My Life and Times

J. Paul Getty Museum/Artists Rights Society

"Torse de l'Été," by Aristide Maillol, donated to the Getty Museum by the estate of Ray Stark

May 11, 2005
A Producer Who Loved Both Art and Ribaldry
By SHARON WAXMAN

LOS ANGELES, May 10 - From his sprawling perch in Holmby Hills, the Hollywood producer Ray Stark amassed a collection of paintings and sculpture that was as notorious as it was illustrious, though perhaps no more notorious than the producer himself, whose estate bequeathed 28 of the sculptures to the J. Paul Getty Trust last month.

Take the six-foot piece by the 20th-century Italian sculptor Marino Marini. It might not have equaled, artistically speaking, some of Stark's other masterpieces, like the eight-foot-tall "Standing Woman I," by Alberto Giacometti, or the bronzes by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, which will all be on permanent display outdoors at the J. Paul Getty Museum as early as next year.

But as a Hollywood legend, the Marini was hard to surpass.

As several of Stark's friends tell it, the 1949 bronze of a naked man with his arms outstretched bestride a horse was missing an original detail: the man's erect penis.

When Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer, then talent agents, visited Venice in the 1980's, they saw an identical sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum there, but with the penis intact. They had a bronze cast of it made and sent it to Stark as a gift, with a photograph of themselves beside the Guggenheim sculpture. The frame was engraved with the message that they had found his "lost" manhood.

Stark kept the photo proudly displayed in his screening room until he died, at 88, in January 2004.

Art collectors in Hollywood (and elsewhere) often have pretensions to respectability. This never seemed to be the case with Stark, the phenomenally successful producing force behind classic films like "Funny Girl," "The Way We Were," "The Sunshine Boys," "The Goodbye Girl" and many others. ("Funny Girl" was based on the life Fanny Brice, the mother of Stark's wife, Fran.) He remained the power behind the throne at Columbia Pictures from the 1960's through the 80's.

With the riches gleaned from those hit films and others, Stark filled his Holmby Hills mansion and a ranch in Santa Ynez with paintings by Impressionists, including Monet, and postwar modernists, including Diebenkorn, Lichtenstein and de Kooning.

The sculptures, however, were considered Stark's greatest passion. They included works by Henry Moore, Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Calder, Aristide Maillol and others, which were scattered across the rolling greens outside the Stark homes.

"It was part of the ambience of his house," recalled David Geffen, the DreamWorks principal and an art collector himself. "He was a serious collector. And Ray loved his sculpture collection even more than his paintings."

The art became part of Stark's legendary aura, influencing a generation of movie insiders to begin acquiring art. He gave frequent parties at the Holmby Hills mansion (once owned by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) where luminaries like the Reagans, Kirk Douglas and Cary Grant, and power brokers like Mr. Ovitz and Mr. Geffen, roamed among the statues.

"To me, he was a tastemaker," said Barbara Guggenheim, an art consultant who worked with Stark in the last decade of his life. "He influenced so many people who are collecting in Hollywood today because he had the taste. His home was beautiful, he understood art, he had an eye for it, and people followed it. If Ray got a Maillol, other people would, too."

But his interaction with the art was anything but high-minded, those who knew him say. Some recalled that Stark would flirt with comely female visitors by taking them on a stroll past one of the reclining nudes in the garden, favorably comparing the guest's buttocks with that of the sculpture. "I'm sure he used that line," said Alan Greisman, the producing partner of the director Rob Reiner and a friend of Stark's. "I don't know if anyone ever complained, but he was so incorrigible. Today he'd get accused of sexual harassment."

Bert Fields, a major Hollywood lawyer working for James Caan, once got on Stark's bad side, threatening to hold up production on "Funny Lady," a sequel to "Funny Girl," because the Mr. Caan's contract was not completed.

Stark was furious, Mr. Fields recalled, and after the film wrapped, the producer sent Mr. Caan one of his Maillol sculptures with the note, "Please tell Mr. Fields to shove this ..." (Mr. Fields had the note framed.)

For security, Stark had placed a police car, a gift from the television producer Aaron Spelling from the set of one of his shows, in the driveway. Other than that, his former employees said, there were no guards patrolling the property to protect the millions of dollars of artwork.

When healthy, Stark would spend many hours walking through his sculpture garden, his friends and former employees said. In the years after he had a stroke, he would sit on his patio and gaze at his treasures. "He used to take a lot of comfort in that," said Jeff Sagansky, an entertainment executive and friend.

But Stark was never an art snob, his friends said. Once Mr. Kelly was with him at the Santa Ynez ranch to install a sculpture, when a bird began leaving droppings all over the piece. Mr. Kelly was appalled, said Mr. Greisman, who was present. Stark found it hilarious.

Another friend and former employee, who asked not to be identified because he had signed a confidentiality agreement, recalled tooling through Paris with Stark in a Bentley, looking for artwork on a day when the galleries happened to be closed. At one gallery the owner recognized Stark from former shopping sprees, and scrambled to open his doors.

Stark vigorously shook his head from the driver's seat, the former employee said, and merely shouted, "You got any Bonnards?"

Many of Stark's friends were surprised to learn that he had left them paintings and sculptures in his will. Mr. Greisman received a nude sketch by Picasso. Mr. Geffen was bequeathed a four-foot-long Henry Moore sculpture of a reclining woman, which had been inside Stark's mansion.

However well known these anecdotes are inside Hollywood, visitors to the Getty Museum who see the sculptures should not expect to find the bawdier tales of Stark's collecting recounted at the museum.

"I'm interested," said William Griswold, the Getty's acting director. "We're interested in the story of Fran and Ray Stark. But those might not be in the brochure."

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