The White Album (9 page)

As it happens I used to go there once in a while, when Earl Warren was governor and his daughter Nina was a year ahead of me at C
.
K
.
McClatchy Senior High School
.
Nina was always called “Honey Bear” in the papers and in
Life
magazine but she was called “Nina” at C
.
K
.
McClatchy Senior High School and she was called “Nina” (or sometimes “Warren”) at weekly meetings of the
M
añana
Club, a local institution to which we both belonged
.
I re
call being initiated into the M
añana
Club one night at the old Governor’s Mansion, in a ceremony which involved being blindfolded and standing around Nina’s bedroom in a state of high apprehension about secret rites which never materialized
.
It was the custom for the
members to hurl mild insults at
the initiates, and I remember being dumbfounded to hear Nina, by my fourteen-year-old lights the most glamorous and unapproachable fifteen-year-old in America, characterize me as “stuck on herself
.
”
There in the Governor’s Mansion that night I learned for the first time that my face to the world was not necessarily the face in my mirror
.
“No smoking on the third floor,” everyone kept saying
.
“Mrs
.
Warren
said
.
No smoking on the third floor
or else!
”

Firetrap or not, the old Governor’s Mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world, and probably still is
.
The morning after I was shown the new “Residence” I visited the old “Mansion,” took the public tour with a group of perhaps twenty people, none of whom seemed to find it as ideal as I did
.
“All those stairs,” they murmured, as if stairs could no longer be tolerated by human physiology
.
“All those stairs,” and “all that waste space
.
”
The old Governor’s Mansion does have stairs and waste space, which is precisely why it remains the kind of house in which sixty adolescent girls might gather and never interrupt the real life of the household
.
The bedrooms are big and private and high-ceilinged and they do not open on the swimming pool and one can imagine reading in one of them, or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner
.
The bathrooms are big and airy and they do not have bidets but they do have room for hampers, and dressing tables, and chairs on which to sit and read a story to a child in the bathtub
.
There are hallways wide and narrow, stairs front and back, sewing rooms, ironing rooms, secret rooms
.
On the gilt mirror in the library there is worked a bust of Shakespeare, a pretty fancy for a hardware merchant in a California farm town in 1877
.
In the k
itchen there is no trash compactor and there is no “island” with the appliances built in but there are two pantries, and a nice old table with a marble top for rolling out pastry and making divinity fudge and chocolate leaves
.
The morning I took the tour our guide asked if anyone could think why the old table had a marble top
.
There were a dozen or so other women in the group, each of an age to have cooked unnumbered meals, but not one of them could think of a single use for a slab of marble in the kitchen
.
It occurred to me that we had finally evolved a society in which knowledge of a pastry marble, like a taste for stairs and closed doors, could be construed as “elitist,” and as I lef
t the Governor’s Mansion I felt
very like the heroine of Mary McCarthy’s
Birds of America,
the one who located America
’s
moral decline in the disappearance of the first course
.

A guard sleeps at night in the old mansion, which has been condemned as a dwelling by the state fire marshal
.
It costs about $85,000 a year to keep guards at the new official residence
.
Meanwhile the current governor of California, Edmund G
.
Brown, Jr
.
, sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the famous apartment for which he pays $275 a month out of his own $49,100 annual salary
.
This has considerable and potent symbolic value, as do the two empty houses themselves, most particularly the house the Reagans built on the river
.
It is a great point around the Capitol these days to have “never seen” the house on the river
.
The governor himself has “never seen” it
.
The governor’s press secretary, Elisabeth Coleman, has “never seen” it
.
The
governor’s
chief of staff, Gray Davis, admits to having seen it, but only once, when “Mary McGrory wanted to see it
.
”
This unseen house on the river is, Jerry Brown has said, “not my style
.
”

As a matter of fact this is precisely the point about the house on the river—the house is not Jerry Brown’s style, not Mary McGrory’s style,
not our style
—and it is a point which presents a certain problem, since the house so clearly
is
the style not only of Jerry Brown’s predecessor but of millions of Jerry Brown’s constituents
.
Words are chosen carefully
.
Reasonable objections are framed
.
One hears about how the house is too far from the Capitol, too far from the Legislature
.
One hears about the folly of running such a lavish establishment for an unmarried governor and one hears about the governor’s temperamental austerity
.
One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room
.
It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center
.
It is the kind of house in which one does not
li
ve, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class
.
I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the
unspeakable.

1977

the place might
have been commissioned by The Magic Christian
.
Mysteriously and rather giddily splendid, hidden in a grove of sycamores just above the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, a commemoration of high culture so immediately productive of crowds and jammed traffic that it can now be approached by appointment only, the seventeen-million-dollar villa built by the late J
.
Paul Getty to house his antiquities and paintings and furniture manages to strike a peculiar nerve in almost everyone who sees it
.
From the beginning, the Getty was said to be vulgar
.
The Getty was said to be “Disney
.
”
The Getty was even said to be Jewish, if I did not misread the subtext in “like a Beverly Hills nouveau-riche dining room”
(Los Angeles Times,
January 6, 1974) and “gussied up like a Bel-Air dining room”
(New
York Times,
May 28,1974)
.

The Getty seems to stir up social discomforts at levels not easily plumbed
.
To mention this museum in the more enlightened of those very dining rooms it is said to resemble is to invite a kind of nervous derision, as if the place were a local hoax, a perverse and deliberate affront to the understated good taste and general class of everyone at the table
.
The Getty’s intricately patterned marble floors and walls are “garish
.
”
The Getty’s illusionistic portico murals are “back lot
.
”
The entire building, an informed improvisation on a villa buried by mud from Vesuvius in 79
a
.
d
.
and seen again only dimly during some eighteenth-century tunneling around Herculaneum, is ritually dismissed as “inauthentic,” although what “authentic” could mean in this context is hard to say
.

Something about the place embarrasses people
.
The collection itself is usually referred to as “that kind of thing,” as in “not even the best of that kind of thing,” or “absolutely top-drawer if you like that kind of thing,” both of which translate “not our kind of thing
.
”
The Getty’s damask-lined galleries of Renaissance and Baroque paintings are distinctly
that kind of thing, there being
little
in the modern temperament that responds immediately to popes and libertine babies, and so are the Getty’s rather unrelenting arrangements of French furniture
.
A Louis XV writing table tends to please the modern eye only if it has been demystified by a glass of field flowers and some silver-framed snapshots, as in a Horst photograph for
Vogue
.
Even the Getty’s famous antiquities are pretty much that kind of thing, evoking as they do not their own period but the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rage for antiquities
.
The sight of a Greek head depresses many people, strikes an unliberated chord, reminds them of books in their grandmother’s parlor and of all they were supposed to learn and never did
.
This note of “learning” pervades the entire Getty collection
.
Even the handful of Impressionists acquired by Getty were recen
tly
removed from the public galleries, put away as irrelevant
.
The Getty collection is in certain ways unremittingly reproachful, and quite inaccessible to generations trained in the conviction that a museum is meant to be fun, with Calder mobiles and Barcelona chairs
.

In short the Getty is a monument to “fine art,” in the old-fashioned didactic sense, which is part of the problem people have with it
.
The place resists contemporary notions about what art is or should be or ever was
.
A museum is now supposed to kindle the untrained imagination, but this museum does not
.
A museum is now supposed to set the natural child in each of us free, but this museum does not
.
This was art acquired to teach a lesson, and there is also a lesson in the building which houses it: the Getty tells us that the past was perhaps different from the way we like to perceive it
.
Ancient marbles were not always attractively faded and worn
.
Ancient marbles once appeared just as they appear here: as strident, opulent evidence of imperial power and acquisition
.
Ancient murals were not always bleached and mellowed and “tasteful
.
”
Ancient murals once looked as they do here: as if dreamed by a Mafia don
.
Ancient fountains once worked, and drowned out that very silence we have come to expect and want from the past
.
Ancient bronze once gleamed ostentatiously
.
The old world was once discomfitingly new, or even nouveau, as people like to say about the Getty
.
(I have never been sure what the word “nouveau” can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns
.
) At a time when all our public
conventions remain rooted in a kind of knocked-down romanticism, when the celebration of natural man’s capacity for moving onward and upward has become a kind of official tic, the Getty presents us with an illustrated lesson in classical doubt
.
The Getty advises us that not much changes
.
The Getty tells us that we were never any better than we are and will never be any better than we were, and in so doing makes a profoundly unpopular political statement
.

The Getty’s founder may or may not have had some such statement in mind
.
In a way he seems to have wanted only to do something no one else could or would do
.
In his posthumous book,
As I See It,
he advises us that he never wanted “one of those concrete-bunker-type structures that are the fad among museum architects
.
”
He refused to pay for any “tinted-glass-and-stainless-steel monstrosity
.
”
He assures us that he was “neither shaken nor surprised” when his villa was finished and “certain critics sniffed
.
”
He had “calculated the risks
.
”
He knew that he was flouting the “doctrinaire and elitist” views he believed endemic in “many Art World (or should I say Artsy-Craftsy?) quarters
.
”