Los Angeles

by A M Homes

  MS. HOMES: Okay, so you got here.

  MR. PAVEL: Got here and … there was no menu. There were no recipes. So if Romulo was working and you ordered a Caesar salad, Romulo made it the way Romulo thought a Caesar salad should be made. If Mike was working, Mike made it the way Mike thought it should be made. In retrospect people always think it was so charming, it was so kooky back then, but in reality it was really bad service!

  MS. HOMES: There seems to be a phenomenon where people do stay here for long periods of time.

  MR. PAVEL: It just lends itself toward that because it was built as an apartment complex. People stay here for months. In the six years I’ve been here there have been people who’ve lived here for over a year.

  MS. HOMES: And do they just get one big bill at the end?

  MR. PAVEL: They pay it like they pay rent, on a monthly basis.

  MS. HOMES: How would you describe what you do on a daily basis?

  MR. PAVEL: There’s a lot of boring technical stuff, the budgets and the money but the main job is to make sure that everyone’s happy. In the morning you check to see who’s arriving, and you decide what rooms they’re going in. But before they arrive you call to see if there’s anything special that they need—it’s kind of like throwing a dinner party every day. And you have your list of things to do and you’re rushing to make it through.

  MS. HOMES: And do you have to remember all that stuff?

  MR. PAVEL: I would say ninety percent of our clientele has been repeat business, people who love the hotel and come back over and over. We’re in the service industry. So your goal is to make them not want for anything while they’re here. The Chateau had this quirky charm of not being corporate. I think people were drawn to it for its history, for its aesthetics. It didn’t have that cookie-cutter feel of the drones with the plastic name tags, always having the same rehearsed lines. But we want to get it to a point where if we notice the guest in the room always has a certain empty box of chocolates and a certain copy of the New Yorker, that the next time they check in, we already have it before they even ask for it. In college I was known for giving really great parties. Part of being ostracized my entire youth was that my entire adult life has been this big make-up for being alone all through my childhood. It’s my job to socialize with the guests, and get to know them. And that’s been the most rewarding thing because that’s what doesn’t feel like work at all. I’ve always loved to get to know people over dinner, over good food, and over a drink. And the fact that I get paid to do that is amazing.

  MS. HOMES: How has the job affected your acting aspirations?

  MR. PAVEL: I still love performing. I still work a lot more than a lot of other people I know. The very nature of acting is that you have a lot of free time on your hands, especially a thirty-two-year-old openly gay male. I get three weeks vacation time a year that I never take. And if I get a guest star on a TV show I take a week off and it feels like vacation. We did a television show, and the other actors on the set had two lines, and they were stressed about it, and I was like, I’m running a hotel from my dressing room! [laughs] You have no idea. It seemed like a walk in the park.

  MS. HOMES: It keeps things in perspective in a lot of ways.

  MR. PAVEL: My biggest problem with so many actors is that they’re so self-involved, and this job has definitely prevented me from doing that. And if I ever did have to support myself as an actor down the road, I hope that I would remember everything that I’ve observed and loathed about people in this industry, and that I will take that to heart and never forget the service people.

  MS. HOMES: Do you still feel you have your Midwestern sensibility?

  MR. PAVEL: I feel that’s what’s made me excel at this job. I really relate to my employees. I mean, the Mexican immigrant experience, which is basically all of the hotel staff—that strong Catholic sense of family and work ethic, is very similar to what I grew up with. One of my managers is a guy I brought from Barney Greengrass. We’ve worked together here for six years. His apartment was on fire, and he called me to see if he could stay at the hotel. I could tell this was a very big deal for him. It was only this moment of total desperation, so he didn’t have to sleep in his car. And I was … Your apartment burned down! Of course you can stay at the hotel! I have empty rooms. And I let him stay here, and the next day I went into the room and he had slept on the couch, because he didn’t want to mess the bed and make extra work for the maid.

  MS. HOMES: What else do you think is important in describing yourself and the hotel?

  MR. PAVEL: What I’m fascinated by is just … the creative energy. You know, there’s something that inherently speaks to me in a lot of people’s art and the fact that they’re drawn to this place as well. But I always go back to the story that one guest who’s been coming here for fourteen years had a psychic come and evaluate the property. She was afraid that there was a ghost and the nine suites kind of freaked her out, so she called in a psychic. The psychic didn’t find a ghost, but her consensus was that the Chateau was built on an energy vortex, like Sedona, New Mexico. And she hypothesized that the reason that all sorts of creative people come here to work is that they’re feeding off the vortex. I love that story because I opened up the front page of Rolling Stone this past month, and it says the Red Hot Chili Peppers just finished their album. And the Chili Peppers were recording their last album in the actual suite. People come here and sit in the lobby and write—my friend wrote her book in the corner there. And part of it’s just it’s a nice atmosphere and it’s quiet, and that you don’t get bothered and no one’s going to kick you out. Friends always say, Oh, well, now you’re general manager of the Chateau, you could go anywhere. But the reality is that I would never want to be general manager anywhere else. I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else, because no other hotel would be like this. And it’s just funny to me how things evolve in one’s life. And that my training in theater and my hobby of acting makes me understand the experience of the guests. In reading the old history, the first manager, Anne Little, was this old character actress who played a squaw in some movies, and I wonder if I’m Anne Little reincarnated!

  CHAPTER TEN

  Building a Frontier Town

  “In the nineteenth century the center of the art world was Paris, in the twentieth century it shifted to New York, and now at the beginning of the twenty-first century there is no dominant center, but everyone agrees L.A. is the hottest city in the art world—the energy is here,” says Anne Philbin, director of UCLA’s Hammer Museum. Formerly director of New York’s Drawing Center, Philbin moved to Los Angeles three years ago. Last summer the Hammer opened an exhibition titled “Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles” featuring both under-known artists who have been at it for a while and others fresh out of school. “It used to be that when people graduated from art school they moved to New York. Now they’re coming to L.A.—it’s about real estate. In New York there are no undiscovered, undeveloped areas. L.A. is still a frontier, and it’s possible to live and work here and for artists to afford large enough studio spaces to work with a kind of scale and ambition—and artists like good weather too, you know,” Philbin says.

  In recent years Los Angeles has become a genuine hot spot for both art and architecture—perhaps the most active and interesting in the country. There’s been a surge of new galleries, museum expansions, increased attendance at arts-related events, a plethora of first-rate art schools drawing students from around the world. The entertainment and other economies in L.A. are able to support the arts economy.

  Architecturally, L.A. has always been a radical outpost. Aesthetically, it is uniquely democratic—the built environment accepting almost anything, which is both the beauty and the horror of it.

  Also operative here has been a brand of set design mentality, an aesthetic of transience, impermanence, the knowledge that at any moment a structure could be consumed by geological disaster, which allows for expressive free play in terms of materials and form. For the recent film
My Life as a House, production designer Dennis Washington had to first construct a neighborhood where there had been none, laying down lawns, walkways, putting up mailboxes, creating facades of houses, and then he had to create a falling-down house for the fictional character, architect George Monroe, to live in. Following that Washington had to design and construct the character’s dream house, modeled on a Greene & Greene craftsman-style house and make it in sections so that they could shoot it as the actors were “building” the house in the course of the film. And then ten weeks later when the film was finished they had to demolish everything.

  “Architects have always on the one hand been fascinated by the climate and by the very particular geography, the horizontality of the city,” says MOCA Director Jeremy Strick. It is a city known for its private spaces, domestic architecture, with an incredible range of modernist and experimental houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner, Ray and Charles Eames, the Case Study Houses. But the city itself is changing, becoming more public. It is as if Los Angeles has matured, gained confidence, and is transforming the way it thinks about itself. There has been a surge of energy, an urgency to this development. One has a distinct sense that something major is happening here—you can literally watch as the skyline changes. Within blocks of each other in downtown Los Angeles, two world-class buildings are currently under construction—Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels by Rafael Moneo. “It’s a moment in L.A. that is similar to that time in the construction of great cities, where a few of these projects moving forward could potentially tip the balance between L.A. being continually considered a great place of experimentation but a bit of a backwater and the city becoming one of the great cities,” says Los Angeles based architect Michael Maltzen. “It’s a city which has lived off of its potential for an incredibly long time in terms of its real role in the pantheon of cities, and now it has the potential to transcend, to live up to its potential.”

  A few years ago, while I was interviewing sculptor Richard Serra, the subject of Serra’s youth in northern California and its effect on his sense of space and possibility came up.

  “I was really born in the sand dunes—there weren’t any blacktop streets. So I had to walk through the sand dunes as a kid, and it was kind of like walking through a big, vast, open desert. And the only things that were around were a few eucalyptus trees, right down to the ocean. And I think that hones your eye in a different way. There is something about being from the West that’s very, very different. … If you go back to New York, it’s really closer to Europe—and I think that there’s something about not being encumbered with a big tradition, if you’re from the West, that’s healthy. You don’t grow up with it all around you. And so, when you finally come to deal with history as it’s been served up, you’re not paralyzed by it. You just think other people who were around did something interesting, and why not you?” Serra said.

  Richard Serra’s sense of both the open landscape and the lack of being burdened by history have allowed artists a pioneer’s freedom of expression and expansion that is almost without precedent—it is perhaps an uniquely American experience.

  Recent examples of that pioneer spirit can be found in L.A.’s Chinatown. Beginning in 1998, a small group of young galleries opened up shop on Chung King Road, part of the ongoing reinvigoration of the downtown area. It wasn’t long ago that stores in Chinatown would only be rented to Chinese people with a connection to Chinatown. In the center of the Chung King Road square is a wishing well filled with goldfish, guarded by a statue of Kuan Yin, Chinese goddess of mercy, flip a quarter in and make your deal. These days it’s a delightful combination of old and new: shops selling straw hats, bamboo umbrellas, jade, cloisonné, and silk robes alternate with storefront galleries exhibiting the freshest of the fresh. Many of the galleries are run by artists for artists and play host to a variety of events including exhibitions and performances. The cultures mix as they celebrate openings at Hop Louie, a family restaurant that has been there for years—their house fried rice is the best I’ve ever had. And echoing the general sprawling style of Los Angeles, galleries are scattered all over the city in small clumps, with new ones opening all the time. People here do their gallery hopping by car, spending Saturdays making their way from Chinatown out to Santa Monica to cover it all.

  When I started thinking about Los Angeles and the art world, Los Angeles and its culture, I thought of Mark Bennett. Bennett is not only a well-known artist, but he’s also a Beverly Hills mailman.

  I first got to know Mark Bennett through his artwork—architectural renderings of the homes of television characters. Over a twenty-year period, Bennett sat in front of the television set, sketching, drawing, making blueprint drawings of classic television homes. He hoped that if he could record these houses and their inhabitants, he would become part of their families and they would become part of him.

  His is an obsession with domestic life—idealized domestic life as portrayed on television. First exhibited in a bar in Hollywood, the works have been presented in solo shows across the country and have been included in group exhibitions, such as “The Home Show” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

  Mark has rendered the homes of Mike and Carol Brady of The Brady Bunch, Rob and Laura Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo starring in I Love Lucy, Oliver and Lisa Douglas, who left New York City for a falling-down house and good country living in Green Acres, and the apartments of Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Felix Unger and Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple and the Clampetts’ Beverly Hills estate as seen on The Beverly Hillbillies. He knows exactly where Mary Richards keeps her spare suitcase and where Granny Clampett brews moonshine.

  Most recently at Santa Monica’s Mark Moore Gallery, Mark exhibited a new project, “As Seen on T.V.,” an installation of mama and papa wing and club chairs, puzzles made into a dance patio, curtains, and a Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress all imprinted with the infamous logo “As Seen on T.V.” and alternately “Similar to Those Seen on T.V.” The show becomes a wonderful visual play on the implication that being seen on television is tantamount to some sort of cultural stamp of approval, like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

  What becomes clear from looking at Mark Bennett’s work is that watching television is not just a collective cultural experience but an instructional one as well—we learn how to live and how others live. Witnessing the ways in which these characters negotiated the space of their faux houses is as much an anthropological investigation as it is a lesson. In these programs we see worlds of possibilities—on television it is possible for fathers and sons to talk about important issues; for mothers and fathers, husbands and wives to argue and recover, for a family to struggle and get on with life. The dysfunction is minimal and is the stuff of situation comedy. On a television show, one can see what a family should be, one can see oneself in the characters, one can see a better life. The focus is ultimately on prosperity, success, and versions of the American Dream.

  It was Mark’s fantasy to someday build a utopian neighborhood where instead of buying an Italianate villa, a split level, ranch, or a colonial, you’d buy a Rob and Laura, or a Mike and Carol. For Mark, watching television was and is about families.

  “It’s about finding families. I had a real hard time with mine while I was growing up, so I made these people my families, wanted them to be my families. You don’t have to be related. I’ve got—Perry Mason: they’re a family to me; they’re always up in the middle of the night making coffee, working on briefs for the next day’s trial. The Gilligan’s Island crew—they weren’t family but they sure did become one. … That’s the difference between Star Trek and Lost in Space. Lost in Space really was a family and Star Trek was really about employees—there’s a difference. … I’m trying as best I can to live a
sitcom life.”

  Growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Mark’s obsession with domestic life started early. On Sunday after church his parents took the family out visiting model houses, dream houses in neighborhoods with fantastic-sounding names. This house-hunting, peeking into the lives of others, was the seed of Mark’s interest in observing other families, seeing how people live, what kind of décor they have, how their personalities are expressed, all of it coupled with the desire for a more perfect family, for acceptance.

  While a young student teacher working in a rough part of Chattanooga, Bennett’s mother encouraged him to take the civil service exam and apply for a position in the post office. A year later, while Bennett was selling shoes in a local mall, he got a letter offering him a job. After six months at the Chattanooga post office, he put in for a transfer—he wanted to go to New York to become an artist. As there were no jobs in New York, he accepted a transfer to Newark, New Jersey, working as a clerk on the midnight shift and after a year transferred to New York’s Times Square station, where he worked as a carrier from 1979 to 1985. By then he’d dropped out of art school, written a couple of screenplays, and decided that, “If I’m going to be in this business, I’m going to move to L.A.” He sold his apartment, bought a house and, by 1995, the first of his blueprint drawings were hanging in a local bar, the Cobalt Cantina in Silverlake. Here his work was “discovered” by Christopher Ford of the Mark Moore Gallery and things took off for Bennett. Throughout, Mark has kept his job as a postman. He credits the job with giving him an enormous amount of stability, with making his life as an artist possible.

  I joined him on his route. “Meet me at eleven on the corner of Roxbury and Wilshire,” Mark said. I waited for him on the bench outside the Beverly Hills branch of Neiman Marcus, right next to the employees door, where everyone hangs out, smoking. It’s 11:15 a.m.—he’s already been at it since 5:30 a.m. Official and adorable with his white pith helmet, shorts, high socks, and the keys to the letter boxes dangling from a brass chain, Mark is a welcome visitor wherever he goes.