The Architects (Part 1)
In my career working for ABC News I was given assignments that allowed me to meet and spend time with two of America’s best known architects whose projects in Los Angeles made a consequential change to the face of the city. Here are my accounts of meeting Richard Meier, the designer of the Getty Center in Part 1 to be followed later by my interview with the Disney Hall architect Frank Gehry in Part 2…
The Too Long Goodbye
In 1997 I took a short tram ride up a hillside adjacent to the 405 Freeway that runs below and connects the Los Angeles Basin to the San Fernando Valley. I arrived to begin shooting a piece about the new Getty Center and to do an interview with its architect Richard Meier for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
The Getty Center in Los Angeles cost $1.3 billion to build and took 14 years to complete. The Getty, as it's called, hadn't opened yet and I had secured one of my favorite cameramen for this assignment. I was particular about who I worked with and justified my attitude for what I considered a good reason. In television news, before there was competition from cable news and subsequently the internet, pictures were as important and sometimes more than the words they accompanied. With a great cameraperson the chances of having great pictures and a great piece were enhanced.
I was with ABC News for 26 years. In all that time I can count on one hand those who I considered to be truly great camerapersons. One of them was Blake Hottle, who was with me that day at the Getty.
And so we began without my assigned correspondent along with us. An NBA star basketball player named Latrell Sprewell had choked his coach the day before and Brian Rooney was pulled off our story to do that one. I rarely minded working without a correspondent when the opportunity arose even if in this case it was one I truly admired and a good friend.
As I walked off the tram atop the Getty Center and even before I could appreciate the 60 mile panoramic view from the San Gabriel mountains to the Pacific Ocean, I noticed a man on his knees beside some rose bushes. He wasn't dressed like a landscaper. To my surprise it was the Getty Center architect himself Richard Meier and as l got closer I saw he had a bunch of cigarette butts in his hand. He wasn't a landscaper. On this day he was a trash collector.
For the next hour Meier gave my crew and me a tour of just about everything he had designed on this hilltop with one exception. In addition to the stunning buildings that housed the art, research and administrative facilities there was a large garden that if the Walt Disney Studios ever decided to do a version of Alice in Wonderland with live actors and real settings, would be a cinch as the choice for the tea party scene.
This possibly psilocybin inspired landscape was the only part of the Getty Center campus that Meier didn't get to design and was a source of emotional pain to him he could not hide. I didn’t think it was a sore thumb but it certainly had no relation to the site’s other appendages.
Meier refused to walk through the garden. To add insult to his injury this just happened to be the day giant planters, suggested by that same garden's creator, were being placed on the steps leading up to one of Meier's gallery buildings.
It was at his first sight of these that Meier morphed into a personification of King Lear rushing into the storm. He left us and ran up the steps where he attempted to throw one of the planters down them. He couldn't.
The planter was so large he failed to even get his arms entirely around it and it appeared to weigh so much that it would likely have taken “The Big One”— the calamitous seismic event that is overdue to someday occur in California —to dislodge it.
It appeared clear to me Meier was suffering from something akin to an architect’s variant of postpartum depression. The next day when I returned to finish the shoot with correspondent Rooney in tow I found further evidence of that when we encountered Meier in the gift shop. As we approached, we heard him scolding an employee about the appearance of a display that he was in the middle of rearranging himself.
The Getty Center had taken a good chunk of Richard Meier’s professional life to complete and he had lived in a house on the site nearly that entire time. This project was his masterwork— his baby.
Perhaps that explains the behavior I witnessed. It was as if Meier had been raising a child who was now an adult but Meier himself was the one who needed to be leaving the nest. At the end of our time together I took the liberty of counseling him.
Me: “Richard, I've only known you for a short time but I think you need to let go.”
Meier: “I know... but it's so hard.”
Twenty years later Meier was asked if there was anything he was unhappy about with the Getty. His answer: “If there was, I’ve forgotten about it.”
Click on the link below to see the story that aired on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings…
Interesting, Peter, but the You Tube link is to a story about Frank Gehry. I know you're in Bilbao now, or were yesterday, so maybe you've got Gehry on your mind but I would love to see the clip about Richard Meier. It's all fascinating, however, and how lucky you were to spend time with these great creative minds.