is especially sharp as one enters the Spirit of Romance Gallery, which flows right into the Spirit of Imagination Gallery. First, one is greeted with Thomas Moran’s “Mountain of the Holy Cross” (1875), a large oil painting of rapids running through the great jagged American wilderness and, prominently in the backdrop, a glowing “cross” cut by nature into the side of a mountain. The painting was made to strike awe in the hearts of viewers--and did (it was famous in its time)--as well as to make the connection between the American frontier and Manifest Destiny. Meanwhile, the Imagination Gallery is about movie cowboys, with their shiny pistols, props and costumes, and movie stills enshrined in display cases.

On the border between Romance and Imagination lies a section devoted to William F. Cody, also known as the legendary Buffalo Bill, including his ornately tooled saddle, posters from his Wild West Show and other paraphernalia. As explained in text and a short video, Cody was a man who shamelessly mythologized the West and his own place in the fable. Early popular literature and film held him up as the hero he wanted to be known as, but by Robert Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976)--we see a billboard used in the movie as well as clips--we see him as the self-promoting huckster he was.

Right now special exhibitions on view include “California Deserts: Today and Yesterday,” which compares photos of desert sights taken between 1911 and 1950 with those taken today. “Fingerprints and Footsteps: Uncovering Family Stories” is the result of two fifth-grade classes, one from Castelar Elementary, one from Mount Washington Elementary, working with museum staff to create an exhibition using material from their own lives and diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Edgier exhibitions are on the horizon. This summer the museum will present an exhibition about balladeer-social activist Woody Guthrie, titled “This Land Is Your Land,” that was organized by the Smithsonian. Next spring there will be a major show organized by the museum’s staff about Los Angeles’ Chinatown, based on Lisa See’s “On Gold Mountain.” The latter will address some dark moments of Western history--the persecution of Chinese immigrants.

Jackie Autry sees no contradiction in the range of such programming. She believes the museum is being true to the spirit of her late husband, who loved the history of the West and knew that his films were only a fictionalized account. “He wanted to leave something behind that was maybe not as phony as his movies portrayed,” she says, “something that represented what he believed the [real] history of the West to be.” *

* Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles. (323) 667-2000. Open Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Adults, $7.50; seniors and students, $5; children 5 and under, $3.