Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles, Part One

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[classical music introduction]

James Cuno: Hello, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Welcome to Art + Ideas, a podcast in which I speak to artists, conservators, authors, and scholars about their work.

Frank Gehry: My father always wrote me off as a dreamer, never to be seen in—you know, one of those. And so he didn’t have much hope for me. My mother was always comparing me to her friends’ sons who were doing well. So I had a bad time.

Cuno: In this episode, I speak with architect Frank Gehry in the first of several conversations we recorded together.

[classical music fades out]

Frank Gehry cares deeply about Los Angeles. Over the almost 70 years that he’s lived and worked here, he’s changed and elevated the architectural profile of the city as perhaps only Frank Lloyd Wright or Richard Neutra before him. Today, we’ll explore Frank’s earliest years in the city, his architectural training, friendships with artists, and breakthrough projects. In upcoming episodes, we’ll discuss the first years of his independent architectural practice up to the design and construction of his celebrated house, the so-called Gehry House; his “mature period,” including his work for LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the LA Philharmonic’s Hollywood Bowl; his late “heroic” years (my term, not his), with the construction of Disney Hall; and his grand vision to revitalize the LA River. All along the way we’ll hear Frank’s uncompromising view of this history, delivered in his own words as only Frank can.

What follows is an edited version of our longer conversation we had over lunch in his studio.

Cuno: Frank, thanks so much for your time and your interest in this project.

So today, I wanna talk to you about your early LA experiences and how it was that you came to establish your architecture studio, and what effect LA had on your studio practice, if any. You were born in Toronto, and you came to LA, I think, in 1947, [Gehry: Right] at the age of about 18. Is that right?

Gehry: 17, 18, something like that.

Cuno: Well, tell us what brought you to LA, and what were your first impressions of the city?

Gehry: Well, I lived in Toronto. My father was a salesman, quasi-business, but he wasn’t very successful. He had bad times. And he had a serious heart attack at 49 years old.

Cuno: In Toronto?

Gehry: Toronto, yeah. And he lost—whatever he had, he lost, financially, and he was kind of broke. And I didn’t know this at—as that was going on. I didn’t know the magnitude of it completely.

Cuno: But you sensed some anxiety in the family?

Gehry: Yeah. He was struggling, I knew that. His brother, his older brother, was moving his family to LA from Detroit, and it was a time where when people got sick, they’d bring ’em to a softer climate. So big brother said, “I’m gonna take care of you. Come on, come with me to California and you’ll feel better.” Which he did. And we were all excited. He was driving cross country, sent postcards and things.

Cuno: He came out before you came out?

Gehry: Yeah. And he rented an apartment. And he didn’t make it look—sound flowery, but you know, just okay, this is what we’re doing. My mother and sister came out earlier. I think I was finishing my schoolwork, my year, and I had to stay there to finish it. So I lived at my grandmother’s house. I got on a train and came to LA. They picked me up at Union Station. The blaring sun. I mean, everything was just like, wow. [laughs]

Cuno: And where was the family living then? So where did you—what was the first apartment that you lived in?

Gehry: Well, so then he took me to the apartment. It was a—what was then called 9th Street. I think they’ve changed the name of the street, but—it was the corner of Burlington and 9th. The building’s still there. It was an old apartment building, probably the ’20s, with wrought iron elevator cages and things like that. But it was run down. It was not—wasn’t spiffy. It was pretty over-the-hill, as we say.

Cuno: Did your father have a job then, or was he still looking for one?

Gehry: He did get a job as a truck driver, with a soda pop company, delivering—now, here’s a guy with a heart attack, delivering cases [Cuno: Doesn’t sound good, yeah] of soda. It didn’t make sense to me, but that’s the job he got. The apartment was two rooms. I guess the size of this one.

Cuno: Yeah, this library, which must be 60 by 30.

Gehry: Yeah, so there were two rooms like this, with [a] big window on one side. And they had a little kitchen, one bathroom. And there were sliding doors between the rooms, so you could open it all up. So one was the living room, one was the bedroom. And they had the old pulldown wall beds...

Cuno: Oh, yeah, Murphy beds.

Gehry: …that you pull down. And so there was one of those in each room. So the parents stayed in one of those, and the other one I got, and my kid sister got the couch. And it was tight. [chuckles]

Cuno: Yeah, sounds like it.

Gehry: Tight quarters. My mother got a job at the Broadway Hollywood, in the candy department. Now, here’s a lady that was—belonged to Hadassah, all those Jewish philanthropic organizations. I mean, they didn’t have much money, but that was her kind of thing in Toronto and—she had always wanted to go to law school, but her father sent her brother to law school, you know, who then didn’t use what he learned. She would’ve been a lawyer. He didn’t. And so she started going to night school at LA City College, studying law. She hadn’t even completed her high school. So she had to do all that.

Cuno: And that was downtown. Did she get from your apartment to the school by bus?

Gehry: Yeah. that was Alvarado, so it was one—it was Vermont. So you took 9th Street to Vermont, straight up. And I did the same. I went to—

Cuno: Right, ’cause you went to LA City College, too.

Gehry: I went to LA City, too.

Cuno: Yeah. At night, or was it during the day?

Gehry: Yeah, I went at night. ’Cause I worked during the—I was a truck driver also. I got a job working for a relative, in a—in the Sacramento Valley, for a furn—she had a furniture company and we would—he was selling kitchen furniture, like tables and chairs in chrome, that they used to make outta chrome back in those days, with upholstered seats and he would make breakfast nooks that you had to fit into the wall. And so I was delivering those.

Cuno: But sometime not long after that, you got into USC. And I remember you saying to me once that you can’t imagine how your parents could afford sending you to USC. Did you ever figure that out?

Gehry: They didn’t. [chuckles]

Cuno: They didn’t send you. You went on fellowship?

Gehry: I was a truck driver. I was going to night school. I had my cousin, who was the son of the brother that brought my father out. And they had money, so he had a convertible and he joined a fraternity at SC, and he was like a college boy, at those days, with the bobby soxers, and he always included me in all his stuff, even though we didn’t have any money to do it.

Cuno: Was he a couple years older?

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: A couple.

Gehry: Three. Maybe three or—he’s still alive.

Cuno: So somehow, they made it possible for you to get to go through USC?

Gehry: No, I started—I did—when I was at LA City College, I was trying to figure out who—what I wanted to be. And I took classes in all kinds of things. But two classes I took, one in—in—there was an architect teaching, and it was to do kitchen cabinets, or how to draw that stuff. And for some reason, because I was doing the—I was installing stuff like that, I took that class. And that architect took a liking to me and got me through. You know, he was very positive about what I was doing. I took a class in perspective. And why I did that, I don’t know. And I got an F.

Cuno: [chuckles] Oh, that’s not good, not promising for your career.

Gehry: And since I’d never had an F before in my life, that really got me angry. So I took the class again, and I got an A. And then I felt better. [chuckles] Anyway, as a truck driver, and this—having a cousin at USC, he would always drag me down there. So I took a class in ceramics.

Cuno: Yeah, with Glen Lukens, right?

Gehry: Glen, yeah. The first year, I was doing just ceramics. The second, I stayed on with him as his assistant, so I didn’t have to pay tuition. And during that period, he was building a house by Soriano.

Cuno: Yeah. Rafael Soriano.

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: Was Soriano the first architect you met? I mean, that was a practicing architect, in some sense, of the professional life of an architect?

Gehry: [over Cuno] Probably. Probably.

Cuno: Did you get a sense of the practice of architecture, or just that this was an architect? Did he take you to the studio or to the offices?

Gehry: No, I never went to his—I never went to his studio or anything. I went to see the house under construction. Soriano was there. He had a black beret, a black shirt, black everything. Broken nose. He’s from the isle of Rhodes. And he was telling the steel guys, “Put this here and put that here and put that here,” and I guess Glen saw the light in my eyes. I was enjoying it. And when we got back, he said, “You know, I got a hunch. I think we should enroll you in a class in architecture.” There’s a night school class on Monday nights at SC. Schoen—not Schoenberg, something Schoenberg—he was an architect with one of the big engineering firms in LA—was teaching the class. And so my first building that I did looked like Soriano. [chuckle]

Cuno: Well, obviously. That was all you knew. Was USC at that time the likely place an architect would go for an education?

Gehry: Yeah, it was the only—it was the only architecture school, SC.

Cuno: But this guy Arnold Schrier had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, I think, or Lloyd Wright maybe.

Gehry: Lloyd.

Cuno: And did he introduce you to modernist architecture in Los Angeles? Because it was the time to see new things, new things being built all the time. And maybe Julius Shulman. Do I remember that, that he introduced you…?

Gehry: Yeah, Julius was involved, Arnold was involved, Craig Ellwood was involved. [chuckles]

Cuno: And by involved, you mean at USC? Or just in architecture?

Gehry: No, in my life. I think what happened is during that period, I met Arnold Schrier. He was working at Lloyd Wright’s studio. And he would, on weekends, go out looking at the houses by eminent architects in the city, and I used to go with him. And somehow he met Julius Shulman.

Cuno: The great photographer of modernist architecture, yeah.

Gehry: Right. And would drag me along. And somehow we got invited to dinner to Julius’ house, which was a Soriano house. And somehow at those dinner, Craig Ellwood and his then wife, an actress, Gloria Henry, would come. And somehow we all became friends. [chuckles]

Cuno: What did your parents think about your interest in architecture? Did they think, well, there’s a future there, he’ll make some money?

Gehry: Yeah. [chuckles]

Cuno: He’ll be okay.

Gehry: My father always wrote me off as a dreamer, never to be seen, you know, one of those. And so he didn’t have much hope for me. My mother was always comparing me to her friends’ sons, who were doing well. So I had a bad time. I never measured up. Although she took me to museums and took me to concerts. She’s the one that got me into all of that, back in Canada.

Cuno: Uh-huh. But you also—we’ll go back to Canada for a second—you also had the support of your grandfather and grandmother, right?

Gehry: Yes. And the grandfather [had] a hardware store, which I worked at with him, and so I got to cut glass and thread pipes and a lotta stuff that would later become practical.

Cuno: Yeah. And he was encouraging, as a personality.

Gehry: Yeah. And he read a lot. And mostly Talmud, they always studied Talmud, and Talmud is about curiosity. That’s all they do.

Cuno: Just ask why. Why this, why that?

Gehry: They just keep asking why this and why—and they argue about the answers. [chuckles]

Cuno: So back to USC and these guys. What about Greg Walsh?

Gehry: Greg came along when I got into second year architecture. So first year, in that night class was John Kelsey, who became Kelsey and Ladd who did the Pasadena museum.

Cuno: Oh, oh. Oh, no kidding.

Gehry: I met him that night. In that class. And he was one of the ones with me that got skipped into second year. And we stayed friends. He died recently, but—I loved that guy.

Cuno: But Greg Walsh was your peer. He was a fellow student.

Gehry: Second year. Greg was in—Greg was curious about buildings, so—and he knew Arnold Schrier, either through me or somehow, but they became friends. And we would search every Schindler house, every Wright house, everything. And drove people nuts. We’d knock on the doors. All the things people do to me and I can’t stand it.

Cuno: Who had the car, you or Greg?

Gehry: [chuckles] I don’t remember. But we did go everywhere. I did meet Schindler, and could call him. He was great. And when I got into the regular class at SC, he would come and lecture. And he was the typical hippie. He had sackcloth shirts and I mean, he really fit the story. I was taken by him, pretty much, because it felt real, it felt human, it felt—it didn’t feel contrived, somehow. It felt like, you know, you were putting two pieces of wood together, you were doing a—he would draw—he had a piece of plywood and he had a T-square and a pencil, and he didn’t use a triangle. He put the pencil on the edge of—and that’s how he got his—[chuckle]

Cuno: Did he talk about the profession, the nobility of the profession, [Gehry: No] the ambitions of the profession? Nothing about that. Nothing about the ethos of the profession, the ethics of the profession?

Gehry: No, no. We got some funny stories with his—you know, he had a thing that he had a thing with every woman of every house he built. RM was kind of a ladies’ man. That was funny. But I met Lloyd Wright, who was not easy to talk to. He was always worried about his father. That was really—you could feel it, you know?

Cuno: Yeah, I’m sure.

Gehry: When Daddy was coming to town, boy, did he just—[makes a noise]. I met Lautner—the people that were easy were… ’Cause the school, everybody was sorta bitten by the Japanese wood architecture.

Cuno: Yeah, as was Schindler.

Gehry: Yeah. But the guys I—like there was a guy Bill Rudolph, and there was Gene Weston, the one that just died. And they were all acolytes of like Gordon Drake and Harwell Hamilton Harris, and it was easy. You know, you could get the post and beam structures, you could draw it, you could—and they’re beautiful. You know, you’ve seen—you’ve been in those houses and all. Annie Philbin lives in one now.

Cuno: Well, one of your teachers at USC at the time, along with Cal Straub, was Garrett Eckbo. And Greg Ain. And both of them had leftist politics, or had a sense of the profession as doing something other than making fine, fancy houses, right?

Gehry: There were several organizations. One was called the Architectural Panel. And all the lefties belonged to that. And we’d meet every Friday night somewhere and Greg Ain would come and talk, or Garrett would talk or…There was a big brouhaha about the baseball stadium and—

Cuno: Dodger Stadium, yeah.

Gehry: Dodgers Stadium.

Cuno: You had to clear all this housing to make it, right?

Gehry: And Neutra’s office was doing something, and a guy named Al Boeke worked for Neutra. And he’s the guy that then went to Hawaii, and came back and hired Charles Moore to do Sea Ranch.

Cuno: Oh, gosh.

Gehry: My Neutra story’s a sad one. When I graduated, I wanted to go work for him because they were involved with social stuff. Especially Boeke and a lotta the people around. And Neutra’s partner, who did the UCLA school and what’s his name—anyway…

Cuno: Did they offer you a job? Or you just wanted—

Gehry: No.

Cuno: You wanted them to.

Gehry: So I went for an interview with Richard himself. I took my thesis and I was married by then, I had a child. I can show it you, the thesis project.

Cuno: Really? It’s a building or is it a—?

Gehry: It was for Mexico.

Cuno: Oh, that’s right. Baja.

Gehry: Baja, yeah.

Cuno: Right. And that was also housing.

Gehry: Yeah. So I went to meet Neutra, and he looked through it. And he was, you know, a big WACO airplane guy with a lotta hair. He was very friendly. And he says, “Ah, start Monday.” I said, “Fine.” And he got up to leave and I said, “Mr. Neutra, shouldn’t we discuss the financial stuff?” He said, “Oh, don’t worry, they’ll tell you much you have to pay on Monday.”

Cuno: You have to pay?

Gehry: Mm. I didn’t say anything, but I never went back. So—

Cuno: But it was about that time that Victor Gruen Associates offered you a job. Is that right? Maybe a summer job?

Gehry: Edgardo Contini was in my fourth year. So I’m just out of Straub, fourth year, Edgardo’s teaching. He’s an engineer. He was Victor’s partner, became Victor’s partner. And they were doing social housing. And I did a project for something, but it was a riff on the house, the Neutra-Schindler house with the concrete panels.

Cuno: Right.

Gehry: I took that idea and built something with it, and Contini thought it was brilliant and blah-blah-blah. And so they hired me for the summer. And then when I graduated, I went to work there.

Cuno: But you get drafted into the Army. It’s like 1955. So were you with Victor Gruen for a year or two before you got drafted, between USC and drafting?

Gehry: No, right away. What happened is—I was very interested in flying. And when I was a truck driver, I had a cousin who had a WACO airplane. And I used to go out on weekends and fly with him. A biplane. And then on weekends, I got—made extra money by washing people’s planes in Van Nuys.

Cuno: Didn’t know there were so many people with planes that had a need to have them washed.

Gehry: Van Nuys Airport. Well, they were movie stars. It was famous ones. I forget.

Cuno: Yeah. Yeah.

Gehry: So when I got into SC, I joined Air ROTC. ’Cause in high school in Canada, I was in Air ROTC. And I had a fantasy about flying. I figured if you have to go in the Army anyway—’cause that time, everybody had to go—that I wanted to go in the Air Force. So I was in Air ROTC from second year—second year, third year, fourth year, fifth year. Four years. And I did all the tests and I passed all the things and I was—marched and wore the uniform and polished the brass and did everything for those years. And three months before graduation, the colonel or whatever he was called me in and said, “Frank, there’s been a terrible mistake made. You never were accepted into the Air ROTC.”

Cuno: Oh. That was because of a knee or something? There was some problem, right?

Gehry: ’Cause I had a knee—and I was 4-F in the Army. But the Air ROTC, they saw it, they went along with it, you know?

Cuno: Figured you’d be sitting down in an airplane anyway.

Gehry: Yeah. So he told me that three months before graduation. Which meant I was back into the draft.

Cuno: I see.

Gehry: And I was 4-F, but I had to go in—soon as I was out of that, I had to go in for reexamination. I went for the examination. The doctor was crippled. And he looked at me and said, “4-F?” He said, “Look, I’m—they found something for me to do; they’ll find something for you to do.” And he goes, “1-A,” and that’s it. Boom. So I got drafted.

Cuno: And you went to Fort Ord.

Gehry: Fort Ord.

Cuno: Did you have thoughts that you might end up in Korea?

Gehry: Well, it was at the end of the K—it looked like it was over. But there were threats. You know, when you’re in the Army, everybody’s making up stories and—we’re shipping out, we’re shipping out. Anyway, after a day as the clerk, the captain came to me and said, “What else can you do?” Because I couldn’t do it. So I ended up making signs for him. The signs were—because they didn’t—I’d finish a sign a day and I’d take ’em and he’d say, “No, no, make it nicer. You can—you can take a week to do this if you want, or even two weeks. Make it.” So I started doing these flamboyant baroque-looking signs, and I was having fun. At the same time, they were getting ready to go on maneuvers to test a new Army model, which was breaking up the different—the cavalry, the infantry, the tanks, the things, into sections, and making one Army unit that had one of each in it. So it was a compact fighting unit that was self-sufficient. They needed somebody to make these charts. And so I made signs, charts. In their mind, same thing. So I’m the chart guy now. So it’s top secret. The general looks at me, he says, “You—have you got any clearances?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, you’re gonna need top-secret clearance. What’s your past like? Have you got any communist leanings or any—” [chuckles] I forget. Stuff like that, you know. And I said, “No, I’m clear.” I mean, I didn’t tell him about all the leftie organizations I was in. So, right hand up, he swore me in. I’m now top secret. Puts me in a barracks all by myself. A barracks is from here to the other side, and twice this width. I’m sitting at a table all by myself. And then they brought a guy from somewhere else, who was from France, but he was living in the US. He was American. He got drafted. So he spoke French. And we’d make these charts of line companies. How many enlisted men and how many tanks and we’d—and they were top-secret charts. And then they asked us—they asked me if I could help them. They needed a—some field desks and equipment that went in the field on maneuvers and they gave me a list of stuff. “Is there anything you could do to help us with this?”

Cuno: To design them.

Gehry: Design them. So I designed everything. And I designed a field latrine. I can draw it for you. It was—it was like a little square that you sat on. The back had two pipes that went up with canvas, and then a little canvas—it looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright thing. And I had it going both ways. So there were two latrines, with this thing in between.

Cuno: Back to back?

Gehry: Back to back. And I made models for them. And they loved it. I made desks and—they’d never seen shit like this, you know, so—

Cuno: Did they—they put it to use? I mean, [chuckles] was it put in practice?

Gehry: I think so. I think so, but—

Cuno: Into production?

Gehry: I think life went faster than that. So while I was in the infantry thing, when I would go to—on these 20-mile hikes, my leg would swell. And it wasn’t anything I’d experienced before, ’cause that never happened before. And so I went—I used to go to the infirmary or whatever you call it. And the—the doctor for legs—what do they call ’em? Whatever it is, you know the word. And he said, “Look, what’s happening is those boots, when you tie ’em up, are—

Cuno: Cutting the circulation off?

Gehry: Are cutting cir—he said, “So that’s what’s making it swell.” And he said, “So I’m gonna give you a slip that you shouldn’t wear boots.” And I took it back to the company. I didn’t know what that meant. Took it back to the company commander and he looked at it and he—this guy was really anti-Semite. He said, “You fucking Jews, you always get outta everything.” You couldn’t do KP or guard duty without boots. [they laugh] So when I got to Atlanta and I was in top-secret drawings, the leg was still acting up a little. So I went to the infirmary a couple times and I had a heating pad that I would do. The doctor in charge, a captain, was from Montgomery, Alabama. He was just getting ready to go out of the Army, and he was getting ready to build himself a clinic in Montgomery, Alabama. I’m an architect, so he starts asking me about this clinic and how he should do it. And you know, I’m easy-going, so I start designing the thing with him. And it got to where he would call me to come for the heat treatment [they laugh], so we could work together. Which is fine. I mean, it wasn’t—you know, it was a couple hours very other day or something. But then I got a call from the general. And he says—comes to the office—and the general, he must’ve been gay. He had starched fatigues. I’ve never seen that before. He was really like a guy that’s been looking in a mirror all day long. And he said, “Private Gehry,” he says, “I’m really proud of you, young man.” I said, “Thank you, sir. What did I do?” [chuckles] He said, “Well, you’ve had problems with your leg and you haven’t been complaining.” And he said, “And we’re about to go on maneuvers in the South, in Louisiana, where you’re gonna have trouble.” And I said, “No, no, I can do it.” He says, “Look, captain over there at the infirmary told me that you’re not a complainer, but he said, ‘Don’t take that guy on—’”

Cuno: On maneuvers.

Gehry: On maneuvers. Now, I didn’t ask him to do it. [chuckles] At the same time, I’d met Al Trevino at the PX or something. Al Trevino was a Harvard graduate and a landscape architect, who then went to work with Irvine. And he’s still a friend. He’s still around. And Al said he’s doing the general’s gardens. They’re getting ready to do a big dayroom remodeling thing for the Third Army, and they need an architect. He said, “They—they think they need decorators, but they really need—” He said, “Would you be interested?” I said, “Sure, but I—you know, I didn’t—” Anyway, long story shorty, Al put in a request for me to go up there. I did go up. I met the general. I did talk to him, I did—he said, “Well, you’re not a decorator. I need a decorator.” And I said, “Well, I can do what you want.” And so I made a model. I went home, made a model of a—of a dayroom. Worked all night, over a weekend, and took it back and showed it to him. And he said, “Okay.” And then he put in a request for me, just as this general was being told, and it—boom, it worked. And he signed the order and let me go up to Atlanta. [laughter]

Cuno: To do this dayroom or whatever it was called. Lounge of some kind.

Gehry: And then my first day, we fall out the morning with the sergeant telling us to pick up trash. Assholes and elbows, they used to say. And that sergeant was none other than Leonard Nimoy. [laughter]

Cuno: That can’t be true. Is that true?

Gehry: Yeah. [Cuno chuckles] Now, I didn’t know—at that point, we didn’t know who he was, and he didn’t know who I was, and he didn’t—nobody knew who anybody was. He was a nice guy. He was getting ready t—’cause it was Special Services, so they—Special Services had all the country-western singers. Curtis Gordon, I think his name was, and—I forget their names. We’re all in this group. And we were all falling out together and picking up trash and—some of ’em became really famous.

Cuno: Well, you were certainly very close to Leonard Nimoy much later in life. Did you ever stay in touch from that point on?

Gehry: Yeah, well, I got—yeah. I got to know him. Well, you might even have been there, Annie Philbin had one of those things, and she honored me.

Cuno: Right, right, right, at the Hammer.

Gehry: And I got a little—had a little bit too much to drink, and I got up and I said, “Sergeant Nimoy, would you please stand?” [they laugh] And there he was, and he stood up and I saluted him. Poor guy.

Cuno: So this is about three years after college? I mean, you’re about 25 or so?

Gehry: Yeah, something like that.

Cuno: Yeah. And a young married man and a young father.

Gehry: Yeah, and a father.

Cuno: And at some point, you get out of the Army and you come back to LA.

Gehry: We had another child while I was in the Army, and we stayed in Atlanta. And I had some really amazing experiences. We were in the military housing that was special for the enlisted personnel and other staff. And it was East Point, Georgia, so it’s just outta—slightly outta town. We’d get—we got fliers put on our door, Attorney General Griffin saying, “Beware of your women, the black folk are after them.” It was a whole paragraph, and it was very powerfully written. It wasn’t folksy, like I’m making it.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: I freaked out. At least I had the smarts to call from a pay phone. I called the NAACP. And I got a Mr. Calhoun. And it’s the very Calhoun that then became head of the NAACP. Mr. Calhoun said, “Don’t give me your name your telephone number. This line is bugged.” He said, “If you’re up for it,” he says, “Take that piece of paper to the—Ralph McGill, at the Atlanta Constitution…”

Cuno: The newspaper.

Gehry: “… and give it to him.” Which I did. The next day, I called Ralph McGill.

Cuno: And you were still in the Army.

Gehry: Yeah. And I went. And he was very sweet. McGill was—was not a Southern racist. He was a good guy. And he published it on the op-ed piece, front page of the op-ed, in big letters.

Cuno: Wow. [Gehry chuckles] And was that ever traced back to you?

Gehry: No.

Cuno: Yeah. But you figured your days were numbered in the United States Army.

Gehry: [laughs] No, I wasn’t worried about it. It was just—Atlanta was rough. This is two years after the Supreme Court decision, so it was ’56.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: There was a Black kid in my—in Special Services, who was a concert pianist from Oberlin. And he was afraid to go into town. He wanted to go to the library, so I used to drive him in and stay with him while he was in the library. You had to use separate washrooms. I mean, you know.

Cuno: Even though it was a integrated service. I mean, Truman integrated the service in…

Gehry: Yeah, but outside the service.

Cuno: Oh, I see.

Gehry: So if you went to the department store or anything, or restaurants, it was all segregated.

Cuno: So long did you stay in the Army?

Gehry: 21 months.

Cuno: All right. Did you come back to LA, or did you go on—

Gehry: No, they gave me a—they gave me an early—they give you—at that time, they’d give you a three-month early discharge if you go back to school.

Cuno: Yeah. Oh, that’s how—that’s how you—that was one of the motivations for going to Harvard?

Gehry: And that’s why I went to Harvard. Eckbo and Simon Eisner were the planning guys. They knew my politics and everything. They knew I didn’t wanna do rich-guy houses, so they said, “You should be in city planning.” City planning was run by Reg Isaacs, at that time. And so I applied, got accepted to city planning.

Cuno: Which you misunderstood? You thought it was gonna be urban design more?

Gehry: Well, I thought—yeah, I thought that you c—I thought it was flexible. And so I ended up in classes with Jon Goss and Otto Eckstein and…Not bad. I’m not complaining. I mean, after I got there, I did have a class with Jon Goss that Teddy Kennedy and the Aga Khan were in. But it was 200 people and we never got to meet each other. [chuckles]

Cuno: But they sometimes—at some point, you figured out or they figured out you were the wrong guy in the wrong place.

Gehry: I figured out. What happened is we were doing a master plan for Worcester.

Cuno: Worcester, Mass.

Gehry: Mass., in the planning. You know, master plan, to me, was—’cause I’d worked at Gruen, was like he was doing for Forth Worth, was to lay out the streets and traffic and all that stuff. Master plan for my class was an economic planning structure of the city. You know, I forget what it was, but it was nothing that I—

Cuno: It wasn’t designing anything.

Gehry: Wasn’t designing anything. And I started the presentation of this master plan for Worcester, and Charles Eliot III stopped me and said, “Mr. Gehry, this has nothing to do with the class I gave. Please sit down.” [chuckles]

Cuno: And this is just weeks into the term.

Gehry: It was—well, like it was November.

Cuno: Oh, right. Yeah.

Gehry: And I was—I was so angry. So I waited for him. Class is over. I saw him go up into his—his office was at Robinson Hall. It was like a ship’s ladder. Had a door at the bottom that looked like you were going to the captain’s. I knocked on the door. “Yes.” I open the door, there’s Charles Laughton standing at the top of the steps looking at me, and I start screaming at him.

You know, “You can’t do this to somebody. This is outrageous. To embarrass me in front of Sert, to make me feel like nothing.” I—I—I must—I unloaded. By the time I was finished, there was a crowd around me. And I told him to go fuck himself and I slammed the door and I walked out. [chuckles] I then went to see Sert and told him, “Look, I’ve—probably my own fault. I got in the wrong pew. Can you transfer me to urban design?” He said, “You will have to apply again.” I said, “You know, I’m married, I have kids.” He said, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” Can you imagine that? It was cold-blooded. They were really cold-blooded. So the only good thing is that Charles Laughton’s assistant, Peter Nash, who was the classicist, took me out for a drink. And he said, “Look, what you did was perfectly fine.” He said, “That guy was outta line doing that to a student.” And he said, “I apologize for him.” They—and Peter helped me get a—arranged a special card that I could go take any class I wanted. But no credit.

Cuno: But it was while you were there that Pereira and Luckman, the fir—LA firm, reached out to you, is that right, to get…

Gehry: Yes.

Cuno: ’Cause Pereira had been your thesis advisor, maybe?

Gehry: Pereira and I were friends because he was my thesis advisor, and I got paid for doing the Mexican project. He—he thought that was—

Cuno: Your—your thesis project, your Baja project.

Gehry: Yeah. We got a stipend from the Mexican government to do the work. I mean, it wasn’t a lotta money, but Bill Pereira was very impressed with that.

Cuno: Yeah. And he was doing the L—his firm got the project for the LA International Airport about that time?

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: I mean, did they—did they hire you for that job? Or they want to hire you for that job?

Gehry: Yes. What happened is one of the planners in the office, Jack Levash—I don’t know if he’s around anymore, but—came back to the Urban Design Conference and took me aside and said, “Bill Pereira would like you to come back, if you’re coming back to LA, to work in the office with him and be close to him, working with him. It’s—it’s a big opportunity and…” So I said, “God, that’s great.” Because I had been told by the Gruen guys, not by the partners, but by one of the—a Swiss guy that was in charge of the planning department, that there was no work for me at the Gruen office. It turned out he was trying to keep me out cause I was talented and he didn’t want…I guess that’s why, but—

Cuno: Because you actually do go back to Gruen.

Gehry: Well, what happened is I—I go to Pereira and start working with Bill. And the first thing he asked me to do is, he says, “The Hearsts are giving up the castle. They’re gonna turn it into a public venue. And I’m going up to have dinner with the Hearsts and I’d like you to come with me.” And I looked at him and said, “No way.” [laughter] So I said, “Please. I can’t work on that one.” So he put me on the airport.

Cuno: Uh-huh. What was—what part of the airport were you working on? Just one terminal or another terminal?

Gehry: No, they were—they were laying—they’d laid out the runways and all that stuff. They were doing the buildings, and they needed those number towers. [Cuno: Oh, right, yeah] Just numbers. So I had—I was given that to design.

Cuno: All right.

Gehry: The ones I designed aren’t the ones they built, but—I had—mine were lit up and everything.

Cuno: But just to get to this straight, so now you’re out of the Army, you’ve been to Harvard, now you’re coming back. And this is about ’57 or so?

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: And you’re—for the first time in three or four years, you’re back in Los Angeles.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: And Los Angeles must’ve been, in the late 50s, post-war, booming like crazy.

Gehry: It was, yeah. And—and Pereira’s office was booming, and…

Cuno: But were you long in the office, before Gruen comes?

Gehry: I didn’t fit. I didn’t fit Pereira’s office. I fit him. If it was just Bill and me, we would’ve had a great time. The rest of the office was corporate, they—and what they did is, they had a little theater set up. Like a theater. You’d pull the curtains and open, and there would be the project. And for each project, they’d do three schemes. And then the client would come in and they’d give him a drink and he’d sit there and they’d open the first screen in there. And they theatrical lighting and this was the project. Then a team would explain it. Then boom, and then they’d stop for a minute, they’d put another one. And then the client would pick the scheme. And I found that abhorrent and…

Cuno: Inevitably, the client would pick the scheme they wanted the—the architectural firm want the client to pick, [Gehry: Yeah] ’cause they’d orchestrated the whole thing.

Gehry: Yeah. I don’t know if they picked the one they wanted them to pick, but that’s the way they did it.

Cuno: Did you stay with Peirera?

Gehry: I just didn’t fit. And at that time, Rudy called me, Baumfeld. And I loved Rudy and we were really close from way—from the beginning. I mean, he was—I just bonded with him. Called me, took me to lunch. And he said, “Why aren’t you here at my office?” And I said, “Well, Beta told me you didn’t need anybody.” He said, “I want you here tomorrow.” [chuckles] So I went.

Cuno: You gave up Pereira, you gave up that big project of the airport. ’Cause the culture was better at—

Gehry: Rudy. I loved Rudy. And—

Cuno: Was that your model for—your sort of first model for what a studio practice would be like?

Gehry: I suppose, yeah.

Cuno: Was it that everybody had this—the principals had the offices and all the draftsmen and all the young designers all just in open spaces with big tables?

Gehry: Yeah, it was—

Cuno: Working together and working all night, working all—all day, the whole thing?

Gehry: Yeah. Working all day and night. But there were—you know, it continues there. The quality of the work, the architecture wasn’t triple-A great, and they were doing shopping centers, but they were social things, too. And Rudy was a great furniture designer. And he was an art collector. You could talk to him about things that—I mean, I could talk about music and art with him. And—

Cuno: And he was Viennese. I mean, he was a cultured character.

Gehry: Yeah. And he drove me nuts about model making. You’d make everything perfect.

Cuno: He also drove a beautiful BMW or Mercedes. It was kind of qui—a picture perfect car.

Gehry: Blue.

Cuno: Blue car?

Gehry: Blue car.

Cuno: Ah, yeah. But it was there that you got reunited with Greg Walsh? At Gruen?

Gehry: No, Greg—I got him a job there.

Cuno: Oh, you got—uh-huh.

Gehry: I got Greg the job there.

Cuno: And with him, because they allowed you to do work outside the firm, you did a little cabin in the west of Palm Springs somewhere, you and Greg, is that right?

Gehry: No, it’s up in Idyllwild.

Cuno: Idyllwild, yeah.

Gehry: Yeah. Yeah. It’s still there. Somebody—somebody I know went to see it the other—a few weeks ago. Told me they went to see it.

Cuno: Was there tension in your mind then between the big firm practice and the independent practice?

Gehry: No, I was committed to the—to the big firm. I thought this was it. I was in the holy land. I loved Contini, I loved Victor, I loved everybody. They treated me very well. I worked very hard. I ended up having almost my own office within the office. I could do a shopping center over a weekend and I was really fast. And they loved it. And I could write good letters and I understood the contracts. I understood the whole thing. I was—I was in it. [chuckles] I was what they needed. I was—

Cuno: But you were pulled away by the prospect of your own projects?

Gehry: Well, they—they— [chuckles] This could be—I mean, that was the time where my marriage was dicey. And I would—I was drinking a lot, so—and it was a time when people went out to lunch and had three martinis. It was—everybody was doing it that time. And so you’d come back the first couple hours after lunch—so the days were—you’d work four hours in the morning, or maybe you’d come in early and work till twelve or one. You’d take a two-hour lunch, you’d come back a little fuzzy, and three o’clock you’d be back in it and you could work till midnight, right?

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: So that was kinda the culture. But then a friend from Harvard, a guy named Mark Bias or [changes pronunciation] Bias...

Gehry: Bias.

Cuno: Bias, invited you to go to France.

Gehry: Anita had lived through SC…

Cuno: Is your wife.

Gehry: ...Harvard, two kids, and she always wanted to go to France. And I—and she just—so it was her turn, right? And I was feeling like I should get outta Gruen, that I wasn’t gonna make it there, with the bureaucracy that they were setting up; I didn’t fit. And so a year before I left, I gave notice. I went in to Rudy and told him, “I’m buying tickets to go to Europe. And I know it’s a year off and I don’t—I know it’s a stupid—but I love you and I can’t help. I gotta tell ya, that’s what I’m doing.” And that’s when we got the Steeves house and we were—I used that money, the fee…

Cuno: Oh, the money from the house, I see, yeah. Yeah.

Gehry: …to buy the tickets for the trip. I bought four tickets on the Holland America line. And said to Rudy and to all the partners, that I was—you know, there’s plenty of time. “Yeah, I’m gonna be here 100 percent till I leave, but tell me who you want me to train and how you want me to do this, and we got time to think it through, so I’m not [going to] walk out the door.” They never believed I was gonna leave. So they didn’t do anything. And so they kept piling more and more on me. Three months before I’m leaving, they call me in. There’s this huge new project somewhere. Great project. I forget what it was. [laughs] You know, anybody’d give their—anything to do it. And they assumed I would stay. And I said, “No, I can’t.” And I stuck to my guns and I—and right down till the end, they almost never quite believed it.

Cuno: Well, you were giving up the sure thing for something you didn’t quite know what it might be.

Gehry: Right. Right.

Cuno: So you make your way across on the boat, you make your way to France and you’re—

Gehry: We get to France. Bias and his wife live in Meudon. They find me an apartment in their building. So they’re up on the third floor, they find me an apartment on deuxième sous-sol, that’s second lower basement, but it’s at ground level. And it’s ground level to a crèche, a nursery. And the kids joined, so it all worked out.

Cuno: And Bias was working there. I mean, he could give you some work?

Gehry: Yes. He was working—he had started his own office by then. Or he was partners with somebody, and they were working.

Cuno: I mean, it was rather menial work you were given; it wasn’t great, challenging work…

Gehry: No, it was— we were doing—I think those drawings are in the stuff you guys are getting. It’s the master plan for Villacoublay. That’s the town that was General de Gaulle’s home. And Mark Bias knew Roselle, who was the most famous French planner alive. He was planning cities. And a guy, young man who worked for Roselle, name was van Yonkavik. Yugoslav, I guess. And Yonkavik was making these cellules, they called them. So he—it was a sheet—I wonder if you can get ’em still. He would take a building and analyze it and it would be pictures and stuff. It was in two pages and like the French do it, it’s fine print and stuff. And so he was making those and he needed somebody to draw stuff, and so we were helping him. And then Roselle had these planning projects that he asked us to do drawings for. So that was night work. I got a job with a French architect, Ramondez, whose offices are on the Champs-Élysées. Maybe I can say it: soixant dix neuf Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The building’s still there, and Mimi Pinson is a dance thing. Did you ever—you know what I’m talking about? There’s a place called Mimi Pinson, where in the old days, people would go and you’d get dancing lessons. But it was a place where you’d get a drink and the girls would dance with you. I don’t know what happened after they danced with you. I don’t think it was like that; I think it was kinda [to] meet people, legit. It wasn’t…

Cuno: But did you think you might stay for a very long time or stay forever? Was it that kind of a move? Or you knew it was gonna be temporary?

Gehry: I liked it. I didn’t have anything to come back to. So I was hoping. But they didn’t pay much. You know, it was—I had an incredible job. I was getting four francs an hour; that was less than a buck.

Cuno: It’s not much, not for a family.

Gehry: And we would miss one meal a week, my wife and I would, so the kids could eat. Now, if Mark heard about it, he’d invite us down, but we didn’t—tried not to do that, because he was struggling, too. We had enough money from my father and mother [who] gave us a couple hundred dollars, and somebody—anyway, we bought a Volkswagen, a little Beetle. And I would work four days a week, and I would take off Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for us. With the kids and with Mark, and we’d—he had a deux chevaux, and we’d drive around and they’d pull all the seats out of the deux chevaux and we’d picnic and…

Cuno: And you saw medieval—

Gehry: Went to Pont du Gard and everything. But the thing that he introduced me to that struck the chord was Otung. And then from there, the—because history of architecture, when I was at SC, was kinda nothing. It was the, you know, we’ve found the modernists, we’re going ahead. That stuff’s, just, we’re not gonna look at that anymore. And so it was only after—and a lotta my friends who had this same experience, when they got to Europe and saw Chartres and—

Cuno: Vézelay and—

Gehry: …Vézelay and all these places, they went crazy and said—they felt betrayed by their teachers. Why didn’t you tell me, you know? You know, my first night off the boat in Paris, we went to Gregorian chants at Notre Dame. I mean, it was magic. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, you know? Anyway.

Cuno: But then Victor Gruen comes over.

Gehry: So this goes on—

Cuno: To try to get you to come back—

Gehry: This goes on for a—a year. Not—not quite a year. And Ramondez, when everybody goes on vacation, August…

Cuno: Yeah, August, yeah.

Gehry: I’m left alone in the office, doing a competition for a little town in the South of France. Centre Pau, P-A-U, in the Pyrenees. And it was a shopping center-office-housing thing. And he left the whole thing to me. Just do it and send it in. Which I did. He never saw it. We won the competition. [laugh] And he was happy. I decided I had to get back, go home. It was time. And we took the last two months, I guess. I guess we took August, after I finished the competition, and September, and traveled.

Cuno: But Gruen comes over, right?

Gehry: So at the end, the very end of all this, I’m planning to go home. I get a call from Victor. He’s gonna be in Paris. Do I have time, any time to spend with him? And I said, “Yeah, great.” I said, “My favorite place to go is Marly-le-Roi, the garden by Le Nôtre.” And I said, “The garden’s still there, and the architecture’s not, but it’s a beautiful place to have a picnic. And if you’ve never seen it, let me take you there.” So he and his wife and I—my wife didn’t come with me—got a picnic in Marly-le-Roi. And we drank a lot and had a lot of fun talking about old days and—he love—I—you know, Marly—that’s one of the places I always go. When I go to France—any time I go, I always go there and I sit in the garden.

Cuno: Yeah. Well, did he talk to you about coming back to LA?

Gehry: So then he didn’t say a word until the end. He was staying at the Ritz. And he had a car, and so he—we drove back to the Ritz in his car. We stopped and—this was goodbye, you know. And he said, “You know I’m retired from the office and I’m getting ready to open an office in Paris and I’d like you to be my partner.” I looked at him, I couldn’t—you know. In the context of what had happened in my life at that point, that was like, you kidding me? [they laugh] What are you talking about? And my mind went click. I couldn’t do it. And I thanked him and I said, “I—” I said, “Victor, my—I don’t know what to say, but I think the time has passed that I could—could accept that.”

Cuno: You’ve had this sort of pattern of turning away from certain successes…

Gehry: Yeah, I do.

Cuno: …to venturesome opportunities, of which this was one. So you come back to LA, and with Greg, you opened your first practice that was, that was yours?

Gehry: No, I started myself. So it wasn’t yet Frank Gehry and Greg Walsh Partners or something. No. What happened is this guy Wesley Bilson, who was married to the Kay Jewelers heiress, his brother, Wesley, who I sail with once in a while, was married to Anita’s best friend in high school. And so we—this—we knew them. Now, Anita’s my ex-wife.

Cuno: Right.

Gehry: And he introduced me to his brother, who was with the Kay Jewelers thing. And his brother wanted to—he liked me, somehow got excited about getting involved with architecture, and decided he was gonna get me this job with his father-in-law. ’Cause his father-in-law had just come back from Japan. He was a Japophile. Loved everything Japanese. And Wesley knew I knew that. And so he got me the job to do Kay Jewelers. And so that was my first job. And I did it myself. Greg wasn’t involved at all. I did it at home. I got paid $2,000, I remember. And during that period, Wesley then said, “Why don’t we find some land and build apartments?” And I think—the dates—before I left—when I was in Europe, I got a call from Wesley. Or maybe it’s before. It was before I went to Europe. Wesley and I looked at a piece of land in Highland Avenue, Santa Monica, and—and put the group together and bought it. And we were designing this apartment building, with Ferry, Dune, Ghafari, and I forget who else, that went to school with us. And Greg was not involved. And so this was designed before I left for Europe. And it became more and more clear that he was gonna get the money to build it, as I was coming back, so I had that to come back to. That was sort of a—maybe that’s why I felt comfortable quitting or something.

Cuno: But it was still speculation, right? You were gonna develop the properties and sell them.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: You weren’t just getting paid a contract for designing them.

Gehry: No, no.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: So we designed it via mail, [chuckles] back and forth, I think. And then when I came back, we made a solid and we build it and—and rented it. And we were gonna do a couple others that we never got—got further than this one.

Cuno: So does Greg come into the picture then? Because he’s with you at the Danziger Studio in ’64. But the Danziger project looks, you know, by everything I’ve seen, to have been a signature departure from everything you’d done before, principally, right? So what compelled that? Danziger, was he—you know, was it partly him, himself, ’cause he was a graphic designer and he had particular ideas about what he wanted for the house or for the studio?

Gehry: Well, at that very point, Lou Kahn had just, right? And we were all looking at the master.

Cuno: The kind of simple masking that he has, the concrete planes of walls.

Gehry: I think—yeah. And if you look at the trajectory of studies we did, I—they’re in—they’re all in the files, I’m sure—they got simpler and simpler. Lou, he’s still alive, by the way, he’s—he lives in Pasadena or Altadena. Louie hired Fred Usher, who was a graphics architect, who worked with Eames and had—he was fairly well known by then, in the local field. And Lou hired him to do the studio. And Fred brought it to me, saying that he couldn’t do it. And then Greg joined me.

Cuno: I see.

Gehry: Something like that.

Cuno: Yeah. And with that job, you got a job, also with—or you got introduced to the whole artistic circle around that time, or the Ferus Gallery, with Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz and Ed Moses and Bob Irwin and Billy Al Bengston—the whole gang. I mean, it was a shift in—

Gehry: [over Cuno] Well, that happened ’cause they were—they came around and looked at the building. It wasn’t that I went after them or anything. While I was working at Gruen, I did get involved with contemporary art. You know, I mean, I was always interested. And so I used to go to La Cienega, to the—

Cuno: Ferus Gallery?

Gehry: To all of ’em.

Cuno: All of ’em, yeah.

Gehry: And saw a lotta the stuff that was going on. Ed Moses invited me to dinner and started talking to me about stuff, and opened the door to Billy and Larry Bell and—but it happened over time. It wasn’t just like one day.

Cuno: But you found a community that fit.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Yeah, I felt comfortable with them. I was enjoying the way they worked, ’cause it felt right to me. It felt like the right way to build things. The—the sort of literary way to architecture, which was all around me, I cou—I wasn’t interested.

Cuno: And was it the kind of independence they seemed to have that appealed to you, as well?

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: Yeah. I mean, they didn’t work for a corporation, the way you were working for Victor Gruen Associates.

Gehry: Right. They were free. They were doing their own stuff. And—and it was hands-on. It was very personal. And they liked what I was doing. Which made it nice for me. They were interested. They came around. I—I think of myself in that period as sycophantic. I was, you know—I didn’t know what they thought of me, really. I thought I was just—they were just nice guys and they were being friendly. I only found out recently that they were really impressed with me. I didn’t—it makes me cry when I think of it, ’cause I never knew it. Well, you were about 30—in your 30s, at that time. So you had—your trajectory from graduation of USC to them is really in another direction that was unsatisfactory. So you were leaving that trajectory and assuming another one, starting over again now.

Gehry: They were friends, but I was still doing Santa Monica Place and commercial work that didn’t—

Cuno: Paid the bills, I suppose.

Gehry: Yeah, but didn’t—I think that’s why I felt always like the outsider. I wasn’t—I wasn’t pure.

Cuno: In that group?

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: Yeah, yeah. And at the same time, the marriage is breaking up?

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: So the relationships that you had in place, you’re—you’re giving up on those relationships, as it were, you’re turning away from them.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: And that—that moment, you were also embracing psychotherapy. And that was important, not—not only because of the—

Gehry: Well, Ed Moses was—did that to me, too. I was—I had psycho—

Cuno: [over Gehry] Milton Wexler, is that right?

Gehry: Yeah. I had—I had gone to a shrink before. A couple of them, different ones. About the marriage, and they weren’t very—neither one of them was very successful. But Ed Moses dragged me to Milton. And that changed everything.

Cuno: Both because of the—of him and what he did, but also the community of people that were around him, that gave you the kind of emotional support that you needed at the time?

Gehry: I think—I think so. But he was really clear with me. I—It’s somebody that could— that could look you in the eye and tell you what—how he read what you were doing. You had to listen. You know, it was like—the most compelling thing, finally, that turned the corner was he had these groups of 15 people. And you would sit twice a week, for three hours each, and talk to each other. And in that 15 people, there was a range of—of people. There was like [a] very famous movie star. [chuckles] Or a great director, a great writer or—then a lawyer, then a schleppy architect or—you know, it was mixed up. And when—when you’re talking to 15 people and 14 of them turn on you and say, hey, mister, did you see what you just did? Or [chuckles] what you just said, or what you’re doing? You can’t dismiss it. That’s the brilliance of it. I—I couldn’t believe it. It happened to me several times, and it was—it just changed my life. The most incredible thing was before one of those events, I couldn’t get up in front of an audience and speak; and after one of those events, I could, without notes. [chuckles] And how—how did that happen? It just pulled a plug. You know, we’re so bottled up. More than we realize, in a lotta ways. And nobody tells you. You know, and then here’s— here’s a smart-ass group of people, and 14 people tell you this, and they all say the same thing. You can’t escape, you know.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: You gotta listen. So I think that’s—that was the killer, or the—the great thing that Milton did. And when it happened, he didn’t leave me on the floor out to dry. He’d take me home with him and say, “Okay, now [chuckles] what do you think about that?” And he didn’t soften the blow, but he made it clear that this was—this was real, not trivial stuff.

Cuno: Must’ve been a frightening time for you.

Gehry: Yeah, it was frightening.

Cuno: I mean, you had a lot of—on your plate. You had a responsibility for a family, the family was breaking up, you had children.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Well, he’s the one that said to me, about the family, he said, “Look, you’ve gotta commit to one thing or the other.” He said, “I’m not gonna continue seeing you if you’re gonna be wishy-washy about this.” He made me made me look at it, and the reality of it, and—and I think that’s what we don’t get. We don’t get—I mean, people don’t tell you how they feel. I mean, you can—you gotta learn to read it. You know, I see it here with some of the people that’ve been here for a long time. It’s really hard. You build your own little world, right? And—and it ain’t necessarily so. And how the rest of the world is seeing you. And to—so you gotta take responsibility for your actions, which is—you can’t blame somebody else…

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Cuno: Our theme music comes from “The Dharma at Big Sur,” composed by John Adams for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003. Look for new episodes of Art + Ideas every other Wednesday. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, and SoundCloud or visit getty.edu/podcasts for more resources. Thanks for listening.

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