Dr. Culture

...Robert F Erburu, then chairman of the Times Mirror Company (which owned the Times), sent Annenberg a fawning letter of apology, as did Murphy...

...A fancy party for the 50th anniversary of the gallery was planned, and Murphy was to be presented with the gallery's highest honor, the gold Andrew W Mellon Medal, named for the gallery's founder/benefactor...

...At UCLA Murphy, with librarian Robert Vosper (who he brought from Kansas), built the stellar collection of the Venetian's works...

...Less known to the general public, but very much at the fore of the attention of insiders, was Murphy's role in creating, and in some cases directAnthony Day, editor of the editorial pages at the Los Angeles Times during 1971-89, died on September 2. ing, the great arts institutions of Los Angeles and America: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ahmanson Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the Los Angeles Public Library...

...Davis is blunt about Murphy's disappointments in the hazardous games he was playing with the biggest of the big boys...

...but his real passion was art, and knowledge itself...

...County Museum of Art: Armand Hammer's uneven collection of art, the magnificent Norton Simon collection of Old Masters and Impressionists, and the dazzling Walter Annenberg collection of Impressionists and post-Impressionists...

...He was, for instance, a most knowledgeable admirer of Aldus Manutius, the early, elegant Venetian printer, so influential on the look of the type we use today...

...He was, from first to last, an institutional man, almost as if born to work within an establishment and webs of relationships to achieve his ends...

...Much of his success depended upon his skill in using his combination of force and charm...

...That's how I get things done," Murphy replied matter-of-factly...

...The "broker" of the title was Franklin D. Murphy, best remembered as the doctor from Kansas who, as chancellor of UCLA, successfully challenged Berkeley's supremacy among the several campuses of the University of California and created a research university eminent in its own right...

...Murphy prided himself on his long experience with men of the world...

...A friend, noting that Murphy was up to his ears in all these institutions as trustee, chairman, president, board member, or just plain adviser and friend, said that he was "a walking conflict of interest...

...It happened three times with potential major acquisitions that, perhaps, might have gone to the L.A...

...The treatment Annen-berg dealt to the National Gallery and to Murphy looks like an act of deliberate cruelty and public humiliation...

...He had a public face and gave many speeches, but his heavy lifting was done in private, behind doors that, to outsiders, remained forbiddingly closed...

...It was inevitable that a personality and will as strong as Murphy's would set him at odds with Clark Kerr, president of the whole UC system...

...Murphy thought his relationship with Annenberg had reached a stage of mutual respect and affection," Davis writes...

...but the damage was done...

...Among other things, it turned out that Annenberg was furious about a Los Angeles Times article by its art critic, William Wilson, that laid out—wholly appropriately—the murky origins of the Annenberg fortune in the nether regions of publishing in Milwaukee and Philadelphia...

...They had the treasure...

...She writes: Friendship with a targeted collector was a touch-and-go relationship at best...

...Murphy seemed an obvious choice—never made—to have succeeded Kerr...

...He conversed animatedly about the art scene and its participants, especially about Armand Hammer, who he despised...

...So it was a sharp blow to Murphy when the elaborate system failed...

...Rumored (and hoped-for) marriages and mergers between Hammer and Simon and others (chiefly UCLA) gradually unraveled...

...by Anthony Day The Culture Broker vividly tells the story of the post-World War II emergence of one of America's great metropolises through the actions of a man who, by force of will and good connections, made himself one of the prime creators of a new kind of great city...

...he wanted them to give it to Los Angeles...

...Nevertheless, Murphy approached each situation expecting cordiality and loyalty, and he was taken aback when he was not at least privy to the intentions of men he thought he knew so well...

...It came as a wrenching realization that the truth was otherwise...

...From his long encouragement of Howard Ahmanson and his foundation, from the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, from the mighty Getty to the National Galley to the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History to the Norton Simon to the Kress Foundation to the Franklin D. Murphy sculpture garden at UCLA to the Skirball Cultural Center (for exploring the relationship between Jewish culture and American ideals)—in ways large and small, modest and grand, Murphy built and left his monument for all the rest of Los Angeles, California, and the nation...

...I should point out that, over the years, Murphy and I came to regard one another as friends, especially after he retired from his Times Mirror duties in 1986...

...Perhaps more important to the intellectual life of Los Angeles than any particular thing Murphy did—except, of course, his vision for UCLA—or tried to do, was his fierce insistence on appreciating, collecting, and presenting to the public the finest works of art money then could buy...

...Just 48 hours before the medal was to be draped over Murphy's neck, Annenberg announced that all his splendid, costly art was, in fact, going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York...

...It was a magnificent achievement, now handsomely and fully told by Margaret Leslie Davis...

...It was undoubtedly going, all along, to the more prestigious Met...