Treats! Magazine Issue Two | Page 46

from exotic animal skins, has replaced the understated class on display in the photo with the dog. The hunger in the photo with the nubiles is gone, too. Now, he is ripened by sun and age and by being able to have what he wants. The photos are no longer documents of becoming, but evidence of having become.
PLAYING GOD I meet the man in the photos, James Goldstein, on a brilliant, sun-kissed spring morning at his home on a hillside in Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills. I would come up again weeks later and the sky was equally crystalline, the air breezy, the view pristine. One wonders if the weather is always perfect up here? goldstein greets me in a cap, running gear and running shoes, all featuring fluorescent, lime-green highlights. He is small and wiry with a deep tan and long, wispy white hair spilling down from his python-skin cowboy hat; he moves with the air of an alligator in the sun and his words are so carefully chosen that you wonder if they are being meticulously carved, like stone and concrete, in his mind first. His voice is a low, guttural baritone that never loses its monotone rhythm. The house where we meet, his house, is one of modernist John
That Goldstein and Lautner would find each other could seem fated if you believed in that kind of stuff. Both grew up idiosyncratic independents in the conservative Midwest and both fell under the spell of Frank Lloyd Wright. Goldstein, the son of a Racine, Wisconsin department store owner, discovered his passions at an early age. A friend who lived a block away lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright. His father’ s store was near the Johnson Wax plant, also designed by Wright. Thus began his appreciation of finer architecture, the modernist Wright buildings standing out from the typically drab constructions in Milwaukee and Chicago.
“ Growing up, I was definitely focused on modern design,” says Goldstein.“ I was always looking at new buildings.” We’ re sitting on the pool’ s concrete deck, the sun is strong, the sky clear and the deck angles out above the horizon towards Century City, where Goldstein made some of his considerable, though somewhat mysterious, fortune.“ Real estate investments” is all he’ ll say on the subject. those early impressions lasted as Goldstein made his way out West as a young adult.“ As I moved out here and started traveling to Europe and being exposed to more and
Goldstein bought the house in 1972 for $ 182,000.“ It was a mess,” he says,“ but I could see the brilliance of the design.”
Lautner’ s remarkable mid-century Los Angeles residences. It, along with The Chemosphere in Hollywood, Silvertop / Reiner Residence in Silver Lake, The Elrod Residence in Palm Springs, the Garcia House on Mulholland, have become symbolic of a certain sort of Los Angeles dream; be it design or lifestyle or both, which is, of course, as Lautner intended. And the Silver Screen has come a calling to shoot in these modernistic, almost cave-like structures— namely as dwellings of villains. goldstein’ s house, known as The Sheats / Golstein residence, has been featured in The Big Lebowski and Charlie’ s Angels: Full Throttle, among many others. Angelina Jolie got semi naked here for Timothy Hutton in Playing God. It has been speculated that Lautner’ s stunningly bold creations attract Hollywood villains because they form perfect repositories for projecting limbic system overreach— flying too close to the sun, as it were. Or, to put it another way, since Hollywood traffics in mostly a puritanical moralism, despite its reputation, anything this good has to be bad. Goldstein, though, is no villain, especially when it comes to stewardship of Lautner’ s legacy. He resurrected this remarkable house and, to some degree, Lautner himself. Thanks to Goldstein’ s loving attention, this house is now part of the permanent record of aspirational LA architecture. more varieties of architecture, I developed an appreciation for old designs that I never had as a boy, but at the same time I wanted to have something thrusting into the future, rather than something from the past.” i ask Goldstein if there was something in the optimism of Southern California’ s embrace of mid-century American modernism that made him want to break from the past, and, especially the Gothic Midwest where a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy who liked to dress in pink suits might seek reinvention in the wide open West. Goldstein reflexively dismisses the psychobabble, but hints around its margins anyway.
“ Nah, I don’ t think that was the case,” he says.“ I like the clean, minimal look together with the feeling of the future and something that had never been done before,” he says.“ I liked the idea of creating something new and I liked the feel of openness, of bringing the outside to the inside. All of those things.”
LAUTNER SETS SAIL Helen and Paul Sheats commissioned The Sheats / Goldstein House, as it’ s known in architectural circles, in 1961. The couple had worked with John Lautner before in 1948 and 1949 on the L’ Horizon Apartments in Westwood. The L’ Horizon Apartments, with its space-age curves and dramatic angles, can be seen as a modest banner raising for Lautner who strives
Photo: courtesy of Jim Goldstein
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