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They landed Composer Johnny (Body and Soul) Green as master of ceremonies. Jack Benny, Danny Kaye and Dinah Shore were persuaded to contribute their talents, Christian Dior himself put on a fashion show, and the Ambassador Hotel provided free space. Buff and Grace sweet-talked a Cadillac Eldorado out of General Motors to raffle off, and the evening—still remembered as the Eldorado Party—netted a munificent $400,000.
Sudden Chance. For three years the money sat in a bank while Buff busied herself elsewhere. Then one free day, on a sudden impulse Buff drove 50 miles south of Los Angeles to call on Myford Irvine, an eccentric millionaire she hardly knew whose family owned the famed 93,000-acre Irvine Ranch, now being turned into the world's largest private development, master-planned by William Pereira (TIME, Sept. 6, 1963). Her timing turned out to have been just right: Irvine killed himself within a month—but not before he had pledged Buff $100,000.
She scooped up another $100,000 from a foundation, was promoted to president of the Symphony Association, and persuaded the county board of supervisors to set aside 7½ acres in Los Angeles' projected civic center for a hall to house her orchestra. The county board not only agreed but chose top Los Angeles Architect Welton Becket for the job and undertook to pay his fee.
Battle of the Bar. Buff set herself a goal of $4,000,000, installed an office staff in what had been the swimming-pool changing rooms behind the Chandler mansion, and began a determined assault on every rich Californian she knew. A year later, she called a luncheon meeting of her big-money committee at Perino's Restaurant, prepared to go before them just $250,000 short of her $4,000,000 goal. But on the way in, she spied her old friend. Oilman Edwin Pauley, led him into the bar, and appealed to his patriotism, chauvinism, civic pride, social duty, and the obligation to help out an old friend. Pauley surrendered. Buff was starting out of the bar with his pledge of $125,000 when she spotted another oilman, Samuel Mosher, chairman of the Signal Oil & Gas Co. A few minutes later, she announced triumphantly at the luncheon that the $4,000,000 goal had been reached.
"Once you have the momentum and the excitement going for you, you must keep going or it fades very quickly," says Buff Chandler, who should know. She herself kept plenty of excitement going by constantly enlarging the plans to house the symphony. From a single building, it has become three: the 3,250-seat Pavilion, the drumlike 750-seat Mark Taper Forum for theater-m-the-round, and the 2,100-seat Center Theater. The complex includes two restaurants, private dining rooms, rehearsal halls, studios, set-designing facilities, and underground parking space for 2,000 cars. This meant that she had to raise her own goal to $18.5 million.
But as Buff Chandler is well aware, it's what goes into the building that counts. The Philharmonic's Music Director Mehta is a case in point. When he turned up in Los Angeles as a guest artist, he was such an instant success that Buff and other symphony directors invited him back for another guest appearance—at which Conductor Georg Solti, who had been