American Masters (1985–…): Season 25, Episode 8 - The Architect & the Painter: The Creative Lives of Ray & Charles Eames - full transcript
An artist is
a title that you earn.
And it's a little embarrassing
to hear
people refer to themselves
as artists.
It's like referring to
themselves as a genius.
This was a man who was
a Merlin of curiosity.
He was driven by his curiosity.
We weren't sure
quite what he was.
Was he an architect?
Was he a designer?
Was he a filmmaker?
But what he was, obviously,
was something
we all wanted to be.
I had been trained as a painter,
but when we were working
on furniture,
and again in film,
it never seemed like leaving
painting in any way,
because it was
just another form.
She made paintings out of
what she was surrounded by.
Everything she touched, she
turned into something magical.
Everything that they did
in design, she saw as
an extension of her painting.
And everything they did in
design, he saw as an extension
of his architecture.
For them, these names like
painter and architect,
they weren't job descriptions.
They were ways of looking
at the world.
They were introducing people
to look at the world
differently.
Life was fun, was work, was fun,
was life.
People would say
it was childlike behavior,
but what's wrong with that?
The Eameses have put
all this joy back in life.
You know that modernism,
let's face it,
was getting boring.
Had they just designed
the furniture,
they'd be in the pantheon.
It's the multifaceted nature
of the career
that is extraordinary.
They give shape to America's
20th century.
I came from
an architectural office
where there were individual
tables with a conference room,
and there was carpet
on the floor.
There were lights.
We had drafting tables,
and all the equipment
that you needed,
et cetera, et cetera.
I walk into Eames Office,
and it was like walking
into a circus.
I walked in the door, and
of course I immediately thought,
"Got any jobs here?"
I'm just totally blown away
by the patina on every surface
of graphics, and there were
models everywhere,
and there was just stuff.
I was just overwhelmed.
I saw this incredible apparition
of animation stands
and photographs
spread out on tables.
Models being lit
for photography,
a screening room,
and a wonderful wood shop.
Saltwater tanks.
There were Eames chairs
with Steinberg drawings on them.
Every kind of visual treat
you can imagine.
And I thought, "I've come
to work in Disneyland."
If you had taken
the roof off of it,
you would see that place
changing constantly.
So we'd just go around
and take everything
out of the middle
of the studio,
to put up a movie set
to take pictures tomorrow,
and then the next day,
you'd take out all the movie set
and put the tables all back up,
and everybody's
back at work again.
It was very informal.
I mean, there wasn't ever
any kind
of routine.
There were no
"regular meetings."
Because I did not have
a design degree,
many of the people
in the Office thought
I probably shouldn't be there,
but Charles had
a different attitude.
And he said this to me...
"I can teach you how to draw.
"If you can think
and you can see,
and you can prove that to me,
you can work here."
For four decades,
901 Washington Boulevard
in Venice Beach, California,
was one of the most
creative addresses on Earth.
Dozens of gifted young designers
cut their teeth within the walls
of the studio.
But the vision for the Office
came from the top.
We have to have
a place where you can recognize
where you're going
when you start out.
Modern design was born
from the marriage
of art and industry.
The Eames Office was born
from the marriage
of Ray Kaiser...
A painter who rarely painted...
And Charles Eames...
An architecture school dropout
who never got his license.
"Eventually, everything
connects," Charles said.
Furniture, toys, architecture,
exhibitions, photography,
and film were all connected
in the wild, whimsical world
of the Eames Office.
Charles and Ray Eames
wanted to bring
the most magnificent experiences
that you could have
with your eyes
to the largest number of people.
I don't think there's anything
more important
for an artist to want to do.
It was a career that defined
what it means to be a designer.
And it all began with a chair.
Charles, where did the
classic Eames chair come from?
Did it come to you in a flash,
as you were shaving one morning?
It sort of came to me
in a 30-year flash, if you want.
TIME magazine called it
"the greatest design
of the 20th century."
But it didn't start out
that way.
It began as a failure.
Responding to a competition
at the museum of modern art
in 1940,
two unknown young architects...
Charles Eames and his friend,
Eero Saarinen,
set out to reinvent
the very idea of the chair.
The goal is to create
an inexpensive,
mass-produced chair
which is well designed,
and which is molded to the body,
because it doesn't need a lot
of upholstery, which is,
"a," old-fashioned,
and "b," expensive.
Upholstery is what
Louis XIV did.
Working at the Cranbrook
Academy of Art near Detroit,
Eames and Saarinen thought they
could mold
the new miracle material,
plywood,
into two directions at once
to make a comfortable,
form-fitting shell.
The critical point
is where that back
becomes the seat.
The glues aren't good
enough, and the chair splinters,
which means,
when you'd sit on it,
it would be a little
uncomfortable.
So they have to upholster it.
Despite failing
at their goal of creating
a single-piece plywood shell,
Charles and Eero
won the competition.
The irony is that
the chair that
Eames and Saarinen designed,
they couldn't really
manufacture.
Even with the upholstery
to cover the cracked surface,
no existing machine could
successfully mold the plywood
into the shape of the chair.
It couldn't be made
in the way that they claimed
it could be made.
They had designed the look of it
without designing
the substance of it.
After many unsuccessful
attempts,
Eero Saarinen scrapped
the project.
But Charles wasn't ready
to give up...
This time, with a new partner.
At Cranbrook, he had become
friendly with Ray Kaiser,
a talented young artist who had
helped with the chair project.
I said to Ray one day,
"How did you and Charles
get together?"
"Oh! I can't talk about it."
I said, "Well, why not?"
"Well, we just did."
They sparked, and
the rest is literally history.
And I think in Ray,
he really found his complement.
But there was a problem.
Charles was already married.
He had moved up to Cranbrook
from St. Louis
with his wife, Catherine,
and his young daughter, Lucia.
The love letters are
Charles's letters to Ray,
because the letters that Ray
wrote back to Charles,
Charles destroyed,
because he was married.
They show Charles madly in love
with her.
There's no doubt about that.
He talks about walking past
the building
that she used to live in
and looking up at her window,
and they are very moving.
These letters are talking about
a joined future
as artists together.
I think his decision feels made.
Ray certainly felt uncomfortable
enough to leave Cranbrook
and go away and think about
what she was going to do
thereafter.
Catherine was
a very impressive person.
Knowing them both, as I did,
you can see why
they didn't stay together.
He really thought he had
something to offer the world,
and this was going to be
a journey
with a lot of unexpectedness.
This was a journey that might
not lead to, uh, success.
And I think that maybe
at that point in her life,
this was not necessarily
the place that Catherine
wanted to go.
But I think that maybe
in Charles's mind
that he had wanted a life
where love and work
and life and work
were all blended together.
Charles quit his job
at Cranbrook,
and, in one last letter to Ray,
asked for her hand in marriage.
His future with his new bride
now depended
on making the chair work.
Broke and short on options,
Charles and Ray
headed from Michigan to L.A.
to finish what he had started.
Part of this journey
to California was
they were both
going to figure out
how to mass-produce molded
plywood and compound curves...
Which sounds very unromantic,
but I think it probably
was pretty romantic,
under the circumstances.
In their two-bedroom
apartment in Westwood Village,
Charles and Ray set up
a makeshift workshop.
The...
The first to...
That did the molding,
which was so magic,
we called it by a magic name.
So we called it "Kazam!"
The "Kazam!" machine was
a jury-rigged molding device
made out of heating coils
and a bicycle pump.
But in 1942,
with the nation at war,
raw materials were scarce,
and the "Kazam!" lay silent.
But with the setback,
there was also opportunity.
The U.S. military
needed better splints.
The standard-issue
splint was metallic,
and so the vibration of
the two people carrying them
actually would make
the wound worse.
They would actually be
better off
if you grabbed a stick
off the ground and tied it to it
than with this amplification.
So Charles and Ray said,
"Well, you know,
we're experimenting
with molded plywood.
Why don't we try
and design a new splint?"
They're trying to make
a three-dimensional curve,
kind of a bowl, you might say.
They can't quite do it yet.
So they need holes
in the plywood
in order to release the tension,
'cause otherwise
it's going to splinter
where they try to do it.
But working within
the constraints,
what's nice is that this is
exactly what you need
for a splint, 'cause you need
a place for the bandages to go.
In a rented warehouse space,
their team of skilled designers
and craftspeople
made 150,000 splints.
With peace approaching,
Charles and Ray
had one thing on their minds...
Applying the lessons
of the splints
to the failed plywood chairs.
This time, they wouldn't design
the look of the chair first.
They would never make
that mistake again.
They would let the design flow
from the learning.
That meant
knowing who they were serving.
In Charles's words,
it was always about being
a good host to their guests.
The people we
wanted to serve were varied,
and to begin with we studied
the shape and postures
of many types...
Averages and extremes.
But it was more
than just a search
for the best chair design.
It was the beginning
of the Eames design process,
a process of learning by doing.
In the design of any structure,
it is often the connection
that provides the key
to the solution.
"Never delegate
understanding," Charles said.
It would become a hallmark
of Eames design,
their secret ingredient.
Charles said,
yeah, there's a secret.
First you have an idea,
then you discard the idea,
then you have 50 other ideas
and you discard them,
and then you do several models,
and they don't work,
and you throw them out.
And the secret is work and work
and work and work and work.
The plywood furniture
was good to go in 1946.
Charles said of the furniture,
"We wanted to make the best
for the most for the least."
That sentiment struck a chord
with the Herman Miller
furniture company.
Honest and simple
in its use of materials,
the plywood furniture was also
affordable for the common man.
Together, they would become one
of the great success stories
of the postwar era.
Charles and Ray Eames
provide much of the furniture
for a kind of
Upper-middle-class,
educated audience
moving to suburbia.
When the Second World War ended,
it wasn't just five years
of pent-up demand.
It was actually almost 15 years,
because you also have 10 years
of the Depression.
And people have much more money,
so if you wanted to sort of
do something
different than your parents,
you bought that Eames furniture.
And it was promoted that way.
Everything around the marketing
suggested,
"Here is something new
for a new society."
And America was a new society
in '45.
In the decades to follow,
Charles and Ray scored success
with line after line
of Eames furniture.
And their unmistakable designs
became a ubiquitous part
of American culture,
right up to today.
Sold for $900, 232.
I think the work retains
a real freshness.
Elements of it still inform
contemporary design today.
$700.
$2,000.
$2,100.
$2,100.
$7,000.
Fair warning,
selling...$13,000.
Are we done?
Sold for $13,000.
The rightness of the furniture
will continue to appeal
to new generations.
The word "Eames" has now
become a generic word.
I mean, if you go on eBay,
it always says, "Eames era"
blah, blah, blah.
So it's become
a word like "Victorian."
Maybe it's, in a way, accurate,
because just like Queen Victoria
represents an attitude,
Eames also embodies
a certain approach
to life and to thinking.
By the early '50s,
Charles had grown
an outsized reputation
as an icon of modernism,
fighting to inject
an ethical dimension
into American capitalism.
At that price,
the customer knows
exactly what he's going to get.
This!
In MGM's "Executive Suite,"
William Holden stars
as a curiously
Charles Eames-like
furniture designer.
We'll have a line
of low-priced furniture,
a new and different line,
as different from anything
we're making today
as a modern automobile is
different from a covered wagon.
In the outside world,
Charles's reputation
may have grown larger than life,
but within the Eames Office,
there was always the lingering
question of credit.
There are still some sore issues
among certain people who feel
they never were recognized
as much as they should,
but it's a very delicate issue.
The issue came to a head
back in 1946
at the unveiling
of the original Eames chair
when the museum of modern art
gave Charles a one-man show.
MOMA gives the name
Charles Eames,
and this causes a certain
tension in the Office,
because it was thought to be
a collaborative effort.
It's not that he's swooping
in or is doing nothing
and scarfing up all the credit,
but he is not the only designer
that was involved.
This happens all the time.
A group of young people
co-creating
and influencing each other
and inspiring each other,
and then the question is,
"Who did what?"
One of the last projects
I worked on was
"Day of the Dead," the film.
I was down in Mexico
helping with that film,
shooting, gathering objects,
and setting the type.
And I wrote,
"Assistance in Mexico,"
and I wrote the names
of the people.
So Charles came by my desk
and said, "What is that?!"
And I said, "But we worked
on it, didn't we?"
I went to New York
many, many times,
putting the time life
lobbies together,
and Charles never went
and saw them
while the things
were being constructed,
but I could never say
that I designed anything
at the Eames Office.
I never saw anything
come out of there that was not
signatured, you know,
by him and Ray.
When a product comes out,
it's a river.
It starts at one point,
and it ends at another point.
Many people jump into it
along the way.
And everybody contributes
a small piece,
but only if they go on
after that
to produce
a stunning amount of work,
I think, are they
capable of saying,
"I did this, this, and this
in the Eames Office
with no credit."
I think he ran the Office
a bit like a Renaissance studio.
You know, there's
a master painter,
but then there are
all the other people
who help realize the work.
He may have been exploiting us,
but if you were not stupid,
you were also exploiting
that relationship.
I was happy,
being exploited
by a proper master.
The most wonderful work is...
Is the conscience
and the talents of a person
who have every right
to have their name on it,
even though it's done
by minions of other people.
Things good and bad,
he rightfully has his name
on them, and they rightfully
are Charles Eames or
Charles and Ray Eames products.
Almost always,
when there's a successful man,
there is a very interesting
and able woman behind him.
And a better case
could seldom be found
than in Ray and Charles Eames.
Come on in, Ray.
Hello, I'm so happy to see you.
This is Mrs. Eames,
and she's going to tell us
how she helps Charles
design these chairs.
How do you manage that?
Well, uh, aside from serving
as an extreme in the testing,
there are a million things,
but, uh, I think
the most difficult thing
is to keep the big idea,
to be able to look
critically at the work.
Arlene Francis is
clearly having a hard time
with this husband and wife
working together.
You know, this is the era
of "Mad Men,"
as we're watching now.
This is not fitting.
And Charles Eames is trying
to promote Ray Eames,
as saying that,
"We collaborated on this."
Well, uh, Ray...
Ray was a painter.
Ray worked here in New York with
Hans Hofmann for a long time,
which is a pretty good start.
I actually thought
Charles was more embarrassed
than Ray.
Ray is hidden away.
Charles is being highlighted,
the great male designer.
It's a very interesting moment
of American sexual politics
in the 1950s.
Uh, I wonder if you're going
to maybe take us through
and show how... how the Eames
chair has developed.
And, Ray, shall we
let Charles do it,
or do you want to help with it?
Please, please.
No, you see, as I told you,
she is behind the man,
but terribly important.
Thank you, Ray.
All right, Charles...
The feminist conscience
had not been yet raised.
Ray would always stand
behind Charles.
And on camera or in interviews,
she said hardly anything.
Her warm but quiet conversation
shrank to total silence
before the camera,
but her impact on Eames' work
spoke for her.
She sat like a delicious
dumpling in a doll's dress,
concentrating
on a sweep of subjects
which would seemingly
choke a computer.
People always made the mistake
that Charles and Ray,
it was two brothers.
They were a married couple,
while at the same time,
they were partners
in whatever
their design effort was.
Ray felt, I think,
deeply enraged
and hurt, on occasion,
when it was assumed that it was
actually just Charles's business
and it was the office
of Charles Eames,
not the office
of Charles and Ray Eames.
It was Charles
who was in charge,
but the body of work
would not have been the same
without Ray's contributions,
and how you separate that out,
I don't know.
If the public saw Ray
as little more
than the devoted wife
supporting her husband,
Charles saw a talented artist
who had participated
in the birth of abstract art
in America.
Her mentor was the German
abstract expressionist
Hans Hofmann.
Hofmann is one
of the great catalytic figures
in American art.
He starts a school
in New York City in '33
with at times no more than
a dozen or two students.
They, together, are the seed
out of which
the new American art
really grows.
He was getting ideas from people
like Mondrian, Paul Klee,
Kandinsky,
but he was communicating them
not as textbook learning, but as
this incredibly visceral
sensation.
And I have talked to people
who remember him
walking into the studio and
looking at a drawing of theirs
and tearing it down the middle
and then taking the two parts
and moving them.
And then suddenly something
that had been very static
was dynamic.
So I think it's there
that Ray learned
some, at least, of this
wonderful capacity that she had
for collaging,
for juxtaposition.
She could move things around
very, very easily
and beautifully and find form,
and find form
in relation to other form.
Ray knew what was art
and what was not.
And Charles depended
on her aesthetic genius.
And she would put
objects on shoots
that would just bring
the whole thing to life.
By putting the stack
of black wire chairs
naked with the wooden bird
with the little wire legs,
gave you a very different
feeling about those chairs.
Charles could not deal
with the idea
that any of the furniture
would have color on it.
If you put a palette of colors
in front of him,
they just... like he couldn't
handle it.
It just went over his head.
He deferred to her completely
on color sense.
She saw everything
as a painting.
She had these enormous eyes
that were...
They were open like this
all the time.
And I think Charles
was very dependent on that.
You could just hear him say,
"Ra-ay!"
Which meant, "Come and help!"
At the Library of Congress,
Ray's letters
to a traveling Charles
show her fastidious attention
to every detail
of their life and work.
When she writes to Charles
in Paris
and she's talking about
the slides that he's just taken,
and she has this sketch
showing how she
and Sandro and Don Albinson
have changed the chair.
And then she's going on
about the films,
and she's going on
about Elmer Bernstein.
Then she tells him all
the places to shop in Paris
and where to get his shoes
and where to get her gloves
and what the stitching
should be like on the gloves
and how this perfume
by Balmain is $55 an ounce here,
but it's cheaper in Paris,
"and please get it for me."
It's as if
they were one individual
with two different
special areas,
and a lot of it was unspoken,
just eye... eye contact.
A nodding of something...
An idea
that they both would agree on.
So that's how
you begin to separate
their artistic personalities
and their contributions.
But the separating them
isn't the important part.
It's what they created together.
That's why it's so good.
Perhaps the greatest
Eames design of all
was the image
of Charles and Ray.
Their playful self-portraits,
eccentric dress,
and quotable quotes
all contributed
to the endearing picture
of a happy, modern couple
absorbed in the challenges
of their work.
Charles and Ray
were cultural icons,
but their public face masked
a deep desire for privacy.
After long hours at 901,
they would retreat
to the home they built
in Pacific Palisades.
Charles and Ray were
their own community,
and we were
in the satellite group.
And so was everybody else.
I had no sense that they
were trying to keep out
the outside world
or anything else.
They had created a world
and a lifestyle
that just required them to go
in this tunnel from their house
to the work, you know,
back home again,
so what you surround yourself
with and the choices you make
about where you live
and how you live
and the artifacts you have,
they're all based upon
trying to create
a seamless environment
and a seamless life.
Originally, the house
was designed by Charles
with Eero Saarinen as part of
the influential case study
housing program in 1945.
But Charles and Ray were not
ones to let a good design rest.
Charles Eames and
Eero Saarinen designed a house
that we now call
the Bridge House,
and it was for this site.
It would have cantilevered
from the hillside
out into the middle
of the meadow.
One of the ideas of the house
was to use technologies
that had come
out of the war effort.
So all the parts of this house
were off the shelf.
But the Bridge House
was never built.
After World War II,
there were major
material shortages,
and it took about
two or three years
to even get the parts
that they had ordered.
And in that time,
Charles and Ray
fell in love with this meadow.
We spent all...
All our spare time here.
Began to think it would be
criminal to put that house
in the middle of the field.
Charles realized,
"Oh, we're making the classic
architect's mistake."
You find a beautiful site,
and you plunk a house
in the middle of it.
With the meadow in mind,
Charles and Ray redesigned
the Bridge House
and began construction.
It was relatively quick,
because they were relying on
some form of prefabrication,
of bringing materials
to the site
and assembling them.
On Christmas Eve, 1949,
Charles and Ray moved in.
Hines: The Eames house
in Los Angeles
on that bluff
overlooking the Pacific Ocean
is surely one of the great
buildings of the 20th century.
Known to architectural
historians
as Case Study House Number 8,
it is the archetypal
modern house.
Or at least,
it started that way.
The Eames house
as it was first made
is very different
from what it became
as they lived in it
through the years
and as it acquired
all their little touches.
I think people miss that
unless you've really been there
and been inside of it.
Now, do you remember this?
Do you remember this?
I do.
I do.
Uh, I don't remember
this one here,
but there was at least one
at the Office.
Modern design has this
sort of cliché of being
the, you know,
the homes of super villains.
Very hard-edged things.
You can't have, you know,
your Pepperidge Farm cookies
on the kitchen counter,
because that's going to ruin,
you know, this perfect tableau
of this perfect life
that you live.
But you would never look
at the Eames House
and think that.
The container for your life
can be simple,
but that doesn't mean
your life has to be simple.
What was in the house
was a combination of things
that one hadn't seen before.
There was a tumbleweed
hanging from the ceiling.
Well, now you can see a lot of
tumbleweed around
in people's houses,
but in those days,
it was.
And near the tumbleweed
hanging from the ceiling,
there were two
Hans Hofmann paintings
suspended from
the deck of the roof.
The floor was just another
canvas for Ray,
the ceiling was
just another canvas,
a sofa was a canvas
for a collage of objects.
She would have entirely
all of her famous
blue and white dishes
stacked up.
But she would have little red
hearts or little red accents.
And it was all perfect.
I went to dinner
at Ray and Charles's house
one night,
and it came to dessert.
So what they had arranged
for dessert
was three bowls of flowers
that they put in front of you
to admire,
so it was a visual dessert.
I was really off with that,
I can tell you.
I was really...
Because I hadn't eaten much.
I was saving up for the...
So I'm looking
at these stupid flowers,
you know,
and I'm saying, "What the hell
is wrong with these people?"
You know, so I got in my car,
and I drove out to the nearest
Dairy Queen.
"Take your pleasure
seriously," Charles said,
and that's exactly
what they did.
Every time
the Ringling Brothers
and Barnum & Bailey Circus
would come to town, we would all
get out our cameras
and our ectochrome, and we'd go
running downtown, and we'd
photograph the circus.
And he said, "Photograph."
"What?"
He said, "Anything you want.
Just photograph."
And a couple of people
of the audience
were there to feed you.
It's like a machine gun,
somebody was feeding you
the cartridges.
And I took a lot of pictures.
What impressed him was
how everybody knew their place,
and sometimes they had
two or three different tasks
that they had to do.
The circus looks
like a free-for-all
and is absolutely
a model of constraints.
And for Charles,
this was one supreme example...
"the performance."
"Never let the blood show,"
he would say.
And this went back
to his philosophy
of no good design,
no good performance
without restrictions, without
restraints, without rules.
He goes to the circus,
and he just
is overwhelmed by the richness
of everything, you know,
the costumes and the wagons
and the tent.
And he comes back,
and he's trying to...
You can't turn a circus
into a piece of furniture,
but he's desperately wanting to.
Charles and Ray did not
turn the circus into a chair,
but they did turn
the Eames Office into a circus.
He wasn't embarrassed at all
about what it is
that he was doing.
You know, he felt really
confident about,
"Yeah, this is a toy shop.
This... I'm just
having fun here.
And, you know, somehow or other,
you guys bring me money
and tell me to go ahead,
and I'm going to."
Royalties from
Herman Miller gave Charles
the freedom to move beyond
his reputation
as a designer
of modern furniture.
Herman Miller
was always after him
to do more chairs, and he would
do chairs every now and then,
but I don't think he liked
to think of himself
or have others think of him
as the chair designer.
I was a film critic,
and that gave me an excuse
to go down to 901.
I fell in love with
the whole concept of 901,
which was a kind of
Renaissance art workshop,
where they did everything.
At the time, he was considered
a kind of cutesy,
passé little filmmaker,
but no one had ever written
about the films.
Eames films are their own genre,
the product not of a film studio
concerned with profits,
but of a curious mind
yearning to communicate
the complex beauty
of everyday objects.
We've never used
film as an art form.
We just use film as a tool.
They were, at heart,
a kind of mixture of vanity
and self-expression.
They only had one obligation,
and that was
to satisfy Charles.
Much of our energy
is like the guy in Vaudeville
that has
the plates going, and he's
intent on getting 30 plates
spinning at one time,
but part of the process is
quickly being aware of the ones
that are winding down,
and keeping them spinning.
One of the titles
that began to circulate
between all the employees
was the Eamery,
because it was like this place
where everyone was driven
to work all the time.
It was 24/7,
365.
Going to the Eames Office
and watching people
at their desks
was like watching people
take their brains out
and knead them like dough.
People that came
from the outside
couldn't believe that this was
the way things were done,
but it was a delicious agony.
It was like a temple for me.
Many of us understood very well
that we were very poorly suited
for employment
in certain kinds of jobs.
We were very well suited
to be there.
Charles had a terrible
time interacting with people.
Several times, I hired people,
and they would be there
like three days,
and he'd come to me and say,
"I just can't stand that guy.
Get him out of here."
And I never did know what it was
that he saw in that person
that he could just not
work with them.
I happen to have
a sort of interest in language
as a means of communication,
which I like to believe
can be simple and direct.
Charles, I would say,
didn't subscribe to that.
Uh, no, we have to... you know,
the only thing is, uh, Perry,
we have to have some sort of
a background before we do this,
because one sort of begins to...
His speech wasn't
yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda.
It was stop and go,
and stop and go.
No, you... you let me... cut
this, let me re... let me...
He had this incredible ability
to surround every subject
with a little cloud of words.
We... we were hoping to...
There were two...
There were several things.
There was, uh...
You finally got the message
at the end of about
15 or 20 minutes of wondering,
"What the hell is he
talking about?"
It finally dawned on you
that he was telling you
you were an absolute clown
because there's something wrong.
This one is
going to have something to do
with what I think of
as the new covetables.
He appeared
one day at a conference at UCLA,
and he started to speak, and it
just ran right off the track.
Looked up, and he said,
"I'm sorry.
I just...
Isn't going to work today."
And somebody said, "No, no!"
So he said,
"Well, give me a minute."
He put his head down.
And everybody waited.
And it took about two minutes.
And he raised up.
And he just took off.
Boom.
Reams of paper.
What you do with a ream of paper
can never quite come up
to what the paper offers.
He knew where his center was.
And there are not a lot of
people that can do that.
I... I have buttons
that get pushed,
but I don't know
where my center is.
For Charles,
knowing where his center was
meant working
for powerful clients
without compromising his ideals.
And making a film to represent
the United States
in communist Russia in 1959
would put that philosophy
to the test.
At the height of the Cold War,
the American government
and the government
of the Soviet Union
decided to hold
joint expositions.
The United States would show
what America was about
to the Soviet public,
and the Soviet Union would show
what they were about to America.
And one of the centerpieces
were a series
of American kitchens,
and it was there
that Khrushchev and Nixon
had their so-called
Kitchen Debate.
There are some instances
where you may be ahead of us.
There may be some instances...
For example,
color television...
Where we're ahead of you.
But in order for both of us...
For both of us to benefit...
For both of us to benefit...
But the U.S.
Information Agency
decided that they had to show
Russians more about America
than just cars
and household appliances.
The idea is that
Charles and Ray will make a film
about life in the USA:
"Glimpses of the USA."
How could you make the world
as we see it
in the United States...
How could you make it
really credible
to an audience like that?
We could've shown the greatest
freeway in the United States.
If we'd shown one picture
and they'd gone,
they'd say, you know,
"They've got the great
freeway interchange,
but we've got one at Minsk,
and we're going to build one
at Smolensk,
and we'll have two,
and they have one."
But in the redundancy
of the multi-image technique,
in something like 12 seconds,
I think we showed
120 freeway interchanges.
People were sent
all over the country.
Friends were called
to take images
so that it looked nationalistic.
It couldn't look specific
and regional.
It had to be
national and egalitarian.
Charles said...
Wanted pictures
of people setting off for work,
children coming from school,
coming up from the subway.
And freeways.
So I did my first,
you know, helicopter flights,
sort of strapped in,
leaning way out.
I think the State Department
had sort of envisioned
having lots of troop marches.
And Charles said
he'd do the film,
but he didn't want to have it
reviewed before it was shown.
The government
really didn't have any idea
what was happening.
We would have these showings
for the guy who would represent
the government, coming out.
It seemed like each time,
it would just get going,
and then it'd go blank.
And we'd say, "That's as far
as we are right now."
And he'd say, "Well...
Yeah, I guess it looks okay.
I don't know."
So he'd go away.
Well, as Charles said, sometimes
if you don't ask
for people's opinions,
then they don't
give them to you.
They just got there
the day before,
and I think by that time,
the USIA was just relieved
that there'd be anything
to show.
You know, and here you
have this giant effort
that'd gone into
building the building
and putting the screens up,
and tickets being...
All of that happening.
And he's waiting
till the very last minute.
It's just kind of his nature.
Right at the end,
he would suddenly appear,
and it would look
like it was effortless.
He'd say, you know,
"This is just a little something
we've been doing."
You know, and there'd be
blood all over the floor
from the thing, you know?
When we look at the night sky,
these are the stars we see...
The same stars that shine down
upon Russia each night.
We see the same clusters,
the same nebulae.
And from the sky, it would be
difficult to distinguish
the Russian city
from the American city.
If you're going to communicate
with 3 million Soviet citizens,
you need to say something true.
You can't just show off
you've got
better weapons or this or that.
You've got to try to speak
from the heart, and they did.
Was it propaganda?
Goodness, yes, have you seen it?
Yes, it's, it's selling
the U.S.,
and it's selling, I think,
a very sanitized USA.
Of course it was propaganda.
They were Cold Warriors.
The difference is they...
I believe they genuinely
believed it.
One of the interesting
things was how to end this.
Charles had this idea
of a jet plane.
Ray still felt this might be
a bit hard-edged, a bit...
Could have
military implications.
We never had an ending,
and one day Ray walked in
and said, "Forget-me-nots."
Charles said,
"Okay, forget-me-nots."
Forget-me-nots,
the universal symbol
of friendship,
translates directly
into Russian,
Nezabudki, "forget me not."
They described Nikita Khrushchev
with tears
running down his cheeks.
So you have this wonderful
sort of double ending
of the simplicity of a flower,
but then this "Forget me not."
And it worked
like the best Hollywood movie.
The Moscow show made
Charles and Ray newly famous,
not as designers of furniture,
but as communicators.
Communicators who used images
rather than words.
Charles was very wary of words.
It's not about writing a script.
It's about a sequence of images
that can tell a story.
In the Eames film "Tops,"
there are no words,
just pictures.
In a way,
the film is a kind of an essay
about the nature and meaning
of a top.
In the beginning,
it's all about winding up,
getting started,
putting it together,
assembling the materials.
And then it's
about throwing them,
seeing how they work,
what they do,
how they dance,
how they spin, how they sing,
whatever it is
that their meaning is.
But then you come to one moment
where there's an architectural
plan on the tabletop,
a blueprint, and what spins
is a thumbtack, and you realize
you have suddenly gotten
directly into the essence
of what it means to be a top.
Things have meaning,
things have personality,
things express ideas.
Many designers were
and still are happy with
the manipulation of objects.
He was only truly deeply happy
manipulating an idea.
Beginning in the 1950s,
the idea of the computer
triggered fear in the minds
of Americans.
People were seeing computers,
and there was a worry
about them.
And this notion
of the electronic brain
feeds into fears that we're
going to be taken over
by machines.
At the time, computers
were synonymous
with just one company... IBM.
What was IBM's product?
Big vacuum tube machines,
huge room-size machines,
building-size machines, so that
the average individual
was feeling an alien,
science-fiction type
invasion of my privacy.
How do you combat that?
IBM turned to the Eames Office.
To overcome the computer's
PR problem,
Charles and Ray set out
to humanize it.
Properly related,
it can maintain a balance
between man's needs
and his resources.
It's done in this,
what to us today
looks really corny...
But at the time, this was
thought to be radical...
To do a film for a science
company, like a cartoon.
Something has now
emerged that might make
even our most elegant theories
workable.
And you go from the abacus.
As human problems
become more complex,
people invent
more complicated machines
to solve those problems,
and the culmination of that is
the computer.
This is a story of a technique
in the service of mankind.
It's not
going to take over the world,
it's not going to be robots.
It's the logical
evolutionary progression
of man developing products
to solve problems.
Charles's visionary
interest in computers
helped to bring IBM into
the Eames Office stables.
But it was not expertise
that made Charles and Ray
indispensible to
the rapidly growing company.
You sell your expertise,
you have a limited repertoire.
You sell your ignorance,
it's an unlimited repertoire.
He was selling his ignorance
and his desire to learn
about a subject.
And the journey...
Of him not knowing to knowing...
Was his work.
Over two decades,
Charles and Ray would complete
dozens of projects,
large and small, for IBM.
But perhaps the most bold was
their pavilion
for the 1964 New York
World's Fair,
a 1.2-acre experimental space
celebrating the role
of computers in everyday life.
I was drawing the stuff
as fast as he
could conjure it up,
and they came up with this idea
of putting that theater
up on top of these trees.
And so I knew they were going to
have these plungers
going into the ground...
They are going to move,
you know,
400 people up on this ramp.
And I knew, as a designer,
I knew I was going to
have to figure out some way
to make all that happen.
And he's just so excited
about this thing.
And I'm just standing there
like that.
And I said,
"Charles, this is just nuts."
And he says, "Yeah, and no one
had told us not to do it."
For the show in Moscow,
they had used seven screens.
But at the IBM Pavilion,
there were 22.
Charles was very big on
making people feel welcome.
You don't just get them in
an auditorium and show the film.
You have a host.
But, uh, it was very hard.
Everything you said not only had
to be memorized and rehearsed,
but it had to be timed,
so when you pointed
to this screen,
what you were talking about
appeared on this screen.
And the same with that screen
and all the others.
But the problem was,
the host
had a nervous breakdown.
As Charles and Ray's reputation
as visual communicators grew,
so did their list
of corporate clients.
N is for...
♪ Navigation equipment ♪
♪ Network protectors ♪
♪ Nuclear plant control ♪
♪ Nuclear reactor plants ♪
♪ For surface ships
and submarines ♪
Westinghouse,
Boeing, and Polaroid
all trusted the Eames Office
to solve their problems.
When the Office was hired
by Alcoa
to show off the uses
of aluminum,
they built a solar-powered
Do-Nothing Machine,
which did exactly that.
That was in the golden years,
when the heads of corporations
would speak,
a chair away from the designer.
So that if you needed
to talk to somebody,
you talked
to the decision maker.
You didn't talk to a manager
who talked to a director
who talked to a chief director
who talked to a vice president
who talked to
a senior vice president
who talked to
an executive vice president
who was allowed to talk to God.
Almost never
was there a dissenting voice.
We trusted his decision making
entirely.
So his freedom to do
and to explain
and to conceive and execute
was almost unparalleled.
They didn't have contracts.
They had a handshake.
All those huge projects
were done on a handshake.
"We're going to give you
the best product,
but we can't tell you
what it's going to cost."
And for IBM
and for Polaroid,
and for Herman Miller,
it was okay.
And for Charles,
these gentlemen's agreements
went both ways.
The budget for
"Mathematica" was $150,000.
It actually ended up
costing $300,000,
and Charles paid
for the $150,000
that it went over budget.
So the whole thing
about what things cost
and trying to keep it
within the budget
and meet the clients,
he didn't care about...
He cared about it, but he just,
he couldn't stop himself.
Charles and Ray's career
began with a utopian notion
of providing low-cost,
high-quality goods to the masses
through industrial production.
But they never viewed their work
for corporate titans
as selling out.
They wanted to work
for the Google of their time,
and they did, and it allowed
them incredible experimentation.
And they believed they could
have a bigger impact
on everyday life by working
for the bigger company.
IBM shared Charles's concern
that American kids were falling
behind in math and science.
And as usual, they gave
the Office free rein
to address the problem.
Maybe, Charles felt,
a film could help.
We begin
with a scene one meter wide,
which we view from just
one meter away.
Now, every ten seconds,
we will look
from ten times farther away,
and our field of view will be
ten times wider.
"Powers of Ten" would
become the best known
of all the Eames films,
viewed in countless classrooms
and copied freely by
filmmakers around the world.
Everyone has seen
"Powers of Ten."
They may not have seen
the version Charles did,
but they have seen
one of the countless rip-offs
of that film.
Ten to the sixth,
a one with six zeros,
a million meters...
Soon the earth will show
as a solid sphere.
Nobody had done
a movie like that.
How can you fail,
doing a cosmic zoom
in and out from all that is?
And so the concept is,
all by itself, mind-blowing.
The trip back to
the picnic on the lakefront
will be a sped-up version,
reducing the distance
to the Earth's surface by one
power of ten every two seconds.
It's "Ch-ch-ch-ch-shoo,"
excessive information,
dizzying information.
Ten to the ninth meters,
ten to the eighth...
Like in a chase
sequence in a movie,
everything is going by so fast,
it forces the observer to choose
the information
that's truly important,
which is the car or the person
that is running away from you...
I.e., the idea.
One. We are back
at our starting point.
Eames was aware that, in fact,
that this was somewhat dizzying,
and that it wasn't possible
to get all
of this information across
in a single viewing,
and that was fine.
What he probably didn't know
was that he was also looking
into the future
of audio-visual perception.
The pace at which we receive
information today
is as fast as he was doing
back then.
As a single proton
fills our scene,
we reach the edge
of present understanding.
As time went on,
Charles became more and more
and more interested in ideas,
especially science
and mathematics.
Ray was less engaged.
I mean, I'm no mathematician,
and I'm no... not an architect,
I'm not... I haven't had
certain training,
so I just try to help in the way
that I... in any way I can.
I don't stop to think
whether I can.
I just go as far as I can.
And if I...
If I can't, I can't.
I think Ray may have suffered
from a feeling
of marginalization,
because some
of those last projects
were heavy on ideas
and not as heavy
on the kind of visual richness
that was Ray's forte.
She's no longer as instrumental
in the entire thing.
She can apply an aesthetic,
she can dress a set, and so on,
but, um, she's no longer
as central.
Ray's exquisite taste,
her eye for form and color,
made her indispensible
to the Office.
But it could also be
a terrible burden.
I remember peering
into Ray's office
only once or twice,
because when the door opened
and I looked into it,
I thought, "I don't ever want
to look in there again,
because it's a little
frightening."
Ray had a little room,
smaller than Charles's,
directly across the hall
from his,
that was just absolutely jammed
with all of her little
pieces of paper
and all of her little slides
and all of the little notes
that people had mailed to her
and that she was mailing
to them.
And she would go in
and find things.
She would say, "Oh, I have one,"
and she would disappear
into the room
and come out
with the perfect kite.
Or she'd go in and find
the perfect scarf or something.
She would go,
and she would fuss with it,
and change it one day,
and the next day,
she would look at it again
and change
a little something else.
And I think over the years,
the perfectionism
did get in the way.
In a way, it crippled her.
Here is oh, a picnic
basket, a drawing of a basket.
Up in Seaview Village,
so probably Deborah Sussman.
It's a letter
from Lily Saarinen.
That's cool.
Look at that,
I've never seen that.
There we go...
"Dearest Queen
of all Pack Rats."
I think it was almost
a nervous tic with her.
She was constantly making notes,
and usually on the back of
Benson & Hedges wrappers.
This is one of the wrappers,
and on this side
she designed something
that looks very reminiscent
of some of her fabric designs.
And you turn it over, and you
see it's a Benson & Hedges.
And on this side
are notes she made
for lighting of the puppet shows
at the IBM pavilion.
You'd find them everywhere.
They'd drive you crazy.
And they could say, "Buy soap,"
or "Liver and onions
for dinner,"
or they'd have
very elaborate ideas.
She had her suits made,
and they had pockets that went
all the way to the hem.
So whatever she wanted to keep,
she would just shove
in the pockets.
So what would happen
with these notes?
McALEER: Well, for a time,
she asked the staff
to try to type them up,
and I think it became
too overwhelming for the staff.
It was such an avalanche
of notes.
Ray didn't communicate
like everybody else does.
She expected that you
pre-understood
what she was talking about.
The people who didn't
make the effort
would sometimes use
the epithet "Crazy Rayzy,"
simply because they
didn't understand her.
But Ray is not crazy.
She's brilliant.
And Ray had a lot of competition
for Charles's attention,
which I don't think anybody ever
really gave her credit for.
That everybody wanted Charles
and not Ray.
He was the guy that
the IBM executives would call.
He was the guy that you went to
to discuss the projects
intellectually.
He was very charismatic.
Charles was extremely
charismatic.
He was very charismatic.
He was very handsome.
He was very handsome
and very charismatic.
I know that word is really
overused, but he was.
And especially very charismatic
to women.
He reminded me of Henry Fonda,
and I met Henry Fonda one time,
and I told Henry Fonda this,
that I thought
they looked alike,
and he said,
"That's a compliment."
I mean, he had these dimples,
and he... "Aw, shucks,"
kind of guy.
He was handsome
and smart, and cool.
So, you know, that's a kind of
lethal combination.
It was the vision.
It was the personality.
It was the charm.
It was the unexpected.
It was the person.
This is just a small selection
of letters that I went through
to find things that pertain
particularly to the work.
"In the next few weeks, I must
pull together a preliminary film
for the 'Franklin and Jefferson'
show."
And then the rest is personal.
I think their marriage,
it was a mystery to everybody,
in a way.
They were emotionally
extremely bonded.
But he found excitement
and thrills outside of Ray,
and outside of the Office,
which was really
crushing to her.
I met him when he was
on the visiting committee
for the architecture department
at M.I.T.
and I was a young
assistant professor.
Charles said, "Let's experiment
with some films on art."
I have many, many letters,
extraordinary letters.
Because we didn't live
in the same city,
we tried to see each other
as we could.
He had come to London,
and I was there,
and I could not get away.
And he said, "I will come
and stand in front of the house
at a certain time," and I
slipped out of this
rather formal dinner,
and there he was, and we just
looked at each other.
We had a very profound love
for each other.
He wanted very much
for us to get married
and to have a child,
and to close...
He wanted to close
the Eames Office in Venice,
which he found very burdensome,
and for us to open an office
together in New York.
And I made a decision...
And I don't know if was
the right decision...
That I couldn't do it to Ray.
Because I had a friendship
with her,
but above all because they had
been together so long,
and I knew how much
she depended on him.
And I said, "I can't do it."
Ray dealt with it
very privately.
She was hurt deeply,
but she wasn't
the kind of person
who would have said,
"It's me or her."
I don't think
she wanted to leave.
I think it was something
that she had to accept.
This wasn't the era
of easy-come, easy-go
relationships.
There was too much
shared life and community,
and the fact that he, you know,
had other relationships outside
of the Office...
he seemed to be constructed
that way.
But there is a position
that I think is nonsense,
which is to say that because
Charles was having
a relationship
with somebody else
that he couldn't then carry on
a collaboration with Ray.
I mean,
that clearly didn't happen.
In fact, Charles and Ray
were about to collaborate
on the largest,
most complex project
the Office would ever undertake.
For the nation's bicentennial
celebration in 1976,
the Eames Office designed
"The World
of Franklin and Jefferson,"
a traveling show made up
of three films,
40,000 words
translated into four languages,
and thousands of photographs
and objects,
including a stuffed bison.
When "Franklin and Jefferson"
opened in Paris,
it was seen by 50,000 people
in two months.
More than a thousand visitors
saw it each day
in London and Warsaw.
But when it came to New York,
the reception was different.
When it appeared at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
The New York Times reviewed it,
and the headline was,
"What Is This Stuff
Doing at the Met?"
It was one of the first times
the Eameses were ever
criticized.
It had an enormous
amount of text.
Nobody could have possibly read
it all, it was so dense.
This show was
a bit picky for me,
too many little objects
that I would remember none.
It was too many things to see.
I can remember about ten things.
He knew so much
about all these things,
he couldn't edit out something.
These are things of the period
and of the time,
from Mount Vernon.
They were all
so interesting to him,
and he was familiar with them,
and he could see all these
connections.
But you can't keep it all
in your head
if you're not
that familiar with it.
You could
call it clutter, but that's not
what Charles
would have called it,
because clutter is
just stuff that's
dropped and abandoned
and forgotten and left there.
It was dense,
and it was complex,
but there was a mind at work
placing it there.
Whether you as the recipient
were willing and able to accept
that is another question.
They're pushing up
against the envelope
of what technology could do,
because they're trying to give
the visitor
a hypertext experience,
but they're doing it
in physical space.
And it doesn't work.
They are anticipating
what the computer can do today
very easily
with layering text and giving
you at different levels.
So it's a failure,
but it's an honest failure.
The criticism of
"Franklin and Jefferson"
hit Charles hard.
The
"Franklin and Jefferson" show
was an exhausting show
because it was huge,
and I think sort of
the machinery of doing that
was just tiring.
I saw Charles at his happiest
when he was getting to do
a lot of photography.
And he was very engaged directly
on the creative process
of doing the photographs...
Which led me to the idea
that maybe he felt
he was missing something,
you know,
because he had had
the transition
to more of an executive
position at the Office.
It was very hard for him,
because he didn't really have
a successor,
and for the years
that I was there, he was always
looking for the perfect person.
It was a battle one day
with the IBM representative,
Mike Sullivan,
and Mike said,
"Why don't you shut this down?"
And he said, "I'd like to."
And Sullivan said,
"What would you do?"
And he said, "I'd just travel
and shoot."
"But," he said, "I don't know
what to do about Ray,
and closing the Office."
He was tired, and he was,
I don't know if it was his
heart, but he was cold a lot.
I brought him one morning...
It was a Saturday morning,
and I'd made applesauce cake
or something,
and I brought it to the office,
and I handed it to Charles
wrapped in tin foil,
and it was still warm,
and he took it,
pressed it to his chest,
and he was thrilled
to have that warmth
just sort of on his chest.
I was out of
the office the day that he died.
It was, in a way,
it was expected.
It just didn't seem possible.
I mean, I knew that some people
that Charles worked with,
men in the East, wept.
He was such a dominant force in
the lives of designers that...
it was like there was suddenly
a big empty hole.
There are still days
when I'm driving
down the highway,
thinking about things,
and I think,
"Why did you die?
I'm not through with you yet!
I haven't finished asking you
the questions I wanted to ask."
He was the most important person
in my life.
I mean, he could be, he could
really be tough, you know,
but he...
he was an extraordinary person.
After Charles died,
suddenly Ray was
the head of the Office.
She gathered everybody around,
and she talked about her goals
and what she wanted to do,
and how she needed our help.
And it was really very powerful,
because she had never
done that before.
But she felt this huge burden
about carrying on the name
and carrying on the Office.
And I think it was killing her.
And I said, "Come on, Ray,
why don't you
just close the Office,
and let's go and paint."
And she said
"No, that's all in the past.
I can't do that anymore."
Without Charles,
activity in the Eames Office
dwindled,
until it was time
to finally close 901.
Ray focused
on the painstaking work
of cataloguing the voluminous
40-year output
of the Eames Office.
Nearly 350,000 photographs
and half a million documents
had to be organized for shipment
to the Library of Congress.
But over the years,
a new generation
lifted Ray
from Charles's shadow,
discovering in her
exuberant design sense
a refreshing alternative
to the austerity of modernism.
And Ray seemed to finally
find her voice
as one of the most influential
women of American design.
Best for the most for the least,
that was always the principle.
That's why we became interested
in mass production.
At that point,
women began to point to Ray.
You know, "If there are
two Eameses,
why aren't they both credited?"
And now, of course, they are.
She kept saying, in
the hospital, "What day is it?"
And I would say,
"It's Wednesday the 18th."
And she would say, "Oh."
And then the next time
I would come,
then she would say,
"What day is it?"
"It's Thursday."
"Oh."
I think she wanted to die
on the same day as Charles
because it sort of symbolized
their being one.
Her last statement was one
of being with Charles.
This guy and that guy
could trade places.
There's probably an Eames chair
literally in every single issue
that we've published.
You know, you could go
from the DAX to the DSS
to the LCW,
you know, you'll get
this whole range.
Clockwise just a little.
Just a little.
The furniture still has
a quality
that every young designer
is searching for,
because of the amount of thought
that's been put into it
by everyone whose hands touch
the project.
I think you see that optimism
of the American spirit
in their design.
It provided
just a great blueprint
for how we could live our lives.
What furniture designers
ever have produced
40 to 50 pieces of furniture
that have been in production
for five decades?
But the other thing is
the sheer joy,
that aspect of play.
No one else, I think,
had that combination
of the pragmatic
and the aesthetic.
Seven...
They loved to say,
"We don't do art.
We solve problems."
It's the process.
It's, how do we get
from where we are
to where we want to be?
Grasp the rear
of the viewfinder...
Charles and Ray were
always looking to the future.
They weren't
sort of sitting around,
telling war stories about
organic furniture.
What they were doing is like,
"What's the next thing?"
They were there
for the major moments
in American history,
and they were really the
pioneers of the information age.
The visitor
can try out the computer
as a carrier of information.
The breadth
of the work is extraordinary,
but there is also a unifying
theme of beauty
and a desire to reach
a broad audience.
So if it was pulled forward
a little bit?
Every designer owes them
some amount of debt,
but at the same time, part of
that debt should be to kind of
take what they did
and move beyond it.
a title that you earn.
And it's a little embarrassing
to hear
people refer to themselves
as artists.
It's like referring to
themselves as a genius.
This was a man who was
a Merlin of curiosity.
He was driven by his curiosity.
We weren't sure
quite what he was.
Was he an architect?
Was he a designer?
Was he a filmmaker?
But what he was, obviously,
was something
we all wanted to be.
I had been trained as a painter,
but when we were working
on furniture,
and again in film,
it never seemed like leaving
painting in any way,
because it was
just another form.
She made paintings out of
what she was surrounded by.
Everything she touched, she
turned into something magical.
Everything that they did
in design, she saw as
an extension of her painting.
And everything they did in
design, he saw as an extension
of his architecture.
For them, these names like
painter and architect,
they weren't job descriptions.
They were ways of looking
at the world.
They were introducing people
to look at the world
differently.
Life was fun, was work, was fun,
was life.
People would say
it was childlike behavior,
but what's wrong with that?
The Eameses have put
all this joy back in life.
You know that modernism,
let's face it,
was getting boring.
Had they just designed
the furniture,
they'd be in the pantheon.
It's the multifaceted nature
of the career
that is extraordinary.
They give shape to America's
20th century.
I came from
an architectural office
where there were individual
tables with a conference room,
and there was carpet
on the floor.
There were lights.
We had drafting tables,
and all the equipment
that you needed,
et cetera, et cetera.
I walk into Eames Office,
and it was like walking
into a circus.
I walked in the door, and
of course I immediately thought,
"Got any jobs here?"
I'm just totally blown away
by the patina on every surface
of graphics, and there were
models everywhere,
and there was just stuff.
I was just overwhelmed.
I saw this incredible apparition
of animation stands
and photographs
spread out on tables.
Models being lit
for photography,
a screening room,
and a wonderful wood shop.
Saltwater tanks.
There were Eames chairs
with Steinberg drawings on them.
Every kind of visual treat
you can imagine.
And I thought, "I've come
to work in Disneyland."
If you had taken
the roof off of it,
you would see that place
changing constantly.
So we'd just go around
and take everything
out of the middle
of the studio,
to put up a movie set
to take pictures tomorrow,
and then the next day,
you'd take out all the movie set
and put the tables all back up,
and everybody's
back at work again.
It was very informal.
I mean, there wasn't ever
any kind
of routine.
There were no
"regular meetings."
Because I did not have
a design degree,
many of the people
in the Office thought
I probably shouldn't be there,
but Charles had
a different attitude.
And he said this to me...
"I can teach you how to draw.
"If you can think
and you can see,
and you can prove that to me,
you can work here."
For four decades,
901 Washington Boulevard
in Venice Beach, California,
was one of the most
creative addresses on Earth.
Dozens of gifted young designers
cut their teeth within the walls
of the studio.
But the vision for the Office
came from the top.
We have to have
a place where you can recognize
where you're going
when you start out.
Modern design was born
from the marriage
of art and industry.
The Eames Office was born
from the marriage
of Ray Kaiser...
A painter who rarely painted...
And Charles Eames...
An architecture school dropout
who never got his license.
"Eventually, everything
connects," Charles said.
Furniture, toys, architecture,
exhibitions, photography,
and film were all connected
in the wild, whimsical world
of the Eames Office.
Charles and Ray Eames
wanted to bring
the most magnificent experiences
that you could have
with your eyes
to the largest number of people.
I don't think there's anything
more important
for an artist to want to do.
It was a career that defined
what it means to be a designer.
And it all began with a chair.
Charles, where did the
classic Eames chair come from?
Did it come to you in a flash,
as you were shaving one morning?
It sort of came to me
in a 30-year flash, if you want.
TIME magazine called it
"the greatest design
of the 20th century."
But it didn't start out
that way.
It began as a failure.
Responding to a competition
at the museum of modern art
in 1940,
two unknown young architects...
Charles Eames and his friend,
Eero Saarinen,
set out to reinvent
the very idea of the chair.
The goal is to create
an inexpensive,
mass-produced chair
which is well designed,
and which is molded to the body,
because it doesn't need a lot
of upholstery, which is,
"a," old-fashioned,
and "b," expensive.
Upholstery is what
Louis XIV did.
Working at the Cranbrook
Academy of Art near Detroit,
Eames and Saarinen thought they
could mold
the new miracle material,
plywood,
into two directions at once
to make a comfortable,
form-fitting shell.
The critical point
is where that back
becomes the seat.
The glues aren't good
enough, and the chair splinters,
which means,
when you'd sit on it,
it would be a little
uncomfortable.
So they have to upholster it.
Despite failing
at their goal of creating
a single-piece plywood shell,
Charles and Eero
won the competition.
The irony is that
the chair that
Eames and Saarinen designed,
they couldn't really
manufacture.
Even with the upholstery
to cover the cracked surface,
no existing machine could
successfully mold the plywood
into the shape of the chair.
It couldn't be made
in the way that they claimed
it could be made.
They had designed the look of it
without designing
the substance of it.
After many unsuccessful
attempts,
Eero Saarinen scrapped
the project.
But Charles wasn't ready
to give up...
This time, with a new partner.
At Cranbrook, he had become
friendly with Ray Kaiser,
a talented young artist who had
helped with the chair project.
I said to Ray one day,
"How did you and Charles
get together?"
"Oh! I can't talk about it."
I said, "Well, why not?"
"Well, we just did."
They sparked, and
the rest is literally history.
And I think in Ray,
he really found his complement.
But there was a problem.
Charles was already married.
He had moved up to Cranbrook
from St. Louis
with his wife, Catherine,
and his young daughter, Lucia.
The love letters are
Charles's letters to Ray,
because the letters that Ray
wrote back to Charles,
Charles destroyed,
because he was married.
They show Charles madly in love
with her.
There's no doubt about that.
He talks about walking past
the building
that she used to live in
and looking up at her window,
and they are very moving.
These letters are talking about
a joined future
as artists together.
I think his decision feels made.
Ray certainly felt uncomfortable
enough to leave Cranbrook
and go away and think about
what she was going to do
thereafter.
Catherine was
a very impressive person.
Knowing them both, as I did,
you can see why
they didn't stay together.
He really thought he had
something to offer the world,
and this was going to be
a journey
with a lot of unexpectedness.
This was a journey that might
not lead to, uh, success.
And I think that maybe
at that point in her life,
this was not necessarily
the place that Catherine
wanted to go.
But I think that maybe
in Charles's mind
that he had wanted a life
where love and work
and life and work
were all blended together.
Charles quit his job
at Cranbrook,
and, in one last letter to Ray,
asked for her hand in marriage.
His future with his new bride
now depended
on making the chair work.
Broke and short on options,
Charles and Ray
headed from Michigan to L.A.
to finish what he had started.
Part of this journey
to California was
they were both
going to figure out
how to mass-produce molded
plywood and compound curves...
Which sounds very unromantic,
but I think it probably
was pretty romantic,
under the circumstances.
In their two-bedroom
apartment in Westwood Village,
Charles and Ray set up
a makeshift workshop.
The...
The first to...
That did the molding,
which was so magic,
we called it by a magic name.
So we called it "Kazam!"
The "Kazam!" machine was
a jury-rigged molding device
made out of heating coils
and a bicycle pump.
But in 1942,
with the nation at war,
raw materials were scarce,
and the "Kazam!" lay silent.
But with the setback,
there was also opportunity.
The U.S. military
needed better splints.
The standard-issue
splint was metallic,
and so the vibration of
the two people carrying them
actually would make
the wound worse.
They would actually be
better off
if you grabbed a stick
off the ground and tied it to it
than with this amplification.
So Charles and Ray said,
"Well, you know,
we're experimenting
with molded plywood.
Why don't we try
and design a new splint?"
They're trying to make
a three-dimensional curve,
kind of a bowl, you might say.
They can't quite do it yet.
So they need holes
in the plywood
in order to release the tension,
'cause otherwise
it's going to splinter
where they try to do it.
But working within
the constraints,
what's nice is that this is
exactly what you need
for a splint, 'cause you need
a place for the bandages to go.
In a rented warehouse space,
their team of skilled designers
and craftspeople
made 150,000 splints.
With peace approaching,
Charles and Ray
had one thing on their minds...
Applying the lessons
of the splints
to the failed plywood chairs.
This time, they wouldn't design
the look of the chair first.
They would never make
that mistake again.
They would let the design flow
from the learning.
That meant
knowing who they were serving.
In Charles's words,
it was always about being
a good host to their guests.
The people we
wanted to serve were varied,
and to begin with we studied
the shape and postures
of many types...
Averages and extremes.
But it was more
than just a search
for the best chair design.
It was the beginning
of the Eames design process,
a process of learning by doing.
In the design of any structure,
it is often the connection
that provides the key
to the solution.
"Never delegate
understanding," Charles said.
It would become a hallmark
of Eames design,
their secret ingredient.
Charles said,
yeah, there's a secret.
First you have an idea,
then you discard the idea,
then you have 50 other ideas
and you discard them,
and then you do several models,
and they don't work,
and you throw them out.
And the secret is work and work
and work and work and work.
The plywood furniture
was good to go in 1946.
Charles said of the furniture,
"We wanted to make the best
for the most for the least."
That sentiment struck a chord
with the Herman Miller
furniture company.
Honest and simple
in its use of materials,
the plywood furniture was also
affordable for the common man.
Together, they would become one
of the great success stories
of the postwar era.
Charles and Ray Eames
provide much of the furniture
for a kind of
Upper-middle-class,
educated audience
moving to suburbia.
When the Second World War ended,
it wasn't just five years
of pent-up demand.
It was actually almost 15 years,
because you also have 10 years
of the Depression.
And people have much more money,
so if you wanted to sort of
do something
different than your parents,
you bought that Eames furniture.
And it was promoted that way.
Everything around the marketing
suggested,
"Here is something new
for a new society."
And America was a new society
in '45.
In the decades to follow,
Charles and Ray scored success
with line after line
of Eames furniture.
And their unmistakable designs
became a ubiquitous part
of American culture,
right up to today.
Sold for $900, 232.
I think the work retains
a real freshness.
Elements of it still inform
contemporary design today.
$700.
$2,000.
$2,100.
$2,100.
$7,000.
Fair warning,
selling...$13,000.
Are we done?
Sold for $13,000.
The rightness of the furniture
will continue to appeal
to new generations.
The word "Eames" has now
become a generic word.
I mean, if you go on eBay,
it always says, "Eames era"
blah, blah, blah.
So it's become
a word like "Victorian."
Maybe it's, in a way, accurate,
because just like Queen Victoria
represents an attitude,
Eames also embodies
a certain approach
to life and to thinking.
By the early '50s,
Charles had grown
an outsized reputation
as an icon of modernism,
fighting to inject
an ethical dimension
into American capitalism.
At that price,
the customer knows
exactly what he's going to get.
This!
In MGM's "Executive Suite,"
William Holden stars
as a curiously
Charles Eames-like
furniture designer.
We'll have a line
of low-priced furniture,
a new and different line,
as different from anything
we're making today
as a modern automobile is
different from a covered wagon.
In the outside world,
Charles's reputation
may have grown larger than life,
but within the Eames Office,
there was always the lingering
question of credit.
There are still some sore issues
among certain people who feel
they never were recognized
as much as they should,
but it's a very delicate issue.
The issue came to a head
back in 1946
at the unveiling
of the original Eames chair
when the museum of modern art
gave Charles a one-man show.
MOMA gives the name
Charles Eames,
and this causes a certain
tension in the Office,
because it was thought to be
a collaborative effort.
It's not that he's swooping
in or is doing nothing
and scarfing up all the credit,
but he is not the only designer
that was involved.
This happens all the time.
A group of young people
co-creating
and influencing each other
and inspiring each other,
and then the question is,
"Who did what?"
One of the last projects
I worked on was
"Day of the Dead," the film.
I was down in Mexico
helping with that film,
shooting, gathering objects,
and setting the type.
And I wrote,
"Assistance in Mexico,"
and I wrote the names
of the people.
So Charles came by my desk
and said, "What is that?!"
And I said, "But we worked
on it, didn't we?"
I went to New York
many, many times,
putting the time life
lobbies together,
and Charles never went
and saw them
while the things
were being constructed,
but I could never say
that I designed anything
at the Eames Office.
I never saw anything
come out of there that was not
signatured, you know,
by him and Ray.
When a product comes out,
it's a river.
It starts at one point,
and it ends at another point.
Many people jump into it
along the way.
And everybody contributes
a small piece,
but only if they go on
after that
to produce
a stunning amount of work,
I think, are they
capable of saying,
"I did this, this, and this
in the Eames Office
with no credit."
I think he ran the Office
a bit like a Renaissance studio.
You know, there's
a master painter,
but then there are
all the other people
who help realize the work.
He may have been exploiting us,
but if you were not stupid,
you were also exploiting
that relationship.
I was happy,
being exploited
by a proper master.
The most wonderful work is...
Is the conscience
and the talents of a person
who have every right
to have their name on it,
even though it's done
by minions of other people.
Things good and bad,
he rightfully has his name
on them, and they rightfully
are Charles Eames or
Charles and Ray Eames products.
Almost always,
when there's a successful man,
there is a very interesting
and able woman behind him.
And a better case
could seldom be found
than in Ray and Charles Eames.
Come on in, Ray.
Hello, I'm so happy to see you.
This is Mrs. Eames,
and she's going to tell us
how she helps Charles
design these chairs.
How do you manage that?
Well, uh, aside from serving
as an extreme in the testing,
there are a million things,
but, uh, I think
the most difficult thing
is to keep the big idea,
to be able to look
critically at the work.
Arlene Francis is
clearly having a hard time
with this husband and wife
working together.
You know, this is the era
of "Mad Men,"
as we're watching now.
This is not fitting.
And Charles Eames is trying
to promote Ray Eames,
as saying that,
"We collaborated on this."
Well, uh, Ray...
Ray was a painter.
Ray worked here in New York with
Hans Hofmann for a long time,
which is a pretty good start.
I actually thought
Charles was more embarrassed
than Ray.
Ray is hidden away.
Charles is being highlighted,
the great male designer.
It's a very interesting moment
of American sexual politics
in the 1950s.
Uh, I wonder if you're going
to maybe take us through
and show how... how the Eames
chair has developed.
And, Ray, shall we
let Charles do it,
or do you want to help with it?
Please, please.
No, you see, as I told you,
she is behind the man,
but terribly important.
Thank you, Ray.
All right, Charles...
The feminist conscience
had not been yet raised.
Ray would always stand
behind Charles.
And on camera or in interviews,
she said hardly anything.
Her warm but quiet conversation
shrank to total silence
before the camera,
but her impact on Eames' work
spoke for her.
She sat like a delicious
dumpling in a doll's dress,
concentrating
on a sweep of subjects
which would seemingly
choke a computer.
People always made the mistake
that Charles and Ray,
it was two brothers.
They were a married couple,
while at the same time,
they were partners
in whatever
their design effort was.
Ray felt, I think,
deeply enraged
and hurt, on occasion,
when it was assumed that it was
actually just Charles's business
and it was the office
of Charles Eames,
not the office
of Charles and Ray Eames.
It was Charles
who was in charge,
but the body of work
would not have been the same
without Ray's contributions,
and how you separate that out,
I don't know.
If the public saw Ray
as little more
than the devoted wife
supporting her husband,
Charles saw a talented artist
who had participated
in the birth of abstract art
in America.
Her mentor was the German
abstract expressionist
Hans Hofmann.
Hofmann is one
of the great catalytic figures
in American art.
He starts a school
in New York City in '33
with at times no more than
a dozen or two students.
They, together, are the seed
out of which
the new American art
really grows.
He was getting ideas from people
like Mondrian, Paul Klee,
Kandinsky,
but he was communicating them
not as textbook learning, but as
this incredibly visceral
sensation.
And I have talked to people
who remember him
walking into the studio and
looking at a drawing of theirs
and tearing it down the middle
and then taking the two parts
and moving them.
And then suddenly something
that had been very static
was dynamic.
So I think it's there
that Ray learned
some, at least, of this
wonderful capacity that she had
for collaging,
for juxtaposition.
She could move things around
very, very easily
and beautifully and find form,
and find form
in relation to other form.
Ray knew what was art
and what was not.
And Charles depended
on her aesthetic genius.
And she would put
objects on shoots
that would just bring
the whole thing to life.
By putting the stack
of black wire chairs
naked with the wooden bird
with the little wire legs,
gave you a very different
feeling about those chairs.
Charles could not deal
with the idea
that any of the furniture
would have color on it.
If you put a palette of colors
in front of him,
they just... like he couldn't
handle it.
It just went over his head.
He deferred to her completely
on color sense.
She saw everything
as a painting.
She had these enormous eyes
that were...
They were open like this
all the time.
And I think Charles
was very dependent on that.
You could just hear him say,
"Ra-ay!"
Which meant, "Come and help!"
At the Library of Congress,
Ray's letters
to a traveling Charles
show her fastidious attention
to every detail
of their life and work.
When she writes to Charles
in Paris
and she's talking about
the slides that he's just taken,
and she has this sketch
showing how she
and Sandro and Don Albinson
have changed the chair.
And then she's going on
about the films,
and she's going on
about Elmer Bernstein.
Then she tells him all
the places to shop in Paris
and where to get his shoes
and where to get her gloves
and what the stitching
should be like on the gloves
and how this perfume
by Balmain is $55 an ounce here,
but it's cheaper in Paris,
"and please get it for me."
It's as if
they were one individual
with two different
special areas,
and a lot of it was unspoken,
just eye... eye contact.
A nodding of something...
An idea
that they both would agree on.
So that's how
you begin to separate
their artistic personalities
and their contributions.
But the separating them
isn't the important part.
It's what they created together.
That's why it's so good.
Perhaps the greatest
Eames design of all
was the image
of Charles and Ray.
Their playful self-portraits,
eccentric dress,
and quotable quotes
all contributed
to the endearing picture
of a happy, modern couple
absorbed in the challenges
of their work.
Charles and Ray
were cultural icons,
but their public face masked
a deep desire for privacy.
After long hours at 901,
they would retreat
to the home they built
in Pacific Palisades.
Charles and Ray were
their own community,
and we were
in the satellite group.
And so was everybody else.
I had no sense that they
were trying to keep out
the outside world
or anything else.
They had created a world
and a lifestyle
that just required them to go
in this tunnel from their house
to the work, you know,
back home again,
so what you surround yourself
with and the choices you make
about where you live
and how you live
and the artifacts you have,
they're all based upon
trying to create
a seamless environment
and a seamless life.
Originally, the house
was designed by Charles
with Eero Saarinen as part of
the influential case study
housing program in 1945.
But Charles and Ray were not
ones to let a good design rest.
Charles Eames and
Eero Saarinen designed a house
that we now call
the Bridge House,
and it was for this site.
It would have cantilevered
from the hillside
out into the middle
of the meadow.
One of the ideas of the house
was to use technologies
that had come
out of the war effort.
So all the parts of this house
were off the shelf.
But the Bridge House
was never built.
After World War II,
there were major
material shortages,
and it took about
two or three years
to even get the parts
that they had ordered.
And in that time,
Charles and Ray
fell in love with this meadow.
We spent all...
All our spare time here.
Began to think it would be
criminal to put that house
in the middle of the field.
Charles realized,
"Oh, we're making the classic
architect's mistake."
You find a beautiful site,
and you plunk a house
in the middle of it.
With the meadow in mind,
Charles and Ray redesigned
the Bridge House
and began construction.
It was relatively quick,
because they were relying on
some form of prefabrication,
of bringing materials
to the site
and assembling them.
On Christmas Eve, 1949,
Charles and Ray moved in.
Hines: The Eames house
in Los Angeles
on that bluff
overlooking the Pacific Ocean
is surely one of the great
buildings of the 20th century.
Known to architectural
historians
as Case Study House Number 8,
it is the archetypal
modern house.
Or at least,
it started that way.
The Eames house
as it was first made
is very different
from what it became
as they lived in it
through the years
and as it acquired
all their little touches.
I think people miss that
unless you've really been there
and been inside of it.
Now, do you remember this?
Do you remember this?
I do.
I do.
Uh, I don't remember
this one here,
but there was at least one
at the Office.
Modern design has this
sort of cliché of being
the, you know,
the homes of super villains.
Very hard-edged things.
You can't have, you know,
your Pepperidge Farm cookies
on the kitchen counter,
because that's going to ruin,
you know, this perfect tableau
of this perfect life
that you live.
But you would never look
at the Eames House
and think that.
The container for your life
can be simple,
but that doesn't mean
your life has to be simple.
What was in the house
was a combination of things
that one hadn't seen before.
There was a tumbleweed
hanging from the ceiling.
Well, now you can see a lot of
tumbleweed around
in people's houses,
but in those days,
it was.
And near the tumbleweed
hanging from the ceiling,
there were two
Hans Hofmann paintings
suspended from
the deck of the roof.
The floor was just another
canvas for Ray,
the ceiling was
just another canvas,
a sofa was a canvas
for a collage of objects.
She would have entirely
all of her famous
blue and white dishes
stacked up.
But she would have little red
hearts or little red accents.
And it was all perfect.
I went to dinner
at Ray and Charles's house
one night,
and it came to dessert.
So what they had arranged
for dessert
was three bowls of flowers
that they put in front of you
to admire,
so it was a visual dessert.
I was really off with that,
I can tell you.
I was really...
Because I hadn't eaten much.
I was saving up for the...
So I'm looking
at these stupid flowers,
you know,
and I'm saying, "What the hell
is wrong with these people?"
You know, so I got in my car,
and I drove out to the nearest
Dairy Queen.
"Take your pleasure
seriously," Charles said,
and that's exactly
what they did.
Every time
the Ringling Brothers
and Barnum & Bailey Circus
would come to town, we would all
get out our cameras
and our ectochrome, and we'd go
running downtown, and we'd
photograph the circus.
And he said, "Photograph."
"What?"
He said, "Anything you want.
Just photograph."
And a couple of people
of the audience
were there to feed you.
It's like a machine gun,
somebody was feeding you
the cartridges.
And I took a lot of pictures.
What impressed him was
how everybody knew their place,
and sometimes they had
two or three different tasks
that they had to do.
The circus looks
like a free-for-all
and is absolutely
a model of constraints.
And for Charles,
this was one supreme example...
"the performance."
"Never let the blood show,"
he would say.
And this went back
to his philosophy
of no good design,
no good performance
without restrictions, without
restraints, without rules.
He goes to the circus,
and he just
is overwhelmed by the richness
of everything, you know,
the costumes and the wagons
and the tent.
And he comes back,
and he's trying to...
You can't turn a circus
into a piece of furniture,
but he's desperately wanting to.
Charles and Ray did not
turn the circus into a chair,
but they did turn
the Eames Office into a circus.
He wasn't embarrassed at all
about what it is
that he was doing.
You know, he felt really
confident about,
"Yeah, this is a toy shop.
This... I'm just
having fun here.
And, you know, somehow or other,
you guys bring me money
and tell me to go ahead,
and I'm going to."
Royalties from
Herman Miller gave Charles
the freedom to move beyond
his reputation
as a designer
of modern furniture.
Herman Miller
was always after him
to do more chairs, and he would
do chairs every now and then,
but I don't think he liked
to think of himself
or have others think of him
as the chair designer.
I was a film critic,
and that gave me an excuse
to go down to 901.
I fell in love with
the whole concept of 901,
which was a kind of
Renaissance art workshop,
where they did everything.
At the time, he was considered
a kind of cutesy,
passé little filmmaker,
but no one had ever written
about the films.
Eames films are their own genre,
the product not of a film studio
concerned with profits,
but of a curious mind
yearning to communicate
the complex beauty
of everyday objects.
We've never used
film as an art form.
We just use film as a tool.
They were, at heart,
a kind of mixture of vanity
and self-expression.
They only had one obligation,
and that was
to satisfy Charles.
Much of our energy
is like the guy in Vaudeville
that has
the plates going, and he's
intent on getting 30 plates
spinning at one time,
but part of the process is
quickly being aware of the ones
that are winding down,
and keeping them spinning.
One of the titles
that began to circulate
between all the employees
was the Eamery,
because it was like this place
where everyone was driven
to work all the time.
It was 24/7,
365.
Going to the Eames Office
and watching people
at their desks
was like watching people
take their brains out
and knead them like dough.
People that came
from the outside
couldn't believe that this was
the way things were done,
but it was a delicious agony.
It was like a temple for me.
Many of us understood very well
that we were very poorly suited
for employment
in certain kinds of jobs.
We were very well suited
to be there.
Charles had a terrible
time interacting with people.
Several times, I hired people,
and they would be there
like three days,
and he'd come to me and say,
"I just can't stand that guy.
Get him out of here."
And I never did know what it was
that he saw in that person
that he could just not
work with them.
I happen to have
a sort of interest in language
as a means of communication,
which I like to believe
can be simple and direct.
Charles, I would say,
didn't subscribe to that.
Uh, no, we have to... you know,
the only thing is, uh, Perry,
we have to have some sort of
a background before we do this,
because one sort of begins to...
His speech wasn't
yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda.
It was stop and go,
and stop and go.
No, you... you let me... cut
this, let me re... let me...
He had this incredible ability
to surround every subject
with a little cloud of words.
We... we were hoping to...
There were two...
There were several things.
There was, uh...
You finally got the message
at the end of about
15 or 20 minutes of wondering,
"What the hell is he
talking about?"
It finally dawned on you
that he was telling you
you were an absolute clown
because there's something wrong.
This one is
going to have something to do
with what I think of
as the new covetables.
He appeared
one day at a conference at UCLA,
and he started to speak, and it
just ran right off the track.
Looked up, and he said,
"I'm sorry.
I just...
Isn't going to work today."
And somebody said, "No, no!"
So he said,
"Well, give me a minute."
He put his head down.
And everybody waited.
And it took about two minutes.
And he raised up.
And he just took off.
Boom.
Reams of paper.
What you do with a ream of paper
can never quite come up
to what the paper offers.
He knew where his center was.
And there are not a lot of
people that can do that.
I... I have buttons
that get pushed,
but I don't know
where my center is.
For Charles,
knowing where his center was
meant working
for powerful clients
without compromising his ideals.
And making a film to represent
the United States
in communist Russia in 1959
would put that philosophy
to the test.
At the height of the Cold War,
the American government
and the government
of the Soviet Union
decided to hold
joint expositions.
The United States would show
what America was about
to the Soviet public,
and the Soviet Union would show
what they were about to America.
And one of the centerpieces
were a series
of American kitchens,
and it was there
that Khrushchev and Nixon
had their so-called
Kitchen Debate.
There are some instances
where you may be ahead of us.
There may be some instances...
For example,
color television...
Where we're ahead of you.
But in order for both of us...
For both of us to benefit...
For both of us to benefit...
But the U.S.
Information Agency
decided that they had to show
Russians more about America
than just cars
and household appliances.
The idea is that
Charles and Ray will make a film
about life in the USA:
"Glimpses of the USA."
How could you make the world
as we see it
in the United States...
How could you make it
really credible
to an audience like that?
We could've shown the greatest
freeway in the United States.
If we'd shown one picture
and they'd gone,
they'd say, you know,
"They've got the great
freeway interchange,
but we've got one at Minsk,
and we're going to build one
at Smolensk,
and we'll have two,
and they have one."
But in the redundancy
of the multi-image technique,
in something like 12 seconds,
I think we showed
120 freeway interchanges.
People were sent
all over the country.
Friends were called
to take images
so that it looked nationalistic.
It couldn't look specific
and regional.
It had to be
national and egalitarian.
Charles said...
Wanted pictures
of people setting off for work,
children coming from school,
coming up from the subway.
And freeways.
So I did my first,
you know, helicopter flights,
sort of strapped in,
leaning way out.
I think the State Department
had sort of envisioned
having lots of troop marches.
And Charles said
he'd do the film,
but he didn't want to have it
reviewed before it was shown.
The government
really didn't have any idea
what was happening.
We would have these showings
for the guy who would represent
the government, coming out.
It seemed like each time,
it would just get going,
and then it'd go blank.
And we'd say, "That's as far
as we are right now."
And he'd say, "Well...
Yeah, I guess it looks okay.
I don't know."
So he'd go away.
Well, as Charles said, sometimes
if you don't ask
for people's opinions,
then they don't
give them to you.
They just got there
the day before,
and I think by that time,
the USIA was just relieved
that there'd be anything
to show.
You know, and here you
have this giant effort
that'd gone into
building the building
and putting the screens up,
and tickets being...
All of that happening.
And he's waiting
till the very last minute.
It's just kind of his nature.
Right at the end,
he would suddenly appear,
and it would look
like it was effortless.
He'd say, you know,
"This is just a little something
we've been doing."
You know, and there'd be
blood all over the floor
from the thing, you know?
When we look at the night sky,
these are the stars we see...
The same stars that shine down
upon Russia each night.
We see the same clusters,
the same nebulae.
And from the sky, it would be
difficult to distinguish
the Russian city
from the American city.
If you're going to communicate
with 3 million Soviet citizens,
you need to say something true.
You can't just show off
you've got
better weapons or this or that.
You've got to try to speak
from the heart, and they did.
Was it propaganda?
Goodness, yes, have you seen it?
Yes, it's, it's selling
the U.S.,
and it's selling, I think,
a very sanitized USA.
Of course it was propaganda.
They were Cold Warriors.
The difference is they...
I believe they genuinely
believed it.
One of the interesting
things was how to end this.
Charles had this idea
of a jet plane.
Ray still felt this might be
a bit hard-edged, a bit...
Could have
military implications.
We never had an ending,
and one day Ray walked in
and said, "Forget-me-nots."
Charles said,
"Okay, forget-me-nots."
Forget-me-nots,
the universal symbol
of friendship,
translates directly
into Russian,
Nezabudki, "forget me not."
They described Nikita Khrushchev
with tears
running down his cheeks.
So you have this wonderful
sort of double ending
of the simplicity of a flower,
but then this "Forget me not."
And it worked
like the best Hollywood movie.
The Moscow show made
Charles and Ray newly famous,
not as designers of furniture,
but as communicators.
Communicators who used images
rather than words.
Charles was very wary of words.
It's not about writing a script.
It's about a sequence of images
that can tell a story.
In the Eames film "Tops,"
there are no words,
just pictures.
In a way,
the film is a kind of an essay
about the nature and meaning
of a top.
In the beginning,
it's all about winding up,
getting started,
putting it together,
assembling the materials.
And then it's
about throwing them,
seeing how they work,
what they do,
how they dance,
how they spin, how they sing,
whatever it is
that their meaning is.
But then you come to one moment
where there's an architectural
plan on the tabletop,
a blueprint, and what spins
is a thumbtack, and you realize
you have suddenly gotten
directly into the essence
of what it means to be a top.
Things have meaning,
things have personality,
things express ideas.
Many designers were
and still are happy with
the manipulation of objects.
He was only truly deeply happy
manipulating an idea.
Beginning in the 1950s,
the idea of the computer
triggered fear in the minds
of Americans.
People were seeing computers,
and there was a worry
about them.
And this notion
of the electronic brain
feeds into fears that we're
going to be taken over
by machines.
At the time, computers
were synonymous
with just one company... IBM.
What was IBM's product?
Big vacuum tube machines,
huge room-size machines,
building-size machines, so that
the average individual
was feeling an alien,
science-fiction type
invasion of my privacy.
How do you combat that?
IBM turned to the Eames Office.
To overcome the computer's
PR problem,
Charles and Ray set out
to humanize it.
Properly related,
it can maintain a balance
between man's needs
and his resources.
It's done in this,
what to us today
looks really corny...
But at the time, this was
thought to be radical...
To do a film for a science
company, like a cartoon.
Something has now
emerged that might make
even our most elegant theories
workable.
And you go from the abacus.
As human problems
become more complex,
people invent
more complicated machines
to solve those problems,
and the culmination of that is
the computer.
This is a story of a technique
in the service of mankind.
It's not
going to take over the world,
it's not going to be robots.
It's the logical
evolutionary progression
of man developing products
to solve problems.
Charles's visionary
interest in computers
helped to bring IBM into
the Eames Office stables.
But it was not expertise
that made Charles and Ray
indispensible to
the rapidly growing company.
You sell your expertise,
you have a limited repertoire.
You sell your ignorance,
it's an unlimited repertoire.
He was selling his ignorance
and his desire to learn
about a subject.
And the journey...
Of him not knowing to knowing...
Was his work.
Over two decades,
Charles and Ray would complete
dozens of projects,
large and small, for IBM.
But perhaps the most bold was
their pavilion
for the 1964 New York
World's Fair,
a 1.2-acre experimental space
celebrating the role
of computers in everyday life.
I was drawing the stuff
as fast as he
could conjure it up,
and they came up with this idea
of putting that theater
up on top of these trees.
And so I knew they were going to
have these plungers
going into the ground...
They are going to move,
you know,
400 people up on this ramp.
And I knew, as a designer,
I knew I was going to
have to figure out some way
to make all that happen.
And he's just so excited
about this thing.
And I'm just standing there
like that.
And I said,
"Charles, this is just nuts."
And he says, "Yeah, and no one
had told us not to do it."
For the show in Moscow,
they had used seven screens.
But at the IBM Pavilion,
there were 22.
Charles was very big on
making people feel welcome.
You don't just get them in
an auditorium and show the film.
You have a host.
But, uh, it was very hard.
Everything you said not only had
to be memorized and rehearsed,
but it had to be timed,
so when you pointed
to this screen,
what you were talking about
appeared on this screen.
And the same with that screen
and all the others.
But the problem was,
the host
had a nervous breakdown.
As Charles and Ray's reputation
as visual communicators grew,
so did their list
of corporate clients.
N is for...
♪ Navigation equipment ♪
♪ Network protectors ♪
♪ Nuclear plant control ♪
♪ Nuclear reactor plants ♪
♪ For surface ships
and submarines ♪
Westinghouse,
Boeing, and Polaroid
all trusted the Eames Office
to solve their problems.
When the Office was hired
by Alcoa
to show off the uses
of aluminum,
they built a solar-powered
Do-Nothing Machine,
which did exactly that.
That was in the golden years,
when the heads of corporations
would speak,
a chair away from the designer.
So that if you needed
to talk to somebody,
you talked
to the decision maker.
You didn't talk to a manager
who talked to a director
who talked to a chief director
who talked to a vice president
who talked to
a senior vice president
who talked to
an executive vice president
who was allowed to talk to God.
Almost never
was there a dissenting voice.
We trusted his decision making
entirely.
So his freedom to do
and to explain
and to conceive and execute
was almost unparalleled.
They didn't have contracts.
They had a handshake.
All those huge projects
were done on a handshake.
"We're going to give you
the best product,
but we can't tell you
what it's going to cost."
And for IBM
and for Polaroid,
and for Herman Miller,
it was okay.
And for Charles,
these gentlemen's agreements
went both ways.
The budget for
"Mathematica" was $150,000.
It actually ended up
costing $300,000,
and Charles paid
for the $150,000
that it went over budget.
So the whole thing
about what things cost
and trying to keep it
within the budget
and meet the clients,
he didn't care about...
He cared about it, but he just,
he couldn't stop himself.
Charles and Ray's career
began with a utopian notion
of providing low-cost,
high-quality goods to the masses
through industrial production.
But they never viewed their work
for corporate titans
as selling out.
They wanted to work
for the Google of their time,
and they did, and it allowed
them incredible experimentation.
And they believed they could
have a bigger impact
on everyday life by working
for the bigger company.
IBM shared Charles's concern
that American kids were falling
behind in math and science.
And as usual, they gave
the Office free rein
to address the problem.
Maybe, Charles felt,
a film could help.
We begin
with a scene one meter wide,
which we view from just
one meter away.
Now, every ten seconds,
we will look
from ten times farther away,
and our field of view will be
ten times wider.
"Powers of Ten" would
become the best known
of all the Eames films,
viewed in countless classrooms
and copied freely by
filmmakers around the world.
Everyone has seen
"Powers of Ten."
They may not have seen
the version Charles did,
but they have seen
one of the countless rip-offs
of that film.
Ten to the sixth,
a one with six zeros,
a million meters...
Soon the earth will show
as a solid sphere.
Nobody had done
a movie like that.
How can you fail,
doing a cosmic zoom
in and out from all that is?
And so the concept is,
all by itself, mind-blowing.
The trip back to
the picnic on the lakefront
will be a sped-up version,
reducing the distance
to the Earth's surface by one
power of ten every two seconds.
It's "Ch-ch-ch-ch-shoo,"
excessive information,
dizzying information.
Ten to the ninth meters,
ten to the eighth...
Like in a chase
sequence in a movie,
everything is going by so fast,
it forces the observer to choose
the information
that's truly important,
which is the car or the person
that is running away from you...
I.e., the idea.
One. We are back
at our starting point.
Eames was aware that, in fact,
that this was somewhat dizzying,
and that it wasn't possible
to get all
of this information across
in a single viewing,
and that was fine.
What he probably didn't know
was that he was also looking
into the future
of audio-visual perception.
The pace at which we receive
information today
is as fast as he was doing
back then.
As a single proton
fills our scene,
we reach the edge
of present understanding.
As time went on,
Charles became more and more
and more interested in ideas,
especially science
and mathematics.
Ray was less engaged.
I mean, I'm no mathematician,
and I'm no... not an architect,
I'm not... I haven't had
certain training,
so I just try to help in the way
that I... in any way I can.
I don't stop to think
whether I can.
I just go as far as I can.
And if I...
If I can't, I can't.
I think Ray may have suffered
from a feeling
of marginalization,
because some
of those last projects
were heavy on ideas
and not as heavy
on the kind of visual richness
that was Ray's forte.
She's no longer as instrumental
in the entire thing.
She can apply an aesthetic,
she can dress a set, and so on,
but, um, she's no longer
as central.
Ray's exquisite taste,
her eye for form and color,
made her indispensible
to the Office.
But it could also be
a terrible burden.
I remember peering
into Ray's office
only once or twice,
because when the door opened
and I looked into it,
I thought, "I don't ever want
to look in there again,
because it's a little
frightening."
Ray had a little room,
smaller than Charles's,
directly across the hall
from his,
that was just absolutely jammed
with all of her little
pieces of paper
and all of her little slides
and all of the little notes
that people had mailed to her
and that she was mailing
to them.
And she would go in
and find things.
She would say, "Oh, I have one,"
and she would disappear
into the room
and come out
with the perfect kite.
Or she'd go in and find
the perfect scarf or something.
She would go,
and she would fuss with it,
and change it one day,
and the next day,
she would look at it again
and change
a little something else.
And I think over the years,
the perfectionism
did get in the way.
In a way, it crippled her.
Here is oh, a picnic
basket, a drawing of a basket.
Up in Seaview Village,
so probably Deborah Sussman.
It's a letter
from Lily Saarinen.
That's cool.
Look at that,
I've never seen that.
There we go...
"Dearest Queen
of all Pack Rats."
I think it was almost
a nervous tic with her.
She was constantly making notes,
and usually on the back of
Benson & Hedges wrappers.
This is one of the wrappers,
and on this side
she designed something
that looks very reminiscent
of some of her fabric designs.
And you turn it over, and you
see it's a Benson & Hedges.
And on this side
are notes she made
for lighting of the puppet shows
at the IBM pavilion.
You'd find them everywhere.
They'd drive you crazy.
And they could say, "Buy soap,"
or "Liver and onions
for dinner,"
or they'd have
very elaborate ideas.
She had her suits made,
and they had pockets that went
all the way to the hem.
So whatever she wanted to keep,
she would just shove
in the pockets.
So what would happen
with these notes?
McALEER: Well, for a time,
she asked the staff
to try to type them up,
and I think it became
too overwhelming for the staff.
It was such an avalanche
of notes.
Ray didn't communicate
like everybody else does.
She expected that you
pre-understood
what she was talking about.
The people who didn't
make the effort
would sometimes use
the epithet "Crazy Rayzy,"
simply because they
didn't understand her.
But Ray is not crazy.
She's brilliant.
And Ray had a lot of competition
for Charles's attention,
which I don't think anybody ever
really gave her credit for.
That everybody wanted Charles
and not Ray.
He was the guy that
the IBM executives would call.
He was the guy that you went to
to discuss the projects
intellectually.
He was very charismatic.
Charles was extremely
charismatic.
He was very charismatic.
He was very handsome.
He was very handsome
and very charismatic.
I know that word is really
overused, but he was.
And especially very charismatic
to women.
He reminded me of Henry Fonda,
and I met Henry Fonda one time,
and I told Henry Fonda this,
that I thought
they looked alike,
and he said,
"That's a compliment."
I mean, he had these dimples,
and he... "Aw, shucks,"
kind of guy.
He was handsome
and smart, and cool.
So, you know, that's a kind of
lethal combination.
It was the vision.
It was the personality.
It was the charm.
It was the unexpected.
It was the person.
This is just a small selection
of letters that I went through
to find things that pertain
particularly to the work.
"In the next few weeks, I must
pull together a preliminary film
for the 'Franklin and Jefferson'
show."
And then the rest is personal.
I think their marriage,
it was a mystery to everybody,
in a way.
They were emotionally
extremely bonded.
But he found excitement
and thrills outside of Ray,
and outside of the Office,
which was really
crushing to her.
I met him when he was
on the visiting committee
for the architecture department
at M.I.T.
and I was a young
assistant professor.
Charles said, "Let's experiment
with some films on art."
I have many, many letters,
extraordinary letters.
Because we didn't live
in the same city,
we tried to see each other
as we could.
He had come to London,
and I was there,
and I could not get away.
And he said, "I will come
and stand in front of the house
at a certain time," and I
slipped out of this
rather formal dinner,
and there he was, and we just
looked at each other.
We had a very profound love
for each other.
He wanted very much
for us to get married
and to have a child,
and to close...
He wanted to close
the Eames Office in Venice,
which he found very burdensome,
and for us to open an office
together in New York.
And I made a decision...
And I don't know if was
the right decision...
That I couldn't do it to Ray.
Because I had a friendship
with her,
but above all because they had
been together so long,
and I knew how much
she depended on him.
And I said, "I can't do it."
Ray dealt with it
very privately.
She was hurt deeply,
but she wasn't
the kind of person
who would have said,
"It's me or her."
I don't think
she wanted to leave.
I think it was something
that she had to accept.
This wasn't the era
of easy-come, easy-go
relationships.
There was too much
shared life and community,
and the fact that he, you know,
had other relationships outside
of the Office...
he seemed to be constructed
that way.
But there is a position
that I think is nonsense,
which is to say that because
Charles was having
a relationship
with somebody else
that he couldn't then carry on
a collaboration with Ray.
I mean,
that clearly didn't happen.
In fact, Charles and Ray
were about to collaborate
on the largest,
most complex project
the Office would ever undertake.
For the nation's bicentennial
celebration in 1976,
the Eames Office designed
"The World
of Franklin and Jefferson,"
a traveling show made up
of three films,
40,000 words
translated into four languages,
and thousands of photographs
and objects,
including a stuffed bison.
When "Franklin and Jefferson"
opened in Paris,
it was seen by 50,000 people
in two months.
More than a thousand visitors
saw it each day
in London and Warsaw.
But when it came to New York,
the reception was different.
When it appeared at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
The New York Times reviewed it,
and the headline was,
"What Is This Stuff
Doing at the Met?"
It was one of the first times
the Eameses were ever
criticized.
It had an enormous
amount of text.
Nobody could have possibly read
it all, it was so dense.
This show was
a bit picky for me,
too many little objects
that I would remember none.
It was too many things to see.
I can remember about ten things.
He knew so much
about all these things,
he couldn't edit out something.
These are things of the period
and of the time,
from Mount Vernon.
They were all
so interesting to him,
and he was familiar with them,
and he could see all these
connections.
But you can't keep it all
in your head
if you're not
that familiar with it.
You could
call it clutter, but that's not
what Charles
would have called it,
because clutter is
just stuff that's
dropped and abandoned
and forgotten and left there.
It was dense,
and it was complex,
but there was a mind at work
placing it there.
Whether you as the recipient
were willing and able to accept
that is another question.
They're pushing up
against the envelope
of what technology could do,
because they're trying to give
the visitor
a hypertext experience,
but they're doing it
in physical space.
And it doesn't work.
They are anticipating
what the computer can do today
very easily
with layering text and giving
you at different levels.
So it's a failure,
but it's an honest failure.
The criticism of
"Franklin and Jefferson"
hit Charles hard.
The
"Franklin and Jefferson" show
was an exhausting show
because it was huge,
and I think sort of
the machinery of doing that
was just tiring.
I saw Charles at his happiest
when he was getting to do
a lot of photography.
And he was very engaged directly
on the creative process
of doing the photographs...
Which led me to the idea
that maybe he felt
he was missing something,
you know,
because he had had
the transition
to more of an executive
position at the Office.
It was very hard for him,
because he didn't really have
a successor,
and for the years
that I was there, he was always
looking for the perfect person.
It was a battle one day
with the IBM representative,
Mike Sullivan,
and Mike said,
"Why don't you shut this down?"
And he said, "I'd like to."
And Sullivan said,
"What would you do?"
And he said, "I'd just travel
and shoot."
"But," he said, "I don't know
what to do about Ray,
and closing the Office."
He was tired, and he was,
I don't know if it was his
heart, but he was cold a lot.
I brought him one morning...
It was a Saturday morning,
and I'd made applesauce cake
or something,
and I brought it to the office,
and I handed it to Charles
wrapped in tin foil,
and it was still warm,
and he took it,
pressed it to his chest,
and he was thrilled
to have that warmth
just sort of on his chest.
I was out of
the office the day that he died.
It was, in a way,
it was expected.
It just didn't seem possible.
I mean, I knew that some people
that Charles worked with,
men in the East, wept.
He was such a dominant force in
the lives of designers that...
it was like there was suddenly
a big empty hole.
There are still days
when I'm driving
down the highway,
thinking about things,
and I think,
"Why did you die?
I'm not through with you yet!
I haven't finished asking you
the questions I wanted to ask."
He was the most important person
in my life.
I mean, he could be, he could
really be tough, you know,
but he...
he was an extraordinary person.
After Charles died,
suddenly Ray was
the head of the Office.
She gathered everybody around,
and she talked about her goals
and what she wanted to do,
and how she needed our help.
And it was really very powerful,
because she had never
done that before.
But she felt this huge burden
about carrying on the name
and carrying on the Office.
And I think it was killing her.
And I said, "Come on, Ray,
why don't you
just close the Office,
and let's go and paint."
And she said
"No, that's all in the past.
I can't do that anymore."
Without Charles,
activity in the Eames Office
dwindled,
until it was time
to finally close 901.
Ray focused
on the painstaking work
of cataloguing the voluminous
40-year output
of the Eames Office.
Nearly 350,000 photographs
and half a million documents
had to be organized for shipment
to the Library of Congress.
But over the years,
a new generation
lifted Ray
from Charles's shadow,
discovering in her
exuberant design sense
a refreshing alternative
to the austerity of modernism.
And Ray seemed to finally
find her voice
as one of the most influential
women of American design.
Best for the most for the least,
that was always the principle.
That's why we became interested
in mass production.
At that point,
women began to point to Ray.
You know, "If there are
two Eameses,
why aren't they both credited?"
And now, of course, they are.
She kept saying, in
the hospital, "What day is it?"
And I would say,
"It's Wednesday the 18th."
And she would say, "Oh."
And then the next time
I would come,
then she would say,
"What day is it?"
"It's Thursday."
"Oh."
I think she wanted to die
on the same day as Charles
because it sort of symbolized
their being one.
Her last statement was one
of being with Charles.
This guy and that guy
could trade places.
There's probably an Eames chair
literally in every single issue
that we've published.
You know, you could go
from the DAX to the DSS
to the LCW,
you know, you'll get
this whole range.
Clockwise just a little.
Just a little.
The furniture still has
a quality
that every young designer
is searching for,
because of the amount of thought
that's been put into it
by everyone whose hands touch
the project.
I think you see that optimism
of the American spirit
in their design.
It provided
just a great blueprint
for how we could live our lives.
What furniture designers
ever have produced
40 to 50 pieces of furniture
that have been in production
for five decades?
But the other thing is
the sheer joy,
that aspect of play.
No one else, I think,
had that combination
of the pragmatic
and the aesthetic.
Seven...
They loved to say,
"We don't do art.
We solve problems."
It's the process.
It's, how do we get
from where we are
to where we want to be?
Grasp the rear
of the viewfinder...
Charles and Ray were
always looking to the future.
They weren't
sort of sitting around,
telling war stories about
organic furniture.
What they were doing is like,
"What's the next thing?"
They were there
for the major moments
in American history,
and they were really the
pioneers of the information age.
The visitor
can try out the computer
as a carrier of information.
The breadth
of the work is extraordinary,
but there is also a unifying
theme of beauty
and a desire to reach
a broad audience.
So if it was pulled forward
a little bit?
Every designer owes them
some amount of debt,
but at the same time, part of
that debt should be to kind of
take what they did
and move beyond it.