Jennifer Jones - The Dealer and Miss Jones

As 86-year-old Norton Simon lay dying, museum curators circled, hoping to plunder the last great private art collection in America. Would his wife, 40s movie star Jennifer Jones, allow the breakup of the industrialist's billion-dollar legacy? In the first interview since her husband's death, Jones reveals her plans for the world-renowned Norton Simon Museum

The voice on the other end of the phone line sounds tentative, wistful. "Every year I would bring up this thing about having refreshments," she says with the faintest trace of an Oklahoma twang, "but he would say, `I'm not running a restaurant,' and so we left it at that." After canceling twice, Jennifer Jones has finally acquiesced to an interview. She hasn't called to discuss her five Oscar nominations or her troubled marriage to David O. Selznick. The reclusive widow of industrialist Norton Simon wants to talk about the Pasadena museum that bears her late husband's name. But for the moment, she has drifted into a reverie about Simon's cantankerous resistance to serving food in his museum. "Then, about three weeks before he . . ." Her voice trails off.

"I didn't know he was leaving us," she resumes. "He said to me, `Well, darling, you can have your tearoom now,' and I said, 'Oh no, Norton, I don't want it anymore.' And then three weeks later, he was gone."

Since Norton Simon's death in June 1993, the uncertain future of the Norton Simon Museum has been one of the art world's great obsessions. Jones replaced him as president of the museum in 1989--after the debilitating Guillain-Barre syndrome left him confined to a wheelchair--but the former actress seemed wholly unsuited to managing a billion-dollar art empire. To make matters worse, Jones was reluctant to discuss her intentions--if she had any. Museum spokespeople said little more, except that the Norton Simon would continue operating according to the wishes of its namesake. But anyone who followed Simon's autocratic career knew that his death left an unfillable void.

Rumors have been flying ever since. The collection is actually owned by two foundations, and many worry that lawyers and accountants will push Jones aside to keep buying and selling art, trading on the inventory to generate cash. If the collection isn't broken up, others speculate it might be absorbed by another museum. Perhaps a long contemplated merger with the J. Paul Getty Museum will go through, integrating Simon's holdings into a supercollection in Brentwood. In another scenario, Simon's art might take a backseat to Jones's favorite charities: The sale of a few Dutch masters or a Monet could fund years of mental-health programs and cancer research.

One thing is certain: Private art collections rarely sit still in the United States--especially in this case, when many of Simon's van Goghs or Cezannes could bring $50 million apiece., Even the ironclad ban on lending or selling paintings left by collector Albert C. Barnes was recently pried apart by opportunistic Barnes Foundation trustees, who smelled a windfall. Only a huge public outcry kept the Barnes treasures off the auction block. Closer to home, the Armand Hammer Museum--founded by Simon's archrival--was absorbed by UCLA, who sold much of its collection just three years after Hammer's death.

Simon's death made his collection the next target. And there were no visible defenders. This year, for the first time, 76-year-old Jones seems ready to step into her husband's shoes and is willing to reveal her plans for the museum and set the record straight.

"People would ask Norton what made him buy a certain picture, what attracted him to it," Jones remembers. "He had an interest in psychology, and just as he combined psychology with business, he' also combined it with art. He would say, 'If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.' He had an extraordinarily unusual way of thinking. Nobody can say what he would have wanted were he here. It would have depended on the circumstances. But I believe he'd be in agreement with what the board of trustees and I are attempting to do."

Before Norton Simon ever began collecting art, he was known as a fierce corporate raider, a collector of companies. "I owned only 10 percent of a company," he told an interviewer, " but I always acted like I owned 100 percent--and people assumed it was true."

Tall and gaunt, with sad, heavy-lidded eyes set close to a long, thin nose, Simon resembled El Greco's The Old Man in Fur, a painting he eventually bought. Born Norton Glickman in 1907, the Portland, Oregon, storekeeper's son dropped out of UC Berkeley after a few weeks. "I liked money more than going to school," he recalled. Before age 35, Simon acquired a bankrupt juice company in Fullerton for $7,000, turned it into a profitable operation and sold it to Hunt Brothers for $3 million. Soon, he owned enough Hunt stock to shape the future of that company. Eventually, he controlled Ohio Match, Northern Pacific Railroad, Wheeling Steel, the McCall Company, Simon & Schuster and Avis.

Simon collected art the same way he collected companies: methodically, ruthlessly and insatiably. "He never yelled, he never lost his temper, but he was relentless--he weighed you down, he wore you out," recalls Pratapaditya Pal, former curator of Asian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "I think if I were a dealer, I would have hated to deal with him." Of course, the world's art dealers had no choice. Norton Simon was one of the biggest buyers on the market."

His favorite weapon was the telephone. A small circle of top dealers and curators grew to dread a ringing phone at midnight. Simon had to know if a certain Cezanne was better than one he'd just bought. Or if an Indian bronze was worth what a dealer was asking. All he wanted was five minutes, but that inevitably turned into an hour--and he always got his answers. He could be charming, but more often than not he was impatient, unyielding and gruff.

"I met him on the phone," recalls John Walsh, now director of the Getty. "He was very charming: `Oh, it must be late in New York.' Yeah, it was late, but then, without taking a breath, he would tell you what he'd been looking at. In my case, I was sort of a Dutch-paintings nerd at the Met at the time, so mostly that's what we talked about. "

Even J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art, admits "holding Norton's hand" through some delicate purchases. Simon was disarmingly frank about probing for information whenever it suited him, dealer Stephen Hahn remembers: "Just to provoke him, I said, `Norton, why do you call up a dozen people before you buy a painting? Are you so unsure about your own taste?' And he said; `You're damn right.' "He asked everybody--his driver, his maid. I said, `Why do you ask them?' And he said, `These are the people who are going to see the pictures in my museum.'"

"You can only judge by results," says Walsh, who considers Simon the most important collector of his time. "The result in his case was a collection of pictures that has an extremely high batting average, just looking at sheer quality and importance."

Without the benefit of any art training or even a college degree, Simon, a self-described existential businessman, managed to put together a collection of European paintings and Asian sculpture that no museum or gallery west of the Mississippi will ever be able to match on its own.

A cast of Rodin's Burghers of Calais greets visitors to the vaguely H-shaped museum on Colorado Boulevard, not far from the Rose Bowl. To the left are Simon's impressionist and modern paintings--the Renoirs, Cezannes and other trophies that a wealthy businessman might be expected to own. But Simon surprises you with his East Asian sculptures, from erotic Indian bronzes to august Khmer figures in stone. To the right are the old masters--Rubens, Cranach and Giorgione--and two stunning Zurbarins: The Birth of the Virgin and Still Life ivith Lemons and Oranges. Farther on is Tiepolo's remarkable Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance. Packed into the lower level are the 69 bronze sculptures found in Degas's studio after his death, not to mention 17th-century Dutch portraits any museum (most certainly the Getty) would covet, plus Dutch landscapes, still lifes, more Indian sculpture and small galleries devoted to drawings by Klee and Picasso.

For first-time visitors, the museum can be a shock. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the West. And it is far from the status-driven "checkbook collection" all too common in California. Many of the artists whose works line the walls of the Norton Simon are obscure enough that the cognoscenti would have to look up their names.

Everett Fahy, chairman of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, calls Simon "the greatest collector since the Second World War." But that collector was also the purveyor of Hunt's Ketchup, a numbers whiz who didn't begin buying paintings until he was well past 40. Even those in the art world who knew him struggle to explain how he bought better paintings than anyone else. Some credit the sheer energy he devoted to learning about art--and to haggling mercilessly over purchases. It didn't hurt that Simon came to the table with an enormous fortune, and that, when he bought them, paintings sold for a fraction of today's prices.

Simon considered contemporary art beyond his ken. "Once I had a de Kooning, two Gorkys and a Hofmann," he told an interviewer. "But I sold them because I found it was tough enough to pick good paintings out of the past. I did not want to tax myself with the myriad painters of the present." As many self-made men did, Simon bought impressionist paintings when he moved to Hancock Park in the early 50s and needed to cover the walls. He started with, a Bonnard, a Gauguin and a Pissarro. Soon, the house--as well as his later homes in Malibu and Bel-Air--was packed with paintings and sculptures, as was the bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where Simon spent the last few years of his life.

But buying paintings one at a time wasn't enough for the restless businessman who liked to swallow companies whole. So he set up the Norton Simon Foundation and, in 1964, purchased the entire stock of New York's Duveen Brothers, one of the world's most celebrated galleries. He acquired their sculpture, porcelains, tapestries, furniture and 150 paintings, including works by Botticelli, Titian and Fragonard. Duveen's five-story townhouse on 79th Street and its library of 15,000 books also came in the transaction. "It was another kind of buyout," says a New York dealer. "He peeled it off and made a good business deal." Simon sold most of Duveen's inventory, then swapped the building with another gallery for three more paintings.

The following year, Simon made an even bigger splash. Christie's in London was selling the renowned Cook collection including Rembrandt's portrait of his son, Titus. Simon's purchase of that painting in March 1965--and the manner in which he did it--stunned the art world.

Against the advice of Christie's management, Simon decided to bid in person rather than through a dealer. He also insisted on absolute secrecy. Christie's Charles Alsopp (now Lord Hinlip, the firm's chairman) was instructed to hire a Rolls-Royce and wait at Heathrow Airport wearing dark glasses and holding a white carnation and a copy
of the Financial Times. When Simon spotted him, the Rolls whisked them both into, town.

For the auction, Simon stipulated several bizarre requirements in a handwritten agreement signed by Christie's. He would be bidding as long as he was sitting down, the pact read. If he stood up, that meant he had stopped. The agreement further stated: "If he sits down again, he is not bidding unless he raises his finger. Having raised his finger, he is bidding until he stands up again." Finally, if Simon's bid secured the Rembrandt, the work would be recorded as sold to Autolycus, in order to ensure the eccentric Californian's anonymity.

To the great embarrassment of Christie's, the actual auction departed from the script. When the Rembrandt came on the block--part of the last lot in a sale of 105 works--an impatient Simon began bidding out loud, breaking his own agreement. When the price reached 650,000 guineas, he stopped. Silent and motionless, Simon watched the gavel come down at 740,000. The successful bidder was Marlborough Fine Arts.

Applause swept the sale room until a voice shouted, "Hold it, hold it!" To an astonished crowd, Simon called out, "All right, I will read what's in my pocket." The secret bidding agreement was then read in front of a horde of reporters, and Simon argued that by not bidding, he was actually bidding. Incredibly, Christie's then reopened the auction, and Simon's subsequent bid went unchallenged by the furious Marlborough representatives. When the gavel came down for the last time, Simon had Titus for 798,000 guineas, the highest price any painting had brought to date in Britain.

In his first international exposure, Simon alienated everyone he dealt with, yet he still walked away with the picture he came for--a feat he would repeat many times. "Norton Simon thinks he can buy anything," one dealer observed after the Titus uproar. "One of these days, he's going to sit down with de Gaulle and offer to buy the Louvre."

At the age of 64, in 1971 Simon married Jennifer Jones. Their whirlwind romance came at a point when he was clearly drifting, and the marriage signaled an important turning point in his career as a collector. just two years earlier, he had nearly given up on his two passions--business and art--in order to pursue: a quixotic dream in national politics. Though always a solid Republican, he held moderate views that were never quite in sync with Southern California's powerful Republican right wing, and in 1970, this frustration propelled him into a race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, a decision so sudden that the millionaire had to borrow the $125 registration fee.

Simon sold millions of dollars in art to finance his primary run, but the taciturn entrepreneur was no campaigner. His gambit only managed to sidetrack the political career of GOP nominee George Murphy, who lost in the general election to Democrat John Tunney. In his speeches, Simon promised to bring the efficiency of capitalism to politics, but his personal life was already in disarray. Within the year, Simon's first marriage collapsed and his 31 year-old son committed suicide. Simon first met Jones at a cocktail party given by another collector, Walter Annenberg. She may have been as adrift in her own life as Simon was in his. Though she won an Academy Award in 1944 for The Song of Bernadette and starred in such '40s classics as Since You Went Away and Portrait of Jennie, Jones hadn't made a respectable film in 10 years, and her last credit was the justly forgotten Angel, Angel, Down We Go, a 1969 AIP bomb in which she played a retired soft-core porn star. Less than a month after being introduced, the couple were married aboard a ship in the' English Channel, and they honeymooned in Hawaii and India. Jones, who practiced yoga, is said to have ddmired Indian culture, and she introduced her new husband to the subcontinent's tradition of temple sculpture.

True to form, Simon began telephoning dealers to learn which Indian sculptures were considered the best, and that's when he discovered how little they cost. "Remember, the man was buying world-class paintings, and the prices were very substantial," recalls Asian-art expert Pratapaditya Pal. "Then he started to took at world-class Indian sculptures. He kept reiterating how impressed he was that one could buy such staggeringly beautiful works of art for so little money, when compared with what you got if you were using that money in Western art." Serious Asian-art collectors. already included John D. Rockefeller and a handful of major museums, but Simon dove right in.

By 1973, Norton Simon was an important enough player in Asian art that the Metropolitan Museum agreed to show his growing collection. The exhibition should have marked his triumphant entree into the upper ranks of the East Coast art establishment and could have resulted in the rest of his collection finding a permanent home at the Met. But disaster struck, and Simon's abrasive personality just made things worse.

On the eve of the show, the Indian government announced that Simon's Shivapuram Nataral'a, a magnificent bronze dancing deity that appeared on the catalog's cover, was stolen property. The work had been bought in good faith from a reputable dealer, Simon argued, but protests mounted, and even Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then ambassador to India, supported New Delhi's position.

An indignant Simon canceled the show, refusing to let the Met display any of his sculptures without the Nataraja. He even threatened to go on television with a frontal assault. If the Met won't show his Nataraja, he told Ben Heller, the New York dealer who sold him the sculpture, then Simon was going to tell the world about all the objects in the Met with provenances that were just as shady.

"`Your people won't tell you this, Norton,'" Heller recalls saying," `but you'd be a jackass and an idiot and a laughingstock. You're a nouveau riche California Jew fighting the eastern establishment. Cut it out.'"

With that warning, Heller maintains, Simon calmed down. "You have a point," the collector said. He still managed to burn a few bridges in a front-page interview with the New York Times. "Hell, yes, it was smuggled," Simon was quoted as saying of the Nataraja. "I spent between $15 million and $16 million in the last two years on Asian art, and most of it was smuggled." By the time the controversy died down, Simon had given up on the East Coast, and the East Coast had given up on him--but the experience gave him the impetus to create his own museum.

Simon was always seeking a permanent venue to display his treasures. The motivation was not purely philanthropic. California law required that art purchased under tax-deductible auspices be accessible to the public. Early on, he wanted to establish a gallery in Fullerton, where his firm was based. He planned to build an art gallery and library, but the tightfisted city fathers drew the line at paying for a parking lot--though Simon had agreed to fund the rest. They foolishly turned him down.

LACMA was the obvious alternative, especially since Simon had helped curator Richard Fargo Brown plan the museum in the late '50s. At the time, the county's art collection was housed in its natural-history museum. But when it turned out that the new museum's main structure would be named for Harold Ahmanson, a savings-and-loan tycoon who donated $2 million, Simon jealously reduced his own pledge from $1 million to $100,000. For the time being, however, his art stayed on the walls.

There was still an unwritten understanding that Simon's collection would wind up at LACMA, and he remained on the board throughout the '60s. "I never saw Norton sign a piece of paper agreeing to anything," says Joseph Koepfli, a museum founder. He says the LACMA trustees were prepared to build a five-story structure for Simon's collection and provide it with a full-time curator. But in 1971, when LACMA named rival collector Armand Hammer to its board, Simon resigned as a trustee. "He just picked up his marbles and left," says a LACMA curator.

In 1974, Simon found another museum. A group of collectors had built the new Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, the only institution on the West Coast then focused exclusively on contemporary art. A dispute over its new building had left the adventurous museum more than $800,000 in debt "We were broke--no money, no mazuma," says one founder, Robert Rowan.

That was the moment Simon appeared on the scene, with plenty of cash, a first class collection and a hard bargain. What tat first seemed an altruistic errand of mercy quickly took on the colorings of a leveraged buyout. Simon offered to contribute $1 million to the museum--which leased its site from the city of Pasadena for $1 a year--as long as his collection could occupy three-quarters of the space and he could appoint 7 members of the 10-member board.

Simon was "enigmatic more than tough," says Gifford Phillips, a museum trustee. The new benefactor renovated the galleries but closed the restaurant and stopped all social receptions. "To me, such functions are like supermarket openings," Simon said at the time. Over the protests of the last three original trustees, his new board--which included Jones, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Candice Bergen and Warren Beatty--rubber-stamped his demand that the museum's name be changed to the Norton Simon Museum. All of the contemporary paintings went into storage, and Simon finally had his own institution--without even donating his art. The paintings and sculpture remained the property of the foundation he controlled and were only on loan to the museum.

The original Pasadena trustees were furious, but Monroe Price, then a local lawyer, came up with a novel solution: "Pasadena got all upset about the name change, and I suggested they change the name of Pasadena, the town, to Norton Simon." For his part, Simon welcomed the notoriety. "Look at the free publicity I'm getting for the museum and the collection," a local curator remembers him saying. "Do you know how many millions that's worth?"

By the late 1970s, Simon stopped collecting Asian art. The legal scrutiny irked him, and he was alienating dealers. "Norton would get very disturbed when three dealers would own a piece together," says Heller. "He couldn't play them against each other." But when Simon couldn't buy, he would sell--and always at a profit. Fellow corporate raiders made good customers. In 1979, he sold a Maillol sculpture he had bought nine years earlier for $90,000 to Ivan Boesky for $350,000.

Not all the art Simon sold, however, was his. Leafing through the 1980 Christie's sales calendar, donors to the former Pasadena Museum noticed an auction of modern art that offered works they themselves had donated--pieces by de Kooning, Lichtenstein, Sam Francis and Diebenkorn. The auction was placed on hold when three former Pasadena trustees sued, charging that Simon was violating the museum's mission.

Simon hired three L.A. law firms to defend him, and he eventually won. The court ruled that the mission of the Norton Simon Museum lay in the hands of Norton Simon. The trial also revealed Simon had been selling other Pasadena works privately, among them a Frank Stella painting and hundreds of prints. Gifford Phillips, one of the plaintiffs who had built the Pasadena collection, remembers the judge asking him, "You don't think your art is as important as Norton Simon's pictures, do you?'

A compromise placed the works on extended loan to LACMA, but the lawsuit accelerated Simon's search for other quarters. In 1981, he announced he might give his entire Asian collection to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Sensing a windfall, then mayor Dianne Feinstein feted the collector, treating the offer as a fait accompli. But Simon moved on, flirting first with Washington, D.C.--where he considered an outright purchase of the Corcoran Gallery--before entering into a series of complex negotiations with UCLA.

In February 1987, the university disclosed that "serious discussions" with Simon and Jennifer Jones were in the final stages. They were planning to donate the entire collection to the university, though neither Simon nor Jones bothered to appear at the lavish press conference where the announcement was made. Less than four months later, the deal was off.

Dealers who knew Simon suspected his real goal was always a marriage with the J. Paul Getty Trust, the only institution with enough money to buy his collection and still. be able to maintain it. As early as 1982, a deal looked promising. The two museums even began buying paintings together--first a Poussin for $4 million, then a Degas pastel for $3.7 million. "It was a way to avoid a shooting match in the sale room," says the Getty's Walsh, then a curator at the Met. The purchases were seen as the first tentative steps toward a merger. "Tentative? Everything's tentative," Simon told an interviewer.

In the end, the Getty had more to gain from Simon than he did from the Getty. "Paul Getty was a bargain hunter," says Walsh. "Once in a while, he'd spend a lot of money for something important, but his collection looks like that of a bargain hunter. Not Simon's.

"That is, the collection we used to have," he adds quickly, thinking of the Getty's recent costly buying campaign--at prices that would have shocked Simon. "We've open adding, and we haven't exactly been bargain hunters."

Simon's failure to close a deal with the Getty wasn't caused by indecisiveness but by ambivalence. "The collection is the closest he could come to immortality, and when you're dealing with your immortality, that's something different from a business decision," says Harold Williams, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Williams first proposed that the Getty and the Norton Simon buy paintings together. "I wanted to get the Getty acquiring again, and I thought it might do something more for our relationship, which it obviously didn't," he says. "I thought it would be an ideal marriage. In part, Norton did, too."

What, then, held Simon back? "He began to think about the value of his collection," Williams says, 'and he saw how good it was. That made it hard to conceive of merging with another collection. It became even more a matter of trust. To whom do you entrust something that now has this value?" Whatever his real reasons, Simon's decision to leave his collection in Pasadena seems to have been the right one. Privately, even some Getty curators agree. Not only did the prospect of absorbing the Norton Simon Museum risk bankrupting them (coming at the same time as their lavish construction project), but it threatened to keep the Getty from charting its own course as a collection.

"In our own way, we're at his level now, but it has taken hundreds of millions of dollars," says Walsh, who doubts any private collector will ever repeat Simon's achievement. "The money's there, the material's not. It's too late to do that in European paintings."

The Met's Fahy echoes those sentiments: "I don't see pictures like that coming up again. How many of them are likely to get loose? Very, very few. They're all in public collections." just how few are available? Recently, LACMA curators--who work under the constraints of a minimal acquisitions budget--were crossing their fingers in the hope that Lucille Simon, Norton's first wife, would give their museum the few paintings from the couple's collection that she retained as part of their divorce settlement. (In 1992, LACMA also mounted what must have been the world's first Jennifer Jones film retrospective, just a year before Simon's death.)

By the mid '80s, the man who had bought for the past 30 years finally stopped. Prices for impressionist and modern paintings were doubling and tripling, and Simon was now wheelchair-bound, which precluded the marathon calls and constant travel that had been his routine as a buyer. "Mastery was all for Norton," Walsh says. "The easiest and most pleasurable part of the mastery was getting the better of another intelligent, clever and, ideally, powerful person. You can't beat that. It was a big aphrodisiac for him."

No longer able to buy, Norton Simon began to think about the final disposition of his spectacular holdings. There was only so much more he could do.

He left us a great jewel," says Jennifer Jones, "but the setting can be improved. What we're trying to do is give a gem of a collection a more beautiful setting."

After two and a half years of quiet indecision, Jones says she is ready to take charge. Today, she presides over an institution that has an exquisite collection, an ample endowment and a low-maintenance building--and that's considerably more than other museums can claim.

She's particularly lucky not to be facing the kinds of problems that have recently been plaguing the rest of the L.A. art scene. Peter Norton--a prominent MOCA benefactor--jumped ship when that museum refused to host a pet exhibition titled, "Black Male. " At LACMA, fractious trustees have now spent more than two years searching for a director. In Malibu, the Getty is pouring more than a billion dollars into a neo-Babylonian shrine for a collection inferior to Simon's.

Jones may not be the dictator her husband was, or the wheeler-dealer, but she knows what she wants. First and foremost, the Norton Simon collection will not be subsumed into the Getty or any other museum. "Oh no, no, no," she insists, her voice gaining confidence as she speaks of her plans. "There'll be no merger. The Norton Simon Museum will remain. That's absolutely Norton's wish. We talked many times with the Getty. We talked many times with the National Gallery and Carter Brown. We talked with UCLA. Everybody wanted a merger, and Norton considered it. But after many talks, of which I was always a part, we decided we wanted to remain the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, with no collaboration with anyone else."

In the past, the board was a hollow shell. Simon. assumed all powers unto himself while he lived, and after his death, Jones and the staff were afraid to change anything. "Norton put together a board that just nodded yes to everything," says one source close to the museum. Conventional wisdom said Jones insisted her show-biz friends be trustees, but in fact it was Simon who gave the board its Hollywood luster.

Under her auspices, new arrivals to the board include: Frank Gehry, who designed a house for the Simons years ago and will supervise an understated renovation of the museum; David Geffen, a serious contemporary-art collector in his own right, who fled LACMA's quarrelsome board more than a year ago and became a Norton Simon trustee in October; Eppie Lederer (aka Ann Landers); and Milton Wexler, psychoanalyst to the stars, who also happens to be blind. Dr. Wexler counts Jones among his patients, along with several other trustees.

Much of what Jones envisions for the future is simple and practical--and has very little to do with art. For one thing, she finally plans to put in that cafe she always wanted, so visitors don't have to trek into Old Town just to get a cappuccino. "In effect, he gave me permission," she says. "Norton thought, She wants a tearoom--let her deal with it; I don't have to. So I think we'll have some sort of little pavilion for light sandwiches and high tea."

Another goal is to make the Norton Simon more "user friendly," a plan that has already meant bringing groups of cancer patients to the museum several times a year to take their minds off their illnesses--"for a day at least," says Jones, herself a veteran of a battle with breast cancer.

Gehry intends to improve the lighting and reconfigure some galleries. "It's not an enormous concept, " Jones says. "Instead of long corridors with pictures hung one after the other like little soldiers, he wants to make some rooms for more intimate viewing."

The exhibition space, she promises, will offer an alternative to the white-walled marathons that most museums have become lately. "For years, I've wanted to do something about changing the walls. I don't like gray walls and I don't like white walls, so it becomes a problem. Years ago, I saw velvet behind some of the old masters at the Metropolitan, and I thought, That's so beautiful, they're so wonderful--why can't we do that? But then we felt it's too expensive and would have to be replaced occasionally."

Norton Simon's stingy loan policy has been loosened, "but very judiciously," Jones hastens to add, "and not long-term loans." Simon compulsively borrowed art from dealers, but he was loathe to lend anyone his own paintings. In the past, many major exhibitions have been incomplete because a crucial painting couldn't be borrowed from Pasadena. But at present, a Sam Francis work is on loan to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and Brancusi's Bird in Space was sent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a retrospective. Soon, the board expects to announce that the famed Galka Scheyer collection of German expressionist art will be loaned to a Korean museum. Recent visits to Pasadena by directors of other major museums point to further openings to the outside world.

"The National Gallery in London wanted to borrow the Zurbaran "Still Life with Lemons and Oranges," she says, referring to her favorite work in the museum. "And when they said we could have anything we wanted out of the National Gallery, I said, What about the Velazquez--the beautiful nude?' And they came back and said we could have anything but that, so we decided not to let the Zurbaran go on tour."

In addition, Jones was concerned that visitors to Pasadena while the Zurbaran was on loan in London would miss seeing it. "If you go to the Huntington, you want to see The Blue Boy and Pinky. If they're not there, you'll be disappointed."

A complete catalog is finally in the works, funded in part by a grant from the Getty. And although the museum has not yet launched into the CD-ROM mania, Jones says they have been approached.

So far, money doesn't seem to be a problem. The Norton Simon does not even have a development office, the fundraising arm that is now the driving force at most other museums.

We were left well endowed, shall I say," Jones states, without a trace of coyness. "However, we'd be very happy if anybody would like to drop a little money in the pot. You know, the Huntington was left very well endowed, and then they got into trouble, although they're in better shape now. We're aware of their experience and we're trying to avoid that. " "Norton's genius at the financial end was impeccable," says a source familiar with the museum's financial condition. "I've never seen anything so exquisitely structured; it's a work of art in itself." The museum derives income from car dealerships that operate on land next to its parking lot--probably the only museum in the country with such an arrangement.

That should keep them from having to sell any works of art to raise cash, Jones believes, but the museum won't be expanding its holdings either, scouring the market the way Simon did to "trade up" on the value of his inventory. That part of the collector's legacy has been jettisoned.

"The Norton Simon collection is the Norton Simon collection," Jones says. "If we bought another painting, it wouldn't be Norton Simon buying it. That's not to say that down the line, if some great painting came along, one might not want to buy it--although with the competition from the Getty I think it would be very difficult. For us, the important thing now is to take what we have, the great collection, and present it properly. In my lifetime, that's what I want most to happen."

Back to Article Index