Fifteen Minutes of Palaver: Thomas Hoving

The passing of Tom Hoving at 78 reminded me of Andy Warhol’s cliché about fifteen minutes of celebrity. Rebecca Sinkler, onetime literary editor of the Inquirer, in 1980 threw a party for Hoving, then the editor of Connoisseur. She introduced me to him as an academic hoping to soon become a more demotic freelancer.

Gil Spencer was printing my Op Eds in the Daily News, Nessa Forman my art reviews in the Bulletin, and Becky (who held beer parlor court Friday afternoons, after putting the Sunday Inky to bed, with aspiring journalists like thriller reviewer Richard Fuller and then rising cartoonist Signe Wilkinson and me) had just published my tout of Garrison Keillor’s first book.

Restless in my Beaver College sinecure—I had just been a visiting professor for a year in San Francisco--where my Annenberg student John Bigby was media chair and I had a weekly NPR arts radio show, Museroom West, so I was contemplating the “folly” of dumping a tenured full professorship for the excitement of the marketplace. (It helped that I had recently inherited more bucks than I knew what to do with.)

So there I was, in a serendipitous fifteen minute palaver with the Metropolitan’s Mega star. We talked architecture, about which subject a passion for Frank Lloyd Wright had recently hooked my muse. I enthused to him about Charles Goodman whose prefab Cape Codder for National Homes ($6000, $400 down, $40 a month) had been our first house as young marrieds in Lansing. (I’d still happily be there had I not won a Ford grant to study media and English teaching in New York!)

Hoving said some brass at Disneyland had been harassing him about a prefab project they were promoting in Orange County. Would I look into it for him? Disney? Pause. My entire Am Lit shtick at Beaver was centered on what I called our losing battle between the two Walts. Disney and Whitman. Bad and Good! As simple as that. Disneyland? The Purgatory of the American Imagination?

But a Connoisseur assignment? I’d conned academics for less. Imagine writing about architecture for Tom. Real money. Not Philly tidbits. Fantasy trumps idealism! I bit my tongue and agreed to fly West. I must say the IQ level and esthetic savvy of the brass at Disney far outdazzled my local academic peers. But still I didn’t see a story there. Nonetheless I dutifully reported as charged to Tom’s fixer, Phil Herrera, a multilingual French/Guatemalan mix who grew up in Paris and was the most metropolitan man it was my singular blessing ever to know. (Sadly he passed much too early in 2008.)
And he had a proposal I was eager to pursue.

A Brazilian named Jose Caldas Zanine (Who??) was getting his first exhibition ever at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Would I go? No less a voice than that centenarian ace Oscar Niemayer had lauded him to his face on his 70th birthday thus. (“Jose, you began as a humble carpenter from Recife when you made me the maquettes for Brasilia. Then you graduated to furniture. And now you’re a great architect.”) Unhappily great architects don’t award Prizkers and this Brasilian autodidact was known only to a few cognoscenti. (He didn’t get any exhibitions in Brazil until a decade after his death a decade later in Paris.)

I called PAN AM that very afternoon. My encounter with Jose was the greatest single day in my life as a journalist. He found me so eager an interviewer that he spent the entire day filling in the details of his strangely meteoric career. At supper time he made me a present of two slabs from” his favorite tree”, whose roots provided mosquitoes pools of water in which to breed, thereby preserving naturally all the more his threatened rain forests. It was a puzzle to explain my strange load of timber to the stewardesses on the flight home. (And visitors to my Louie Kahn home in Philly are always puzzled by its honorific position!) But my $2000 fee made perfect sense to my children who wondered where I had been!

Phil also nurtured my Conn trail on Douglas Cardinal, the Metis architect from Red Deer, Alberta, whose Museum of Canadian Civilization in Hull, opposite Moshe Safdie’s National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, clocked a million visitors in its first decade, making it the most visited building in Canada, he told me proudly at lunch there ten years after we had opened its premiere together. The University of British Columbia had flunked him at the end of his freshman year as being unsuitable for “the profession”. But he perfected his independence at the U of Texas where he worked nights for an architect for tuition money.

And when Prime Minister Pierre “Multi Culti” Trudeau delightedly discovered this unsung Indian architect, he gave him the greatest assignment in the history of Canadian architecture—and warned him against boreocrats. He as well as Zanine remain among the greatest underknown architects of our time. Douglas loved the title I gave my essay on his breakthrough St. Mary’s church in Red Dear: “The Ronchamps of the Prairie.” That earned me a whole day with him there in the new museum, explaining what he was up to: Phil loved my discovering such “nonentities”. And I discovered early on in my new career as a cultural reporter that there were more satisfying things than being a full professor with tenure.

Fifteen minutes of palaver with a Titan!