ArcaMax

The strange house on 23rd Street -- a trapezoid of plywood, shower glass and chain link fence -- was the laughingstock of our Santa Monica neighborhood. Even Frank Gehry's gardener joked about the architect owner: "Poor Mr. Gehry."

Years later, my father and I attended an inaugural concert given at his stunning, sculpted Disney Hall. The Berlin Philharmonic played Schubert, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the most enchanting music I'd ever heard.

The architect Gehry listened in the middle of the hall with no fanfare. At intermission, I approached him for a brief interview.

With brio, he said, "I'm going nuts!"

Many more peak moments and curving buildings around the world rose before Gehry died at 96 this month. He made Los Angelenos excited about going downtown.

Great cities -- Prague, Paris and New York -- have Gehry's writing on their cityscapes, using shiny materials like stainless steel and titanium. They defy and dance on the vertical laws and right angles of his calling. Each is utterly unique.

If the cities were not great to begin with, Gehry made them into cultural destinations. Case in point: the monumental Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, a fishlike work set on its Spanish riverfront. In his frank style, Gehry said it reminded him of gefilte fish fare he ate when he was growing up.

2025 was a dark year. Did we have to lose another towering genius too? British playwright Tom Stoppard died at 88 in his country house, surrounded by sorrow and love.

Stoppard was our Shakespeare, just as inventive, meaningful and memorable. Like the Bard, he traversed across time easily.

"Arcadia" tantalized audiences with the real chance that a bright girl might have seen the future of computer coding a couple of centuries ago.

"Clarity of utterance," Stoppard told actors and directors, was his motto. His mind-bending and witty works explored such subjects as philosophy, quantum physics and, playfully, Hamlet's courtiers, in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."

In private life, Stoppard cut similarly striking scenes. Attending the opera "Aida" in Luxor, Egypt, with his (second) wife, Miriam, he quipped, it was better than "Aida" without Luxor.

Stoppard was revered on both sides of the Atlantic as the sun in the theater world's sky. He did some Hollywood work, coauthoring "Shakespeare in Love."

But he was the writer who showed up for play rehearsals. He led the London Library and other literary causes. He defended jailed dissidents such as his Czech friend (and later president) Vaclav Havel.

Like Gehry, whose vision might be "clarity of shape," his body of work soared as he aged. Mid-career, in "The Real Thing," Stoppard revealed some of his soul in Henry, a playwright crashing on the shoals of fidelity -- a very British theme. One line stayed with me:

"There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day."

Stoppard had dash and flash, which he shared generously with his 400 best friends, invited to his Chelsea Physic Garden party every other summer. Doesn't that sound Shakespearean?

Yet his final play, the elegiac "Leopoldstadt," set in flourishing Jewish Vienna before Nazi Germany, pays homage to family members who died in Auschwitz.

Stoppard regretted not knowing he himself was Jewish until adulthood. He also reproached himself for trotting out the line that he had "a charmed life," biographer Hermione Lee wrote.

Gehry and Stoppard belonged to the "Silent" Generation and changed their fields forever.

Children in hard times, the Depression and war, this generation is smaller and sandwiched in between the "Greatest" and "baby boomers."

"Silents" did not hold much power, except for one political genius: House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. Elected at 47, she met male skeptics as she climbed the leadership ladder. At 85, luckily she's still with us as the (former) first and only woman speaker of the House.

The California Democrat never flinched at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, when she faced grave danger. She once tore up President Donald Trump's speech, wearing suffrage white. And she disciplined a disorganized party and delivered Obamacare a victory.

Like Stoppard, the pristine Pelosi knows politics is a form of performance art, or theater. And she played the part of the brilliant outsider, like Gehry.

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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.

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