Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel (12 page)
Read Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel Online
Authors: Maria Semple
Tags: #Fiction / Humorous, #Contemporary Women, #Humorous, #Family Life, #Fiction, #Fiction / Family Life, #Fiction / Contemporary Women
PAUL JELLINEK:
Beeber Bifocal just kind of evolved. It’s not like Bernadette had a big idea going in. It started with knitting the glasses together. And then came the tabletops made out of lenses. Then the table bases made out of machinery parts. It was fucking great. I’d come by with my students and give them extra credit if they’d help.
There was a back room piled ceiling-to-floor with catalogues. Bernadette glued them together until they were solid four-foot-by-four-foot cubes. One night we all got drunk and took a chain saw to them and cut out seats. They became the living room furniture.
DAVID WALKER:
Pretty soon it became obvious that the point was to avoid any runs to the hardware store and use only what was on the premises. It became kind of a game. I don’t know if you could call it architecture, but it sure was fun.
PAUL JELLINEK:
Back then, architecture was all about the technology. Everyone was switching from drafting boards to AutoCAD; all anyone wanted to talk about was prefab. People were building McMansions to within six inches of the lot line. What Bernadette was doing was completely outside the mainstream. In some ways, Beeber Bifocal’s roots lie in hobo art. It’s a very crafty house. The feminists are going to kill me on this, but Bernadette Fox is a very feminine architect. When you walk into Beeber Bifocal, you’re overwhelmed by the care and the patience that was put into it. It’s like walking into a big hug.
At her day job at the Getty, Fox was growing indignant at the waste of shipping ton after ton of travertine from Italy only to have it refused by her superiors for minor inconsistencies.
PAUL JELLINEK:
One day, I mentioned to her that the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs had just bought an empty lot next to the Watts Towers, and they were interviewing architects for a visitors center.
Fox spent a month secretly designing a fountain, museum, and a series of viewing platforms made from the Getty’s rejected travertine.
PAUL JELLINEK:
She made the connection because the Watts Towers were constructed out of other people’s garbage. Bernadette designed these nautilus-shaped viewing platforms, which echoed the fossils in the travertine and the whorls of the Watts Towers.
When Fox presented her plan to the Getty management, they quickly and unequivocally shot her down.
PAUL JELLINEK:
The Getty was interested in one thing: getting the Getty built. They didn’t need some low-level employee telling them what to do with their extra material. Plus, can you imagine the PR? It’s not good enough for the Getty, but it’s good enough for South Central? Who needs that headache?
Richard Meier and Partners were unable to find Fox’s drawings in their Getty Center archives.
PAUL JELLINEK:
I’m sure Bernadette just threw them away. The important thing to come out of it—and she knew it—was that she had forged a distinct point of view, which was, simply, to waste nothing.
Fox and Branch moved into the Beeber Bifocal House in 1991. Fox was restless for another project.
JUDY TOLL:
Bernadette and her husband had poured everything into that glasses factory they were living in, and she didn’t have much money to spend. So I found her a scrubby piece of land on Mulholland in Hollywood, near Runyon Canyon. It had a flat pad and a great view of the city. The piece of land next to it was also for sale. I suggested they buy that, too, but they couldn’t afford it.
Fox committed to building a house using only materials from within a twenty-mile radius. That didn’t mean going to a Home Depot a mile away and buying steel from China. The materials all had to be sourced locally.
DAVID WALKER:
She asks me if I’m up for the challenge. I tell her, Sure.
PAUL JELLINEK:
One of the smartest things Bernadette did was hook up with Dave. Most contractors can’t work without plans, but he could. If the Twenty Mile House demonstrates anything, it’s what a genius she was with permits.
When it comes to Bernadette, everyone teaches Beeber and Twenty Mile. I teach her permits. It’s impossible to look at the plans she submitted to plan-check without cracking up. It’s pages and pages full of official-looking documentation that contain virtually no information. It was different back them. It was before the building boom, before the earthquake. You could just go down to the building department and talk to the top guy.
Ali Fahad was the top guy at the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.
ALI FAHAD:
Of course I remember Bernadette Fox. She was a charmer. She wouldn’t deal with anybody but me. My wife and I had just had twins, and Bernadette came with hand-knit blankets and hats for them both. She’d sit, we’d have tea, she’d explain what she wanted to do with her house, and I’d tell her how to do it.
PAUL JELLINEK:
See! Only a woman could do something like that.
Architecture has always been a male-dominated profession. Until the emergence of Zaha Hadid in 2005, one was hard-pressed to name a famous female architect. Eileen Gray and Julia Morgan are sometimes mentioned. Mainly, female architects stood in the shadows of their famous male partners: Ann Tyng to Louis Kahn, Marion Griffin to Frank Lloyd Wright, Denise Scott Brown to Robert Venturi.
ELLIE SAITO:
That’s what drove me so crazy about Bernadette at Princeton. To be one of two women in the whole architecture department, and you spend your time knitting? It was as bad as crying during review. I felt it was important, as a woman, to go toe-to-toe with the men. Any time I tried to talk to Bernadette about this, she had no interest.
DAVID WALKER:
If we needed something welded, I’d bring a guy in and Bernadette would explain to him what she’d want, then the guy gave
me
the answer. But it never bothered Bernadette. She wanted to get her house built, and if that meant some sub disrespecting, it was fine with her.
PAUL JELLINEK:
That’s why Dave was so important. If Bernadette was just a woman standing on-site trying to get metal welded, she’d have gotten eaten alive. And don’t forget, she was thirty. Architecture is one of the few professions where age and experience are actually considered assets. To be a young woman on her own, building a house essentially without plans, well, that just wasn’t done. I mean, even Ayn Rand’s architect was a guy.
After receiving a building permit for a three-bedroom, four-thousand-square-foot, glass-and-steel box with a detached garage and guesthouse, Fox began construction on the Twenty Mile House. A cement factory in Gardena supplied the sand, which Fox mixed on-site. For steel, a recycling yard in Glendale contacted Fox if beams came in. (Materials from a dump were deemed OK, even if the materials themselves originated from outside the twenty-mile radius.) A house down the street was being torn down; its
dumpster was a great source for materials. Tree trimmers provided wood, which would be used for cabinets, flooring, and furniture.
ELLIE SAITO:
I was in L.A. on my way to Palm Springs to meet with some prefab developers. I stopped by the Twenty Mile House. Bernadette was all laughter, in overalls and a tool belt, speaking broken Spanish to a bunch of workers. It was infectious. I rolled up my Issey Miyake and helped dig a trench.
One day, a convoy of trucks pulled into the adjacent lot. The property had been purchased by Nigel Mills-Murray, the TV magnate from England, best known for his smash game show
You Catch It, You Keep It.
He had hired a British architect to design a fourteen-thousand-square-foot Tudor-style white marble mansion Fox dubbed the White Castle. Initially, the relationship between the two crews was cordial. Fox would go to the White Castle and borrow an electrician for an hour. An inspector was about to revoke the White Castle’s grading permit, and Fox talked him out of it.
DAVID WALKER:
The building of the White Castle was like a movie in fast motion. Hundreds of workers descended on the place and worked around the clock, literally. Three crews a day working eight-hour shifts.
There’s a story that during the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola had a sign on his trailer: “Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick Two.” That’s the way it is with houses. Me and Bernadette, we definitely picked “cheap” and “good.” But, man, we were slow. The White Castle, well, they picked “fast” and “fast.”
The White Castle was ready to move into before Fox and Walker had closed the walls on the Twenty Mile House.
DAVID WALKER:
The
You Catch It, You Keep It
guy starts coming by, doing walk-throughs with the decorator. One day, he decides he doesn’t like the brass hardware. He has every handle, doorknob, hinge, and bathroom fixture switched out.
For us, it was like Christmas came early. The next day, Bernadette is literally standing in the White Castle’s dumpster when the English guy pulls up in his Rolls-Royce.
Nigel Mills-Murray did not respond to several interview requests. His business manager did.
JOHN L. SAYRE:
Who
would
like to drive up and find a neighbor digging through his trash? Nobody, that’s who. My client would have been happy to discuss a fair price for his fixtures. But the woman didn’t ask. She just entered his property and stole from him. Last time I checked, that was illegal.
Overnight, Mills-Murray erected a razor-wire fence and posted a twenty-four-hour security guard at the entrance to the driveway. (The White Castle and the Twenty Mile House shared a driveway. Technically, it was an easement deeded to the White Castle over the Twenty Mile House’s property. This would become an important factor in the year to come.)
Fox became obsessed with getting the discarded hardware. When a truck arrived at the White Castle to remove the dumpster, she jumped in her car and followed it to a traffic light. She gave the driver a hundred bucks to salvage Mills-Murray’s hardware.
DAVID WALKER:
She thought it was too tacky to use in the house. She decided to solder the pieces together with wire, like in the old days, and turn it into her front gate.
Mills-Murray called the police, but no charges were filed. The next day, the gate was gone. Fox was convinced Mills-Murray had stolen it, but she had no proof. With Fox’s job at the Getty winding down, she quit and devoted all her energies to the Twenty Mile House.
PAUL JELLINEK:
I definitely noticed a different energy once Bernadette quit. I’d show up with students, and all she’d talk about was the White Castle and how ugly it was, how much they wasted. It was all true, but it had nothing to do with architecture.
The White Castle was finally completed. Its crowning touch was a million dollars’ worth of California fan palms planted along the shared driveway, each lowered into place by helicopter. Fox became furious that her entry now looked like a Ritz-Carlton. She complained, but Mills-Murray sent over the title report clearly specifying that his easement over her property was for “ingress and egress” and “landscaping decisions and maintenance.”
DAVID WALKER:
Twenty years later, any time I hear the words “easement,” “ingress,” or “egress,” I still get sick to my stomach. Bernadette would not stop ranting about it. I started to wear a Walkman so I could tune her out.
Mills-Murray decided to christen his new home by hosting a lavish Oscar after-party. He hired Prince to play in the backyard. Lack of parking is always an issue along Mulholland Drive, so
Mills-Murray hired a valet. The day before the party, Fox eavesdropped on Mills-Murray’s assistant as she walked the driveway with the head valet, figuring out where to park a hundred cars. Fox notified a dozen towing companies that cars were going to be illegally parked on her driveway.
During the party, while the valets snuck into the backyard to watch Prince perform “Let’s Go Crazy,” Fox waved in the idling fleet of tow trucks. In a flash, twenty cars were towed. When a raging Mills-Murray confronted Fox, she calmly produced the property title, which stated the driveway was for “ingress and egress.” Not parking cars.
PAUL JELLINEK:
Elgie and Bernadette were living at Beeber Bifocal at the time, with the idea they would move into the Twenty Mile House and start a family. But Elgie was growing distraught by what the neighbor feud was doing to Bernadette. There was no way he was going to move into that house. I told him to wait, that things might change.
One April morning in 1992, Fox received a phone call. “Are you Bernadette Fox?” the voice asked. “Are you alone?”
The caller told her she’d been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. It had never before been given to an architect. The $500,000 grant is awarded to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”
PAUL JELLINEK:
A friend of mine in Chicago who was affiliated with the MacArthur Foundation—I don’t even know how, the whole thing’s so mysterious—asked me what I thought was the most exciting thing going on in architecture. I told
him the truth—Bernadette Fox’s house. Who the hell knew what she was exactly—an architect, an outsider artist, a lady who liked working with her hands, a glorified dumpster-diver. I just knew her houses felt good to walk into.
It was ’92, and there was talk of green architecture, but this was before LEED, before the Green Building Council, a decade before
Dwell
. Sure, environmental architecture had been around for decades, but beauty wasn’t a priority.
My friend from Chicago came out with a big group. No doubt they expected some ugly-ass yurt made out of license plates and tires. But when they walked into the Twenty Mile House, they started laughing, that’s how gorgeous it was. A sparkling glass box with clean lines, not an inch of drywall or paint. The floors were concrete; the walls and ceiling, wood; the counters, exposed aggregate with bits of broken glass for translucent color. Even with all those warm materials, it felt lighter inside than outside.
That day, Bernadette was building the garage, pouring concrete into forms and doing tilt-up walls. The MacArthur guys took off their suit jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and helped. That’s when I knew she’d won it.
