Olive Behrendt, Music Center Patron, Dies

Olive Behrendt, a Los Angeles culture devotee who, when not raising millions of dollars for music, enjoyed playing jazz with Jascha Heifetz or racing around Venice in her powerboat, died Thursday in that Italian city.

A founding member of the Amazing Blue Ribbon, the Music Center’s prime support group, she was a once promising soprano who gave up a budding operatic career for marriage. She was 72, and her death was attributed by her Los Angeles physician to a pulmonary embolism.

As was her custom between the end of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s concert season and the opening of the Hollywood Bowl’s summer festivities, she was living at Venice’s posh Cipriani Hotel. Her husband also died in Venice, in 1970.

Woman of the Year

A woman of diverse talents and interests, the widow of Los Angeles insurance executive George W. Behrendt was among the first fund-raisers called on by Dorothy Buffum Chandler when the Music Center was conceived in the 1950s.

F. Daniel Frost, the center’s chairman, said: “Olive Behrendt’s great love for the Music Center came through to all of us every day of her life. Along with her dear friend, Buff Chandler, she was one of the founding and guiding spirits of the Music Center. Not only was she a great leader and knowledgeble supporter of all of the performing arts, she was also a wonderful, warm and gracious person. Her many contributions will never be forgotten.”

When the Music Center was dedicated in 1964, Mrs. Behrendt--who directed the center’s final “Bucks Bag” fund-raising campaign--was named a Times Woman of the Year.

In the article that accompanied that award, Mrs. Behrendt looked back on a life that had begun on North Granada Avenue in Alhambra, where she was born Olive Carmen Ponitz. Her father founded a chain of dress shops and her mother was a Russian immigrant.

She learned four languages, but never Russian, she said: French was the official language at home. She was raised to appreciate the arts, was taught piano and singing and graduated from Los Angeles High School at age 14. Her parents permitted her to enter UCLA, “because I was so tall” and later let her give up her philosophy major to concentrate on voice studies.

Mrs. Behrendt went to New York and became a pupil of Fritz Kissinger, former assistant to German conductor Otto Klemperer and accompanist to basso Ezio Pinza. In 1938 she was accepted as an understudy by the San Francisco Opera Co., of which she became a director many years later.

In 1939 she married Behrendt, head of a large Los Angeles insurance agency, and they built a home on Mulholland Terrace. The architect for that home, Sumner Spaulding, made her aware of the association that supported the Los Angeles County Museum and thus began her long affiliation with the arts in the city.

She helped establish the Sunday chamber music concerts at the museum, became a trustee of the Cedars of Lebanon and Mt. Sinai hospitals (since combined into one medical center), took over the board of counselors of USC’s School of Music and was named a director of the San Francisco Opera when that company was regularly performing in Los Angeles.

She also was an accomplished horsewoman and liked to dine on corned beef sandwiches she produced from a brown paper bag in her box at the Hollywood Bowl while those around her sampled more exotic cuisine and sipped fine wines from crystal goblets.

In that box, on any given evening, could be found her longtime Hollywood friends Danny Kaye, Roddy McDowall or Anne and Kirk Douglas.

“The most fun in the world,” she said, “is to play two-piano jazz with Jascha Heifetz,” the world-acclaimed violinist whom Mrs. Behrendt also counted among her closest friends.

After the Behrendts began spending part of their year in Venice, Mrs. Behrendt decided to try her hand at boating and succeeded in becoming the first (and believed only) woman licensed for a power boat in that city.

As her once-dark hair grayed in later years, she expanded her philanthropies to include a Catholic orphanage in Salzburg, Austria.

At home she added vice president of the Norton Simon Museum and associate of Caltech to her Music Center titles and became board chairman of her late husband’s insurance agency until its sale in 1973.

She also served as president, chairman and vice chairman of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and arranged the Pension Fund concerts at the Hollywood Bowl to aid those musicians.

Late Thursday, Andre Previn, music director of the Philharmonic, called her “a very great lady. Apart from her unfailing kindness and friendship to me, I knew her to be passionate about music and about her commitment to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. There won’t be a single member of the orchestra who will not miss her.”

She is survived by a brother, Milton Ponitz. Services are pending.