Buffie & the Baton

Mrs. Norman Buffum ("Buffie") Chandler, wife of Press Lord Norman Chandler (Los Angeles Times and Mirror) believes that there are "seven phases" in a woman's life: birth, childhood, adolescence, education, marriage, motherhood and community service. For more than a decade Buffie, now 59, has been in Phase 7 with formidable vigor. Picking a conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic has long been her prerogative, and she exercises it with the care, authority and sometimes the emotionalism of Queen Victoria choosing a Prime Minister. Her latest choice, Hungarian-born Georg Sold, last week did not act the way a proper musical prime minister should. Charging Buffie with trying to run his orchestra, he quit.

Artistic Disgrace. When he signed a three-year contract a year ago. Sold was hailed as the kind of orchestra builder Los Angeles had long needed and just the man to lead the orchestra into the city's new $10 million music center (opening in 1963). But citing a "serious breach of contract," Sold suddenly submitted his resignation by cable from Germany.

In Solti's absence, and without consulting him, the Philharmonic board had named young Indian Conductor Zubin Mehta "a conductor" for a yearly eight-week stretch. Because Mehta is busy elsewhere (as head of the Montreal Symphony), Solti suggested that he only be a guest conductor, and for a short period, to leave more time for other guests. What was at stake, argued Solti, was not merely a few weeks more or less of Mehta's conducting stints, but whether Solti himself was to be boss of his own orchestra. The music critic of the rival Examiner was delighted to write: "Once more Los Angeles has been tumbled from possible artistic eminence to obvious artistic disgrace. Why? Is the Philharmonic Orchestra a civic enterprise ... or is it a private enterprise, dictatorially controlled?"

Cultural Dictatorship. Whatever the answer to that indignant question may be, Angelenos know that Buffie Chandler usually gets her way. She is a director of the San Francisco Opera, lifetime honorary chairman of the Hollywood Bowl, a committee chairman for the Los Angeles Music Center and president of the Southern California Symphony Association. With the aid of the vast influence of the Chandler fortune (oil, ranching, television, insurance), Buffie Chandler has established a near-dictatorship of culture in Southern California. Says one veteran of a Chandler-chaired board: "A meeting with Mrs. Chandler is like a meeting with Mr. Khrushchev; you sit around a table, and she makes the decisions."

An energetic, vastly determined woman who once ran the 220-yd. dash on her high school girls' track team, Mrs. Chandler believes that "our only hope for survival lies in women and in education and cultural exchanges.'' Her notable contributions to culture have been the saving of the Hollywood Bowl through a vigorous fund-raising campaign in 1951 and the launching of the new music center. Her detractors accuse her of ignoring better-informed musical opinion than her own and of alienating, before Solti, such talented musicians as Eduard van Beinum and Alfred Wallenstein.

"The situation," said Solti, "is grotesque." Buffie said nothing, standing on the dignity of the title that her Symphony Association had conferred on her: California's "first citizen of music."

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