David Cassidy on the Web
Bopping to Her Own Beat
May 25, 2011
By Bob Morris
STEPPING out of her home near North Hollywood to get the mail on a recent sunny morning, Allee Willis noticed a bowling ball in the garden that needed cleaning.
“It’s the blue one,” she called to an assistant. “Get the bucket!”
The ball got a bath on the front lawn with warm water, window cleaner and something like tenderness. Ms. Willis watched from the shade in front of her 1937 Streamline Moderne stucco house. She used to shellac the bowling balls that are lined up like rose bushes in her sand garden. But they peeled in the heat. Some exploded.
“Now I just let them age naturally and fade in the sun,” she said. “I feel the same way about bowling balls as I do about my own aging. I’m just letting it happen.”
Ms. Willis, who is ageless at 64, is a Grammy- and Emmy-winning songwriter, producer, artist, set designer, director and collector. She is also the curator and head cheese of an online museum of kitsch, on her antic Web site, AlleeWillis.com.
Apart from her career successes — which include writing the theme song for “Friends” and the soundtrack for “Beverly Hills Cop,” as well as songs for Earth, Wind & Fire, the Pointer Sisters, the Pet Shop Boys, Patti LaBelle, Boy George and the musical “The Color Purple” — there is little about Ms. Willis that is conventional.
Her home was built by William Kesling, a prolific Southern California architect who faded from public view because of a fraud conviction and business troubles. While he is now revered for his use of large windows, pocket doors and an open style suited to the local climate, he was disdained by his peers Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler for his less-than-rigorous adherence to Bauhaus principles.
Ms. Willis also eschews rules in favor of her own idea of beauty. Her love of kitsch, once shared by other members of her generation then pushed aside by later trends, guides her decorating and landscaping, as well as her hairstyle and mismatched ensembles, which make Julian Schnabel’s pajamas-in-public habit look conservative. But that does not mean she’s laid back or lackadaisical in any way.
When she bought the house in 1981, a few years after getting off food stamps — thanks, in part to her hit “September,” for Earth, Wind & Fire — she painted the exterior pink, but not bubble-gum pink, which she loathes (especially in cheap plastic flamingos). “The house is an authentic pale pink, true to its time,” she said.
She also built cabinets in the yard, lighted the palm trees and installed a vintage modern fountain. Then she poured concrete in the backyard, to make her lawn amoeba-shaped. “To get it just right, I had to do it three times,” she said.
Her famously wild parties are carefully planned, too. Parties are in the air here, she explained, since the house was built as a retreat for Paramount, a place where actors could let loose on the weekends, in a remote area that was once mostly orange groves and walnut orchards, except for one neighbor down the dirt road, Amelia Earhart.
In recent years, Cher, Shelley Duvall, Cyndi Lauper, Buck Henry, Bruce Vilanch, Carrie Fisher, David Cassidy, Teri Garr and Joni Mitchell have all come to Ms. Willis’s party extravaganzas, she said, dressed as potluck foods or in garbage-bag negligees that they decorated with art supplies she provided. Ms. Willis, who considers party-giving an art form, requires full participation.
“Put guests in costumes and give them activities, and they’ll talk to each other,” she said. “People who express themselves creatively are always happiest in that state.”
Ms. Willis, who directed music videos for Blondie and the Cars, was an early adopter of the Internet, and she talks about design with an artist’s passion. But she favors colors, shapes, ingenuity and wit over minimalism or prestigious labels.
“I’m a snob in reverse, and when I see great midcentury design in homes that look spare and impeccable, I yawn,” she told a visitor from her tufted periwinkle chair. “The real spirit of the Atomic Age and the ’60s and ’70s was about freedom, not restraint.”
Her furniture includes an amoeba-shaped coffee table bought years ago at a vintage store on Melrose Avenue, an Eames lounge chair, Lucite dining chairs, a Chromcraft recliner and a Sputnik chandelier. Among the art and accessories in her home are her own whimsical paintings and sculptures, a red ladybug transistor radio, half a dozen globe-shaped TVs with original chains for hanging and clear plastic ottomans with flower displays inside.
There is also a leopard-skin porkpie drummer’s seat, a Sock It to Me ashtray made from a melted beer bottle and a drinking glass with a chain for swingers to wear around their necks at parties.
“To keep your hands free for more important things,” Ms. Willis said.
In the recording studio at the front of the house, she marveled at a black velvet portrait of a warrior who looked to be a cross between a Tahitian, a character from the 1975 film “Mandingo” and one of the Village People.
“Kitsch is pop stuff that becomes ubiquitous, like hairstyles and fashions of the day that look completely ridiculous now,” she said. “Or it’s new stuff that’s ridiculous, like the toilet-seat covers of William and Kate for the royal wedding.”
It’s also the rock-bottom-bad movies she screens for friends, like “Rhinestone,” with Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone.
“The worse something is, the more I love it,” she added.
Even when it comes to music. She takes credit, for instance, for discovering the Del Rubio Triplets, middle-age women who achieved some amount of fame in the late 1980s, when the B-52s and Devo were making kitsch cool and irony was ascending.
“The Del Rubios had no real talent, but loved music so much that people heard them and were blown away because they were having such a good time,” said Ms. Willis, who featured them in the column she was writing for Details at the time. “I love people trying to do their best, and when I hear bad singing, it completely intrigues me. They’re not worried what people think at all. I love ingenuity and I love heart.”
She also has a tender spot for talented people whose time has passed. Jerrie Thill, for instance, is a 91-year-old professional drummer on an oxygen tank who was a beauty in her time and is now the subject of a YouTube video and song by Ms. Willis that has received some 396,000 hits.
“She’s just so fabulous, I had to make a music video with her,” Ms. Willis said.
Unlike many artists who become eccentric adults, Ms. Willis did not grow up tortured or alienated. She grew up happy, and was encouraged to be creative in public school in Mumford, Mich., outside Detroit, when Motown was at its peak. Her mother was an elementary school teacher who loved crafts, and her father a scrap dealer.
“I was always making things as a kid, and haven’t changed my life since,” she said. It did take a while to convince her father that the vintage furniture and old metal sculptures she bought for her home, along with the giant neon sign in the backyard, would not be more valuable as scrap that could be melted down and sold for $22 a ton. But he eventually came around.
“My father was a good person, and so was my mother,” she said. “So I’m not fleeing where I came from; I’m glorifying it. People think that the kitsch I collect is just junk, or that it makes rooms busy. I can tell when they walk into this house what they think. To me, it’s simple and soulful. It’s about expression and not being afraid.”
Visitors, she finds, often have an emotional response to her things. A certain style of clock radio or lunchbox might recall a childhood bedroom. A Naugahyde recliner might remind them of a den in a house where a favorite aunt lived. Or an old jar of Pond’s Cold Cream might remind them of a mother in the 1970s, before a divorce, when she was still young and beautiful.
“Suddenly they’ll have tears in their eyes and start talking about themselves,” she said. “I love that, because I see all my things as having emotional, not financial, value.”
Although she does not have children, Ms. Willis seems to have affection to spare for her friends and her cats. And she’s always delighted to give a tour of her home, which remains true to its original design, after the renovation.
There are as few right angles as possible, even in the glassed-in office she built in the backyard near the swimming pool and in the paneled recreation room downstairs, which contains, among other things, Beatles shoes, a parlor game called Slang-A-Lang, a Connie Francis album, Farrah Fawcett shampoo and “Leave It to Beaver” memorabilia autographed by Jerry Mathers, who is a friend. The tile floor, which she commissioned in 2002, is decorated with musical fish and sea horses. “I wanted singing sea life,” she said.
As lunchtime approached, Ms. Willis, satisfied that the bowling balls were clean, surveyed her front lawn. She straightened an African mask hanging from a tree and fiddled with some horse grass to make it stand up straighter. Then she started ripping away at some vines on the side of the neighbors’ house until she exposed a midcentury metal wall sculpture of musical notes and clefs.
“I can see this from my music studio when I’m working,” said Ms. Willis, praising her neighbors for allowing her to use their house as a canvas for her displays. “I know it’s ridiculous, but it makes me so happy. What more can I say?”
The last stop on the tour was a guest bathroom with a Lucite toilet seat embedded with playing cards and poker chips from a defunct Las Vegas hotel.
“Who needs a royal wedding toilet seat when you can have this?” she asked.
