Hall in the Family

NAPA VALLEY —  Walt Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, doesn’t much care for the stress of leaving her family’s peaceful winery here, Silverado Vineyards, to travel by car to San Francisco International Airport, then by plane to Los Angeles.

“I think the L.A. commutes are worse than flying across the country because you never know whether the plane is going to take off or not,” she exclaimed.

But, earlier this week, Miller, 63, committed to becoming a very frequent flyer when she was named vice chairwoman of the newly appointed oversight board for the Walt Disney Concert Hall project. She will work closely with businessman Eli Broad, former ad hoc fund-raising chief for the planned new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Broad will serve as chairman.

Miller also scored a coup this week when the Disney Hall leadership accepted her proposal to authorize $14 million of Disney family money to engage the hall’s architect, Frank O. Gehry, to complete working drawings for the hall, rather than turn that work over to contractors. Coming as a surprise from the once-quiet Miller, it has been seen as a bold move, since Broad and the project’s other ad hoc fund-raising leader, Mayor Richard Riordan, had previously fought against hiring Gehry to do the drawings, citing scheduling and budget concerns.

“I think that everything that happened this week is positive,” said Miller, who makes her next trip to L.A. on Tuesday to meet all the members of the new board, which includes Riordan; County Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky; Los Angeles Philharmonic board President Robert Attiyeh; Music Center Chair Andrea Van de Kamp;developer Robert Maguire; former banker William Siart; and Northrop Chairman Kent Kresa.

On the table Tuesday, Miller said, will be Broad’s current hall cost estimate of $220 million--$50 million already spent, plus $170 million to complete--which he introduced several months ago. Miller said Thursday that several builders, including M.A. Mortenson, hired by the hall’s committee last week to work with Gehry to come up with a guaranteed maximum price for the hall, have already estimated the hall’s total cost at $255 million.

Miller said she feels comfortable working side by side with Broad--but not with his estimate. “That figure is a bad figure,” Miller said. “I have a real problem with it. Everyone is stressing how important this figure is to Eli, and I don’t understand why. . . . I don’t understand why we have to pretend that it makes any sense.”

Broad was not available for comment.

Beyond the estimate issue, however, Miller remains encouraged about the resolution of the flap over Gehry’s role, which led the architect to threaten to quit in late May. “It was a good week,” she says now, sounding relieved.

Of her new role in the concert hall project, instigated by a 1987 gift of $50 million from her mother, Lillian B. Disney, Miller mused: “I think I have always had some kind of title, whether I was involved or not. This time, I intend to be very involved; this time, there’s no passing it off. But I really feel we have a design and building team in place that can work together.”

In a conversation last weekend at Silverado Vineyards, Miller called her decision long overdue. The winery, made of stone and redwood and perched on a rocky hilltop, looks out over more than 100 acres of property in the Stags Leap area of Napa Valley. The region is best known for red grapes including the Merlot, which thrives on the rough volcanic soil.

The vineyard property also houses Miller and husband Ron Miller’s rustic wooden home, a guest house next to a pond of water lilies so lusciously oversized they resemble animated images from “Fantasia,” and 100-year-old olive trees, which produce the oil sold at the vineyard.

“In all honesty, [using Disney funds to engage Gehry to complete design drawings] is something we should have done two years ago,” Miller said. “I held off then, because I didn’t know if we were going to be able to raise any money. If the project doesn’t go through, maybe the money could be used to cure cancer or something.”

Even though Lillian Disney was 87 when she made her gift, Miller said, the Disney matriarch was from the start an aggressive participant. As Lillian Disney aged, however, her absence from the process left a leadership vacuum in the hall’s progress, Miller said. Another complicating factor has been the Millers’ physical remove from the Los Angeles leadership of the hall campaign--the Millers generally divide their time between the vineyard, a home in San Francisco and a Colorado ranch.

The family bought their vineyard property in 1978, but did not move here until the mid-1980s, when Ron Miller was forced out as chief executive officer of Walt Disney Productions (now Walt Disney Co.), largely at the hand of Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, who was then the largest stockholder in the company and is now vice chairman.

“It wasn’t until after he was fired that I said, ‘Come on, let’s just go up there,’ ” said Miller. “We did a little redecorating, and moved in. We also bought an apartment in San Francisco--that was pretty exciting, since we’d never had a real presence in that city.”

Miller notes that there remains no bad blood between the Millers and Walt Disney Co., and she says she would welcome a Disney Co. donation to Disney Hall, responding to rumors that have circulated for months that the company will make a major gift.

“I don’t see them coming in to match what Mother gave because that is a little extreme. But boy, a $5-[million] or $10-million gift, I don’t think they’d miss it!” Miller said slyly.

Other family concerns also have brought Miller to Los Angeles in recent days--her mother, Lillian, 98, still lives in the family’s Holmby Hills home, for one, and Miller is currently collaborating with Santa Monica’s Pantheon Productions on a CD-ROM biography of her father.

Her participation in setting the record straight on her father’s background was inspired, she said, by the 1993 release of an unauthorized and controversial Walt Disney biography by Marc Eliot that depicted Disney both as a bigot who was uncaring about his family and as an informant for the FBI.

“That book came out just after the death of my sister [Sharon Disney Lund died of cancer in 1993 at age 56]. Thank God she didn’t see it because it was a nasty piece of trash, it was just vile,” Miller said.

“We really are a bland little family,” she added. “It [the CD-ROM] is not a whitewash; it’s a real story, because the worst thing you can say about my dad is that at times he was grumpy, and at times he made people angry and hurt their feelings. That is the worst thing you can say, other than that he smoked himself to death.”

Until Miller’s teens, the Disneys lived in the Los Feliz hills area. Miller attended the Marlborough School for Girls in Hancock Park. Miller describes her childhood as happy, but admitted: “My dad loved his celebrity--well, he’d earned it. I don’t like living in the wake of his celebrity. It’s hard on my children, people are always calling them up for Disneyland tickets.”

Miller said her mother grew up poor, the youngest of 10, on the Nez Perce Indian reservation in Lapwai, Idaho. “Her family loved music, sang together,” she said. “I think my dad fell in love with her almost immediately. . . . She was a very independent little lady.”

Miller attended USC, intending to major in English. “I thought I might have liked to be a foreign correspondent,” she says. Instead, she fell in love with USC football star Ron Miller and left school to raise a family. The Millers have seven children and 12 grandchildren.

“All my girlfriends were getting married, everybody got married early then,” she says now. “And I haven’t regretted my decision.”

Miller returned to college--UCLA this time--two decades later. “I was 42, I remember, because it was just when my eyesight started to change, everything was blurry,” Miller joked. “I remember how I thought it would gain me some respect from my children, maybe I was the reason that they were not very academically inclined. But no, they just thought I was crazy.”

Like her mother, Miller loves music and dance; she is a supporter of the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Ballet, and was a longtime donor of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, formerly the resident company of the Los Angeles Music Center. And while she remains a strong supporter of architect Gehry, she wants to make sure that architectural controversies don’t continue to overshadow her mother’s dream of a concert hall that not only looks perfect, but sounds perfect.

“We didn’t come in saying it has to look like the Taj Mahal, or it’s got to look like a Grecian temple or something,” she said. “We let other people determine that. The only thing my mother would say is, ‘It’s got to have perfect acoustics.’ She knew that was the heart of it.”