Building the Southland’s Cultural Reputation, Brick by Brick

The postwar years in Los Angeles were years of expansion and ambition. The city seemed to have all the ingredients for greatness--factories, freeways and a freewheeling lifestyle--everything, residents lamented, except high culture.

At last, in the 1960s, on a downtown hilltop, the Music Center--two theaters and a concert hall--opened to the public, the city’s first permanent complex dedicated solely to the performing arts.

It was the product of brains and brawn, vision and no small measure of arm-twisting, but Los Angeles’ “culture-vulture” yearnings were actually as old as the frontier days.

The Wild West town had had a short-lived opera house, where patrons passed pitchers of ice water down the rows of seats, and it also boasted the Merced Theater on Olvera Street.

But in April 1887, at the northeast corner of 5th and Olive streets across from what would later be called Pershing Square, the velvet curtains rose on the city’s newest, largest theater--Hazard’s Pavilion.

The National Opera Company had come to town with 300 singers, ballet dancers and musicians--and “100 tons of baggage.” It presented the first performance in the new building, but would be followed by not-quite-cultural events like prizefights, revival meetings and political rallies.

The man who built the place--Henry Hazard, soon to be elected mayor--used the pavilion for launching a movement to split California and form a “state of Southern California.” But the effort came to naught.

The pavilion was razed in 1906, and the Theater Beautiful, as it was immodestly named, rose on the site, becoming the city’s third reinforced-concrete building. With 2,300 seats, it was the largest and, promoters claimed, most elegant auditorium west of Chicago.

Composer/pianist George Gershwin played his last concert there. African American scientist Booker T. Washington lectured there. John Philip Sousa and Igor Stravinsky conducted their own music in the theater.

The vaudeville dance team of Buck and Bubbles performed on the same stage as Pavlova and Nijinsky--but not at the same time. Jack Benny and Fatty Arbuckle told jokes there, and before she built her Echo Park temple, the flamboyant, golden-voiced Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson preached there. But on Sundays, the more solemn services of the Temple Baptist Church took over the space.

When the Los Angeles Philharmonic moved into the theater in 1920, the building adopted a new name--Philharmonic Auditorium.

The orchestra performed there for 44 years, and Los Angeles Civic Light Opera staged its productions on the same stage for 27 years.

The auditorium’s faded curtains fell for the last time in 1964, two weeks before the Music Center opened. Only the church remained as a tenant until 1984, and the once-grand auditorium was smashed into rubble the following year.

Dorothy Chandler Makes Center a Reality

The original idea of a music center had been floated at the end of World War II, two full decades before it opened. The facility was at first awkwardly conceived as part convention center, part symphony hall.

Three times, Los Angeles voters rejected the project at the polls. After the last defeat, in the 1950s, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of then-Times Publisher Norman Chandler and member of a prominent Long Beach department store family, rallied to make the Music Center a reality.

Chandler had earned her stripes as a fund-raiser in 1951 with her dramatic rescue of the Hollywood Bowl, and for the Music Center she waged a nine-year campaign that eventually produced more than

$20 million in private donations.

Her chutzpah was legendary. When a wealthy man gave her a $20,000 check for the Music Center, she tore it up and called the amount ridiculous, saying she needed more than that from him.

The first fund-raising event, in 1955, was the “Eldorado Party,” named for the model of Cadillac that was raffled off. Jack Benny, Danny Kaye and Dinah Shore contributed their talents to the Ambassador Hotel soiree, and Christian Dior put on a fashion show. The $400,000 in proceeds were the seed money--10% of Chandler’s goal. Composer John Green (“Body and Soul”) called her “the greatest fund-raiser since Al Capone.”

But where to put the Music Center? The first choice was on land adjoining the Art Deco Pan-Pacific Auditorium in the Wilshire district. But the focus quickly shifted to Bunker Hill, a venerable downtown neighborhood that, by the mid-1950s, had become a decaying fringe of the central city. It was a prime location for redevelopment.

In the end, after a strenuous courtship of elected officials, Chandler got seven acres for the complex--on the condition that all the money from the Music Center would go to Los Angeles County, which owned the land.

Vigorous Fund-Raising Gets Impressive Results

Chandler sought out her first large donor, Myford Irvine, principal owner of the Irvine Ranch, and secured a pledge of $100,000 only a month before Irvine died under mysterious circumstances, a death that was ruled a suicide.

Her vigorous fund-raising got results. Actress Marion Davies, the longtime mistress of rival publisher William Randolph Hearst, traveled with bodyguards, but Chandler was not deterred. She followed Davies into a women’s restroom someplace. Davies ended up donating an emerald necklace to the fund.

When Chandler hit up actor Cary Grant, he reminded her that he had already put in a $25,000 check, but she snapped back, “It’s time you brought me another.” And, to the chagrin of her son, Otis, who followed his father as publisher of The Times, she once cornered Henry Kissinger in an elevator in the Times building and asked for a donation.

For those who couldn’t afford big donations, Chandler dreamed up the idea of “buck bags.” Her cadres of volunteers went out on the street with brown paper bags, asking for donations of any amount from passersby and stashing them in the paper sacks.

The Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion opened in December 1964 with a gala Philharmonic concert, and conductor Zubin Mehta saluted her from the podium.

“Unlike the princes of Florence and the pharaohs of Egypt, she is a dignified, simple lady,” he said. The audience gave her a four-minute standing ovation.

Chandler had persuaded financiers Howard Ahmanson Sr. and Mark Taper to make gifts of $1.5 million each toward creating the theaters that now bear their names.

Twenty years later, a donation of $50 million from Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian, seeded the creation of the Disney Concert Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, set to open across the street from the Pavilion by 2004.

The woman who could probably have organized the invasion of Europe died in 1997 at age 96, but the Music Center Operating Committee, the fund-raising arm of the complex, is still going strong, extending the city’s cultural corridor in steel and marble and music.