PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : At Home With Mr. Wright

On the corner of Vermont Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, between Woolworth’s and the carwash, a steep hill rises from what would, long ago, have been a flat plain reaching to the ocean. The hill is ringed with olive trees and tall firs and crowned with an exotic concrete fortress: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Park.

The house is 70 years old. Time and city ownership have softened it: Gardens have grown up, the city put up an art gallery and lots of notices about where to park and what not to do. An ugly chain-link fence rings part of the house and, looking south, there is no longer the sweep of land, nor the beauty of old buildings--just a jumble of roofs, spindly palms and dirty air.

Yet even here, there is magic. Turning toward the mountains, watching the Earth fold there, listening to children running and squealing across the park grass, ghosts take shape. The mind’s eye sees Miss Aline Barnsdall, oil heiress, all well-dressed formality without and eccentricity within. Is that her young daughter (father unknown) running with a nursemaid in the olive grove? And over there, the wisp-like and sartorially exquisite Frank Lloyd Wright, then in his troubled 50s. To this genius, Barnsdall entrusted her dreams for a house amid a colony of arts and artists--and lost many of them in the turmoil of his steaming between Los Angeles and Tokyo, arguing, bullying, charming, intensity always in tow.

It was madness to build this Mayan-inspired temple, a whim of brillance for a woman, herself spoiled and tempestuous. But because of it, she has lived on: Her life continues through those who come for the $1.50 Hollyhock tour. Many of the visitors are pilgrims, surprisingly few from Los Angeles. They have come to walk in the artist’s footsteps and they leave enthralled by vistas, shapes, details, by the leaded windows, heavy concrete doors, the low dense mass drawing them in.

The volunteer docents, products of a 10-week training course, have the special look of acolytes, as if, in training, they had fingered the mantle of greatness. Jim, long blond hair a-flying, turquoise shirt a shock of color against Wright’s muted earth tones, is an actor. He weaves in and out of the house and courtyards, talking of spiritual values, of the organic oneness of all things, and his voice carries over to the children playing tag, the dozing lovers and old men in the sunshine.

Frank Lloyd Wright said: “All values are human values or else not valuable.” What connection would have to be made, one wonders, between the worshiping of him in this esoteric backwater and the table of Armenian card players who have made a small steady place for themselves in the lee of his concrete masterwork?

Karabet the carpenter always arrives first: He trudges slowly up the hill, swinging his worry beads, his deeply creased face beneath a black beret. He is 70 and came from Yerevan last year, speaking not a word of English. Maybe now he has a word or two; not more. It is his self-appointed task to reserve the park’s only picnic table and to drag it under a shady tree, just as it is the city groundsman’s task to drag it back again into the open the moment he has the chance.

By 10, as the first tour files into the Hollyhock House behind him, Karabet’s card game is under way. Petra, 60, has known only flight and hardship: Her parents fled the Armenian massacre in Turkey for Greece. She was a girl when the Nazis came, 15 when her family went to Armenia, to a life of more fear, hunger and her grinding days as a welder. Nubar, 67, the shoemaker; Jivan, 86, the weaver: They all look back to a Europe of war and uneasy peace, and now to an unexpected old age in freedom. They sit in Barnsdall Park, slapping down worn cards in their unfathomable game, arguing and spluttering over hands as they always do, as if any of them had money at stake.

Small black eyes--those not clouded by cataracts or glaucoma--sum up all that pass before them, knowing, as those do who have endured history, that to be mistaken is to lose all. The gold and plastic teeth smile in furrowed, brown faces with the warmth of those who have endured and survived the unimaginable.

They are our history, every bit as much as the Hollyhock House, into which, despite all the talk of “oneness within and without,” they had never been invited by docents or curator. We are surrounded by connections and by riches. How rarely we notice either, alas.