How Jews helped build L.A.’s Music Center

At the opening night of the Los Angeles Music Center 50 years ago last month, though their names were not listed among the headliners — notably Ludwig von Beethoven and Richard Strauss — members of L.A.’s Jewish community were clearly part of the program. That evening, poised to perform in a sparkling new building with a glass facade and stylized columns built, in part, by Jewish donors, was an orchestra that included many Jewish musicians.

The Music Center’s premiere on Dec. 6, 1964, was a Jewish family affair as well as a pivotal civic moment for Los Angeles. Seated in the packed house was Frances Heifetz Bloch. Not only was her famous cousin, violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz, performing, but also the clarinet section included her husband, principal clarinetist Kalman Bloch, and her 21-year-old daughter, Michele.

Today, Michele Zukovsky, the L.A. Philharmonic’s current principal clarinetist, remembers well that opening night. After the orchestra finished playing, conductor Zubin Mehta turned to the audience and said of the hall, “ ‘We like it,’ ” Zukovsky said. And the audience “loved it,” recalled Zukovsky, who’d joined the orchestra at age 18.

However, “the rest of us weren’t so sure” initially about the acoustics, she said. The orchestra had grown accustomed to its former “old-fashioned” performance space. But, as the musicians practiced and performed in the new venue, eventually “they got used to it,” said Zukovsky, who estimated that at the time of the performance, the orchestra was 25 percent Jewish.

“You learn to play a hall like you learn to play an instrument,” she said.

This grand hall designed by Welton Becket, and now known as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in honor of its greatest champion, who led the charge for its creation, can also be seen as a symbol of the creation of a bridge between previously divided communities.

From the earliest days of the city, Jews had been civic-minded, participating in government and in the building of the city’s infrastructure, but with the opening of a new temple of music on Bunker Hill, members of the Jewish community for the first time had contributed financially alongside the city’s more established centers of power. These included such bastions as the Los Angeles Times — owned by the Chandler family — and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. The collaboration to create a civic center of culture united everyone in a single goal, to make it a venue that could be enjoyed by everyone.

How had the movers been shaken together?

Years before Mehta picked up the baton to lead the L.A. Philharmonic at that inaugural concert (in what was at first called the Memorial Pavilion), Los Angeles Jews, some famous, some not, answered the call from Dorothy Buffum Chandler to lend financial support to the building of the Music Center.

At first glance, Chandler, known as “Buff” to her friends, might not have seemed someone to whom potential Jewish donors might respond. Born into the family that owned the 16-store chain of Buffum’s department stores, and living in stately and old-monied Hancock Park, she was married to Republican Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times from 1945 to 1960. 

But her own experience working with people as a director of Times Mirror for 18 years became a strength. Chandler was in 1955 appointed by the County Board of Supervisors to lead a citizen’s advisory committee to work toward creating a permanent home for the orchestra. Having earlier led a campaign to preserve the Hollywood Bowl, Chandler knew well what it took to appeal to the city’s wealthy elite, who, in fact, were divided from Jewish Angelenos more by industry, religion, country club and neighborhoods than by tax bracket.

“Buff Chandler, more than anyone else, bridged the gap between the two worlds and connected the communities,” David Halberstam wrote in “The Powers That Be.”

The L.A. Philharmonic had been performing for four decades in the downtown’s old Clune’s Auditorium, built in 1906 to house the Temple Baptist Church. The Philharmonic, along with the Civic Light Opera, needed a new home. In three separate elections — 1951, 1953 and 1954 — the voters had failed to reach the two-thirds support required to pass a bond issue to finance the project. As an alternative approach, a relationship developed between the County Board of Supervisors and private-sector donors for the project.

In 1958, Chandler, the newly named president of the Southern California Symphony Association, organized a new fundraising effort that she knew would need to expand beyond its usual list of L.A.’s chosen few — Henry Salvatori, Justin Dart and Howard Ahmanson, among them — to cross the cultural divide and add some key Jewish donors. Among those added to her fundraising effort was studio boss Sam Goldwyn (born Szmul Gelbfisz).

In 1962, banker and philanthropist S. (Sydney) Mark Taper, who along with his wife, Amelia, had helped to transport hundreds of Jewish and Catholic children out of Nazi Germany, gave $1 million to help build the Forum Theatre, which the County Board of Supervisors renamed in his honor.

Lew Wasserman, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, the son of Orthodox Jews, also played a key role, as did industrialist Norton Simon, best known today for his Pasadena museum.

As evidence of the depth of Jewish participation in the project, among the records of the “original” founders, who donated a minimum of $25,000 each to the Music Center building fund, can be found names of many Jewish Angelenos, representing success in a variety of endeavors.

There is Mark C. Bloome, known more for tune-ups than tunes, classical or otherwise, who was the owner of a chain of tire and automotive shops; business leader and architect Charles Luckman, who was featured on the cover of Time magazine as the “Boy Wonder” of American business; and Manfred Meyberg, president of the Germain Seed and Plant Co.

Other Jewish names among the founders were: Davis, John and Louis Factor of Max Factor & Co., who had found national success in cosmetics; and Union Bank, started by Kaspare Cohn.

Also included were: Sydney J. Rosenberg, who had made a fortune in janitorial services; Leonard H. Straus, the longtime head of the Thrifty drugstore chain; and industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, who gave America the princess phone and the Honeywell thermostat.

Around 1964, Lawrence E. Deutsch and Lloyd E. Rigler, business partners who made their fortune with Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer, donated $250,000 to commission a sculpture for the plaza between the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Mark Taper Forum. After a two-year search, Jacques Lipchitz was chosen to create “Peace on Earth,” which was dedicated in 1969.

According to “Golden Dreams,” by historian Kevin Starr, by the end of her campaign, Chandler and her building-fund committee had raised more than $19 million of the $33.5 million needed to complete the complex.

“Not only had Buff Chandler raised money from the usual suspects among the Anglo-American establishment centered in Hancock Park, Palos Verdes … downtown, Pasadena and San Marino,” Starr wrote, “she had also involved the significantly Jewish Westside of the city in the fundraising effort.”

In 1968, the year after the Ahmanson and Mark Taper Forum were dedicated, Chandler organized a group of 400 prominent Los Angeles women, called the Blue Ribbon group, to contribute or raise $1,000 each “as an annual commitment to the Music Center to support its resident companies,” according to a Music Center timeline.

Many of these women were also Jewish. According to Blue Ribbon records, among those original members were: Mickey Ziffren, novelist, philanthropist and political activist, and wife of attorney Paul Ziffren; Edith Wasserman, married to Hollywood studio head and talent agent Lew Wasserman, and known as the “First Lady of Hollywood” as well as a discerning philanthropist; and Joanne Kozberg, who from 1993 to 1998 was California’s Secretary of State and Consumer Services, and from 1999 to 2002 was president and COO of the Music Center and married to insurance executive Roger A. Kozberg.

Also joining in 1968 was Olive Behrendt who, according to Kozberg, was Chandler’s “right-hand person” when it came to fundraising. “Olive ran the ‘Buck Bag’ drive,” said Kozberg, which used bags created by Walt Disney to raise $2.2 million (including an additional $500,000 from Taper in matching funds.)

Chandler, who on Dec. 18, 1964, made the cover of Time magazine for her efforts, used her Hancock Park home to meet the tried-and-true as well as the new players, recalled Sandra Ausman, a former Blue Ribbon president. Zukovsky remembers going there so Chandler could show her the plans for the new Center. “It was exciting,” said Zukovsky, who called the former church and movie theater that had housed the orchestra the “Old Green Cheese Hall.”

“You learned not to touch the walls,” she said. 

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For the record: A photo caption was changed to correct the identification of the man at the far left of the image, it is Los Angeles County Supervisor Ernest Debs, not Howard Ahmanson.