A Hollywood Legend

“The place had a magic, an ancient feeling, like a stone fortress that has withstood and sheltered and abides.” --Esther van Dekker, describing the Freeman House, where she, her struggling actor husband and infant daughter lived for eight months in the mid-’30s.

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As quirky as the couple for whom it was built, the Freeman House sits in a state of disrepair overlooking a Hollywood in transition. But the innovative Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residence, built in 1924-25 for $23,000, is at last getting a $1.2-million shoring-up, prelude to a planned renovation. Last week, holes 28 feet deep were being drilled, and 11 of the 23 caissons that will anchor the house to its hillside lot at 1962 Glencoe Way were being placed. The overgrown landscaping was being cleared to make room for scaffolding. The Rudolph Schindler-designed built-in furniture had been removed to storage.

Drilling that first hole without incident was a watershed, said Dean Robert H. Timme of the USC School of Architecture. “There were so many unknowns. We were afraid we were going to hit something down underneath there, the road or something.” The 2,500-square-foot house is one of four Los Angeles-area houses designed by Wright known as textile-block houses, so named for their patterned concrete-block interior and exterior walls, and is architecturally important as the prototype for his Usonian houses of the ‘30s, which reflect the changing American lifestyles through their “tadpole” design--large living/dining area, small private rooms.

Inside the Freeman House, a spacious, high-ceilinged living room, anchored on the north with a massive fireplace, is the piece de resistance. The kitchen and both bedrooms are, by today’s standards, on the small side. Originally, there was one bath. A second, a makeshift affair added later, will be ripped out.

The house was designed for Harriet and Samuel Freeman, an avant-garde couple who were part of a social-artistic-political circle that included actor Claude Rains, dancers Martha Graham and Bella Lewitzky and photographer Edward Weston. Over five decades, it was the setting for many a salon gathering.

Built on a soft-soil slope in an era of far less rigid construction codes, the house presented problems long before the 1994 Northridge earthquake, from which it suffered significant damage. The 16-by-16-inch concrete blocks for the walls were molded with on-site sand, and over the years many absorbed water and crumbled. Steel rods holding the blocks in place rusted. “Even without the earthquake, there would have been continuous deterioration,” Timme says.

Former boarder Wyn Evans, who as a struggling young dancer in the late ‘30s occupied the living-room sofa, told Jeffrey Chusid, a former USC architecture professor and onetime resident director of the house, that even then, “water came in through the doors, and the cement walls were always damp. The little things, like being damp and being smelly, didn’t seem to bother [the Freemans].”

And Wright was not always the most practical of men. The house was designed without a broom closet, and without a space for the hot water heater, which was plopped outside. “He didn’t care about things like that,” Timme says. “He was an artist.” Today, the home’s reflecting pool stands empty. Its walls are buckling, its ceilings discolored, the wood floor in the living room warped. Throughout, there is a certain mustiness.

The house has stood vacant since 1997, when Chusid, the last tenant, moved out. He had been resident director since USC took over ownership in 1986, as stipulated in Harriet’s will. And it has been at the eye of a storm of controversy as USC struggled to find funds to restore it.

The Freemans had no children, and Harriet bequeathed the house to USC in 1983, three years before she died in it. Five years earlier her husband had also died there. For 14 years, the house has been in restoration limbo, a victim both of its intrinsic structural shortcomings and, more recently, of the earthquake damage.

Harriet left $200,000 for maintenance, but that has been long since used up. As walls buckled and water seeped in, the university scrambled to find funds to bring the house back up to snuff. Shored up with wooden planks and tented to keep out rain, Wright’s house had become not only an eyesore, neighbors complained, but also a magnet for crime.

If USC couldn’t find the money to make more than “a half-hearted effort” to fix it, they asked, why didn’t they turn the house over to someone who could?

USC considered selling--Harriet Freeman’s will made no stipulation that would have prevented them from doing so--but there was one huge stumbling block: $760,000 in Federal Emergency Management Assn. funds promised to USC for earthquake damage repairs would not have transferred to a new owner.

The FEMA funds became the center of the debate surrounding the fate of the house. The money was far short of the $3.6 million requested by USC, and, in rejecting it, Timme said the university could not take on such an “enormous [financial] liability.” All but $262,000 of the FEMA money, he said, would have to go to things such as permits and engineering fees.

What has changed? USC has accepted the FEMA money and supplemented it with $500,000 from funds donated to USC for use at the university’s discretion. And, Timme says, “we have no intention to sell the property.”

There’s still not enough money in hand to return the house to pristine condition--Timme estimates that would take an additional $1 million to $1.5 million--but there is enough to make the landmark residence structurally sound. That means adding steel beams, caissons and reinforcing pillars, and replacing the roof. Since buildup of the area and its traffic, says Timme, “this house has the pressure of the whole road on it--and it’s on a hillside.”

When this phase of the restoration is completed, he says, “the house will look pretty much the same, but structurally it will be secure.” The interior cosmetics, including replacement of the bastardized kitchen, remodeled in the mid-’50s in a style Timme describes as “early Eisenhower,” will wait. It is a compromise, one that USC hopes will enable it to open the house for limited tours by next summer and to initiate a series of “electronic salons” to be Webcast from the house starting in the fall. Timme envisions gatherings of small groups of creative types in the fields of architecture, fine arts, music and theater interacting with computer users worldwide. It is a logical use for the house, he says, as the paucity of parking in the area is not conducive to large gatherings.

A major fund-raising campaign to raise the additional monies and to establish a maintenance endowment in perpetuity is being considered.

All of this is music to the ears of not only neighbors but conservationists who had watched the house’s deterioration with alarm. Says Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, “We could build a replica for less, but what we have here is a real treasure, part of a collection” of Wright’s textile block houses in Los Angeles. The others, all privately owned, are the Millard House (La Miniatura) in Pasadena, the Storer House in Hollywood and the Ennis-Brown House in Los Feliz. The Freeman House is a City of Los Angeles Cultural Monument and is on the National Registry of Historic Places. But architectural merit aside, Dishman adds, the Freeman House has historical and cultural importance, as does “the Freemans’ role within Los Angeles.”

“We’re extraordinarily happy. This is a good first step, just saving the house,” says neighbor Edward Andrzejczk, one of those who had been openly critical of USC’s stewardship, weary of seeing what he terms “a pile of rubble.” He adds, “They’re not doing a full museum-quality restoration, and that’s fine” for now.

Timme says, “It would probably be cheaper to take this house down and put it back up” in a less-congested area, but “it wouldn’t make any sense” because it is a house designed for its site. He likes to think of the rebuilding of this house and the rebirth of Hollywood as part of one chapter in the city’s ongoing cultural history.

To put things in context, the Freeman House was completed three years after the Egyptian Theater opened nearby on Hollywood Boulevard, and, on Mount Lee, the Hollywoodland (now just Hollywood) sign went up, promoting a new housing tract. Hollywood was in the ascendant.

As Timme takes a visitor through the house, where workmen are attacking obsolete plumbing and removing crumbling blocks, it is possible to picture the somewhat eccentric Harriet Freeman conducting her weekly dance classes in the big, airy, high-ceilinged living room.

It is somewhat more difficult to envision the view from that room in 1925, when the Freeman House sat with only one other on narrow, winding Glencoe Way, then a dirt road, and the roar of the traffic on Highland Avenue below didn’t drown out conversation on the terrace.

A Home With a Storied Past

Born Harriet Press to Lithuanian immigrant parents in Omaha in 1890 and reared in Iowa and Manhattan, Harriet Freeman came with her sister Leah to California in 1919 to join their brother Abe, a tubercular who’d moved West for his health and had opened a spa in Hollywood.

In 1921, she met and married Samuel Freeman, 32, who was born in Manhattan to Hungarian immigrants. His family had moved West when he was 17, and while still a teenager he’d changed his name from Friedman. He was a partner in a family-owned downtown jewelry store.

Harriet, whose passion was the dance, had a fling with show business, playing a mermaid in a movie and joining the road company of a Rudolf Friml musical, “Glorianna.” Through her sister, who taught nursery school with Schindler’s wife, Pauline, she met Schindler, who was to play a major role in her life--and that of the Freeman House.

“She was strong-willed and charismatic and fun and interesting,” says Chusid, who now heads the historic preservation program at the University of Texas in Austin. She would be pleased, he says, “absolutely,” to know of Timme’s plan to hold “electronic salons” in her house and would have loved to see the house “continue its contributions to the city’s artistic and cultural life.”

The Freemans were, by all accounts, the odd couple. Timme says, “It’s reported they went as much as two years without talking to one another.” Sam hated the house, it’s said, and many times threatened to move. But it’s also said that the house kept their marriage together--neither was willing to give it up.

Harriet loved traveling. Sam, a man of habit and routine, hated it. His passion was politics. Both Freemans were Communists, and he enjoyed proselytizing for the Communist Party.

At the time Wright was commissioned to design their house, they were people of modest means. When the original estimate of $9,100 plus $900 commission ballooned to $23,000, they were hard-pressed to meet the bills and initially made do with cardboard boxes as furniture.

Schindler, the famed Viennese-born architect, was hired by Harriet around 1928 to modify the Wright design, adding an apartment under the garage and converting a study between the two bedrooms downstairs into a tiny apartment with kitchenette.

“They only rented to interesting people,” dancer Evans told Chusid, who interviewed her and Dekker in 1987.

Garage apartment tenants included Spanish-born “rumba king” Xavier Cugat. The Freemans also took in down-on-their-luck actors such as Dekker and, later, blacklisted film industry figures.

The Freemans’ fortunes took a decided turn for the better in 1938, when Sam received an inheritance enabling him to retire at the age of 49. Harriet, meanwhile, was teaching dance and exercise classes at Hollywood High and to starlets at Warner Bros. Studios, as well as privately.

Among those welcomed into their social circle was a young dancer, Rudi Gernreich, later to gain fame as creator of the topless swimsuit. While segueing from dancing to costume design, he designed clothes for Harriet.

And there was Schindler, who’d come to Los Angeles in 1920 to supervise construction of the Wright-designed Hollyhock House for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, soon afterward opening his own studio. It’s said he was both Harriet’s architect and her lover, and over 25 years, until his death in 1953, he left his controversial imprint on the house.

In addition to designing the garage apartment, which will be a caretaker’s residence after the renovation, he was commissioned by Harriet to design the built-in furniture that horrifies Wright purists. Timme finds much of it “inconsistent” with the Wright design and, in some instances, intrusive.

Preserving a Piece of L.A. Legend

Today, making the house safe is the first priority. “If we can stabilize it securely,” Timme says, he is confident individual donors will come up with the money to return the rooms and design elements to their original condition in return for recognition plaques.

Ultimately, he would like to see much of the Schindler furniture go to museums. He also thinks there may be museum homes for the concrete blocks that are structurally unsound but not too heavily damaged to have lost their aesthetic value.

Those in good condition will be reattached firmly. For now, unadorned concrete blocks will fill holes left by blocks that are unsalvageable. Ultimately, Timme hopes to have new blocks cast from the original molds. “It’s not like we’re putting on aluminum siding or something.” With a $75,000 Getty Conservation Institute grant, USC is studying the cost of replacement.

Timme calls the house “one of the great pieces of architecture in terms of spaces” as well as the embodiment of a new concept. “He foresaw the Home Depot kind of movement,” says Timme, and the house was meant to be a solution to the major post-World War I housing crunch. The idea? That anyone could buy some plain old concrete blocks and build a house. Of course, Wright’s blocks were not plain but intricately patterned. In his autobiography, Wright, describing the building of the Millard House in Pasadena in 1923, wrote of taking “that despised outcast of the building industry--concrete block--out from underfoot or from the gutter” and finding in it “a hitherto unsuspected soul,” a thing of beauty.

It has not been decided, Timme says, which of the alterations to the original Freeman House should remain and which should go. Should it be restored as a “house museum,” absolutely true to the original design, Timme asks, or should the restoration reflect “the additions that over time have become historically significant? Nothing has been determined . . . we may even do a symposium on this.

“It will be a restoration in progress.”