Built in 1928, Villa Aurora’s Venerable Pipe Organ Is Getting Ready for Its Close-Up

If all goes well, the Villla Aurora’s best-kept secret will be out this time next year. In fact, you won’t be able to avoid hearing her, given the great set of pipes she has. So what’s hiding at the Villa? A vintage pipe organ, which will be played for the first time in decades in December 2010, when the Villa will celebrate its 15th anniversary as a German-American cultural center in Pacific Palisades. Constructed in 1928 by the Artcraft Organ Company of Santa Monica, the organ has eight rows of pipes, from which 34 registers can be engaged simultaneously. But it’s currently in disrepair and a team of pipe organ specialists is currently working to refurbish it in time for its inaugural performance. A benefit event at the Villa is scheduled for Tuesday, December 8 at the historic ‘migr’ refuge, located at 520 Paseo Miramar. Musicians Christopher Bull and Norton Wilson will perform. ‘A musical and visual art program will be performed on our historic Bluthner piano, once owned by the ‘migr’ composer Ernst Toch,’ says Daniel Rothman, director of programs at the Villa Aurora. ‘UCLA organist Christoph Bull and performance painter Norton Wilson will take part. The organ builders we’ve hired to restore the organ will be introduced and the organ chambers displayed.’ Proceeds from the fundraiser will help pay for the renovation of the instrument, sections of which are housed in different parts and floors of the three-tiered mansion. The pipes are located on the first floor, on the opposite side of the living room from the organ console and echo chamber. A level below, the blower is installed in a small room behind the garden apartment. ‘It languished for a couple of years,’ says Rothman. ‘The house was pretty much in ruins. The house sold at the time for $9,000 [in 1943].’ My, times have changed. It will cost nearly $100,000 to restore the organ. The organ could not have a better home than this historical landmark, which Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann called ‘a veritable castle by the sea.’ Villa Aurora is an international meeting place for artists and intellectuals fostering a lively exchange in the fields of literature, art, science and politics. Built in 1927, the Villa was originally a Los Angeles Times demonstration house by architect Mark Daniels (who designed what would become the Hotel Bel-Air). The organ was a feature of the home’s original design, with its manuals and pneumatic percussion effects built in the living room’s east chamber and its pipes into the west chamber. A pair of exiles, German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, purchased the house in 1943. Until the 1950s, the spacious house became one of the preferred meeting places for German and European exiles in Los Angeles and their friends. Filmmakers Fritz Lang and Charlie Chaplin, Mann and his brother, Heinrich, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred D’blin, Franz Werfel, Aldous Huxley, Ludwig Marcuse, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg and Bruno Frank were among the regular guests of the Feuchtwangers. When Feuchtwanger died in 1958, he willed the house to the University of Southern California. Marta continued to live in the house until her death in 1985. Two years later, the home and its contents were left to USC. In 1995, Villa Aurora once again became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, with a focus on its artists-in-residency program under the financial auspices of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in Germany. In the past decade alone, the 501(c)3 nonprofit organization has been the home to more than 120 artists-in-residence, six of them recipients of the Feuchtwanger Fellowship. The cultural facility regularly hosts fucntions aimed to deepen ties between American and European artists and to encourage Jewish-German dialogue. It relies on tax-deductible donations to keep its cultural programs going. It’s late September, and several independent contractors from across Los Angeles are at the Villa to begin the organ restoration process. Greg Rister and Karen Wilson will spend about five months working on the console, while Ken Kukuk and Ed Burnside will concentrate on the pipes chamber, chest percussion and blower. This pipe organ is practically a Palisadian itself. Or at least a close neighbor. ‘It was built right here in Santa Monica,’ says Kukuk. Once based on Wilshire Boulevard, the Artcraft organ company flourished for a couple of decades, when silent movies reigned, before closing in the late 1920s. ‘This may be one of their last organs,’ Rothman notes. What Rister calls a ‘pretty straightforward job’ will take at least half a year to complete. ‘The tuning and repair of the pipe organ will take at least a couple months.’ What the repair team are dealing with consists of a 16-foot pipe organ made up of a console, a 49-note wood bar harp (called a marimba), 61 Vox Humana pipes, 250 medium pipes, 50 large pipes, 247 small pipes, and 25 chime notes. ‘The organ sucks in air up through and into the baffle box,’ Burnside explains. ‘It’ll be a little bit of a challenge to get the wind going.’ Today, Rister will work on individual parts at his Whittier shop. The day before, Rister and Wilson had worked on the organ at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. They recently rebuilt a 1929 Reuter in Santa Monica. ‘We did a church in El Monte, another project up in Torrance,’ Rister continues. One gig took them to the former Hollywood Hills residence of Liberace. ‘We take care of the El Capit’n Theatre in Hollywood,’ says Kukuk, while Burnside, whose career began as a hobby, has worked on the organ that rises out of the stage before movie screenings at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara. In 1964, Kukuk got his big break when he was booked to work at the Wiltern Theatre, the green-hued, art-deco Pallissier building on the corner of Wilshire and Western, which had a 32-foot pipe organ. ‘It’s a fairly lucrative business,’ he says of his esoteric profession. ‘There are not that many people doing it anymore,’ Rister says. ‘You go into this business because you want to.’ ‘We don’t get apprentices,’ Kukuk adds, laughing. As the pipe organ specialists work on a difficult reconstructive process, Rothman remains optimistic that, via the generosity of culture-lovers in the Palisades and beyond, the $97,270 needed to cover repair costs will be raised. ‘The organ is not only part of the Villa’s history, but, in many respects, part of the history of Pacific Palisades,’ Rothman says. ‘With the hope that the community shares this sentiment, we must naturally be hopeful for its restoration in the year to come.’ For information on the December 8 benefit and to make a donation, call 310-454-4231 or e-mail InfoLA@Villa-Aurora.org. Visit www.Villa-Aurora.org.

Handcrafted items will be on sale at the Country Bazaar on Friday, October 23 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The event will be presented by the women of Community United Methodist Church (UMC), 801 Via de la Paz. Early birds are invited to attend today from 7 to 9 p.m. for a $5 admission, which includes a selection of desserts and beverages. The UMC women have been working for months to produce unique gifts and Christmas decorations. The Collectibles Table will feature antiques and jewelry. Other special items and quilts will be on sale at the Silent Auction. A handcrafted, cross-stitched quilt will be the featured item at the Opportunity Drawing. Admission Friday is free. A gourmet luncheon is available by reservation for $15. Contact: 310-454-5529.

Cathy Colman is back with a cache of poems that bundle her thoughts and words from a life that no longer exists. Poets immortalize a lost love, untimely death or forsaken dream. In her new book, ‘Beauty’s Tattoo,’ Colman eulogizes a life, not another’s, but her own, her double. She will be reading and signing copies of the book on Thursday, October 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. The book can be understood as a diary of sorts of Colman’s extreme suffering from 2001 through 2005. The source was fibromyalgia, a condition characterized by long-term, body-wide pain. And while she was battling the disease, she investigated one remedy after another with no relief, except in writing. ‘Writing became a lifeline for me so I didn’t become a victim,’ says Colman, a resident of Pacific Palisades. She chose a letters format”Letter to the Dark Mirror,’ ‘Letter under Siege” in order to have a dialogue with her body and what was happening to it. ‘It was almost as if it were ‘the other,’ and I needed to formalize it this way because I needed to write to that ‘other self’ that was suffering.’ The book reflects a longing for the old life, Colman says. ‘I saw people out on the weekend hiking. I wanted normal things’travel, being in the sun, long hikes. Suddenly I was in this cocoon.’ Despite her expressed guidance to the reader as to the context of the poems, these short lyrics are masterful in their utility of language and clear-eyed imagery. The reader tumbles along faster and faster on Colman’s recognizable outer signposts only to shiver at the metaphysical revelation. ‘A lot comes from my unconscious filtered through the craft,’ she explains. ‘ I often take a list of random words from books or a half line from somewhere else, and I begin writing. Like Michelangelo, who talked about ‘freeing the slaves from marble, I free the poem from the words.’ Colman is an experienced poet, so when she talks about craft she is talking about the tools of poetry, the rules for the dance. Or, as she is also a musician, the musician’s skill. ‘By practicing every glissando, every run, you can give it your own interpretation or better instrument to unfold a philosophy.’ A small, quiet presence, now mostly pain-free, Colman accesses a storehouse of treasure for her poetry, including her journals dating back to the early 1970s. She uses dream imagery and also waking dreams, which, she says, she can access with ‘wild writes.’ ‘I allow myself to completely go free, to free-associate, barring no images, bypassing the internal censor.’ At the same time, her poems may contain historical references, often to music, which carry the internal content: ‘Around the perimeter of the yard, the composer Satie was stalking, stalking /his even paces, the madness of sameness/where music is played in the shape of a pear.’ Her poems are dense and while they flood the reader, there is a kind of sixth degree of comprehension. We may not get the line-by-line meaning, but are moved with feeling at our self-recognition. Colman’s work is brave; she meets love, loss, sex and triumph honestly and explicitly. And all along, the music of the words, the rhythm of free verse draws us along through the whole book as if we were on her journey. She characterizes her life as odd, growing up with the ‘glamour’ of Hollywood. Her father was a TV producer (‘The Love Boat’), but she became ‘an intellectual, as an antidote. I loved high culture, Ezra Pound.’ She started writing at 5, but also loved acting and singing. She thought she would become an actor, but at Berkeley, the acting classes were all filled, so she became a serious writer. She later studied at San Francisco with poet Stan Rice, who changed her life. Colman published her first book ‘Borrowed Dress’ in 2001, which won the Feliz Pollock Prize for Poetry, and has won several other prizes and appeared in many journals, but this doesn’t reflect the breadth of her talent. She has developed an expertise as a script consultant, working with a number of Hollywood writers, including Scott Frank (‘Get Shorty’) and Ed Solomon (‘Men in Black’), and she wouldn’t give up her teaching without a big heartache. ‘ I love my students,’ she says, adding ‘I somehow was good at helping people whenever they are blocked. Poetry inspires the fiction and vice versa.’ And now, to prove the point, Colman is working on a novel and another book of poetry. ‘My novel will have to do with illness, my childhood, fictionalized. The poems will speak about how the world is different for me now. I am writing about the men and women writers who have influenced me, like Oscar Wilde, and using the strategy in each poem that actor Delphine Seyrig used: ‘Didn’t I meet you last year?’ For once, it will not be my personal life.’

Dori Ollestad and Lloyd Ahern eloped to Catalina Island and were married on September 10 at Hamilton Cove. Dori’s sister and brother-in-law were along for the trip but did not know about the wedding plans until the night before. They were in attendance as maid of honor and best man. The wedding ceremony was in the morning and they all were out in their boat in the afternoon swimming and enjoying the sun. Ollestad has been a realtor in the Palisades since 1980 and is a past president of the Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce. Ahern was Palisadian-Post Citizen of the Year, along with Harold Waterhouse, in 1993. They now live along the beach in Malibu.