VANISHING ACT--article in the New Yorker about Richard Neutra

 

In the years just after Richard Neutra died his widow, Dione Neutra, wanted very much to publish a book about his work and their almost half century together. I was  acquainted with Dione well enough for me to have been in her house (built by her husband) and she to have been in mine (in Brentwood--a vacant lot now, after the disaster with the next owner, who enlarged it then lost a reported hundred million dollars gambling). Knowing I was in contact with New York publishers, Dione asked me to write to one of them for her. I did write to a New Yorker who had been my editor on several projects. I don't have a copy, but in the letter I described what Mrs. Neutra wanted to do and stressed how important Neutra had been to California architecture.  As a friend, the editor (now long dead) was disposed to take a letter from me seriously. He did not dismiss the letter at once. Nevertheless--this would have been 1972? 1973?--he replied that he had asked around and that there was (I remember these words very clearly) "among New York publishers absolutely no interest in Richard Neutra."  In the intervening half century I have had many occasions to repeat that judgment  ironically.