Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1940s
. . .
JG: So you entered the program at Douglas after Pearl Harbor at some point?
EM: Yeah. As soon as the program was set up, I heard about it, and I applied, and I got on.
JG: Was that because you knew--was it patriotic for you or you needed the money or . . .
EM: I wanted to, and it was very clear, it seemed very clear to us, that all of us would have to be part of war work in some way. So I actually chose. I said, "I'm going to be a draftsman." You can see my age--I still say "drafts-man." I'll never be able to change that--and "person" is to long.
JG: Unnatural, it's true. You detailed wings of planes?
EM: Yes.
JG: You wrote a little bit about it in that wonderful introduction to the piece in the Whitney show on design, called High Styles, and I recall your having spoken about Shorty the foreman, and how he went off to solve . . . wings . . .
EM: Oh, that, yes. We had a six week's refresher on mathematics in which we learned engineering drawing, the special kinds of things that you did, and engineering drawing, as opposed to other kinds. Then we went to the plant and we had a month there, where we had a week in four different departments. The week that I shall always remember was in experimental, because here was this wonderful character who was out of the past and who really couldn't face all these kids coming in who knew nothing about it. Before that, the planes were built maybe two at a time, [that] would be a big order. Then, suddenly there were all these enormous orders, and he wasn't used to it. could see the old order dying, and I could see how sad it was, and how he--angry . . .
[END TAPE 3 SIDE 2]
[BEGIN TAPE 4, SIDE 1, JUNE 8]
JG: We were talking about drafting at Douglas, one of the weeks of introduction and Esther's memory of the old order--the eclipse of the old order where they used to do two planes at a time and now the orders were for many more planes . . .
EM: Yeah, it was the experimental department. I liked this most of all because I saw someone really working. It was still a handcraft operation with him. Everything else upstairs was mechanized and it was becoming more and more mechanized, and, by the end of the war, everything would be completely mechanized.
That, by the way, was what gave us the hope that architecture, that building the houses would also become mechanized, but it never did. It should have, and that was what Konrad Wachsmann wanted, and that was what many other people wanted--to have a house, I think, in some cases where you could buy parts of it, as you could in Japan, and put them together. Or at least I was told you could in Japan; I'm not sure you could. Then you could build your house as you wanted, out of these parts. But it didn't go that far, but planes did become mechanized and that was one thing, at least.
I went, many of the trainees went, to Westwood. I went to engineering in Westwood on La Cienega near Wilshire, the big hangars there. There were several thousand boards there, just one after another after another. I worked in the wing section and I did the detail drawings. The engineers were dull people. There was once, I was with maybe four or five of them, and something came up, and not one of them had ever heard the name Walt Whitman. Not one. I think, what they were up to, the intellectual engineer, was the one who read Time magazine. That's the high point.
. . .
JG: But why was there the architecture here? You were not as interested by it in New York; it was not happening there in the same way, was it?
EM: No. It's because, I think, here, no one was watching. And you could just do it your own way. The person who understood this best, then talking to, was Cesar Pelli, who knew that it was a good place where you could just do what you liked. But that's the history of Los Angeles, always, from the Spanish days, that it always went its own way. Even, you know (who was the writer who wrote about the early Spanish days?), he said that people would not--you know, they had to go some place, and they wouldn't--they never walked, they always rode a horse. It's the same thing today, the way they never walk, they always drive a car. So it was always that way.
JG: What about the difference between architecture on the East Coast, and modernism on the East Coast, and the modernism here?
. . .
EM: Who was that?
JG: [note: 1938-1947 Schindler renovation, homeowner/music critic Peter Yates] Oh, it was the hillside house, I think in Silver Lake. It's the one with that wonderful rail, that kind of a paperclip rail, up to the uphill part of the site [inaudible]. My impression of the art of that time, through Arts and Architecture, was that there was a lot of conversation between people in different fields, but apparently that was really not the case.
EM: That is what a following generation always likes to believe. It sounds as if they must have liked each other, and they must have discussed, talked a lot. And I know that they always felt, in Europe, during that transition period, transition magazine, that everyone liked each other. But I have never found that true. In any case, there were--and I know Neutra was the most jealous of people.
JG: Was there more sort of interdisciplinary conversation in New York than here, or was it that there was more conversation in New York?
EM: More conversation, but I think there was as much backbiting everywhere.
JG: My impression of that is through Arts and Architecture, which seems to be quite remarkable in tracking . . . Such a high caliber publication in which there was literary criticism and music criticism and architecture.
EM: Yes, yes.
JG: I know that period primarily through Arts and Architecture, and that remains my impression.
. . .
JG: So, I think we're jumping the gun here [inaudible]. Was there anything more about the time at Douglas? Anything more that interests you?
EM: It was the time, the time it took. You were really--and you know, you had to be so damned organized to be able to get a house in order and everything, to get food. You had to stand in line for your meat and other food, after working a ten-hour or a nine-and-a- half-hour day, so it was exhaustion.
There was a woman, the only person about my age (she was slightly older than I was) who was in this program, who had a very wicked sense of humor, and so that helped enormously, that helped enormously. Then, when I chose to go to engineering, she decided to go too, and so we were in different departments there but we could always have great laughs together. I decided I wanted to get into architecture after I left Douglas. I knew we'd all be out when the war was over, and so she decided to do that too. She got a job with Fred Barienbrock, who did the Santa Monica City Hall, you know. It's a pretty poor job. She was loaned to Edla Muir; they loaned people back and forth, Ed and Fred.
JG: You tried to apply to architecture school after the war, didn't you?
EM: Yes, I did; I tried to get in USC. I knew it might be a terrible problem of money, but I did try. I was--oh, this was something! I was completely, you know, discouraged. A woman, and a woman who was over thirty--that was just the laughs for them.
JG: There was no other architecture school that you were interested in?
EM: No. By this time I had, I was so deep in architecture that...
JG: So that was in '44? '45?
EM: Yes, '45. Now here's something I never talk about. It was when we had a week off. We had a week off each year at Douglas, a vacation, and we went both times to Ensenada. We would rent a house there. I wrote during the week fifty to seventy-five pages of a novel, and it was about an architect, and it shows that I was interested, by 1943, enough in architecture to want to do a book on one.
JG: Is that among your papers?
EM: Yeah. Each year Houghton Mifflin gives awards for--you submit manuscripts and they give you awards or something, not awards, but they give you a contract. Mine was sent in, this fifty pages, because at the end of that week I went back to work, and just mailed it off to Houghton Mifflin. Well! Goddamn if I didn't place--there were two of us first. It's funny, that's my luck in a way; it was the same thing on this novel I'd written in Key West, which I'd cut down, which had been . . .
JG: . . . out of four.
EM: Yeah. Just out of the running, just out of the running. Well, this was second. So, I did get a small advance, and I'm sorry to say--I don't talk about it because lots of it was based on, the character was based on Tim, but it was a Tim who was a young architect, which Tim was not, and which he never stood still long enough to . . . And he certainly would not have been a modern, and this man was a modern.
JG: That was a great distinction at the time, to be modern, not to be modern?
EM: Oh, yes indeed, yes. It was like being . . . Sinning and not sinning. [Laughs] I think I got fifteen hundred dollars which was just. . . And this was after two years at Douglas, and it was after V-E day--or was it V-J day, whichever was first--and so the war was winding down, obviously, so I quit. I got this money, I quit, and I went to my typewriter. But I also put a drafting table by the typewriter, because after I'd just tossed off a novel, I wanted to go back into architecture. I wanted to go into architecture.
. . .
JG: We were talking about drafting at Douglas, one of the weeks of introduction and Esther's memory of the old order--the eclipse of the old order where they used to do two planes at a time and now the orders were for many more planes...
EM: Yeah, it was the experimental department. I liked this most of all because I saw someone really working. It was still a handcraft operation with him. Everything else upstairs was mechanized and it was becoming more and more mechanized, and, by the end of the war, everything would be completely mechanized.
That, by the way, was what gave us the hope that architecture, that building the houses would also become mechanized, but it never did. It should have, and that was what Konrad Wachsmann wanted, and that was what many other people wanted--to have a house, I think, in some cases where you could buy parts of it, as you could in Japan, and put them together. Or at least I was told you could in Japan; I'm not sure you could. Then you could build your house as you wanted, out of these parts. But it didn't go that far, but planes did become mechanized and that was one thing, at least.
. . .
JG: You know how these were the halcyon days. So when did you start writing for Arts and Architecture magazine?
EM: Let's see, I met John in 1932. The first thing I wrote for him was on . . . I think it was the issue, 1951, a whole issue on building, on residential building in Mexico. Now I may have done one or two small stories for him before that. I think I probably did, but they would have been unimportant. This was the one. But I'd been writing during that time, for other magazines, and so I wouldn't have written much for John. John didn't pay.
JG: What was your first article on architecture? You were at the Schindler house, with Schindler, weren't you?
EM: Yeah, I wrote about Schindler in 1945. The first one, though, was a letter to the New York World, on a review, Harry Hansen, a review on Le Corbusier's bookCathedrals Are White. I wrote a letter about his review. It had to do with the silos, and silo architecture, and he published it. So you can imagine my pride, in having a letter in the New York World, in the Harry Hansen column. [Laughs]
JG: This was the newspaper you had first gravitated to when you were in New York?
EM: Yes, oh, it was a great newspaper. [Inaudible]
JG: When did it fail?
EM: Oh, the bastards, the sons and daughters, wouldn't take the losses any more. [Laughs] I think it was in the thirties or forties. It was a Depression death.
. . .
JG: This is Joseph Giovannini, in Santa Monica, with Esther McCoy, Side 2 of Tape 4. This is from the...?
EM: This is from manuscript; it's what now is in the typewriter. It's on Schindler. I want to finish it; there's a celebration for his hundredth birthday in October, and I'm writing about my days with Schindler. It's how I set up a typewriter, drafting board next to my typewriter, and [EM reads]
I did all sorts of cross-sections and then necessary details. The house had an L- plan, like one of Harwell Harris's I knew in Santa Monica Canyon, and many of the details were borrowed from Neutra. The plans could easily have been squeezed into three pages, but with all my cross-sections and details, I stretched them out to six. I did this mainly because I wanted to keep the drawing close to me, hoping that the pencil under my hand would teach me something more than how to set down the condition, when a wall meets a floor or a roof. I was hoping that if I'd listen carefully, I would get a clue to why one building was wonderful and another ordinary. That is, the pencil yielded no secrets. I stuck close to Neutra and Harris.
That's enough, isn't it? And so that's the transition between . . .Then I gave up on the novel because, after rewriting it, then the great success of Ayn Rand's book put me at a disadvantage. I must say, that her research on the period, Chicago period of Sullivan and Wright, was fascinating.
JG: You gave up because you didn't want to continue, or because you'd finished the second draft and the publisher didn't like it?
EM: The publishers didn't like the second draft, and I could have worked out something, but I didn't think I . . . By this time a year had passed, and I was in other writing, and
JG: It's hard to go back.
EM: Yes. And also, there were many things that I was learning so much more about architecture by this time, working for Schindler, that it became really passé. It was not what I believed, and so this was another reason why I didn't want to rework that again.
JG: So you were working with Schindler at that time?
EM: Yes.
JG: What houses were you working on with him?
EM: Well, let's see. I can't find the Gebhard book on Schindler where I've marked the ones I worked on, but let's see. I think the first . . . I don't remember the first house I worked on. I've gone over the names many times but it was a project . . . But it was extremely painful because I didn't know . . .
I was to get a couple of elevations ready for the blueprinter when he got back, to be ready. He was off on his jobs. I couldn't find where it indicated in any way what the windows were to be in the living room, and it was a great pain, my first day there, feeling that it was my fault.
Finally he came in, and I had to admit defeat.
He said, "Oh, that's OK," and he just took the pencil, a blunt pencil, and drew in something fast and said, "Call the blueprinter." And he said, "I don't know what I want to do with that yet."
So he just waited, you know, was waiting. They said, always, at City Hall, that they knew that he was on his jobs, and that he'd take care of them. Nothing would get by him.
JG: How did you get the job there? You knew you wanted to work with him, or did you . . .?
EM: No, I was very much interested in the house, and I knew Pauline. Well. It's easier to read it. Can I read it?
I saw the house first in 1941, when Berk and I were taken to meet Pauline, and then . . . I couldn't understand it. It was curious and disturbing. What Pauline said about it was poetic, but to someone who had lately worried about 032 metal at Douglas and was concerned with how things were put together, the Kings Road house was a closed world. At Pauline's I stared at the clerestories, my eye followed the transfer of loads from member to member, the transition between high roof and low roof. I tried to guess how it was done. I tried to guess why it was done. I even tried to guess how it would be drawn. I gave up questioning Pauline because the kind of questions I asked brought only assurances that structure was not the route to an aesthetic appreciation of Schindler.
Then one day Pauline told me that Schindler's only draftsman had been called into the armed service. She suggested that I apply. I'd seen Schindler only once He was standing by his parked car kicking a tire. His thick dark hair stood out from his head in a wiry wreath (he always cut it himself), and his heavy torso was covered with a silk shirt with V-neck and no cuffs. He designed it himself.
[inaudible] was offensive. He looked dusty and tired. I remember then that one of the reasons that people said he was not serious about architecture was that he did his own contracting. How could anyone serious about architecture spend most of the day on the job sites, one of my architect friends asked.
It took some courage to go to see him. I selected from among a dozen or so engineering drawings the two most precisely drawn and most complicated. Then I cleaned up the drawings of the house that I designed. I dressed in something that made me look serious and dependable. What did I expect? A cool dismissal. My wildest hopes were to be in the office long enough to study a set of drawings of one of his houses.
At eleven o'clock one morning I went along the row of wild eugenias to his door, a heavy redwood swinging door with a small glazed peephole in which there was a sign reading "By appointment only." The door was ajar. I entered.
The drafting room was off a hail to the right. It was a large room lighted by windows and clerestory on the west and thin slits of glass between the concrete panels on the east. The room was divided in the middle by a low row of shelves, with the two drafting boards at the far end. At the near end was Schindler's long desk, and back of it was a piano bench covered with a piece of cowhide. Along the west wall, was a table with nothing on it but a small, portable typewriter, locked into uppercase. [Laughs]
Schindler was sitting at the drafting board with his back to me. When I spoke he turned around, obviously annoyed at being disturbed. I could see that I'd come at a bad time. "I wanted to ask you about a job. Maybe I should come back another time," I said.
He didn't look up from the drawing as he asked me what I had done. I took the two engineering drawings out, and said I had been two years at Douglas. He brushed them aside. "Aircraft draftsmen never know anything about the plane except the part they're working on," he said. Then, indifferently, he unrolled my drawings of the house.
I dreaded to hear what he would say about them. I hoped he would only say, "You need more experience," and I could leave. Instead he anchored them to the very dirty drawing on the board with a long flat camel's hair brush, and looked at them closely. Then he turned the pages, once even referring back to the plan on page one.
"The glass," he said. He was looking at the strip of glass I'd used in all the rooms between door height and ceiling height.
I waited. I was ready with the reason for using the glass, to bring south light into north-facing rooms, to see the trees when the curtains were pulled, and then a reason I would not have had the guts to give, to make the house fly, perhaps a hangover from working so long on the airplane wings. But he wasn't curious about why I used the glass, but how I'd used it. The glass was broken up with the studs.
"You could have used a longer span, you know that." That was the most encouraging thing he could have said, that I should have known something. Once pointed out, I saw it immediately, but the architectural standards book I'd been studying deigned no variations on the 2 x 4 stud system, 16 inches on center.
There were other bits of advice, and with each one, I became more confident. For instance, I'd located the sofa too close to the flow of traffic. I wanted to thank him profusely and go home and rework the drawings. Then I could take them out next week to another architect.
I said in apology, "I tried to get in USC, but they discouraged me."
"The less to unlearn," he said. "Come in tomorrow at eleven, eleven to five or six. I can give you a dollar an hour."
I was stunned. He'd already helped me, and a dollar an hour was not bad. I was getting $1.30 an hour at Douglas when I quit.
My job the first day was to have a set of drawings of a house ready for the blueprinter when he returned from the job sites. We went over the drawings together before he left, and it all seemed clear. Blow up two elevations, which he'd done almost free-hand, in 1/8 scale, to 1/4 scale, use a four-foot module, and with a grid system, it was easy to follow the dimensions.
"Don't etch them," he said, referring obviously to my neat engineering drawings. But after he left I discovered that there was no way to get the dimensions for the view windows in the living room.
Now, is that enough?
JG: It's . . .
EM: This piece, which is called Happy Birthday, R.M.S., for celebration of his hundredth birthday, begins
The Eugenia hedge at the north side of 83335 was neatly clipped to head height with not a sprig out of place, while the one to the south grew wild and tall with tufts shooting out everywhere. Two people of different tastes and of equal strength obviously controlled the landscaping of the house on Kings Road. It was the same inside. On the north, the canvas of the sliding doors had been replaced by glass, the concrete wall panels covered with mahogany plywood or painted a Frank Lloyd Wright sun burnt apricot, and the redwood beams painted white. It was as if the house stood up by the pressure of opposing wills. I went to work on the south side in the spring of 1944 for the architect R.M. Schindler. On the north side lived my friend Pauline Schindler, who, after ten or so years of absence, returned to a divided house. The two sides were connected by one kitchen in the house, which Pauline took over.
That's enough.
[END TAPE 4, SIDE 2] [NOTE: the last half of the tape is blank]
[BEGIN TAPE 5, SIDE 1]
JG: . . . for the Archives of American Art, on Saturday, November 14, 1987, in Santa Monica. Esther?
. . .
EM: In 1940 I married Berkeley Tobey, and in 1941, at the end of '41, we were on a picnic at Malibu with George and Elaine Biddle. When we came up and got to radios, we found out about Pearl Harbor. That was the end of the honeymoon and the beginning of a wholly new life. The end of the Depression. The end of leisure, and writing at leisure. I applied for admission to a training program at Douglas for engineering draftsmen. It was mainly made up of women, of 4-F's, and of--well, that's about the main thing, most of them were under forty. They were all under forty.
JG: Men and women?
EM: Yes. So we reviewed mathematics and worked on engineering drawings for six weeks; then we went for a month through various departments at Douglas, before we were assigned to drafting boards. The place that interested me most was the experimental department, where there was a man who had worked with Douglas on models of early planes, and he was very unhappy about all these young people coming in, who really didn't know the plane, and didn't love planes the way he did. It made him really physically sick, all of this, and everything coming down in triplicate, or having to go up from him in triplicate. What he would do would be to go to the plane and fit a part, come back and draw it up on the board, and then cut it out of sheet metal, and go and fit it on and see if it worked.
JG: What was his name?
EM: I don't know. We called him Shorty. I don't know his name. I was in that department for a week. It was in one of the hangars at Douglas, very, very cold, and grim. Then I went to engineering, which was not at Santa Monica but it was off Wilshire on Sepulveda, and there were maybe a thousand drawing boards or more, just one after another. I worked on the wing section for the most part. That meant drawing lightening holes which were in wing assemblies. The lightening holes were being changed constantly, so you'd just check out the electric eraser, and erase what you'd done, and draw in the changes.
JG: I don't know what a lightening hole is.
EM: In the wing. It's the rib, a wing rib, and the hole is to . . . The thing about planes is that you measure weight as much as possible, to keep them as light as possible. A wing rib is stronger if it has holes in it, and it's also lighter. So that was a lot of what I did. I was there for two years.
JG: Doing the same thing?
EM: Yes. I worked on various parts. It was all on the wing section, what I did.
JG: Had you known how to draft before?
EM: Yes.
JG: You learned how to draft then, or before?
EM: No, before. I'd been interested in it, and I learned it from a friend of mine who was building houses, a Canadian. I liked it very much. It was a nine-hour day, and the engineers I found were very stupid. Their idea of intellectual reading was Time magazine. There was one time when something I mentioned, something came up about Walt Whitman, and not one of the engineers standing around my board had ever heard of him. It's sort of typical.
. . .
JG: If back is Douglas, you were talking about engineers, and you had been there for two years . . .
EM: So then, we had one week off a year, at Douglas, and we'd gone to Ensenada a number of times before the war started, and we went there
JG: You and your husband?
EM: Yes, for vacations. While I was there, the week, I started a novel and got about a hundred pages. And so when I came back, I slowly typed it up and I sent it out to Houghton Mifflin. You know, they had young writers. So I got a . . . Two people were awarded this whatever it was, the award. So then I stopped Douglas at that time, after two years, and wrote the book. In the middle of it, the person I was writing about, or who was the protagonist, died. I was very unhappy about it, really just thrown off. It was about architecture. I did an enormous amount of reading about architecture at the time. When it was turned in, Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead had come out a couple of months before, and it was making a great hit.
JG: What year? Do you recall what year?
EM: It would be late '43, I think. You could find out the time of publication of The Fountainhead. They wanted me to rewrite it and put in more architecture. I tried to. It was very disturbing. Anyway, it was dropped. About this time, I decided to go into . . . While I was writing, I had a drafting board by the typewriter, and I began designing a house. At the time I left Douglas, all the young architects there, and engineers, were designing houses for themselves. Most of them were engineering feats of some sort or other. I see some of them along the beach now, some of them that had very novel kinds of construction. Turn it off. [Machine is turned off, and on again].
JG: Okay, we're on again.
EM: I designed a house.
JG: After Douglas?
EM: After Douglas, I designed a house. I bought a book of architectural standards, and then [laughing] at Douglas one of my bosses was Rodney Walker, who had worked in Schindler's office and was very much interested in low-cost housing and had designed some case studies for Arts and Architecture. So he gave me a set of drawings, and I had another set from someone, I can't remember whose it was. There were a great many architects at Douglas. They would stay there until they were called into the service. One was Bill Becket.
Let's see, let me get back on track. Where was I going?
JG: You were talking about designing your own house.
EM: Yes. So I wrote something about this in the L.A. Architect, published in October 1987. After finishing the house, I did endless sections, you know, just to try them out. I think the odd thing about it was that I had a transom strip between all rooms, and even the bathroom, you know, so light would just pour into the place. I was also writing.
I knew Pauline Schindler; I'd met her through Beryl Lacaba, who was the ex-wife of Gregory Lacaba, and they were both in the radical movement, which I was too. I was fascinated with the Schindler house, where Pauline lived. She had been separated from Schindler for eight or ten years, and then she moved back when Mark was ready for high school. She moved back; they just split the house-legally separated and split the house down the middle, and he took the south side and she took the north side.
JG: She'd already been in there, and he was always in there?
EM: Yes. He was out for a little while he tried an office in the architect's building on Figueroa, but he wasn't happy and so moved back to King's Road. Anyway, I was just so fascinated with the house, with Pauline, seeing her there and not understanding how it was done, having been working on a house, and seeing how different this was, and how the difference between something that was really enormously important and my own, which was very modern. I was fascinated with modern. I'd already known Neutra's work and had seen quite a bit of it, and Harris. I knew Harris and Ain, and several others. I'd never seen a Schindler house until this. It was so different from the stripped-down work of Neutra.
Pauline told me one time . . . I saw her maybe four or five times, often I'd see her because over the years I did reading and other work for Dreiser, who lived a block and a half from Pauline on King's Road. I would just go by her place sometimes, or when I had to go to Dreiser's. Then she told me once that Schindler's draftsman had left, had gone into the service (they were still being called up into the service at that time, it would be '44). So I cleaned up the drawings of the house that I'd done and got some engineering drawings together and took them in to Schindler. He was not interested in the engineering drawings. (This is all in the L.A. Architect piece that I did on Schindler's office, so I don't know whether I should go on too long about this. Do you think so?)
JG: Go ahead. Try to do things that are not covered in the article itself.
EM: Well. I was astonished anyway to have him offer me a job so quickly. He had no one in the office then. He never had more than two draftsman at a time in the office. Often he had students that would come for the summer, and some he would use on construction work. I worked there for two years, and worked on the . . . The first thing was to do some detailing on the church, Bethlehem Baptist Church, and then there were several others, houses, that I worked on. I don't have the book here. I marked them. Is that interesting?
JG: Go ahead.
EM: There were times too when . . .This was still wartime and materials were hard to get; they were frozen for the most part, or very restricted, for houses. Even after the war ended, when I was still working in the office, the shortages were so great that the office would be closed for several days or a week until materials became available.
JG: How did you get them, when they were short?
EM: God, they'd sit on the telephone for hours, you know--not hours, but, trying to find even 2 x 4's . . .
JG: Uh-huh. Did that make a difference in the design? If you could get 2 x 3's, would you use 2 x 3's?
EM: You can't use 2 x 3's; they're not permitted.
JG: Well, you can use them in some non-structural situations.
EM: Well, no. This would be for framing.
JG: But, I mean, did he make substitutions that affected the design?
EM: No, no. And they were working around the clock in the Northwest, you know, to get lumber down, so it was coming but just . . . No one knew when. And then often things would be stolen from the site. You couldn't stockpile because someone would be around with a truck.
JG: Was this just after the war or . . .
EM: Just after the war, mainly. Because even after the war there were restrictions on the type of building you could do--the square footage and what materials you could use.
JG: It was very small, wasn't it?
EM: Yes.
JG: The houses . . .
EM: Yes. And that's why in the case-study houses, they were two bedroom houses. But then, too, another reason for this was that the families during the Depression were much smaller. Two was a fairly large family during the Depression. After the war, when small houses were planned . . . You see, even before the Depression, there were not many small houses built. What you did was just to take an old big one and make do with it. Very little work had been done, experimenting with the small house. I think in England they had, and various other places, but not in the United States. So that's why the case-study house program was important-to get good designs for two-bedroom houses. An innovation was that they all had two baths, which was good.
Now, where am I?
JG: About houses. At the time, did the floor plan reflect any change in, sort of the sociology of . . .
EM: Yes, yes, they did. Take Davidson's first case study. It had no halls, and it had the . . .
[END TAPE 5, SIDE 1]
[BEGIN TAPE 5, SIDE 2]
JG: This is Joseph Giovannini interviewing Esther [McCoy] for the Archives of American Art on Saturday, November 14th, in Santa Monica. We're continuing, Esther. We were talking about the floor plan?
EM: Yes. That was a hall-less floor plan, on the Davidson's case study in Brentwood. I'd almost have to show you the floor plan to show you how it worked, but the . . .
JG: What did it reflect about the family? There weren't servants?
EM: Yes. Also, there was a division, another new thing was, between the two bedrooms. There was space. They weren't banked together. Schindler had done that; he did that in the Pressburger house, which was the first one of his that I worked on. I guess that was about '44, and the master bedroom was separated from the children's wing. He may have started that; I don't know. But Wright had really established the open plan. It had come from others before him, but Wright was the one who gave it authority and gave it architectural significance.
JG: That was true of Wright in a lot of things. He was very derivative; there might have been a Leif Ericson who discovered America first but Columbus was the one who made the significant discovery.
EM: Yes. So, what shall I say now.
JG: We were back in about '46 or '47. You were talking about the two-bedroom houses, two bathrooms.
. . .
EM: The case-study house program was initiated in 1945. Many people have asked since then why was not Schindler invited to do one. There was a great distinction between the postwar architects and the pre-war architects. Most of the prewar architects were not invited, the ones who were important. First of all, it was a program that was planned to be short-lived, but it was so successful that it went on and on. It was not only the case-study house, there were all sorts of houses that were built as model houses, and they were constantly visited. They were very popular, some on Wilshire Boulevard. One was Neutra's plywood house.
JG: In Brentwood?
EM: Yes, it was moved to Brentwood, but it was first a model house and was moved there. It was bought by John Entenza's father's law partner, whose name was . . . I've forgotten her first name, but her last name was Gramer. She bought it and moved it to the Brentwood location, where it now still is. Any place you'd drive, there would be some model house, flags out, "open to the public," and you could see it. They were mainly ranch houses, or colonials, or salt boxes, anything, but this was the only case studies that were modern. Another thing, too, they had all modern furnishings and modern kitchens, and the landscaping was done by good modern landscape architects.
JG: Was this the only place in the country where this sort of modern case-study house was . . .
EM: Yes, yes it was.
JG: Neutra had been asked by Levitt to study Levittown, but I guess that was a little bit later.
EM: That was later, yes.
JG: That Levitt decided against doing the modern . . .
Can you place a little bit the importance of modernism, the presence of modernism in Southern California and its importance for the modern movement?
EM: Well, it was late coming. It was strong, but it was late, and most of the architects . . . First let me finish why Neutra, why Schindler was not asked and others . . . The case-study house program started as a short-lived thing, and some of John Entenza's friends and Charles Eames's friends from . . . Where did he go to school?
JG: Oh, Cranbrook.
EM: Cranbrook were invited in. Those are the younger, Eero Saarinen, and others. But after this group, the only older ones . . . There were older ones, Davidson and Wurster. And it was, not Honnold & Rex, but, well, Rex was the one of that partnership who designed the house. Most of the houses that were case-studies, after these first six or eight, were ones that were in the works. The architect came to John, and told him, you know, that they had a house, and it looked good, and so then they worked it out to see whether it was going to fit. It usually did.
Some of them were not all that good, the case studies. I wanted to take them out, when I did the book on the case studies, but the editor wanted them all in. That's why, if Ain had had a house, and had gone to John, he would have done it, put it in the case-study house program.
But after a while it was the younger ones, and that was a very important thing. It was why the magazine became so important, because all the post-war architects wanted to be published in it. It was a sign of having arrived to have something in Arts and Architecture.
While I was working for Schindler I did . . . Schindler, like so many of the other older architects, was rather contemptuous of John Entenza. They looked upon him as a Johnny-come-lately. And since John was more oriented to Europe, and Schindler by this time had cut himself off from Europe, he was rather cool to John. And many things, you know, I would take of Schindler's. Call John and ask him to publish things of Schindler's as they were photographed, and Schindler was always critical about the way the stories were handled. They were not too happy with John, the older architects, and they felt he was too much toward Europe and not enough toward Wright and the modern, the native. What is it now I wanted to get back to?
. . .
EM: . . . peppered, yes [laughing], on the West Coast. The only magazine . . . All the Eastern magazines still printed eclectic stuff, along with modern. Arts and Architecture was the only one that printed just modern. I was writing to Harwell Harris yesterday, telling him this, because he had said some nasty things about John Entenza to Carter Manny and Manny had told me, and was hurt by them, and I was trying to tell him the difference, you know, between the pre-war architects, post&endash;war architects, and that John really had done something to establish architecture on the West Coast. And I was writing for Arts and Architecture and they weren't all out of Europe . . . There were many things, and I did things on O'Gorman for the magazine which were, you know, you can't call those out of the International Style. (I'm wavering again, where was I going?)
JG: One thing about the O'Gorman's, it was not International Style but it was still Modernist.
EM: Well, there were his early things that were International Style, and then he went, really you know, to the Aztec, and it was the decorated. His library, on the campus of Mexico University, was a box that was papered with mosaics.
JG: But it was still volumetrically modern.
EM: Yes, yes.
When California began sending things, you know, it's message, they got sent back at the Rockies; it never got to the East. [Laughs]
JG: [inaudible] never made it to the city.
EM: They did in San Francisco. San Francisco was always the city that was closely connected with the East, never Los Angeles.
JG: Well, what is it. I know this is a digression, but what is it about California that makes it so discredited, Southern California?
EM: Oh, well, because Los Angeles was a pueblo and San Francisco was a presidio and that meant that ships could not call into Los Angeles. They would go to San Francisco and goods had to be then brought down to Los Angeles. Los Angeles at that time had no port. It needed a great deal done to it, and the thieves could operate in Los Angeles. The center of the city was some distance from the sea, but also it was an agricultural center, Los Angeles, and it was always . . . The reason it's so spread out is because the large land holdings that were given to the . . . The land grants were enormous. That's how the ranch house developed; its form came really from just getting materials to these distant places, and also the heat and the way they lived, and they had enormous number of people to take care of. Often they had their own grist mills and their own . . . They had to be self-supporting. So the ranch houses were very long, broad buildings, and they had porches around because they lived outdoors. I wrote about this in California Magazine about two years ago, and it's called California, Los Angeles, something-Destiny through Geography, I think it is.
JG: Wasn't that in the collection of shows that occurred here?
EM: Yes, that was the basis of it. But this is more about what happened, how it developed.
JG: Uh-huh. Geography As Destiny [inaudible]?
EM: Yeah. So it would be freer, and Los Angeles always had the larger population; it had more thieves, and more speculators, and it was livelier from the beginning. And it's always from these very lively places that new design comes. You find it in Texas, you find it in Oklahoma, and in Arizona. You don't find it in Iowa or Michigan in the 19th century, or the first quarter of the 20th century. I think people who made their money easily, vast speculators, they were plungers. And I've written this about Bruce Goff, in writing about him, and people making money in oil. And there was that plungers approach to money. That's why so many houses of Bruce Goff could get built. I know that Lisa Ponti in Milan asked me, "Who are the people who build these, these Goff houses?" She couldn't understand. It's hard to explain to an Italian what oil does to people.
JG: But he also did them for people who didn't have very much money.
EM: True, yes, but it's the design that's unusual.
JG: Uh-huh. But it wasn't the plungers only who, it wasn't the financial plungers who . . .
EM: Oh, the atmosphere of plunging is in the air.
JG: I see.
EM: Yeah.
JG: . . . and by plunging you mean sort of bet what you've got and...
EM: Here today. Yeah. It's fast. It's like stock market money. You get it. It's like the yuppies who make it, the quick millionaires. Especially with oil coming in, waiting for that oil well to come in. I know the money. I went to a boarding school where there were many, many people with oil fortunes who came, and I'd always thought of myself as well off, but there's a great difference between being well off and oil rich. [Both laugh] I change that. I didn't think of myself as well off, I mean it was just money was never mentioned, but it was, you know, we were comfortable. Well, we were well off, damn it! To hell with it.
JG: Why . . . we can erase this if you don't want, but why do you think you're so reticent to talk about your family?
. . .
JG: Now, getting back to the 1940's, where were we?
EM: Now let's see, I got through Douglas, I got through Schindler, I was writing for Arts and Architecture. I wrote for other magazines. I was publishing stories; I had several stories in . . . I was writing while I was in Schindler's office, I was writing while I was at Douglas, and I seemed to have boundless energy. I don't know how I did it. And then did all the cooking. But I loved to cook.
JG: Mmmmm. She's a very good cook, for your information. [Both laugh]
EM: So, I was a scout for a magazine when Mademoiselle . . . I published some stories in Harper's Bazaar, which was considered a literary place. I mean they had a high percentage of stories in Best Short Stories of the Year. Also Mademoiselle. I hadn't published in Mademoiselle, but because I'd published in Bazaar,Mademoiselle asked me to scout architecture out here for them. They were starting a new magazine for young. So, I did. That's my first, in getting--they had to be young. So it was most of the young architects coming back from the war, and they were all modern. I think that was the first time that I began my concentration on young, the youngs, and the moderns. So I did stories for them all over Los Angeles and the West Coast, went up to the Northwest, did a series of stories for them from the Northwest, and went to around Santa Fe. That lasted about maybe three years. It would take about one week a month, went to that.
JG: This was in the early fifties? Late forties?
EM: No, that's the late forties.
JG: What happened to radical politics and your involvement in radical politics in the meantime.
EM: Well, the war changed a great deal of that. Many of us were not happy about the way things were going in the radical movement here, so it was easy to sort of drop out. I sort of dropped out. But then when the hearings came, in the fifties, there, you know, we were all so horrified that these things were--that they could do this--that it changed. I'm really a grass roots liberal, I suppose, when it comes down to it, and I resented all this.
Let's see. Then, I did stories . . . Shulman--I'd gotten him to do stories for Mademoiselle magazine.
. . .
EM: I did an early film, Architecture West, in 1947. I wrote the text for it.