From The Archive: Frank Gehry

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1:34Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios. When I phoned Frank Gehry to ask him to do this podcast, he immediately said yes. For years, every time a new Frank Gehry building opened, Richard, my husband, and I would make a pilgrimage to visit. The Disney Center in Los Angeles, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and more. But one summer in 2008, a spectacular Gary building came up to us in Hyde Park, just 10 minutes from our house. It was a serpentine pavilion, a temporary structure designed with his son Sammy. For those few months, we met friends there almost daily, watching the sun set, listening to people play music, eating and drinking.

2:30This brave and beautiful structure made Hart Park a better park and London a better city. Today, I've made a pilgrimage on my own from London to Los Angeles, not to see a new Frank Gehry building, but to see my much-loved close friend, Frank.

2:54Six slices of prosciutto or pancetta. I really like that. One pheasant plucked and cleaned. Americans don't have... Yeah, no, we don't have game. They don't have pheasants. Canada, I bet, does. Canada, but it's a long time ago I was in Canada. Half a cup of olive oil, I like that. Three garlic cloves peeled. Yes, I'm still in. Three fresh rosemary sprigs. Great. Five fresh sage leaves. Great. Half a bottle of Josephine Doré. Qu 'est-ce que c 'est? Qu 'est-ce que c 'est? It's wine. It's a fortified sweet wine, rather like Marsala. So you could use Marsala as well, but I love the name Josephine Doré for wine.

3:41Okay, I like the name too. 175 millimeter chicken stock, 125 milliliters of heavy cream. Place the prosciutto or pancetta slices over the pheasant and tie on with a string. Heat the olive oil in a saucepan and brown the pheasant on all sides. Add the garlic and herbs. Cook over medium heat for about 40 minutes, adding the wine and stock in stages. You do not want to boil the bird, but braise it in the liquid. Remove the bird and keep warm. Add the cream. Let it simmer and then season. Pour the juices over the pheasant and serve. Yum, yum. It's good, isn't it? I'm shocked you didn't bring me some.

4:33I know. It's not the right season. There aren't pheasant anymore. I would go with this interview. Can you imagine me getting into customs in L.A. I mean, it would make the interview. We could do that. We can do a replay. Okay, we'll do it when you come to London. We'll make it and then eat it. Did you ever do the cooking? I cook matzo braai. Oh, do you? What is that? On Sunday mornings. And I have matzo braai bake-offs with people. Matzo braai is unleavened bread that the Jews crossed the desert with Moses a long time ago. and it's used for Passover. It's used mostly for Passover. It's unleavened bread.

5:18Unleavened bread for Passover. I break it up underwater and get it sort of moist. I salt it and stuff. And I take a bunch of eggs and I beat them up and put them all over the matzo brai. and it absorbs the egg stuff, and then I fry them. That's called matzo braai. Okay. So I grew up with that. Yeah, why did you grow up with? Tell me, first start from the beginning. Where were you born? Toronto. And where were your parents born? My mother, Poland. My father, New York. And his father and mother? His father, Russia. Russia, Poland, yeah. Pinsk, I think. My mother, Lodz, L-O-D-Z. Yeah, Lodz. And what was their story?

6:14They came in 1913, I think. There was a pogrom in Poland. I found out later that the Jews were being rounded up and beaten up. And my grandfather, who delivered coal, he had a wagon. I went to Lodz and saw where the rail tracks were and where he was. When did you get? I was invited to do a film festival called the Kamaraj Film Festival in Poland. And I went with David Lynch. Oh, David Lynch. David Lynch and I went to Poland. I love the people and I went to the city hall there and they asked David and I to sign our names on the wall. And I wrote, my grandfather left in 1913. If he hadn't left, I wouldn't be here.

7:12I was immediately called by the mayor's office and they became very solicitous. They found all my grandparents' families. They all of a sudden became like, to show me they really loved the Jews and blah, blah, blah, which was a bunch of bullshit, I guess. So I did get a pretty deep, and I found out my grandmother actually ran a foundry. There was folklore about it when I was growing up, but it was true. The grandmother did. She ran a foundry in Poland. They came across on a Dutch ship that got stalled mid-ocean which was the reason my mother would never cross a bridge in a car. What? She had a phobia for, so she would get out of the car and walk across the bridge and meet us on the other side because of this experience.

8:19I guess she was a nine-year-old or six-year-old, I don't remember. But obviously they got here. They got to where? Where did they land? To Canada. Right. And they landed in Toronto. My grandfather got a horse and buggy. He was delivering bread, I think, and stuff. They lived in a little house, tiny house, that just got torn down. Did it feel like they were a very Jewish community within Toronto? Yeah, it was a Jewish community. My grandfather went on to have a hardware store, which I worked in as a kid, with him. And he's the one that got me to read Talmud. and he wasn't religious. It was interesting.

9:02He was the head of his little congregation because he was a business guy and so he managed the money for them. But he read Talmud to me. That was interesting. You know, Talmud starts with the word why. Yeah. Curiosity. And curiosity is the feeder for all of our work, right? All creativity. Somebody always asks me what I look for and a new chef or anyone I take on at the River Cafe, and I always say curiosity. Yeah, right. So that's where it came from originally. And so you went to school every day and, you know, you were part of the... So we were in Toronto. I went to Bloor Collegiate until 47, and then we...

9:50But in between, my family moved to Timmins, Ontario, 500 miles north of Toronto. and I lived there from 8 years old to 13 years old. So you've sort of set up a picture of what, where you were. If you were to kind of close your eyes and remember the smells of your mother's kitchen or the food in her kitchen, can you visualize it? Was it a big room? Was it a small kitchen? Yeah, it was a small kitchen. It wasn't, she wasn't a great cook. That's okay. Yeah, my grandmother made, on the cook stove, made all the fish. Yeah. And I used to, that's why everybody says I do fish sculptures, because I used to go pick up the live fish and put it in the bathtub, and then at night, I would, as a kid, I would play with the fish in the bathtub, and then the next day it was gone.

10:50They'd kill it. Did you ever watch them kill the fish? No, I didn't know what happened. And I was, I finally figured it out. Do you think there is? Because that is interesting about why the fish. Because when did the image of the fish begin? Do you know? It's always there. That's a whole other story. Do you want me to get into it? About the fish. Yes. You know, I started practice in 64, my own. I'd worked on shopping centers with Gruen and stuff like that. I'd got some houses to do. I did some small buildings, and I got to know Peter Eisenman and your husband, and Norman Foster, and Michael Graves, and Charlie Moore.

11:42And I wasn't a big force in architecture, but they sort of paid attention. I was doing enough stuff, they paid attention. From the very beginning, I hung out with the artists because I always thought of architecture as an art. And I thought they were coming around to my buildings and looking at my stuff and inviting me for dinner. They being the artists. The artists in L.A. So would that be Ed Ruscha? Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Billy Al-Bankston, John Altoon, Peter Alexander, a lot of people you know. and became close friends, and I would go to their shows, and they would come to my... At a point, Arthur Drexler, do you remember who that is?

12:33He was the architecture guy at MoMA. He was at MoMA, yeah. Did a show called Beaux-Arts. And it was 60, right? 60, I think. Everybody went to that show. I went to it. It was a knockout. The Beaux-Arts buildings, the models they showed, were so seductive. It was incredible. Everybody, it was after that show that Philip put the top on AT &T. Right as a director did that show. And Graves came out, and Stern came out, and they all, okay, so postmodernism became the siren song. And I remember I was at a, and I couldn't buy it. I wasn't buying it, but I thought there was more to life than copying the past.

13:29So I was at a conference with a lot of those guys, and I can't remember where. And when my turn came to talk, which I never prepared talks. I would get up and just say what was on my mind. I looked at them and said, what the hell? Is there only one way to go backwards? Isn't there something new? Isn't there any hope for the future? I forget what it is. And I said, damn it, if you've got to go back, I mean, you can go back 300 million years before man to fish. I said, fish are very architectural, and their movement is beautiful and they suggest movement and it goes with cars and trains and planes and stuff.

14:18So just copy that. I had no idea why I said that. After that, I started to draw fish on all my little drawings. I've got stuff all around with fishy. They're on those drawings too. So I started playing with it. I was doing that project with Klaus Oldenburg in Venezia. The sponsors were a fashion house in Florence asked me to do a fish sculpture for their show. And so I went to Cina Citta and did a drawing, and they made it. I never saw it. In Torino, they were just getting ready to open the Castello de Rivoli as a museum. And they had their first show, and they invited me to be in the first show.

15:15And so they gave me two galleries. And one gallery, I put all my models, and they said they had something for the other gallery. They didn't tell me what. I walk in. The other gallery was this wooden fish made for the fashion show. It's the biggest piece of kitsch I've ever seen. It was so embarrassing. I stood beside it. I was just freaked out that they were making this part of my show. And standing beside me was a guy from the Stedlick Museum who had spoken ill of my work many times before. He's standing beside me, and he said, how'd you do that? And I said, what do you mean? He said, how'd you do that?

16:00I want to talk to you. then I realized what he was talking about the thing looked like it was moving this piece of egregious titch had the movement that a fish has and how they had made it in that way they didn't know it was just an accident this guy said that's brilliant how did you do that I said it's pure I told him I was interested in the fish because of movement Do you think that relates to the carp in the bathtub? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe that a psychiatrist would say that image of the carp in the bathtub. I ain't going to claim anything. I think that the next thing I did was a show at the Walker, and I cut the tail off the fish, the head off the fish, and I made an abstract and it still moved.

16:59It still had the sense of movement. And that's when I got hooked on the shaping and using that to express in architecture. It's kind of iconic, yeah, the image of a holy. So I think that experience made Bilbao.

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18:13That's why over 200 ,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today. Visit washablesofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washablesofas.com Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply I love the food in Bilbao Yeah, let's talk about that because San Sebastian, which is right next to Bilbao is a mecca for food People go there, the chefs are really interesting, so when you say you love the food of Bilbao, tell me about it It's the cod, fish what do they call it? Yeah, the bacalao Bacalao. Bacalao, yes. You know, don't you? You're a cook.

18:55Anyway, Bacalao, I love Bacalao, and I love the wine. Yeah. You would go for these site meetings, and did you spend a lot of time there? Yeah. Bilbao reawakened my food, whatever foodie I was, happened there, because that's what we did. We went out to restaurants with them. The wine was special. Because the life that you're describing of working all day, whether you're Cassavetes, your friend, or actors or writers or artists in their studios, there was a real momentum to go out to eat at the end of the day because the work was solitary. And so was that true here as well? Did you go out to restaurants all the time in Los Angeles?

19:40Yeah, with Benny Gazzaro, we used to go to Italian restaurants. So we had a lot of pasta and a lot of red wine. There was one that somebody told me there was one in like a train carriage. The Pacific Dining Car. Is it still there? Downtown, I think it's still there. Is it? It was in my neighborhood. So we used to go there because it was around the corner from where we lived. And you didn't need a reservation. You'd just walk in. Yeah. And it was never filled. and I mean I used to see Spielberg, he used to be there and a lot of Hollywood people but they would come at 6 in the morning for early breakfast when nobody was there or real late at night.

20:28The thing about a restaurant in a city is that as we found out when restaurants were closed in London is that they do provide a social life to the city that you can go there and see people that you didn't know were going to be there There's a spontaneity about meeting a friend or sitting there for hours. Yeah, Pacific Dining Car was more private. People didn't go there to meet other people. It was very... The booths were spread apart, and it was never filled. Did you, as a kid, did you ever go out to a restaurant when you were a child? Not very much. They couldn't afford to go out, yeah. I do remember going to restaurants with my father in Toronto that had signs, no Jews allowed.

21:12No. I do remember that. Really? Yeah. Really? Wow. And he always knew the owner because he was a gregarious guy, so we would go in anyway. Wow. So he would actually be friends with an owner who actually had a sign on his door saying no Jews. He wasn't friendly with him, but he had some kind of business relationship with him. I don't know. Was your father alive to understand your success? He died before. My success? No. No. My mother did. Did she bask in the glow of your success? She tried. But when she died, I found a box with every article. Yeah. I didn't know she was doing that. And it was from way back.

22:05but she always used to compare me to other people's kids like Hilda's son does why can't you be more like that so I had a bad time I think you had a bad time and they had a bad time imagine leaving your country and having a ship stalled in the middle of the ocean and arriving in a city that you knew no one And, I mean, when you left your home, where did you go to architecture school? USC. So you came to California. So my father lost everything, had a heart attack, had to leave Toronto. He was penniless. His brother brought him to California. My mother came. My sister came. We lived in two rooms the size of this in an old building downtown.

23:08Sisters and brothers? Do you have sisters and brothers? Sister, Doreen. I got a job as a truck driver. My father got a job as a truck driver. I delivered breakfast nooks and furniture. He was a soda pop delivery. My mother got a job in the Broadway Hollywood in the candy department. and she stayed there all the way to the end for her. She worked in the Broadway. She ended up in the decorating department and she was selling draperies to Hollywood people. So would she cook? Would she come home and cook for you? Do you remember sitting down to a meal in your house? My sister would probably remember, but I can't.

23:53I don't remember that. You know, family meals didn't kind of cook. It's exciting, no. No, everybody talks about, you know, how sad it is now that we don't all gather around a table every night. But for some people, quite a few people, it was quite hard and scary and stressful to have to sit around a table with your family. That's what it was for you, was it? Yeah. Because? He just had a temper and... You never knew. He couldn't control it and took it out on me because he saw me as not understanding business. I was the kind of artsy type. So he didn't understand that. And my mother also supported that, that I wasn't really interested in...

24:46I mean, I was interested in going to the symphony and going to art galleries, but not in things that would make a living. And so mealtimes were a kind of tyranny, were they? It was difficult, yeah. And then when you went to architecture school and college, you kind of fended for yourself? Yeah, then I got married. Yeah, became domestic life? That was domestic life, kind of, yeah. Yeah, but this was a first marriage before birth. When you designed the canteen, the Cafeteria Versailles, Newhouse, did that make you think more about food? Was that about space? Was that where people could stop working in the magazines and go and have a meal?

25:28I did think about food because we did the cafeteria part, and we had to set up where you go through the line and get used. That's a radical canteen. I mean, there's no other space like that to have as a place to eat when you're working all day. It was the hottest ticket in New York was to be invited to lunch. Everybody was trying to figure out how they could get. Wow, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, huge. Everybody wanted to go there. I remember going with Victoria took me, and people, friends of mine, call up friends of theirs. They remodeled it. They've totally done it over. What was Sai like as a client?

26:06Was he the client? He was the client. Did he know what he wanted? Really did. Yeah, yeah. I took him to, the best thing I did with Sai as I took him to Japan for a week with Greg Walsh, who was my partner, who had spent a lot of his life in Japan. So Greg knew Japan, really fantastic. And Victoria and Sai and Berta and I and Greg spent a week together. And so I ended up in the same little cafe with a typical Japanese dish, pork noodles or something. And that's what he ordered every day. And he wanted to go back to the same restaurant every day. No, so I, months before he died, I was with him in Paris for the opening of the Louis Vuitton building.

27:02He called me over. He was sitting there kind of not totally with it. And he said, Frank, the trip you took me on to Japan, I think I'm going to cry. He said, was one of the best ever. It was so sweet, what he's in.

27:28Do you like sugar? Do you like sweet food? Oh, boy. Oh, boy. What's your go-to sweet? My friend Stephanie Barron makes the greatest lemon drops, and I invite her to go sailing specifically because she brings the lemon drop. So sailing, yeah. So the boat. Sailing, now you're talking. The boat, yeah. And when you're on the boat, do you eat? We order sandwiches or something. Yeah. And drink wine. Are you interested in the wine? Yeah, I got a lot of it, but I don't. One of my clients is the Southern Wine and Spirits owner from Vegas. Okay. And I did his little building in Vegas. And so he sends us all the wine and stuff.

28:19I mean, I get to like some of it. I pick stuff that I like, yeah. And Berta likes some of it. But we're not winos. Tequila. I like tequila. We've been drinking tequila a little bit. And so we do tequila for dinner. And what other sweets apart from the lemon drops? Do you like chocolate, Frank? Oh, yeah. Yeah, me too. Is there something that when you're feeling kind of low or kind of worried that you might reach for in terms of food? Is there something that you would say there's a kind of sense of comfort in some food? I guess just plain pasta. Pasta, yeah. Do you know, I ask this question to everybody.

29:01And they always end up with pasta. Everybody loves a pasta. Yeah, I think it is. Well, you don't have to eat a lot of it. And it's kind of filling. And you can drink some wine with it. Yeah. And then there's so many varieties of pasta that that gets exciting, you know. And when you go to a restaurant, an Italian restaurant, the varieties are incredible. So I like to try stuff. Well, let's go. Next time I'm here, are you going to restaurants? Are you avoiding them? A little bit. Not much. I'm going to come to the River Cafe more. Frank Gehry, you are invited to the River Cafe. Okay. Invited. That means you don't have to pay anything.

29:44And by the way, Jews are allowed. Jews. Oh, my God. That's terrible. Well, I will be coming because of... I do want you to eat. And also, you know, food is a pleasure. Yeah, it is. It is. It's so good, and it's so... Yeah, a great thing to give yourself, and then just eat it and have delicious things. Okay, so in the morning for breakfast, I take toast, and I fry an egg, and I put it on the toast. That's good. And that's what I have for... But if the egg is good and the toast is good and the butter is good and it's hot, then that's a delicious meal. But you need to put a lot of salt and pepper on it and you need to eat it with pleasure.

30:27No, no, I do. Food is, you know, it's important. And artists and architects and designers, everyone, it's part of the aesthetic. I do make salami and eggs as well as... Oh, now it's coming out. Okay, now it's coming out. It's not just the matzo. Salami, yeah. And the matzo, yeah. I do both. That's my specialty. All right, I'm coming. All right, thank you, Frank.