Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1950s
EM: Let's see. Then, I did stories . . . Shulman--I'd gotten him to do stories for Mademoiselle magazine.
JG: Julius Shulman?
EM: Yes. I'd first gotten him to do Schindler work. Schindler wasn't very happy with it, but, anyway, it was done. Then Shulman asked me to do things for the Times, because so many of the architects . . . There were two places the house architects wanted to appear in, Home Magazine and Sunset. So I would do them, you know; I may have done them for another magazine in the East, and the Times would take them second. But I'd do the story then. So I was writing for the Times and then doing my own writing.
JG: It was always a free-lance life though, wasn't it?
EM: Yes, always. Yes.
JG: What did that mean in terms of what you were able to do and couldn't do.
EM: Well, there was no great pressure until Berkeley had cancer. He had it twice, and this was about 1950. And then the second time, it sort of used up--I guess the second time was in 1950--it sort of used up all we had. So I really--it was dependent--the household--it fell on me, to--and I wasn't very good at it.
JG: What, to make money?
EM: Yeah. I was good at work. I had more industry than money sense. And I had great zest for what I was doing.
JG: You've always worked very hard, your entire life.
EM: Yes, I have. I started out doing nothing, and then, you know, I don't know how it happened but I did. Then I had an idea that we could make some money going to Mexico. I mean we could live on what I was . . . I could write from there. Berkeley was very much, you know--after having x-rays and all, needed something else, and so we rented the house to someone at UCLA and went down for nine months to Mexico. Someone got us a house in Cuernavaca, and it was much less. But somehow it didn't work out. Also, while I was there, I did a big story, a full issue of Arts and Architecture on domestic architecture. Oh, I'd done that before! That's right, I'd gone down to Mexico before that, and had done this story . . .
JG: When was that, the first time?
EM: That was 1950. That was the way it was. I went to Mexico in 1950, and Berkeley was over his first cancer.
JG: That was your first trip there?
EM: Yes, yes. We'd gone down to Ensenada a lot, and we'd stayed there often, but that was the first. A friend down there, I was going with a neighbor, someone who'd I worked at Douglas with, and we went down and I knew someone there who got an apartment for us with a bedroom. It was in the center of town, and we had a wonderful time. There was a show at the Belles Artes on Mexican architecture. I just flipped when I saw it; it was so wonderful.
JG: Belles Artes in Mexico City, obviously. The apartment was in Mexico City?
EM: Yes, yes, on Oaxaca Avenue, off . . .
JG: They had an extraordinary plastic sense, it seems, the Mexicans.
EM: Yes, yes. So, let's see, there were stories on--a big story on Barragan.
JG: For the Times, L.A. Times?
EM: Well, no, this was for Arts and Architecture. I did it first for Arts and Architecture, and then the Times wanted me to do it. So I went down again, and did it for them. Then we went back. Then I'd sold a couple of things to New York Times Magazine. That was when they thought I could write. Later, they wanted everything changed. So, I thought it would be good, you know, that we could live. But after nine months it didn't work out. So we came back.
JG: Nine months in Ensenada or nine months in Mexico City?
EM: Nine months in Cuernavaca. It was when we went down to Mexico that I did the big story on University City, all the buildings. That was another issue of Arts and Architecture. But in the meantime, I was doing stories also, big stories, travel stories for the Times Home Magazine. I worked there for a man named Jimmy Toland, who was really wonderful, and would let me do whatever I wanted. But I was organized enough, so it worked.
So then Sunset asked me to scout for them down here, and so I did. But they wanted just the wood, you know, lumberyard houses. They had no interest at all in the case studies. But I got interested in the landscape department, so I did an enormous number of things on landscape people. It was the beginning of my travels, and I went to Mexico. I went to Yucatan and Guatemala and Mexico for Sunset, and then for the Times.
And then one time Toland said he'd like to meet the editor of Sunset who was down here. So then we had lunch with John Entenza and Toland and the Sunset editor. We walked out to the car, Jimmy walked me out to the car, and he said "How'd you like to go to Italy for me?"
Well, I didn't throw my arms around his neck, but in spirit I did. It started my trips to Italy. I first went over on my own, and it took a long time and I really didn't see how I was going to do it until I hit someone in Florence. They were in charge of quality control of all material that came to the United States, and they had photographs of everything. The head of it had been in a prison camp with the English in North Africa and so his English was perfect. I had just studied Italian on the plane over. But I did get on with people so well, I loved it, and it was so wonderful.
So I came back, did this full issue on Italy, and I hadn't asked the help of any of the Italians here, and when they saw it, they immediately came out with all sorts of presents for me. After that, I went for five years; they paid my expenses, the Italians. I would go over for a month every year, and they would route me through various parts of Italy so I got to know it; I got to know all of Italy.
JG: This started in what, '52?
EM: No, that was '56, the first trip to Italy. But I'd had lots of trips to Mexico before that. Actually the work in Italy was three weeks, and so I took another week and travelled. Once I went to Egypt, I went to Greece a couple of times, I went to Germany, I went to England.
Very often I'd go to John Collier's place in Grasse, in St. Francois de Grasse. They had a big house there that was built by Josephine and her Italian lover--they had a stage--her Italian lover was an actor so . . . But it was a great place, great, and I loved John. John had been in Mexico a couple of times when I was there, and I adore him. He is so funny, he is so great. So I'd go there, and stay for . . .
JG: This was after he--you knew him from Southern California.
EM: Yes. So he was in movies, he wrote for movies then, and he'd made quite a bit of money on African Queen. He owned the story rights and had done the first script for it. But he controlled the . . . He made a lot of money on that. So they bought this [house].
. . .
JG: By the way, you speak of the County Museum. Let's digress a little bit to shows you were involved with. You did a number of shows . . .
EM: Yes. The first one was when I knew Jim Elliott and I knew his associate, Bill Osmun. When I was doing the show, I got the contract to write the book on Five California Architects. Another show had been done on this; I wasn't involved in the show, putting the show together, but I did write the catalog for it, Roots of California American Architecture. So I was somewhat known for that. And then my pieces in the Times had always had wide attention; I'd written on the early moderns, you know, round-ups on them, ten or twelve pages stories in the Times.
JG: That was when the magazine existed?
EM: Yes, well, it has existed for . . . It lost favor, but I mean, at one time it was an important thing. I mean, important; the architecture magazines in the East always got it, and saw things that they would not have seen otherwise. So I was known in a way, here; so Jim, I think, asked me if I would do a show for them and we settled on the Gill show.
JG: What year?
EM: I'd have to look it up, but that would be the late fifties, I think. It's in the catalogue. So I was doing that while I was writing the book. Yeah, it would be late fifties, because I wrote the thing for the catalogue, which would be the essay for the book. It was changed, I mean, second draft of it, for the book, but it was also in the catalogue. I worked with Marvin Rand on [it]. We did all the shows, all the houses, buildings of Gill. That's why it happened to be, it was through the help of the money from the County Museum that Gill got so widely photographed and collected. But I'd had to do it rather fast. I had written a couple of things on Gill for Times Home Magazine, on his early work, his importance here, as part of a round-up. So that show had been successful.
Hitchcock had come out to give the lecture at the show, and it was interesting because he didn't know Gill; he'd never heard of him. He was seeing photographs of work of a man he did not know at all, and it was a little embarrassing to him, and amusing to us, how little he knew. But he did know the Viennese, what's his name, the Viennese, Loos--he did know Loos's work.
Oddly enough, Loos and Gill were born the same year, and this idea that Loos had influenced Gill was preposterous. And Gill had done some of his stripped-down buildings before Loos had. Loos had written about it, but . . . There was always a feeling on the East Coast . . . I don't know whether I've said this here, in these tapes, that they, the East, will believe Europe before they will believe anything west of the Mississippi. Even the Yale guy, Scully, had minimized Gill and had even said that he was influenced by Loos. Loos had written about "the ornament as crime" things in a Vienna paper, but they were written while Gill was already working. It would have meant that the papers would have had to be sent to San Diego from Vienna and to be read by Gill. Gill's nephew, who worked with him at the time, said that he never read anything, that the magazines came in and were unopened, and that he had stopped the subscriptions to Gill's magazines. Well, anyway, it just is one more indication that the West was not taken very seriously, and that if it was an idea, a new idea, it must have come out of Europe. And that was carried on.
When they edited my piece on Gill for Five California Architects, they took out several things. One of them was, they took out Schindler's given names, and so he just came out R.M. I had said that he was baptized Rudolph Michael at the Gummendorfert?) Catholic Church. So then, another thing was that they took out of Gill . . . Gill had, when his nephew started studying architecture, asked him to learn German, because he wanted some things translated, and Louis Gill had not studied German, according to his son. But Scully got this, that he'd had his nephew study German so he could read the Loos articles. So it was really going far afield, to give Europe the advantage over California. It's why Maybeck was neglected so long. And why the Greenes, and, well, Schindler, too. I know, Paul Grotz told me that Neutra was published much by the Forum because, he said, he sent in such a complete package: good photography, all the material, the drawings, you know, presentation drawings, and text were all there. Just put it to bed.
JG: The catalogue to the Gill show I presume is in your papers?
EM: Yes, it is, yes.
JG: What other shows after Gill?
EM: The next year was the Felix Candela show for USC. I did the catalogue on that; I'd done heavy research on that anyway for my articles. And then, well, let's see, a much later one was Ten Italian Architects for the County Museum. I'd gone to Italy for two months on that. And then, oh, yes, the O'Gorman show of mosaics. It was when Marvin and I were in Mexico, and we did that. During this time, too, I was also writing about these things for Zodiac and the other Italian magazine, Lotus. By this time I also was doing occasional things for English magazines. I became great friends with the Pontis and had liked them very much. That came about when I was in Italy doing things for the Times. Ponti had worked in so many fields that if I was short of things in anything I would go to the Ponti office. One of his daughters was there in, sort of in communications. They had photographs of everything. And so Ponti was extremely well represented in the stories I did in the Times.
. . .
I was a consultant for the Hundred Years of A.I.A. in 1957.