Masterpiece Theater - Actress Jennifer Jones Manages the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

The note from Jennifer Jones came on embossed gray stationery and was delivered by hand. "My mother told me never explain, never complain," she wrote in schoolgirl script. "Even as a young actress, I determined I would never give personal interviews, since they made me so uncomfortable." A 1940s Hollywood ingenue, especially one as incessantly demure as Jones, is an unlikely master for a billion bucks worth of art. Yet despite her reclusive ways, the 79-year-old widow of industrialist Norton Simon controls the fate of what is widely considered the finest private collection west of Chicago. For the sake of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and its recent $5 million renovation by architect Frank Gehry, Jones has agreed to break her mother's golden rule and answer questions--but only in writing. "The project," she explains, "is too important to me to entrust to my casual thoughts."

Since 1989, when her husband became incapacitated by Guillain-Barre syndrome, Jones has presided over the museum and the two foundations that own Simon's 12,000-piece collection. Even though the Getty Center has become a black hole of global media attention, the cognoscenti believe that quiet little Norton Simon has way cooler stuff. Even Harold Williams, the recently retired president and chief executive officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust, concedes that it is "without question the finest collection of art created post-World War II."

Consider this: The Simon collection spans 20 centuries of European and Asian culture. There are Goya prints, oils by Gauguin, Lautrec and van Gogh, sculptures by Rodin and ancient sandstone deities from Cambodian temples. There are 500-year-old Flemish tapestries in pristine condition. Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose by Francisco de Zurbaran and Tiepelo's incandescent The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance are considered among a handful of the finest European paintings on the West Coast. The Degas collection, including a prized set of 72 bronze sculpture casts, has been called "enthralling" by critics. There are Rembrandts, of course, most notably Titus, a portrait of the artist's son. And Rubenses. And Cezannes. The collection is strong in so many area--and has so few real weaknesses--that it is difficult to single out one area for special distinction.

But it's not just a great collection. It's also likely to be the last great private collection of our era. Most of the old masters that once resided in English country homes or medieval Italian monasteries are safely tucked away in public museums or smaller collections. A van Gogh in today's surreal market fetches more than $50 million, so even Bill Gates and the Getty won't come close to Simon's historic accomplishment. "Simon came along at the very last moment in history when the world's best paintings were still widely available," observes Jean-Patrice Marandel, curator of European art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "I'm certain this will be his legacy."

Still, keeping up with the Gettys is no small task. For all its glory, the Simon collection had been housed since 1974 in a flawed building on Colorado Boulevard originally designed for the large-scale contemporary collection of the Pasadena Art Museum. With its awkward H shape and somber brown tile, it resembled an upscale mausoleum. Inside, the serpentine white walls undulated from one end of the galleries to the other. The ceiling was low, the light artificial. It was dead wrong for old masters. "The paintings need intimacy and embracing and a loving absorption in a quiet space," says Jones. "This reconstruction goes a long way to satisfying that need."

By 1995, as the stunning new Getty Center emerged on its hilltop, the Norton Simon Museum faced the prospect of being eclipsed by the behemoth in Brentwood. The technology incorporated into the Getty's galleries, including lighting that shifts in response to the exigencies of passing clouds, is beyond state of the art. And the Getty's collection of photographs and drawings may end up one of the best in the world. But its gathering of the kind of marquee painters like van Gogh and Rembrandt--those who get butts in seats, so to speak--is considered lackluster by scholars and critics. The center, some say, is more about architecture and the study of art than art itself. It must have chafed officials at both LACMA and the Norton Simon to hear Getty architect and native New Yorker Richard Meier boast that his complex "represents a beginning of an awareness of culture in a city that had been known for its transitory and somewhat ethereal nature." (Translation: Before the Getty, Angelenos were considered a bunch of slack-jawed surfers too busy firing up doobies to care about Vermeer or Vuillard.)

It is no secret that Gehry and Meier are not-so-friendly rivals, so the chance to be associated with the renovation of a museum with a collection superior to the Getty's must have been a powerful draw. In 1995, Gehry, a museum board member and longtime friend of both Jones and Simon, donated his services to redesign the building.
Over drinks and dinner at L'Orangerie or at Jones's ranch-style home in Bel-Air, Gehry laid out his plans to fellow board members, including Gregory Peck, David Geffen and Tom Brokaw. There would be a drastic change to the interior, as well as new landscaping by garden designer Nancy Power. There were also plans for a small teahouse, which Simon had adamantly opposed. Jones denies that the Getty had anything to do with her decision to upgrade the museum. But "there's been a kind of ripple effect," observes Marandel. "There are so many people coming into town for the Getty, and then to the other museums, that we all had to make things look as good as possible." Even Sara Campbell, director of art at the Norton Simon, admits, "Certainly, we were all thinking about the Getty."

Jones faced more profound challenges than architectural envy. After the death of Simon in 1993, art-world gossips feared that the former actress might buckle to pressure to sell off part of the collection for a quick $100 million to fund charities. Others worried that she would lack the desire and wherewithal to take on such an imposing task and would hand the collection over to her friends at the Getty. Observers felt that, without Simon's autocratic presence, the museum had slipped into an uninspired stewardship. "When Norton died," recalls David Nash, former head of 19th- and 20th-century art for Sotheby's and one of Simon's advisers, "it was like the museum froze."

Thus the renovation offered Jones the chance to squelch rumors about her leadership and the museum's fate. (Why spend $5 million for a collection you're about to give away?) The face-lift would also remind patrons of the superiority of the Simon collection to anything else in town.

But how far could Jones go? Should the museum remain a place for the quiet contemplation of art or, like the Getty Center, become more of a bustling town square? And would the changes, occurring five years after Simon's death, do honor to the collection or appear disrespectful to her husband's vision? "Look," Norton Simon once told Dr. Pratapaditya Pal, the museum's curator of Asian art and one of Simon's longtime advisers, "I can't control anything once I go. All I'm interested in is whether the museum remains the same for a generation."

The collection began in 1954 with a patch of empty wall at the new Hancock Park home of Simon and his first wife Lucille. Simon didn't like the abstract painting chosen by his interior designer, so he strolled into the Dalzell Hatfield Gallery in the arcade of the Ambassador Hotel and picked out a $16,000 Renoir. With that, Simon was promptly seduced into the byzantine world of great art. "He knew that men of means sometimes turned to art collecting," says Los Angeles Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic, the only reporter to interview Simon in the last 10 years of his life and author of the Simon biography Odd Man In. "It was another challenge for him."

There was little in Simon's affluent Portland, Oregon, childhood to predict a fury for collecting. In 1931, as a 24-year-old Berkeley dropout, he bought a bankrupt juice-bottling plant in Fullerton and made it hugely profitable. Then, as though in a 1930s movie montage with swirling $100 bills, he built an empire that encompassed Hunt Foods, the Simon & Schuster publishing house, timber, railroads and even, at one point, matchsticks. "I'd own 10 percent of the company and act like I owned the whole thing," he told an interviewer. When he retired in 1969 and chose to devote his time to art collecting, Norton Simon Inc. was one of the largest companies in America, and Simon one of its richest men.

It takes more than wheelbarrows full of cash, however, to build a collection like Simon's. Scholars are still amazed by his ability to ferret out masterful works by unknown artists. It's a relatively simple matter for a magnate to get his hands on a Picasso but more difficult to pick a stunning Duvivier or a Georg Pencz. "There were collectors who were far richer, like J. Paul Getty," observes Nash. "But they didn't have the acumen or energy to create a collection like Norton's."

Nor did they have Simon's worldwide network of bright young dealers and art scholars who could be tapped for free information about the best paintings on the market. His questions were incessant and obtuse: "Which is better--the Botticelli or the Picasso?" But ambitious dealers, hoping for a big score, were usually happy to deal with the tycoon. "There was a kind of magic he had in dealing with people," says Muchnic. "Even though your wife is screaming at you because you're two hours late for a dinner, he'd keep you on the phone. He had this way of making you feel like you were the only one who could give him the information he needed."

"He was an extraordinarily smart man," says Pal. "And he had no qualms about using anybody who could help him build a great collection. You might say that every expert Simon contacted has contributed to his collection."

Jones, meanwhile, had lived a life of privilege and despair more befitting a heroine in a Danielle Steel novel. Born Phyllis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the only child of a well-to-do family of theater owners, she had, by 26, married actor Robert Walker, had two children, won a Best Actress Oscar for The Song of Bernadette and divorced Walker, who was known for his unstable behavior and alcoholism. In 1949, she married David O. Selznick, her mentor and producer of Gone with the Wind. He was no piece of cake, either. But Jones stuck with him until his death in 1965. By 1969, after she suffered a bout of depression that ended in a suicide attempt, her career was on the rocks. Yet she retained a kind of wistful personality. "There's something childlike about Jennifer," says a longtime acquaintance. "I think that was true of a lot of the women, like Lana Turner and Judy Garland, who were completely controlled by the studios."

In 1971, after divorcing Lucille, the tale goes, Simon met Jones at a cocktail party at Chasen's hosted by media tycoon Walter Annenberg. The couple married less than a month later on a boat in the English Channel. They headed first to Hawaii and then to India, where Simon became enamored of both the bargain and beauty of Asian art. He also became Jones's private art tutor. "He educated her," says museum board member Eppie Lederer, also known as Ann Landers. "She knows exactly what he'd want."

By 1974, after loaning out works to various museums around the country, Simon had tired of the expense and the potential for theft and damage to his nomadic collection. The Pasadena Art Museum, meanwhile, was drowning in debt. In 1969, a group of well-meaning modern-art collectors had raised $5.5 million to build a rather awkward facility in Carmelita Park to house a collection that included works by Richard Diebenkorn and Claes Oldenburg and 450 pieces of German expressionism. Although Simon was no great fan of contemporary art, Pasadena trustees approached him for a bailout. Ever the takeover artist, he smelled blood. He visited the museum with its then staffer Sara Campbell. "How," Campbell and Simon asked each other, "are we ever going to make this work for old masters?"

No matter. Simon agreed to save the museum but on his own Pyrrhic terms: He would pay off the $850,000 in debt as well as the operating expenses. In exchange, 75 percent of the wall space would go to his collection, with the remaining space devoted to the Pasadena's works. He also formed a new 10-member board that infuriated Pasadena's donors by changing the name of the institution to the Norton Simon Museum. For less than the cost of a decent early cubist, Simon got control of a whole museum. "I thought it was a minor tragedy," recalls artist Ed Ruscha, famous for his paintings of iconic palms and fortresslike gas stations. "Not just for L.A. but for the whole contemporary art scene. It became like the iron curtain. Anything done after 1910 was literally locked in the basement."

In 1989, with her husband ailing, Jones took over. There were voices on the staff that argued for a kinder, gentler museum--more exhibitions, perhaps, or lectures. And Jones wanted a teahouse. But Simon detested the idea of patrons sipping cappuccinos at his museum or even attending lectures, and he had eliminated such programs as soon as he took control. Simon was more a purist than a scrooge, however. He wanted people to have a visceral and profound encounter with his soaring collection. Simon, says Jones, believed that "people who are exposed to great art are better human beings for the experience."

Neither Jones nor the board announced any big changes at the museum while Simon was still alive. The elusive teahouse became both a running gag and a barometer of Simon's mortality. Three weeks before his death, a failing Simon quipped to Jones, "Well, darling, you can have your tearoom now."

Five years later, most of the renovation is finished. Visitors expecting the Guggenheim Museum, Gehry's landmark titanium-covered project in northern Spain, will be disappointed. The new Norton Simon (the exterior, unfortunately, remains the same) looks less like a signature Gehry building than it did before his redesign. His work here fades into the background in deference to Simon's old masters and their need for the formality of a 19th-century French salon. Gehry raised the ceilings by two feet and squared off the once curved corners. He added sky-lights to bring natural light into the galleries. The serpentine walls are now straight and have been broken up into smaller galleries better suited to smaller paintings.

It's comforting to know that even museums have a hard time picking out wall paint. "A gallery is no different from a home," says Norton Simon curator Gloria Williams. "We have to observe the museum at noon, at six, in March light and August light to try to get an idea of what we want." And then there are different hues for different paintings--a gathering of Rembrandts, for example, which are predominantly brown and umber, is backed by warm colors with a bit of sienna. The vibrant Tiepolos will get a golden color with a slight hint of peach. Jones had once considered lush velvet for some of the smaller rooms, but it was more hassle (including regular vacuuming) than it was worth. "It's extraordinarily difficult to try to get right," says Williams. "And we're still working on it." Downstairs, Gehry used columns and earth tones and sandstone quarried in India to suggest a southeast Asian temple. Pal says that Gehry, in altering the stairway leading down to the new Asian gallery, has created what looks like a mandala, a traditional design in both Indian and Tibetan art. "It's really quite brilliant on his part," says Pal, at whose suggestion Gehry transformed a long stretch of wall into what is now a vast window that looks onto a small garden. It gives part of the downstairs the feel of an atrium and allows for the kind of light one might find in a temple courtyard.
But it's the decidedly feminine garden that best symbolizes Jones's ascension. She never much cared for the backyard of the museum. With its rectilinear fountain, crew-cut grass and stern statues glaring down from stone pedestals, it was about as inviting as the entrance to a corporate headquarters. So her orders to designer Power were straightforward: "Give me Giverny," she said, referring to the passion and abundance of French impressionist Claude Monet's garden. Power obliged with a curvaceous lotus pond that will be encircled by a burst of calla lilies, cosmia and tulip trees. "It ended up as a kind of tropical Giverny," says Power, one of L.A.'s most highly regarded designers, who also laid out the garden for Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Power found a stash of decomposed, lichen-stained granite in an abandoned quarry in the Sierra Nevada foothills to use for benches and statue pedestals. When the garden reaches full flower in three years, Power hopes her creation will be the kind of public garden common in Europe but a rarity in Los Angeles. "Norton," Jones noted as she looked over Power's landscaping plans, "would have loved this."

The Simon will never match the Getty in architecture or hustle and bustle. But Jones is allowing more exhibitions and lectures (including an upcoming one of Picasso's graphics) and perhaps even a concert or two--the kinds of outreach programs her husband considered a waste of effort. But it's a Jennifer Jones operation now, and despite her quiet ways, she has made the most sweeping and effective changes in the history of the museum. "Jennifer is the driving A force behind the museum's development," says former California attorney general John Van de Kamp, a member of the: museum's board of trustees. "There's no question about it."

A few things at the Norton Simon will stay very much the same, however, no doubt in deference to the wishes of its founder. Further acquisitions will be considered, but only if they have a direct relationship to a piece already in the collection--an earlier study, for example, of a piece purchased by Simon. "The Norton Simon collection is the Norton Simon collection," says Jones. "If we bought another painting, it wouldn't be Norton Simon buying it." Nor, she insists, will there be a merger with another institution, including the Getty. (Nonetheless, officials at the Getty paid conspicuous homage to Jones, who made a rare public appearance at its grand-opening gala last December.) "My sense is that the collection should bear his name," says Williams. "It is a remarkable accomplishment. Who knows what might happen a generation from now? But if his successors respect him, the museum should remain independent."

Would Simon-approve of this evolution? Even Jones admits that her husband would have swallowed hard at the expense and inconvenience of the re-design. "He was so concentrated on building the collection that he might have objected to spending time, thought and resources on redesigning the environment," she says. But friends and museum officials say that the mercurial Simon would probably be delighted to see a rather inappropriate venue transformed into a space more befitting his collection. "Norton was concerned about the visitors' experience," says Williams. "He would approve of anything that displays his art to better advantage."

There has been one slight change in plans, however. Jones now says that, because of Gehry's busy schedule and her own ambivalence, it is unlikely that her much heralded teahouse will ever be built. Simon, it seems, may have the last word after all.

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