Family Ties a Creative Force at White Meadows Gallery

Despite its Edenic name, White Meadows used to stable mules. Inside you can still see the mangers once filled with hay for the recalcitrant beasts.

Today, White Meadows is an art gallery and gift shop at 23130 Sherman Way. It is also an evocative reminder of the Valley that once was.

As Shirley Wainess, who owns the business with daughter Lacie, explains, they lease the property from the family of the late Francis Lederer. A Czech-born film star who later established himself as a Hollywood character actor, Lederer and wife, Marion, moved to the West Valley in the 1940s. On 300 acres in what is now West Hills, they built a Spanish Mission-style home out of native stone. It sits on Canoga Hill, overlooking the Mission-style stables below.

Lederer, who died May 25 at the age of 100, grew rich from Valley real estate. But he not only profited from the Valley, he loved it and its history. According to Wainess, he had originally hoped to purchase the Valley’s essential landmark, the San Fernando Mission. When the deal fell through, he settled for creating a pseudo-Mission of his own, complete with tile imported from Spain and European art and artifacts worthy of a minor-league William Randolph Hearst.

Wainess says Lederer’s will has not yet been executed, but she understands that he made provisions to preserve the property as it is and to prevent its being subdivided and developed in the future.

Lederer is a marvelous example of the conjunction of the global and the local that is so typical of the Valley. Suave and seriously handsome, Lederer first became a film star in Germany, where he made his reputation in G.W. Pabst’s 1928 silent classic “Pandora’s Box.”

He starred opposite American actress Louise Brooks, known as “the girl in the black helmet” for her distinctive dark bobbed hair, a gifted actress who became synonymous with the price to be paid for spurning the advances of powerful men in Hollywood.

Lederer crossed the Atlantic in 1932, and soon found himself in the painfully ironic position of so many other Jewish-European refugees in the film business--forced, often by their accents, to make a living playing screen Nazis in movies, such as 1939’s “Confessions of a Nazi Spy.” A year later he was accused of being a Communist, apparently because of his European anti-war work.

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Even as Lederer continued to cobble together an acting career on stage, screen and later television, he became active in the civic life of his adopted city. He served as the county’s Commissioner of Parks and Recreation and was honorary mayor of Canoga Park. In 1957 he founded the American Academy of Performing Arts in Studio City, an acting school whose distinguished students have included Oscar winner Helen Hunt.

The former stables were empty, after an unsuccessful incarnation as an antiques shop, when Wainess took them over last year. She invested $100,000 in the property, turning stalls into mini-galleries, whitewashing stucco and transforming an arid pasture into a blooming garden.

“I just cleaned it up, got to work and had a vision,” she says.

How Wainess found the energy to work this West Valley miracle is something of a mystery. In 1997 she suffered a devastating spinal injury in an automobile accident. She spent almost a year in the hospital and remained in a wheelchair, unable to walk, until last year (she continues to use a cane). Buffeted by the recent loss of almost a dozen family members and friends, she also has survived bouts with breast and thyroid cancer.

“It’s so over the top nobody believes me except my doctors,” she says, with a laugh.

The gallery’s current show means much to Wainess, unashamed to program the space according to her heart.

Organized by friend Susan Kuss, a gifted artist on the board of the VIVA Gallery in Northridge, it is an exhibition on the resonant theme of mothers and daughters, called “Inseparable Wings.”

Seven artists, all but one affiliated with VIVA, have contributed work which not only pays tribute to the mothers of the artists but also documents their sometimes troubled relationships with their daughters.

Kuss’ contribution includes several glowing, Asian-flavored gilt and feathered collages, featuring family photos. One is called “Crooked Little Heart.” Kuss explains that when she started this project four years ago she realized she was angry with her mother, now 83 and in a convalescent home. Kuss felt her mother wasn’t fighting hard enough against the devastation of old age, and she also felt her mother hadn’t supported her sufficiently in the past.

Then, one day when Kuss was going through her parents’ things, she came upon a reminder, long forgotten, of the time she had been arrested for shoplifting.

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Now 53, Kuss was 14 when she and a friend stole blouses from a local May Co. store. When she called her mother from the police station, her mother said she was disappointed, but never mentioned the incident again. And, in spite of having little money, her mother, a single parent, hired an attorney for both Kuss and her friend, who would have been beaten if her parents had discovered what she had done.

Kuss realized the only thing her mother hadn’t supported her in was her painting, which she began a decade ago. And she also realized how difficult her success (she’s had several solo shows of her prize-winning work) must have been for a woman whose own talent never had a chance to flourish.

Kuss’ mother, Adele Hazzard, was trained as an artist and worked as a designer for Norcross, the greeting card company. Her work is represented in the show by a haunting watercolor seascape.

Of her mother’s work for Norcross, Kuss says, “She sold them, for $25, the fluffy little kitten they still use.”

Encouraged by Kuss, her mother has started painting again.

She is one of the lucky ones. The show is full of work by other mothers who longed to create but whose only outlet was making doll clothes or painting metal trays. Their work tears at a viewer’s heart, a reminder of how many women, as poet Marge Piercy writes, are like bonsai, stunted, albeit made decorative, by cultures that allowed them no time or precedent for making art.

The show continues through Aug. 30. The public is welcome at the opening reception Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. For information, call (818) 227-9663.

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Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.