by Jean Stein
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WALTER HOPPS: Several years after Jennifer and Norton had bought John Frankenheimer’s house, they decided to buy the house next door, at 22368 Pacific Coast Highway. The Garland house. Norton totally redid it. There were some really grand houses built there in Malibu, most not enormously grand, but this was a three-story house. It’s so crazy to have seen the house in the context of the Garland family—old man Garland long dead—and then to see that Norton and Jennifer had fixed up that same house for an additional beach house, you know? Same damn house. Lord knows who has it now. Serious enough house that it wouldn’t have been torn down, I don’t think.
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BRODRICK DUNLAP: After Grace Garland left the house and before the Simons moved in, it sat empty for eight or nine months. People vandalized that house like you wouldn’t believe. We used to shoot into it, boom, boom, boom, blow the windows out. And we’d go in like it was a haunted house and creep around at night. It sure had a strange history. Both Jane Garland and Mary Jennifer were definitely touched. In the evenings we’d go over there and skateboard in the pool.
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FRANK GEHRY: When Norton Simon asked me to do his second house in Malibu, I showed him my sketches and he said, “This looks like it’s your unfinished symphony.” I said, “But Norton, Schubert died, and I’m still going strong.” So he said fine. He liked it. I started making it, and I didn’t know how to do it, so I did one layer at a time. I got the first layer down and I was just starting the second layer and he stopped me. He wouldn’t let me do more. So that’s why it stopped there. The budget wasn’t even a million dollars, just two or three hundred thousand.
Norton was difficult. He was really controlling. He wanted to control me, control the price, the costs. He was a control freak. He wanted to control how much he paid me, or didn’t pay me. If you think about it, it was abusive, I guess. And he was very tricky, because he gave me a budget and then wouldn’t pay for all the additional changes. He called me one day and said, “Jennifer thinks the tile looks bad, what can you do about it?” The tile roof on this house was old Spanish tile, like all the houses around it, and Jennifer one day looked at it and said, “This looks like an old gas station.” She hated it. I said, “Well, there’s lots of tile, you can replace it.” Norton said, “Can you show me what you can do?” So I found the best tile made, it was made in the Midwest, and I showed it to him. He liked it. He said, “Can I order that?” I said, “Well, it’s a different shape, you’ll have to redo the roof, different weight. You’ll have to pay me for doing it.” He said, “I hired you to do my house.” So he didn’t want to pay for the change, the detailing. We ordered the tile and they’d agreed to a certain date. But they missed the date, and he got pissed off. Norton called the company and got the name of the president and then he went out and bought the company and fired the president. Pretty good, huh? So he was a ruthless little motherfucker.
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WALTER HOPPS: Unlike the industrial tycoons from the past, Norton had a deep ambivalence about making a lasting mark in society as a monument builder. It wasn’t until 1974 when the Pasadena Museum found itself in dire straits that he negotiated a deal to house his collection. Men of potency with a lot of social power and ambition have to really worry about death. Let’s accept the sophistry that those with exceptional skills, drives, and resources face the question: “By god, something will stand to outlive me.”
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HAL GLICKSMAN: My position at the Pasadena Art Museum was preparator. I hung the pictures. The trustees didn’t have enough money to keep it going. Simon didn’t come in through the basement and sabotage the thing. It was headed for the rocks when he got it, just months away from closing its doors. And Simon got it for absolutely nothing. What he did was really high-handed. The trustees came to him time and time again to help them and to bail them out, and do a partnership, or anything he wanted, and he kept saying no until he saw that this thing was absolutely on the rocks, and he could get it for next to nothing. He just reveled in, you know, humiliating people and making them grovel and making them jump and everything else. Ruthless. A shonda for the goyim. Until Milken came along, Norton Simon was probably the most hated Jew in America.
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BOB WALKER: When Norton developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, he and Mother moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel for a few years. For the rest of his life he had twenty-four-hour nursing, but I saw how his mind still worked fine. He said once to one of his nurses that he would give away his entire fortune, every dime he’d ever made, if he could just stand again for five minutes and feel the earth beneath his feet. I remember when he was walking on the beach, the joy he got out of walking and being in nature, I mean what for him was nature was the beach.
He was a rare bird, an odd bird. If you had to be in business with him, I think he could have been pretty difficult. But I never asked him for advice. I’m like a knife through butter, going through life avoiding the hard edges. He was always probing and asking questions about my situation. He was always interested in what my second wife, Judy, and I were doing and how we were getting along. I did have a confrontation with him one time when he was trying to convince me that I should declare bankruptcy for Tops in 1990. Tops was the art gallery I’d started with Judy. Business wasn’t great. We were trying to make a little money doing it. I found myself raising my voice trying to explain to him, “Norton, I love this business.” I finally yelled, “We’re not gonna go that way.” Here I am yelling down at this man who’s totally paralyzed in a wheelchair. I remember feeling rather uncomfortable, kind of standing up that much higher than him. Tentatively I decided it was time to be on my way. The next thing I knew, he was chasing me down the hallway of the hotel in his wheelchair. And he’s barking at me like a wild German shepherd. I couldn’t believe it. He had me cornered. He was ferocious in his desire that I understand. He had me against the wall, but I refused to give up the gallery.
Later on they moved together to a house in Bel Air, but the next year, in 1993, he died. We all went to distribute Norton’s ashes in San Pedro Bay, at the entrance of the Los Angeles harbor. I had arranged it. I rented a boat from this guy that I’d found in the Yellow Pages. The boat was rather large, maybe seventy-five feet long with one open deck, but you couldn’t go down inside. We were quite a few of us. There was the whole damn family. It was quite a scene. We all stood on this deck in the windy afternoon, on this funky old wooden ship, motoring out into the San Pedro harbor with Norton’s ashes. And these people were not seagoing people. These were the people in high heels and bouffant hairdos that you would have seen at Norton’s eighty-fifth birthday party at the Norton Simon Museum, holding cocktail glasses. They looked like they’d never been south of Doheny Drive.
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JUDY SIMON: When my father-in-law died, Jennifer called my husband and said, “Would you like to see his body? It will be taken away soon.” And Don said, “Yes, I think I’m going to come over. I want to make sure he’s dead.”
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FRANK GEHRY: Two years after Norton died, Jennifer called me and said, “The Zurbarán painting doesn’t look as good as it did when Norton was here. Would you come and look at it and tell me what’s wrong?” I went and looked at it, and I said, “Well, the color they painted the walls is problematic.” Sara Campbell, who was the museum’s curator, started painting the walls of the museum after Norton died. It was all white before. It’s not that you can’t paint walls to put paintings on, it’s being done all the time, it can look good, but you have to be careful what colors. And whoever was picking the colors wasn’t cool about it. And it became clear that what Sara had done was to display the paintings in some kind of academic fashion. She put them all in chronological order, equally spaced around the room. It was sweet, but it lost the power of the work.
Jennifer put me on the board of the museum, and the other members said they wouldn’t spend any money. I talked to Jennifer, and I said, “Look, I’m not an expert on nineteenth-cen
tury French paintings, but John Walsh is in town, can I bring him out?” So I brought him out and he looked at it, and he wrote me a note. I had said to him, “Give me ten commandments.” I got Carter Brown to do the same. I got Seymour Sly to do the same. I got Wolf Deeterduva, from Germany, and then Irving Lavin from Princeton. They gave me the ten commandments. The first on everybody’s list was to tear the building down and build a new one. I think they were just being nice to me. Then they said that the show was arranged too academically. The relationships between periods weren’t carefully done, the way it should be, with that quality of work. The rooms were hard to hang because of the curved walls. The lighting wasn’t working. There was a problem with the continuity of the galleries, ’cause they were designed for contemporary work, so they didn’t have rooms, so you couldn’t define periods. I had each one of them meet with Jennifer. And we talked it all through, and she asked me to do a study for free. I was on the board, so I couldn’t turn it down. I did the whole thing, showed them how to do it, within budget, leaving the curved walls in, trying to just do a few skylights, reorganizing. We said we would do it, ’cause we didn’t want to close the museum down. And I said to my wife, when I was doing it, “Norton would roll over in his grave if he knew I was redoing his museum.” My wife said, “Frank, stop it. Norton planned it this way. How much are you getting paid for doing it?” I said, “Nothing.” We did the first five galleries and found asbestos. Those five galleries were shut off, the asbestos guys came in, they had to take out the ceiling. When they took out the ceiling they found asbestos had gone down behind the walls, they had to take out the walls. I was adding a couple skylights, so they had to cut holes when they took out the ceiling. They cut the hole for the skylight, and it rained and the floor, the parquet floor buckled. So they had to take out the floor. I said to Jennifer, “I didn’t do that on purpose, but here’s where we are, it’s all stripped down to concrete, and it doesn’t make sense to put back the curving walls like they were.” Now this is ironic. Me, who does curvy walls, was trying to straighten everything out. She agreed with me. So we rebuilt the five galleries the way they are now. Very fine.
We had a board meeting. Gregory Peck came, and Milton Wexler came, and Jennifer and the lawyer Matt Byrne, and the Ann Landers advice columnist, Eppie Lederer. We had set up lunch in the main gallery, which was all new, all changed from what they saw, rehung with all the paintings. It looked drop-dead gorgeous. And all of them sat in the room, had the lunch, nobody commented, anything on anything, zero. At the end of the meeting, I think Eppie turned to the chairman and said, “When are you going to start remodeling?” And Milton was semi-blind by this time and he was the only one who knew. He had leaned over to me and said, “This is gorgeous.” He barely could see it! So when Eppie said that, Milton had a cow. He said to all of them, “You’re sitting in it, you idiots.” So we did finish the museum. We did it for under six million dollars, all of it. I got the garden changed, it was a million out there. I wanted to redo the auditorium, and they wouldn’t let me, they didn’t have any money, and I wanted to put a sound wall in the garden, because when you go out, all you hear is traffic. And Jennifer wanted me to do a teahouse in the garden. I started designing it, and I actually got into it with her. Her fantasy was Arabian nights, you know, Jennifer had this thing about the knight on the horse coming and carrying her off to a tent, ravishing her. She used to talk about it all the time. I decided to make her that fantasy in her garden, I was getting close to it. So I’ve done all this other stuff for free, but I can’t afford to keep doing this. I was getting engineers and stuff. And at the board meeting, Frank Rothman, the lawyer for the museum, turned to me and said, “Oh, we can get a USC student, to do it cheaper.” So that was insulting. But Jennifer was in cuckoo land by then, and she didn’t know that I was being insulted. She got it into her head that I was being paid the four and a half million dollars, the price of the interior remodeling. She called me and started screaming at me, “We paid you all this money!” I said, “Jennifer, I did everything for free.”
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BOB WALKER: Into his late nineties Milton was still giving Mom her two-hour sessions at his apartment on Ocean Avenue, where he lived by then. She would come see him at his home three times a week if not every day. Once when she came to see him for her session, some people found her lying on the floor in the lobby, in front of the elevators. She must have had a dizzy spell and just fallen, but they didn’t know what had happened. She was somewhat incoherent. She could’ve broken something or she could have hit her head. She was very disoriented. Her balance was getting really bad and she was walking with a cane, an elegant white cane I gave her from Tops. They called up Milton, he was on the eighth floor and came down to see if she was all right. But what could he do, he was using a walker himself, he was probably ninety-seven. He just said, “Let’s call 911.” She was taken to the hospital for all kinds of tests but they couldn’t find anything wrong with her. She had to stay there and be “re-electrified.” One day she just took off from the hospital, marched out and walked over to Westwood. They found her at some hotel over there just sitting in the lobby. We finally had a bracelet made for her, a beautiful gold bracelet, so she would know her name and her telephone number. We tried to make her believe that Milton had given it to her so she would wear it.
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DAWN WALKER: I knew Jennifer was in the throes of dementia when I married Bob. One day she left her handbag at Milton’s. She was still going to see him every other day. He was a port in a storm, but that day her defiance reared its head. She had been driven to Milton’s by her assistant, Paul, who had originally been Norton’s runner or gofer. Her session finished, and she came down by herself, and Paul met her in the lobby. Milton came down after her and said, “Oh, Jennifer, here’s your handbag.” She had left it behind from the previous session a couple of days earlier. And she said, “No, I’m not taking it. It doesn’t match my outfit. I’ll send a messenger. I’m sorry to bother you with it, but I’m not taking it, I’m going somewhere.” So Milton said, “Take your handbag! Jennifer, you’re losing your money. Be realistic. They’re telling you your money’s not gonna last. This is ridiculous, spending sixty dollars to send a messenger to me. You’re here right now. Take it. Paul can carry it or put it in the car. Your handbag’s holding you hostage. Don’t you see it?” And what’s in the handbag? A mirror, a comb, lipstick. That’s all she ever carried. But she absolutely refused, and so she sent a messenger because it didn’t match her outfit.
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BOB WALKER: We didn’t go to Milton’s funeral service, it was probably only family members. Mom did make the memorial service at Carrie Fisher’s place. She managed that. It was a major, major party. Everybody she’d ever seen in her life was there, but a lot of the time she wasn’t aware of what was going on. It was impossible to get up to the house somewhere off Coldwater Canyon Drive. Mom had to be in a wheelchair, so we had to go up this dirt path that was behind the tennis courts. It was crazy. All the best doctors, all the best analysts and scientists were there. It was an incredible get-together. Mom wasn’t sure if Milton had been her husband. She’d talk about him: “I miss him, were we ever married?” “No, Mom, he was your analyst.” But she knew he was someone really close to her.
I never saw Milton as a patient, and neither did my brother, Michael. I’m sure Mother would have been happy if we had; Mother was happy when everybody was in therapy. For the last thirty years of Michael’s life, he was living in a small apartment in the Valley, on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys. At one point he worked at a gas station across the street from Whiskey A Go Go. He had been a bouncer and he’d worked at a clothing store and on a kibbutz and at a funeral home. He even volunteered at a 7-Eleven to help the night managers stock the shelves. He got robbed one night. The robber chased him through the store and put the gun to his head, but it misfired. I mean he’d done everything. I have visions of him with a yarmulke on his head, careening through the streets in a hea
rse at seventy miles an hour, stoned, like in a Hunter Thompson nightmare. And then during the funeral, he managed to tip over the coffin, ingloriously or gloriously, and out tumbled the remains of old Uncle Herman in front of the assembled multitudes. Since Uncle Herman was in the coffin, nobody felt they had to put pants on him, for god’s sake. Of course, Michael couldn’t continue working there after that.
At some point, he quit drinking and started attending AA and other kinds of meetings. He called me one morning and said, “Bob, I’m sorry, I really have to apologize to you. I think I’ve done you a great disservice.” And I said, “What could you possibly have done?” And he said, “I go to all of these meetings, and one of the meetings I go to is Survivors of Incest Anonymous.” And I said, “Really? Wow, that’s interesting.” And he said, “I got up at the meeting, and I don’t know why I said it, but I said that I was a victim. When they asked me who the perpetrator was, I said it was you, Bob. I’m so sorry.” I said, “Really? Me? That’s fascinating, Michael.” He said, “But it’s just a matter of time. This is supposed to be anonymous, but since our parents are people of note, it’s just a matter of time before people find out, and you’re going to be accused.” I said, “Well, how old were we at the time?” “Three and four.” I said, “But you don’t remember any specific incident?” He said no. He was obsessed about it for months, and I tried to joke him out of it. I’d be very interested to know what I did when I was four years old. I said, “Michael, set your heart at ease, please. You have probably done me the greatest favor that anyone has ever done for me in my life. If this gets out, I’ll probably never stop working in this town again.” This town loves scandals, you know.
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