How do people whose lives consist of taking on serial identities, assuming the psyches of one made-up character after another, figure out how they wish to be at home? How do they and all the other people who help them win at pretending, come by an environment in which they can rest their multiple selves, soothe their insecurities, renew their will, and still present to all who enter their inner sanctums an image of success and sophistication?
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David Geffen, the famous/infamous enfant-terrible-turned-music-maven-turned-DreamWorks-partner/philan-thropist, offers one example. Tom King's recent biography, The Operator, recounts how Geffen purchased the grandiose, furnished estate of long-deceased studio founder Jack Warner for $47.5 million (a record for a single-family home in America). Geffen was not under any impression he'd gotten a bargain until producer Joel Silver, owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright mansion himself, came over with a bunch of books and told Geffen that there were priceless treasures within the 13,600-square-foot house. The thrilled Geffen brought in antiques dealer and designer extraordinaire Rose Tarlow to look things over and give him a more precise estimate, but when Tarlow delivered her verdict--that the vast majority of furniture in the house was "garbage" (read: reproductions)--Geffen went from speechlessness straight to yelling and told Tarlow she was crazy. Tarlow was no doubt horrified at Geffen, and she didn't much like the house either, but before long she'd agreed to renovate the place for him-- on an unlimited budget, mind you--and proceeded to put many years into that and other Geffen projects.
Not many entertainment people are as wealthy or mercurial as Geffen, and not many designers are as gifted and resilient as Tarlow, but the overall dynamic of Hollywood folk and their artistic support players has a consistent shape. The Industry is full of actors, producers, executives, etc., who want what they want without necessarily knowing what they want, and who require help from bona fide talents with patience and tolerance for the eccentricities of "creative" people.
Hollywood design lore is filled with stories of those who've performed this service brilliantly. Wallace Neff, "architect to the stars"--the first stars--built lovely Spanish Revival houses in the '20s and so understood how to play to the dramatic impulses of his clients that when it came to millionaire razor-blade magnate King Camp Gillette, he worked while the owner took off to Europe for a year and presented him, upon his return, with a 25-room hacienda, complete with dinner waiting on the table.
Legendary designer Billy Haines, who had a first career as a movie star, then morphed into an interior decorator when his openly gay lifestyle became too much for the studio, rose to be the arbiter of taste for all of Hollywood for decades, designing lives as much as houses, dictating everything down to the ashtrays. Another life designer, Tony Duquette, who died just a few years ago, lent his famously over-the-top imagination to many of Hollywood's more exotic dreamers. In his long life, Duquette designed everything from the costumes for the Broadway production of Camelot to the interiors of houses for powers like David O. Selznick to fantabulous jewelry beloved by fashionistas today. Duquette shared Hollywood's love of theater, being wholly dedicated to the transport of the spirit through transformation of material things both high and low (he's rumored to have spent $1000 in a 99-cent store). He was a pioneer in global eclectic, and was unique in his ability to combine pagodas, faux leopard fabrics, abalone-shell chandeliers, geodes and God knows what else, and have it turn out both beautiful and coherent. Sharon Stone, who befriended Duqette at the end of his life, acknowledges his influence and has put a pared down version of it to work in her San Francisco home as well as in a number of her friends' homes she's helped decorate.
Today hundreds of architects, designers, craftsmen and artists supply the design magic for Hollywood's elite. The range of taste and temperament is far greater than you might imagine, given the sameness of the product Hollywood puts out. Because money is not necessarily an object, there can be a divergence of sensibility even in one married couple. Brad Pitt worships at the altar of postmodernist Frank Gehry and got a team together to design his own studio/playhouse in a style that reprised the major modernist movements of the 20th century; his wife, Jennifer Aniston, saw to it that the couple's actual residence was a far more traditional chateau-like affair. Even on the traditional side there's a mood spectrum of approaches: major Industry interior designer Barbara Barry puts a minimalist, sometimes anorexic, spin on mid-century French style; she's balanced out by, say, Frank Pennino, or the very now Hendrix Allardyce, who bring a heftier grace to the business of glamour. When it comes to collecting art, Hollywood players once again exhibit herd mentality of the sort that has the herd running in different directions. Mike Ovitz likes to play mine's-bigger games with his Picassos and Lichtensteins. Candice Bergen owns a number of the loveliest California plein air paintings in captivity.
Designers or artists who deal with prominent Hollywood people are interesting on two counts. First, their work itself is likely to be very good, for though Hollywood has never excelled in good taste as much as simple excess, there is often great beauty with the big money. Second, these designers and artists have an unusual, firsthand perspective on the process of working with Hollywood folk. Some are collaborators; some truly appreciate the weirdnesses of Hollywood creativity; some are bemused. Here's a sampling of people who are very good at their work and very good at dealing with Hollywood, too.
• LUSH LIFE •
Designer Elaine Culotti estimates that probably no more than 10 percent of the high-end entertainment world brings in decorators to do everything "from when they buy the house to when Variety is lying on the table." Some have a precise sense of what they want and like to chase it down, but most want varying degrees of assistance.
Because Culotti owns the spacious, beautifully mysterious furniture and antique store Porta Bella in the heart of Brentwood, a village-y center of the wealthy entertainment world known best to outsiders for its ex-residents Nicole Brown and O.J. Simpson, she appeals to all levels of interest from cocooning showbiz folk. Often, someone who becomes a major client starts out as a browser, like Dylan McDermott's actress-wife Shiva Rose ("the most feminine woman I have ever met," says Culotti), who walked into Porta Bella one day and now has a home designed for the most part by the store's owner.
Porta Bella, which resembles an artfully arranged prop house for a Best Foreign Film romance shot in Tuscany--multi-pastel-colored 19th-century Venetian glass chandeliers overhead, a dark, outrageously carved gondolier rocker featuring the God of Wind in one corner, gorgeously faded tapestries here and there--draws everyone from Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Joni Mitchell to Kelly Preston to Julie Andrews ("who drew the largest crowd of any celebrity who ever came in the store").
A few years after Culotti opened Porta Bella, which was an entrepreneurial leap from her existing antiques and furniture design business, and included both a manufacturing capability and her now fully developed design practice, two movies came along that accelerated her success: Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth. The exact look of those films (early 16th century) wasn't the key--Culotti's pieces are mostly Italian in style (she goes from the Parma Fair to outbuildings in Umbria and beyond to buy an entire shipping container of antiques every few months). It was the lushness of feeling, the sense of Old World abundance, the richness of texture and color. Culotti was already experienced in creating versions of this world, which has natural appeal for a good portion of Hollywood--including Sylvester Stallone and his wife, Jennifer Flavin, who were part of that 10 percent who wanted total design and had the budget to do it. Stallone had moved back to Los Angeles from Miami, where the design of his house was masterminded by Gianni Versace, at the height of South Beach fever. His current house, a Tuscan villa, is a more serene affair, a comfortable version of luxury that gives a nod to both the showpiece and sanctuary aspects of a celebrity home. Culotti found the Stallones a cinch to work with: "He's an executive decision-maker," she says, "and a pussycat with his kids."
Culotti's first major experience with high-intensity celebrity had come when she designed a home for Jean-Claude Van Damme and his then-wife (and future Herbalife widow) Darcy LaPier, who proceeded to get a divorce in the middle of the project. But that did not sour her on celebrity clients. "Hollywood people are artistic and take delight in the process of creativity," she says. "They're fun." And Culotti, whose lickety-split efficiency takes care of the impatient part of the celebrity equation, has a raucous laugh to go with her creative skills in taking care of the other aspects of Hollywood-ish dealings--she's humorously forgiving of showbiz absurdity (she's perhaps the biggest fan of "The Osbournes," since much of the furniture that the domestic nuttiness takes place around is from Porta Bella). She also applies an analytical eye to the psychology of her clients. She loved working for Renny Harlin, director of Die Hard 2 and Deep Blue Sea, who sought her out to decorate a mission-style Spanish house he'd bought, one of the oldest in Beverly Hills. "He was great because, as a director, he understands the benefit of delegation," she says. "Veto power was enough for him."
Culotti does have some telling preferences in the types of entertainment people she works with. First on the list are "up-and-coming young celebrities with new money," she says. "They take risks and they're lots of fun." Second are directors, for reasons already stated. Third are "huge celebrities with great big budgets." There are reasons, of course, that A-list stars are not first on the list. "There are trust issues with these people because they get taken advantage of so much," says Culotti. She understands that, and has her own solution for the problem. "I let them go to my factory," she laughs, "and see their furniture being made."
• THE ANTI-VON STERNBERG OF ARCHITECTURE •
The very word architect conjures up images of egomaniacal, authoritarian artistes who resemble dictatorial directors with whips and megaphones. They pooh-pooh your objections to their aesthetic encroachments on the livability of your own home and then, at billing time, make you feel like Washington Redskins owner Edward Williams, who'd famously complained that free-spending coach George Allen had exceeded the unlimited budget he'd given him.
Certain Hollywood players might so want the cachet of a Frank Gehry or Richard Meier that they let the maestros call the shots, but most people at that level, especially in the entertainment world, are used to having their own vision accommodated. And, in any case, the majority want a look that goes after the timeless qualities of traditional design instead of leaving them to live on a cutting edge.
"It's more important to create moods than monuments," says architect Richard Landry, whose clients include Eddie Murphy, Frank Mancuso, Rod Stewart, Sugar Ray Leonard and Michael Bolton. Like Culotti, Landry likes working with entertainment people for more than monetary reasons and has a generous attitude toward them. "They're fun, and they're optimistic, and they're very high-energy," he says. Landry is a congenial man himself, which sets him apart from many in his field and makes him especially successful with Hollywood. "I am not the kind of architect who tells people, 'This is where you will live,'" he says. He does not even tell them what style they should live with. The most remarkable thing about Landry, who was born in a small, rural town in French-speaking Quebec, is that, while he has a major, worldwide practice and name recognition, he is without a signature style. If someone adores L.A. modernist legend John Lautner, or contemporary postmodernists Luis Barragan or Ricardo Legorreta, he will design them a house that borrows whatever core element in those definitive styles the client is drawn to. If, and this is much more common, someone wants Wallace Neff resurrected, Landry will do a contemporary version of the Spanish Revival style that Hollywood has always loved. It won't be Wallace Neff or even neo-Neffian--there are houses to be bought if you actually want one--but they will have the romance of Neff, along with the catering kitchen, living-room-sized bath and other 21st-century showbiz amenities.
Landry appears to be very skillful at getting wealthy people's divergent fantasies into three coherent dimensions: Haim Saban, who made his fortune off the "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," loves sushi and can now eat it to his heart's content in a large, serene tatami-matted Japanese-style dining room overlooking a Zen pond--all within a traditional and quite grand property having no other Japanese elements in it.
It would be easy to accuse Landry, in the abstract, of doing "theme park" architecture or, worse, carrying on L.A.'s mishmash tradition. But Landry is sought after for his taste and inventiveness, not as a shepherd of excess. He's on Architectural Digest's list of the Top 100 architects and interior designers in the world. In his versatility, he's come to know more about trendiness in Hollywood than most. "A few years ago," he says, "everybody wanted a Tuscan villa. Nobody even knew what that meant, but they wanted it. Now I see a Tuscan house and I can tell you what book it came from." These days, says Landry, "everybody suddenly wants Andalusian," which, in case you are not up on it, "resembles Spanish colonial but is more ornate."
Landry's clients, including his Hollywood clients, love his work, and people whose names cannot be mentioned line up for his services. Landry is fond of pointing out that the only complaints he gets are from people who tell him that strangers keep ringing their doorbells to find out who designed their house.
• OVERNIGHT PARADISE •
"I'm not the big shot I once was," says landscape architect Garett Carlson wryly. Truth is, he is at the very highest level of his profession, but has scaled back his efforts after a long, amped-up stretch during which he created total outdoor worlds for Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, John Candy, and Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews. Though he has created many Xanadus, he himself chooses to live in a very quiet, very beautiful, ultranatural habitat that's deliberately un-grand in the way that a sensitive person who's seen quite a lot of grandness might want things.
Carlson works in a medium that encompasses grass, stone, trees, shrubs, flowers, walls, gates, driveways, paths, gazebos, waterfalls, houses, views and pools, among other things. To Hollywood, he's a multimedia magician, really, because he can take a barren plateau of dirt bought with the proceeds of the latest blockbuster and have it graded, banked, walled and planted within months to look like it was always there, a perfect, poetically balanced landscape that doubles the beauty and value of whatever mansion happens to sit within it. Carlson is the one who introduced to contemporary Hollywood the concept of horizon pools (also known as infinity pools), which have one side that merges seamlessly with the distance in a truly lovely effect of continuous space. Thanks to him, infinity pools have become the must-have item for the very privileged, but he is quick to point out that he didn't invent the idea--he borrowed it from John Lautner, who himself borrowed it from Europe.
Ideally, Carlson begins with something quite unsexily called "site planning," which amounts to making sure the architect doesn't put the house where architects are inclined to put houses--smack in the middle of the property--and developing the shape and texture of space right down to the last fern. The finished landscape should have, says Carlson, "space with no boundaries" and "seclusion with energy." With an already developed property, it's sometimes necessary to do drastic things to achieve these essential qualities--like, "move the pool." People who look at Carlson's before and after shots must be tempted to just hand over their checkbooks, because he really does make it look like it was God, not a high-end landscape architect, who made things look this way.
But before handing over their checkbooks, even top-level celebrities are likely to have gulped. If you've ever wondered what the largest amount of money you could probably spend on your own pool is, here's the number: $250,000, which will give you a nice swim spot with waterfalls and grottoes you can float into. Numbers like that one can put you into shock, but Carlson points out the benefit realized by one client, who bought a property for $2 million, spent $4 million redoing the house, spent another $1 million on the landscape, then sold the whole thing for $13 million. If you wonder how, besides requesting swimming grottoes, you can spend a million on your lawn, part of the answer is this: unless you want to wait 10 or 15 years for your trees to grow (double the length of many careers in Hollywood), you have to buy fully grown trees, which can run $15,000 apiece.
It's understandable that if you're going to be dealing in astronomical sums, you want someone like Garett Carlson on the job. Carlson, who grew up in Southern California, got good not merely by getting the appropriate degrees, but by doing an apprenticeship with a wise old landscape architect named Dudley Trudgett. Carlson speaks of his mentor, who died a few years ago, as if he owes everything to him. Perhaps not even Trudgett, though, can prepare you for Hollywood's most high-intensity players. Power manager Sandy Gallin, a man noted for his design taste and personal testiness, hired Carlson years ago to design his grounds with a budget of $100,000. He so liked the results that when he'd sold that house and gone for bigger game, he sought Carlson out again. But Carlson chose not to take the assignment, despite a whopping budget, because...well, peace of mind is worth something, too. In a gesture of what one would have to consider endearing self-awareness, Gallin had his lawyer call Carlson and make a deal wherein Carlson spoke only to the lawyer throughout the project.
Mostly, though, Carlson, like the other gifted people who work with Hollywood's elite, seems to enjoy the work, particularly when he can get a client to go with the crazier end of the spectrum of ideas he draws up at the planning stage. He still hasn't gotten anyone to take the bait on his concept of a swimming pool with actual fish in it to swim with you. Many people, though, accede to his distaste for diving boards, and have at one end of their pool "diving rocks" instead.
• 21ST CENTURY SUBLIME •
"Lots of people buy paintings with their ears," says Stephen Hannock, whose own paintings are in such demand that there's a two-year waiting list for his work at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and the James Graham & Sons gallery in New York. With that comment, Hannock isn't singling out the entertainment world, where his paintings are avidly collected, but no other place can probably rival Hollywood for the aural approach to acquiring art. After all, überplayer Michael Ovitz once responded to a talented young agent who'd asked why he should work for Ovitz as follows: "Because I have a Picasso and you don't." The irony is that Hannock's paintings are anything but trendy. As he puts it, his aesthetic "is not the white hot center of the universe. It's an understated area. It doesn't work with a brass band and fireworks." In Hollywood, where fortunes are spent on contemporary art that is clever at best and emperor's-new-clothes silly too often, Hannock's popularity is a bit of an anomaly. He paints large landscapes that deliberately recall the great 19th century Hudson River painters and the Romantic glory of Luminism. They are shamelessly beautiful, which in itself flies in the face of late 20th century painting, but beauty, while informed by the past, is thoroughly contemporary, even ahead of its time. While the great 19th century painters Hannock has been moved by painted visual meditations on the Beautiful and the Sublime, he is painting visual meditations on what the 20th century has wrought on those formal concepts. The process of his artistic thinking and daily living as he paints is evident right there on the canvas, both in lines of personal diary scripted plainly but inobtrusively into the texture of the landscape, and in the layers of polished oil he sands and refines to get a glowing surface that both represents and plays with light.
Hannock's best-known painting, The Oxbowa luminous view of a flooded river--hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Many of his other paintings hang in Hollywood, a number in the home of producer Steve Tisch, who has collected Hannock since the early '90s. Hannock is proud to be collected by Tisch"He really loves paintings. He looks at the paintings on his walls." Tisch, as well as others like producer Michael Peyser, Mimi Rogers and Jackson Browne, bought Hannock before he got the buzz on him that he has right now. So did Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen, among others in New York. Sting is an even longer-time collector of Hannock and a close family friend. But the reason Hannock is so ultrahot in Hollywood just now is unusual--he's an Oscar-winner, for paintings and visual effects he did for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come, in which Robin Williams goes to the Beyond in search of his artist-wife. Though the film was not praised for much else, Hannock shared the Academy Award with several others for the dazzling visual collaboration. Hollywood folk don't often have a chance to buy the respected artwork of an actual Oscar winner, and they jumped.
Unlike an interior designer or an architect, Hannock is an artist who can keep his distance from the Hollywood fray, and does. But he seems to have an irresistible appeal to Hollywood on every level. His paintings pop up in movies without any involvement from him. Harrison Ford picked out Hannocks to hang on the walls of the home where his sinister character lived in What Lies Beneath. And in Analyze That, the upcoming sequel to Analyze This, you'll see a painting owned by Robert De Niro's business partner, Jane Rosenthal, another Hannock collector. As it happens, Rosenthal asked Hannock to create one of six awards to be given at the New York-boosting Tribeca Film Festival. The winner of the Emerging Filmmaker Award will receive what Hannock describes as "an envelope nocturne," a small painting done on the envelope in which the request for his participation was sent to him.
The paintings of Stephen Hannock, the architecture of Richard Landry, the landscape design of Garett Carlson and the interior design of Elaine Culotti all make the argument that the Nathanael West-ian horrors of Tinseltown taste do not reign wholly supreme in Hollywood. We would be disappointed not to have the requisite number of giant marble bathtubs with solid gold fixtures and the Roman statues with bougainvillea in the background. But some of the people who have ridiculous amounts of money also have some measure of aesthetic judgment and the ability to have civilized interactions with those trying to work with them. Others at least have the good sense to stand back, shut up and have their money managers write the checks.
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Katherine Mitchell wrote about "The Big Young Hollywood Hangover" for the May issue of Movieline.