Rebels in Paradise (17 page)

Dennis Hopper,
Double Standard,
1961

Photograph by Dennis Hopper, © The Dennis Hopper Trust, courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Once, after Thelonious Monk had played the Renaissance, Shapiro asked Hopper to take Monk to the airport. “I went to pick him up and he was in this Victorian house in Watts,” Hopper said. “I went three hours early because he loved to miss planes and just get high at the airport and watch people. He was in bed and high and had pills all over the floor.”
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Referring to William Parker, the hard-nosed chief of the LAPD, Monk took a long, stoned look at Hopper and asked, “Dennis, how could a man with the name of Parker be down on jazz?”

“So anyway,” Hopper continued, “we missed the airplane.”
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Claxton's acclaimed pictures of jazz musicians earned him a position as art director and photographer for Pacific Jazz Records. A Pasadena native, Claxton had attended UCLA with Hopps and was a regular at Ferus, where he befriended many of the jazz-loving artists, especially John Altoon. On more than one occasion, Altoon would borrow money from Claxton and, to secure the debt, give him a painting. A few days later, Altoon would sneak into Claxton's studio and retrieve the painting without ever telling him. Claxton solved the problem by commissioning Altoon and Irwin to create album covers of their abstract paintings.

The tall, fair Claxton married short, slight Peggy Moffitt in 1961. A Los Angeles native who initially considered a career in acting, Moffitt became one of the top models of the era with her black eye-liner, pale makeup, and glossy dark hair—the absolute opposite of the California girl popularized by television and pop music. Thanks to her association with the radical young Los Angeles fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, she became a recognizable icon of the sixties.

Moffitt and Blum, both extroverts, bonded over their love of the theatrical gesture. One day, she rounded up leggy model Léon Bing and a few other girls. With Blum and Claxton, they all went to the marina for a special photo shoot. Claxton mounted adhesive letters spelling “FERUS GALLERY” on the stern of a cabin cruiser borrowed from his brother. Moffitt and her girls were outfitted in Gernreich bathing suits on loan from the Beverly Hills boutique Jax, where Moffitt had worked as a teenager. Moffitt was furious when “one of the models destroyed one of the bathing suits with a cigarette butt, which I had to pay for.”
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Claxton took a glamorous shot of the pretty girls clustered around Blum, who was wearing his customary blue blazer and assuming an attitude of prosperity. When the photo went out as a gallery announcement, few recipients knew anything about the impoverished Blum. He said, “You have to look like you are doing well and I think we pulled it off.”
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Shirley Hopps recalled that it was all smoke and mirrors. “It was not glamorous. No matter how it looked, Irving was living on about one hundred dollars a month. He had no money but he was a great showman, all facade.”
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Blum, who had aspired to be an actor, could not restrain such indulgence in fantasy. When he spied a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce parked on La Cienega, he called Seymour Rosen, a photographer who had taken pictures of the Watts Towers and of various artists, and asked him to hurry over to the gallery. When Rosen arrived, Blum hustled him across the street and assumed the pose of the putative Rolls owner. “I need to send a photo to my mother in Phoenix to show her I am doing all right,” he said with one of his hearty laughs.
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Clearly, Ferus had moved on from its chaotic Beat origins.

Ferus Gallery yacht with Irving Blum and Peggy Moffitt on the right

Photography by William Claxton, courtesy of Demont Photo Management, LLC

Thanks to Moffitt, Gernreich invited Ferus artists to parties at his house behind a Moroccan wall on Laurel Canyon where he lived with Oreste Pucciani, chairman of the UCLA French department and authority on Jean-Paul Sartre. The house featured Gernreich-designed floors of burnished leather squares, with furniture by Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier and art by Ruscha, Bell, and Rauschenberg. “Rudi loved to have artists around,” Bell said. “He had great parties with fancy people. We'd clown around and he was happy to have an entourage of crazy people as well as fashion people.”
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It was at one such party that Craig Kauffman met fashion-model-turned-photographer Patricia Faure, who took pictures of the Ferus artists in a number of antic poses.

Gernreich was the first fashion designer since Christian Dior to become a household name, thanks to the debut of his topless bathing suit as well as unisex clothing. Born in Vienna in 1922, he and his mother came to Los Angeles with other Jewish refugees in 1938. His father had committed suicide in 1930. He attended L.A. City College and initially hoped to be a dancer, studying with choreographer Lester Horton, who was considered the West Coast Martha Graham. While dancing, he worked part-time designing fabrics and then clothes for various small firms in New York, ultimately returning to Los Angeles feeling discouraged by the French couturiers' monopoly on taste.

His bra-free jersey swimsuits, knit tube dresses, mini-dresses, and other clothes were carried by Jax, Jack Hanson's cutting-edge Beverly Hills boutique. Hanson, retired shortstop for the Los Angeles Angels, had designed the fitted and tapered Jax slacks, with the zipper up the back instead of on the side, favored by Jackie Kennedy and the period's curvy movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. On any given afternoon, he could be found driving around Beverly Hills High School in his 1934 white Rolls-Royce and inviting the cutest girls to work in his store. His wife Sally Hanson became his chief designer, and as profits soared, they opened a “brutally private” nightspot for their exclusive clientele in Beverly Hills called the Daisy.
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Hairstylists Vidal Sassoon and Gene Shacove, whose lively love life inspired the movie
Shampoo
, socialized at the Daisy with their celebrity clientele: fashion models, actresses and actors, socialites, movie moguls, and international jet setters.

Hanson and Gernreich eventually parted company. Not everyone could accept his increasingly controversial designs. After Gernreich received the Coty American Fashion Critics' Award in June 1963, Norman Norell, known for his sequined gowns, returned his own Coty award in protest. The following year, Gernreich launched his topless bathing suit. Gernreich said, “Baring these breasts seemed logical in a period of freer attitudes, freer minds, the emancipation of women.”
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With Moffitt modeling, Claxton took photographs that emphasized the modern, graphic quality of the swimsuit. Gernreich initially did not intend to produce the suit but Diana Vreeland at
Vogue
convinced him otherwise.

Gernreich headquarters at 8460 Santa Monica Boulevard was a khaki-colored square stucco building with twelve-foot panel doors with his name in chrome letters. Three walls and the floor of the showroom were white, one wall was khaki burlap. The room was furnished with black leather Breuer chairs and sofa. Artist Don Bachardy, the partner of author Christopher Isherwood, created sketches for Gernreich's dresses.

In 1965, Moffitt went to New York where, in the studio of photographer Richard Avedon, she met Vidal Sassoon, who had revolutionized hairstyling in London. When Sassoon came to Los Angeles a few months later, Moffitt introduced him to Gernreich. Sassoon created architectural haircuts that perfectly complemented Gernreich's graphic, structured fashions. A mutual admiration society was born, and that was the beginning of the end for teased, bouffant hair.
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CHAPTER EIGHT

The Dawn of Dwan

Around the time that Blum took the helm of Ferus, new contemporary art galleries were popping up all along La Cienega. Everett Ellin's gallery showed work by Stella, Johns, and Oldenburg—who created an elaborate plaster cake for Ellin's wedding—before Ellin was recruited by art dealer Frank Lloyd in 1963 to be the first director of twentieth-century art for Marlborough Galleries in New York.

Art dealer Rolf Nelson, who would marry Frank Gehry's sister, Doreen Goldberg, in 1966, added Philip Hefferton and Ed Bereal to his roster. David Stuart showed Dennis Hopper and Tony Berlant as well as pre-Columbian art. Esther Robles handled established Modernists Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Karl Benjamin, and Claire Falkenstein. Ceeje Gallery, a joint effort by Cecil Hedrick and Jerry Jerome, showed expressive figurative art by Charles Garabedian and Les Biller. Paul Kantor handled De Kooning and top Abstract Expressionists. The Viennese Felix Landau, who had been Pete Seeger's manager in the late 1940s, was considered the archdeacon and showed European moderns Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon as well as Californians John McLaughlin, Peter Voulkos, and Tony DeLap.

Virginia Dwan, 1969

Photograph by Roger Prigent, courtesy of Dwan Gallery Archives

The most serious alternative to Ferus, however, stood several miles west of La Cienega in Westwood: Dwan Gallery. Operating during the same years as Ferus and offering a parallel universe of abstract and Pop artists from New York and Europe, Dwan imported fresh stimulus to the city. Blum said, “It was the gallery that was the most competition.”
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From the outset, Virginia Dwan had a singular advantage: She was heir to a portion of the 3M fortune. A native of Minneapolis, she first learned about modern art at the esteemed Walker Art Center. To avoid the bitter Minnesota winters, her parents rented houses in Los Angeles between 1939 and 1945. After her older sister, June, married and moved to Los Angeles, Dwan followed her west and enrolled in the art department at UCLA. Abstract painter Ed Moses was a student then, and he was the first to bring the pretty, slender brunette to Ferus to meet the other artists.

Dwan was an artist by temperament but felt she did not have the requisite personal drive. She left school to marry social psychiatrist Paul Fischer and soon had a daughter, Candace. (Candace Dwan is now a photography dealer in New York.) While her husband worked, Dwan visited local galleries and one day asked modern art dealer Frank Perls about opening a gallery of her own. “Well, tell me how much money you would like to lose?” he quipped.
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Noticing her crestfallen expression, Perls hired her to sit at the front desk in his gallery on Saturdays. She was there for exhibitions of work by Jean Dubuffet, Pablo Picasso, and the popular UCLA teacher William Brice, the son of vaudevillian Fanny Brice and convicted swindler Nicky Arnstein.

Intelligent and restless in her housewife role, Dwan divorced her first husband and later married Vadim Kondratief, a French medical student at UCLA, who also became a psychiatrist. He encouraged her to open a gallery in 1959 and helped her find the storefront space in a Spanish-style building on Broxton Avenue. “I had no experience,” she said. “I was totally naive.”
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