Los Angeles
House Proud
Bopping to Her Own Beat
By BOB MORRIS
Published: May 25, 2011
Ethan Pines for The New York Times
Multimedia
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 63, 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.”
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 26, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated Ms. Willis's age; she is 63, not 64. It also misstated the location of the school she attended; it was Detroit, not Mumford, Mich. The article also misstated the ages of the Del Rubio Triplets, a singing group, when Ms. Willis discovered them. They were in their 70s, not middle-aged.