West of Eden

by Jean Stein

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  WALTER HOPPS: When Jennifer Jones and Norton Simon were married in 1971 they immediately established a new residence at 22400 Pacific Coast Highway, just south of the Malibu Colony, in a contemporary house with the ocean lapping against the sand.

  Credit 4.7

  Norton Simon and Jennifer Jones Simon on the beach near their home in Malibu, California, 1974.

  Norton’s was a whole modern mythology, dependent on will and a kind of irrational act in the face of total absurdity and nothingness. But eventually style and gesture and how things were seen to be done became a concern of his. So the notions associated with the voracious and megamaniacal willfulness of the earlier robber barons—Mellon, Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller—hooked up with Simon so that he was both something new and a reincarnation of something old. He also seemed to be thrashing about trying to tackle what Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker, and Huntington did out west. But unlike those men, he used this philosophical stance as a rationale for his tremendous ambivalence about making a lasting mark in society. He had some kind of terribly deep ambivalence that prevented him from settling down, that certainly characterized the way he talked about objects he presumably liked, if not cherished. It was all for sale.

  Simon had relaxed, if one could call it that, when he took his second wife, Jennifer Jones. Her style began to pervade that of this self-made tycoon, generally characterized as ruthless by outsiders. Simon himself had always characterized his stance in life as that of an “existential businessman.” His very words. What it seemed to mean with Simon was, “Don’t guess what I’m going to do next.” That’s a key to him. He fancied himself the sort who looked at totally contradictory opinions and acted in ways logic didn’t dictate.

  But whatever he meant by “existential businessman,” it made his face anguished and pinched—I don’t think I’d ever seen him smile prior to his marriage to Jennifer Jones. After his marriage, his hair grew longer and he began, at least at home, to wear open shirts or turtleneck sweaters and slacks, kind of tailored leisure clothes. Before Jennifer, he only wore severe ordinary suits.

  Norton Simon began to collect paintings around the mid-fifties, and by the late sixties had spent maybe sixty-five million dollars in cash. He’d exceeded the compulsive collecting of Chester Dale and Andrew Carnegie, rivaled that of Andrew Mellon, superseded perhaps any American collector in terms of the number of works he’d acquired. The collection was nineteenth century at the core but ranged backward into baroque art and even earlier. The house he’d lived in prior to marrying Jennifer Jones was a relatively nondescript modern home in Hancock Park. Fine woods, plain but rich beige textures, massive furniture of a bland modern character. A few good antiques and very great paintings indeed. The house lacked style, if anything. All the focus was on the art objects, whether a golden Egyptian cat with an earring or Simon’s beloved Cézannes, Pissarros, Matisses, or Manets.

  A simple life as far as style: plain. His business life, though, was byzantine and complex, very guarded and international by then. But it was styleless, too: there was no color or elaborate paraphernalia or friends or social occasions. He entered UC Berkeley in the 1920s but dropped out after only a month and a half, a nobody. He began empire building in the 1930s with a little cannery in Fullerton, and by the 1940s he controlled Hunt’s Foods. By the 1970s, many millions later, he had acquired an extraordinary art collection—and Jennifer Jones was a prize possession indeed.

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  TOMOYUKI “YUKI” TAKEI: I met Jennifer Jones when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. I did her makeup and hair, and I traveled everywhere with her. I spent more time with her than anybody else, more than Norton. I had seen her in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, which was very popular in Japan, and so I wondered, Who is Jennifer Jones? It turned out that she liked Japanese things, anything Asian or Indian, like meditation and yoga. She was very Japanese in some ways. Good manners, you know? We talked about culture and Japanese history. She told me once, “I think my earlier incarnation was Asian. I’m an Okie, but my real background is part Indian, part Native American, and part Asian.” She said, “I’m an Okie, but I hated it there. I couldn’t wait to get out.”

  It would take four hours to do her hair and makeup. And it was all for Norton: hair, makeup, beautiful dresses. The point was not to go out and show other people. Everything was for Norton. “Norton deserves for me to be beautiful.” And he was paying. I did her hair every day, an incredible cost. For the cost of the whole year, you could buy a house in the Valley. And I did it for her for more than thirty years, every day, sometimes morning and night. And she didn’t take off her makeup at night. She’d leave it on until I arrived. When she went to bed, she was all made up. Do you know why? This was not for Norton, this was for herself. She said it was “in case I get sick at night and have to go to the hospital. Somebody’s going to take a picture of me, and I don’t want to be without makeup.” She did this every night.

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  WALTER HOPPS: Norton and Jennifer started a tradition of annual holiday parties on Christmas Eve. I was at their first or second party. Jennifer had set her sights on changing Norton’s style, a change which prior to this Christmas party I hadn’t seen. It was a shock. The interior of the house was done in the most lavish and expensive fashion, a consummate act of conspicuous consumption of taste and fantasy one could describe as, let’s say, rich California beatnik. It seemed in keeping with the style that the entrance hall should feature an upright Egyptian sarcophagus. At the time, a certain kind of woven straw mat had become high fashion, and Jennifer used it throughout. Rich fabrics covered the walls. The influence of Jennifer’s decorator, Tony Duquette, was very much in evidence. And flowers. I don’t ever remember seeing fresh flowers in Simon’s previous house, but this place was lush: orchids and tuberous begonias and ferns. This was how Jennifer set out to rival the intensity of the paintings.

  The cast of characters surrounding Norton had changed with his new status. Simon had become acceptable indeed as a multimillionaire in the movie social world. He was no longer the outsider. I remember running into Dr. Franklin Murphy that evening. Murphy wore many hats: ex-chancellor of UCLA, chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Times, board member of many cultural institutions from Kress to the Los Angeles County Museum. Murphy was one to drink a little, and curiously it was he who reminded me—suddenly and in a startling way late in the evening—of the occasion for the festivities. He was lolling and swaying a bit near a makeshift little bar set up at the edge of Simon’s most inner sanctum, his private study. Well, study meant an enormous stack of books ready to be read piled up against one wall, a locked file cabinet, and a bare desk with enough phones to suggest at least a small-time bookie. In that setting, I noticed Franklin Murphy miss a step, sway slightly, and bump a painting, which for the remainder of the evening hung askew. The painting was a delicate picture of the Madonna with the newborn Christ child by Hans Memling, which in a funny way brought the occasion into a kind of groggy focus. I said to Murphy, “Well, it’s his party, isn’t it?” And he said, “Whose party? Norton’s party?” And I said, “No, it’s his party,” pointing at the painting. I don’t think he got it.

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  DAVID GEFFEN: My relationship with Norton really developed when we became neighbors at Carbon Beach in Malibu. He encouraged me to collect art. The first painting I bought was a Monet water lily. I called up Norton, and I said, “Norton, I bought this beautiful water lily, and I’d love for you to come over and take a look.” So he came over, looked at the painting, and said, “David, it’s an absolutely fantastic water lily. It’s just great. I really have to have it for the collection. What do you want for it?” I said, “Norton, I don’t want to sell it to you, I just got it.” He said, “I have to have it.” So I said, “Well, if you have to have it I’ll sell it to you for what I paid for it.” I mean, he was a good friend. So he bought it. Years later I was walking down the street with John Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s manager, and we go
into Wildenstein’s gallery. One of the Wildensteins said to me, “Oh, we have a beautiful picture, I’d love to show it to you. It’s a water lily.” I said, “Oh, I love water lilies.” So I see it and it’s a gorgeous water lily. I said, “I think I’ve seen it before.” He said, “You may have. It was at the Norton Simon Museum.” It was the picture I had sold Norton, and Wildenstein’s was selling it for many multiples of the amount I had sold it for to Norton. I think I paid something like four to six hundred thousand dollars for it and they had it priced in the millions. So I called Norton and said, “Norton, I was at Wildenstein’s today and saw this beautiful painting. My water lily.” He said, “You mean, my water lily.” And he was right, it was his water lily.

  He always made an effort to teach me how to make money. Years later, after he retired, I remember walking down the beach and passing the house they had bought from John Frankenheimer. It had that bay window in the bedroom, and Norton had a desk there, and I saw him with a phone at each ear. I called him later and said, “Norton, I thought you were retired?” He said, “I am retired.” I said, “I saw you in the window and you had a phone in each ear.” He said, “Oh, I was trading currencies.” I said, “That’s hardly retired,” and he said, “Oh no, to me trading currencies is tennis.”

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  MARTIN SUMMERS: I moved to the Lefevre gallery in 1967, and Norton started to ring me in London about things. It was at Lefevre that we found the great models of Degas sculptures. We had the entire collection including the famous fourteen-year-old girl, which we bought for a million dollars. We were going to sell them, and the first person I thought of was Norton. We thought what we had was an unauthorized although genuine cast of the set. What we had not realized was that this was the original set from which all others were cast, making it the most important set of Degas bronzes that exists. But there they were, we got them over to London, and I remember polishing them lovingly one at a time. I’m a Degas fan and to be able to handle every single one of them was magnificent. I called Norton and said, “We’ve got an extraordinary story, and you should buy them.” He said, “I’m interested. Have you got bronze number thirty-three [Grand Arabesque, First Time]?” I said, “Of course we have bronze number thirty-three.” He said he’d call me back.

  The next morning he called at dawn and said, “There’s a plane leaving London today at eight fifteen A.M. Bring that bronze.” I grabbed the bronze, wrapped it up in a blanket, put it in a grip bag, and rushed to the airport. I carried it on the plane. You didn’t need an export license in those days. It was sitting right above me, up in the rack. I arrived in Los Angeles, got in a taxi, and was about twenty minutes late for our rendezvous at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. I remember combing my hair, looking a little bedraggled, and carrying the bronze statue that I had removed from the grip bag. I grasped it firmly and walked into the Polo Lounge to see Norton sitting there with his assistant, Darryl Isley. In the middle of the round table in a booth was his bronze. It was like some high noon, you know? I sat down and clunked my bronze number thirty-three on the table, too. He grabbed mine, and I grabbed his. He said, “Yours is a fake.” It was his first comment. Darryl intervened and said, “Norton, I wouldn’t pursue that line.” I was looking at Norton’s bronze, which was a third-generation cast, all soapy and soft. You could see the incisions in the plastic, which were very crisp in the models set. I said to Norton—I didn’t say his was a fake—but I said, “I do hope whoever sold you this will take it back, because you shouldn’t have it in your collection.” I thought that was the politest way of saying it. Eventually he came to London, saw the whole collection, and bought it. The set together cost two million dollars; today it would be forty million dollars.

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  JUDY SIMON: Norton was very competitive by nature. He was very critical all the time of his two sons, Bob and Don. Don, whom I later married, said it wasn’t bad until they came into adulthood. He saw the boys as competitors, not sons. Which was bizarre, because they were so far from being competitors: one, Bob, was a poet who always carried a volume of Emily Dickinson with him, and Don, his interest was in international relations. Norton wanted Don to drop out of Berkeley his first semester, because he himself had dropped out of Berkeley after the first six weeks. And then when they went to work for Hunt’s Foods, he put them in minor jobs, had them supervised and just discouraged them. This powerful father continually told them that they were worthless and stupid.

  Don and Bob both came into a tremendous amount of money when they turned twenty-one years old. They inherited stock in Norton’s company from their grandfather, Myer Simon. Norton demanded it back. He said, “You didn’t earn this money, you don’t deserve it. I want it back, all of it.” Bob was going to sign over everything, but Don was very strong, and he said, “I’ll give you back half, but I’m not giving you everything.” Don had the strength to gut it out, but Bob really was too sensitive to have a father that powerful.

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  JOAN WILLENS BEERMAN: Bob shot himself in the closet above the bedroom of where he and his wife, Sylvia, slept. Blood began dripping down on the bed and that’s how she found him. She told me herself. She was nine months pregnant. It was so sad. He was about twenty-eight, maybe thirty. I felt terribly guilty that I had missed cues. He got into deep depressive episodes. At one point he had a gun and they took it away from him. He went out and bought another one right away. He felt that he couldn’t be the kind of father to this child that he wanted to be. He felt he was unequipped, that he was so defective that he would damage this child. That’s the legacy of Norton. Both the boys were so sweet. Two guys with a sensibility that wasn’t equipped to take his berating. They were so demeaned by him.

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  JUDY SIMON: On the day we buried Bob, Norton was utterly, utterly distraught, but he didn’t talk about his guilt. At the funeral, and at the luncheon, he was crying. Bob was his favorite child. And then he started confronting Don, fighting with Don right at the lunch. I don’t remember the exact words he said, but he was having nasty exchanges with his only surviving son on the day of the funeral. And Don was outraged because his father had kept it to himself when he found out that Bob had had a gun. Norton had taken the gun away and put Bob in the UCLA mental hospital, but Bob got ahold of another gun. None of us had a clue that he was in this kind of depression. Norton said, “I believe there are brain disorders, and that’s why I have invested in the PET scan.” For him everything was cerebral.

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  SALLY KELLERMAN: I didn’t have a real intimate relationship with Norton, although he was always very kind to me. I mostly saw him when he and Jennifer would entertain. He did speak to me once about his son killing himself. It was at a dinner at the house in Malibu. He told me, “I figured if he was willing to take that step, then I could have the courage to walk away from my marriage.”

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  JOAN WILLENS BEERMAN: When Bob killed himself there was money left in the will to set up a foundation. It was really a tax ploy, and it was a very small amount, but it turned out that the will was incorrectly written, and in order to avoid huge amounts of taxes, the attorneys made a deal to establish a larger foundation. So more money went to the foundation, a sort of forced foundation. Bob’s widow, Sylvia, asked if I would be a trustee of that foundation.

  Norton always felt the money was his. It was a control issue. I was like in my twenties, just a young kid, so he would call me and say, “I want the money this year to go to this place.” And I would say, “Norton, I’ll bring it up at our next trustee meeting.” He would get angrier and angrier. By then he’d divorced his first wife and married Jennifer, who then took up the cause and was very angry with me, too. Finally she called and said, “We have to meet. We’re going to meet at a neutral site, at Hedda Bolgar’s office.” She was this fabulous woman who was Norton’s therapist and my mentor for a time. But as Norton’s analyst, she stepped way over the boundaries. He gave the funds to start an institution in her name, the Wrigh
t Institute Hedda Bolgar Psychotherapy Clinic. He bought the building or something like that. So we met there. Jennifer started right in defending Norton, yelling at me, saying, “How dare you make him crawl to you and beg you for this money.” And you know, it couldn’t have been very much, maybe a hundred thousand dollars a year, or something like that. So it wasn’t about the money, it was about control, power. I just sort of sat there, and she was saying, “You shouldn’t have anything to do with this, you’re only on it because of Sylvia, and Norton should be on the foundation.” He’s sitting there rather quietly, actually, while she’s yelling at me. Finally I said, “It’s not his money anymore.” And he then said, “I knew it, I knew that’s what you thought.” So he went storming out, and she went out after him. That was the end of our communication. Jennifer was really a bitch, and I didn’t like her. Her agenda was to prove how loyal she was and how much she could take on for him. They were among the few people I never got along with. Sylvia moved away soon after. She took the money and left.

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  MARIN HOPPER: The first time I visited Jennifer after her marriage to Norton, I was ten or eleven years old. On our way to Malibu my mother said, “You know, he makes Hunt’s ketchup,” and, “He’s made a fortune from ketchup and tomatoes.” And I was like, “Wow, really? Jennifer who had been married to David Selznick is now married to this tomato person?” I just couldn’t put it together at all. I said, “Why would she want to do that?” And my mother said, “Well, you know he’s very well-off, and he’s got an incredible art collection. Marin, you might want to comment on his art, maybe you can ask him questions about it, because I know you like art.”

  A few years later, I remember my uncle Bill Hayward came to Norton’s house to visit once when I was staying with Norton and Jennifer for the summer. One night, Bill had a long conversation with Norton about tomatoes and tomato farming. Only Bill could have a conversation about tomatoes. Everyone else said, “Oh, Norton Simon, the great art collector!” The tomatoes were not something anyone else dared bring up with Norton. I remember thinking, Oh, here we are, finally! We’re having the tomato conversation. There was a big scandal at the time. They were gassing the tomatoes to turn them red in the supermarkets. Norton was very upset, because it affected the taste. And Bill was very up to date on his tomato information, the canning process, Norton’s canneries, how he made ketchup, all of that. Bill obviously had done all this studying about tomatoes. It would have been just like him to one day decide that he needed to know all about tomatoes. Or he had done homework in order to have dinner with Norton. Really impressive!