Eli Broad

As head of a multibillion-dollar corporation, SunAmerica Inc., a major collector of contemporary art and mayor’s close friend, Eli Broad seems to have his thumb in many pies. Now he is intent on becoming a key player in shaping the future of Los Angeles.

Last year, Broad took on the task of saving Disney Hall, the downtown concert-hall project mired in financial problems. Its supporters had to raise $52.3 million by June 30, per an arrangement with the county, to keep the proposal on track. An additional $115 million has to be raised by December 1998. Meanwhile, Broad is involved in making over the working drawings needed before construction of the building can begin. These were prepared by Dworsky and Associates and, according to some, are still unusable.

Broad has announced he has already raised the $52.3 million needed for the county deadline. He is now talking about a grander vision for the redevelopment of downtown, and says he is ready to raise an extra $100 million for that second phase of his master plan. That plan, which is still sketchy, would create a “cultural zone” extending along Grand Street, loosely tied to the planned sports-entertainment complex some miles south.

During a conversation in his art-filled living room last Wednesday, Broad, 63, ruminated on art and architecture. He is not new to the cultural scene. Broad was a board member at the Museum of Contemporary Art during the ‘80s; he and his wife, Edythe, remain avid collectors. He originally hired the Disney Concert Hall’s architect, Frank O. Gehry, to design his Brentwood house, though the two allegedly had a falling out and Broad finished the house by working with an independent contractor.

But Broad’s ambitions cover more than just a single building. He portrays himself as an inheritor of Dorothy Chandler’s mission to create a vital cultural center by bringing together the elites of both the downtown business establishment and the Westside Hollywood powers. To Broad, the image of a powerful new establishment and a great cultural nexus are inextricably bound together.

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Question: How did your role change in all this?

Answer: It wasn’t about Disney Hall. It was really about the city. It was about downtown. It got into another issue, which, frankly, turned me on, and that is this city has been accused--maybe rightfully so--of not having a civic leadership . . . . No one seems to care about the center, the hub of the city, the downtown. And we said no city can be great today or in world history without a vibrant hub or center. I don’t think you can deny that.

Already, as you know, at the south end they were talking about the sports entertainment and convention district. What I’ve seen of the [proposed] sports arena, it puts Madison Square Garden to shame. And to the north, the idea was you’ve got to create the cultural district, which will include not only MOCA and the Colburn School of Performing Arts, under construction next door, but a new music center, a new performing arts center for the 21st century.

Q: Who have you been approaching to make this happen?

A: There were no civic leaders five or six years ago. The mayor wasn’t there, Zev [Yaroslavsky] was not chair of the Board of Supervisors. I did things off and on: I was on the board at MOCA, but I didn’t see myself as a civic leader. We got [Times Mirror Chairman and CEO] Mark Willes, who five years ago was in Minneapolis, as you know. He’s now a big advocate of the project. He makes fund-raising calls for the committee. The head of ARCO, Mike Bowlin, who was actually in Texas five years ago. And then you have [head of Ralph’s Grocery Co. and Food-4-Less Inc.] Ron Burkle.

So all of a sudden, this has become a rallying point for a new generation of civic leaders. That became more and more exciting, as opposed to just raising money to build a building . . . .

Both the Music Center and the Los Angeles County Museum are 30-some-odd years old. When you have an institu- tion 30-some-odd years old, the original family leadership is very old and retired away. So you end up with a board that’s ancient. There are widows and widowers on the board. So one of the challenges was to say: Look, the Music Center is a great institution, but it’s an institution that was created out of a vision that is 35 years old. You had a whole different community back then. You had a whole different city.

Q: How, specifically, has that vision changed since then?

A: If you look at the audience, it is a graying audience. It is not representative of the entire community of Southern California. It does not have enough [open] days and nights to bring other sorts of productions in. So we said, what do we have to do? We need money to build Disney Hall. And building Disney Hall, and not doing anything with the rest, doesn’t make sense. You really have to look at--call it whatever you want, modernizing, refurbishing--the entire center. It is starting to show its age. You [need to] figure out a way to tie it all together, architecturally, aesthetically and so on . . . .

So we said: We need money for that and [for endowments] that help people in the community, who wouldn’t otherwise get to come here, by having programs similar to the Kennedy Center, where, every day at 5 o’clock, they have a free concert. The cost of that is only $600,000-$700,000 a year. We have to reach out and do a better job educationally, because the public schools, obviously, have been [lacking] in all forms of art education.

Q: Where is the money for this going to come from?

A: Out of that came the thought, OK, we have to have a total of $265 million. We have $62.5 million in Disney money. That leaves another $200 million. The first $100 million, or a little above that, goes to Disney Hall. The rest will go to refurbishing the entire center and [tying] it together, and creating an endowment for outreach and other programs . . . . So we started at one place, and then wanted to see it built, then the vision expanded to what it can do for downtown, for the city, and how it can become a rallying point for a whole generation of leadership in the city.

Q: Has a broader urban plan been put together for this part of downtown? [The developer] Maguire Thomas put together a plan years ago for redeveloping Grand Street. What are you discussing now?

A: There are a lot of things kicking around. There is a civic-center plan that I’ve glanced at. All I can tell you is that I know that, with the anchor of the north-end cultural center and the great architecture, and with [the south end] sports, entertainment and convention district, what you have then is a reason for people to go downtown, the same reason people go to Manhattan from the other boroughs or New Jersey, Connecticut or wherever--from Long Island. Because they find things there that they cannot find in their backyard--and it’s got to be sports, entertainment and culture.

Q: Some have made the argument--even Frank Gehry, at times--that Disney Hall might have been better off along Wilshire Boulevard, or on the Westside. That is it would have fit into the city’s fabric better.

A: Fine. Our company has nothing downtown. We have zero interest there. We’re headquartered in Century City. But you’ve got to have a hub. You’ve got to have a place where people come together. You could argue: Why have Manhattan? Let’s sink the island and have all the boroughs. Look at every city: look at Chicago; look at Paris. I don’t know of any city that is successful without a vibrant core. And, again, you can only get people there if you offer them things that they can’t find in their neighborhoods. People aren’t going to drive downtown just to go to the movies. They’re going to stay in Westwood or the Valley.

Q: If the money is already being raised, do you think there is a moment when someone should put together a more comprehensive urban plan for downtown?

A: Oh, sure. I can’t tell you at what stage, but if you start with the anchors in the districts to the north and south, and the financial center, I think that the rest of it is going to eventually come.

Q: How close are you now to reaching your fund-raising goals for Disney Hall?

A: We’ve got the $63.5 million of Disney money. The best estimated cost [for completing Disney Hall] is $170 million. We’ve announced $54 million in gifts. As you know, we’ve raised enough [to meet] the county-imposed goal. We have a self-imposed goal of $100 million by June 30, and I think we’re going to get there. If you add that $100 million to the $60 million of Disney money, that is just about all the funds we need for Disney Hall. That’s Phase 1.

. . . . You’ve got the community to raise another $100 million to beautify, for the endowment and for whatever additional funds [needed] for Disney Hall. That will start after Phase 1 is completed, which will hopefully be at the end of June. . . . This time around, we want to make sure we get a quality hall at a maximum price. In other words, we want a contractor who will build this hall at a high quality. That happened at [the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, Spain]. Bilbao was also inspirational to me. It’s coming in pretty much on time and on budget.

Q: How do you avoid the mistakes now that happened during the first go-round? Particularly with the working drawings?

A: You didn’t have an owner. You didn’t have a strong owner. You had a committee of lots of people--all good people, all well-intentioned--yet, sitting around a table, 20 people. I wasn’t there. You can’t get something built by committee. You need a strong owner. Someone who knows how to say “yes” and someone who knows how to say “no.”

Q: And that would be you?

A: I hope it’s not me. I run a big company . . . . We’re going to put a good team together. I’m not going to run away from it, but I’m not going to be full time--I can’t.

Q: Then how do you avoid the problems of a committee when you put a team together?

A: It’ll be a different structure. To have a great piece of architecture built, you not only need a great architect, but a strong client, and I think history proves that, whether it’s [Frank Lloyd Wright’s] Fallingwater, where you have a dialogue between Wright and Edgar Kaufman. I think a great architect like Gehry can do a better job with a strong client. I think all architects can.

Q: The other mistakes from the past that have to be addressed are with the working drawings themselves that Dworsky produced. How will you deal with that?

A: There are other people involved [in reviewing those drawings]. Some people, like Dworsky and others, say that the drawings are 98% done. Others will say that they are 30% done. There are lots of different views on what could be done there.

Q: There was an independent developer, Gerald Hines, though, that reviewed the drawings several years ago.

A: The problem with this project is that they’ve hired every consultant in the world, and money was spent like it was going out of style. We have to take stock of what’s been done. People whom I’ve worked with, [architect] Bill Dahl, we’re sorting it out . . . . Originally, this project started with two contracts: one to Frank Gehry, and one with Dworsky. Both were fixed percentages. Then they started to fast-track it, and it went awry. But we’re not looking back. We want to take stock of what we have, and we want to salvage as much of the working drawings as we can. We’re obviously not changing the design one iota.

Q: Is that definite? Because couldn’t that also be a threat to the project going ahead?

A: There will be no changes in the design. At one time, Frank Gehry looked at changes suggested by the Hines organization, but the fear that Frank has--and that I have, frankly--is that if you start doing that, it’s like unraveling the string.

Q: Is there any possibility that Gehry, after the experience he’s had working on the Guggenheim project in Spain, might redo the working drawings himself?

A: Well, there’s discussion about that. Gehry wants to do the working drawings. He and the owners would have to reach an agreement. But the Gehry office will be involved; the question is to what extent . . . .

My role is to get the resources together to get it built, which is the money. Bill Dahl and Jeff Heller--who was my project manager at this house, then went to work with Richard Meier on the Getty--so he has been working with all sorts of people trying to understand the background, figure out what’s usable, what isn’t. We want to do this in a sensible, intelligent way. We’ve spoken to very large contractors, to say, “This is what we have--here are the drawings, how do you think we ought to do it” . . . .

Q: So this is the hinge that everything turns on, in terms of the plans you have for downtown? The concert hall is part of a much bigger scheme in your mind.

A: You know, Lincoln Center has 65th Street that goes right underneath it. We’re looking at First Street and saying, maybe we can close First Street so that it’s all together. You don’t have a street, you have a tunnel there. No decisions have been made, but that’s been started also. Ideally, you don’t want a street in between the buildings. You want it all together as one performing arts center.

I think that Disney Hall will become the symbol of the city, not unlike the Sydney Opera House. . . . We need that. We need that as a spirit. To show our City Hall as a symbol is interesting, but I think we can do better . . . . We can reposition this city. It really is the city of the 21st century.