Director Allan Mindel and Laurie Frank at a screening of 'Milwaukee, Minnesota' in West Hollywood in 2004
Remembering Laurie Frank, the Creative and Social Force Whose Love for L.A. Went Unrivaled
DECEMBER 29, 2023
The screenwriter, journalist and gallerist, perhaps best known for the wit-drenched dinner parties she hosted at her grand Whitley Terrace home, had an unmatched eye for young talent. "She changed my life," says OIivia Wilde. "She was a real life Auntie Mame."
If you knew Laurie Frank — and who didn’t? — you know her great heart burst skyward on Nov. 30. Hours earlier, a technicolor rainbow appeared over the Hollywood Hills, Laurie’s Promised Land.
You likely knew she was in the first class at Yale that matriculated women — class of 1973 — and went on to be an accomplished screenwriter, journalist and acclaimed gallerist. In the late ‘70s, she worked at ABC News and directed short films for Saturday Night Live, famously Prose and Cons featuring Eddie Murphy in a spoof on Norman Mailer’s championing of murderer Jack Abbott.
In the mid-1980s, she moved to Los Angeles and co-wrote Making Mr. Right (1987) starring John Malkovich and Ann Magnuson, as well as Love Crimes (1992) and later ventured into collecting and selling art. From 2002 to 2013, she ran Frank Pictures at Bergamot Station, showcasing artists of fame and those undiscovered. The latter was Laurie’s forte. She was an intuitive mentor and an occasional muse. Olivia Wilde — who spent a long summer as her teenage houseguest — chalks up her career to Laurie. “She changed my life,” says Wilde. “She was a real life Auntie Mame.” Previously, Laurie cast a teenage Johnny Depp in his first role, a short film she directed at American Film Institute.
But Laurie was perhaps best known as L.A.’s quintessential salonista for the mixed-genre dinners she hosted at her Whitley Terrace home, formerly the residence of Maurice Chevalier. She had found her Shangri-La amidst an enclave of 1920s landmark residences in the Hollywood Hills, east of Highland.
Nobody could rival Laurie’s love affair with Los Angeles, except perhaps the late Eve Babitz, who was a native. Laurie called L.A. “this fabulous world of make believe,” wept with joy at her first sighting of the Hollywood sign and never looked back.
Though she was a purebred intellectual — think of her as a thin, extroverted Gertrude Stein — her mantra was “the meal must go on.”
When she visited New York, you would have battled a blizzard to eat at Laurie’s table in the West Village. Indeed, hundreds of people — friends, relatives of friends, recent acquaintances she may have met earlier that day — can claim to have been wined and dined at Laurie’s weekly dinners of champagne, poached salmon and caviar potatoes. Her generosity was bottomless — even when she was living off of a deck of credit cards — as was not infrequently the case.
If you knew Laurie, you know she loved film noir, bel canto opera and all things French — films, food, philosophers and, most especially, men.
Laurie loved gossip — and knew its soft boundary with news. She kept up with The New York Times but was breathless for the tabs — the National Enquirer, the Globe — usually splayed across the kitchen table.
She wasn’t much for sports; exercise might mean having a smoke while walking her decidedly aggressive dogs — boxer, Mega and later her oversized hound, Daddy (the latter having been passed on to her by artist Ed Moses).
A good dish out, either in person or on the phone, was about the limit of her exertions. Laurie dependably had the poop and scoop on cross-dressing right-wing politicians, illegitimate sires throughout the ages and anyone in any closet anywhere — be they gay, Jewish or merely spying for the CIA or Mossad.
You may not have known she was the only child of a schoolteacher and insurance broker in Westbury, Long Island. Her mother Edith’s family had fled Russia and settled in the Bronx, where they scraped by in the pushcart trade. In her teens, her father died, after a long, tortuous illness from a rare heart abnormality. There was plenty of family depression, and her only uncle took his life at 56.
Many of Laurie’s friends believed she had no family nor next-of-kin. In fact, she had a younger cousin, Alan Burstein, who fondly recalls how “she schlepped me all over Manhattan.” He survives her as does his two grown children.
Laurie had been an intrepid traveler. In 1975, she marched across the Sahara in the Green March for Morocco with her friends Sharon Barr and director David Schweizer. She came with me on reporting trips to Chiapas, Mexico, during the Zapatista rebellion of 1994, and to Havana, where she wowed Fidel Castro wearing a green dress patterned with large corncobs — Laurie’s nod to the empty shelves in Cuba.
Though she had her share of infatuations and romances, notably French New Wave producer Pierre Cottrell and director Barbet Schroeder, her primary relationship, after 2000, was her Whitley Heights home that she described as “my husband.”
Explaining its decor and style to the Los Angeles Times, she declared “I wanted the room to have wit.” And she meant it.
By nature accommodating, Laurie was nevertheless ready to go to war over visual wit and original design. Though hardly my beat, she talked me into chronicling Whitley Heights’ steamy feud with “Whitley Depths” as she described it but mostly over prohibited design elements. Other recruits to the cause were bold-face names like the Coppolas, the Bertoluccis, Wim Wenders, Phillip Noyce et al.
Such was her enchantment with her Whitley Terrace husband/home that she bought it despite a geological assessment that it was slipping off its foundation and likely down the hillside. Even after a kitchen electrical fire in October 2004 burned it down, Laurie rebuilt it to even greater splendor. Of course, there was some magical insurance money that bankrolled the rebuild (and a new foundation) plus her year-long residence in a Chateau Marmont bungalow.
When the insurance money ran out, she kept on giving. Laurie’s self-care was miserly but her affection for chosen friends was reckless and extravagant. Come the holidays, Laurie had gifts for all; the back seat of her leased SUV would be chockablock with exquisitely gift-wrapped boxes from Neiman Marcus.
By 2009, she had no choice but to sell her house/husband. Four years later, she had to close the gallery.
I’m not going to tell you that Laurie didn’t have some big-time problems. She did. She loved Camel cigarettes and Grey Goose vodka — way too much. So she didn’t get the happy Hollywood ending she so deserved.
But while she may have given up on herself, she never gave up on you. She was your confidence when you didn’t have any, your friend when others left you.
If you knew Laurie Frank, you know when it came to banter, she exhaled Dorothy Parker, but when it came to heart, she was all Dolly Parton.
Still, her distinctive brand of optimistic irony never left her.
When told on her last day, that she would be given end-of-life palliative care, Laurie beamed brightly: “You mean I won!”
BY A.L. BARDACH
The Hollywood Reporter