There’s never a bad time to be at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Last Wednesday at 3:45 p.m. the bar was full, and the producer Ilya Salkind—you don’t know him, but he did the original Superman movies—was eating an early dinner. He got the Polo Lounge McCarthy Salad, as everyone does, and was chatting with a pair of agents looking to make a Christopher Reeve documentary. Art dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, who’ll open an LA outpost of Michael Werner Gallery this year across from Larry Gagosian’s spot in Beverly Hills, wandered through, early for a meeting. An elegant-looking woman in a coat insisted that her tea rest for 10 minutes before it was served to her. This is the classiest place to take a drink in Los Angeles.
In strolled Simon Fox, the busiest man there—he’s the global CEO of Frieze, the art fair company owned by Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, and Frieze Los Angeles was set to open the following day. He’s British, once ran the publishing umbrella that owns The Mirror and OK!, and favors blue suits. He ordered a glass of Champagne and a bottle of flat water.
“I have that worst and most obvious Los Angeles excuse: traffic,” he said, explaining his 15-minute tardiness, his English accent stretching out that dreadful word.
I wanted to chat with Fox about the business of Frieze, which started out as an arts magazine in the ’90s and in a 10-year span starting in 2003 birthed extremely popular art fairs in London and New York. Emanuel’s Endeavor bought 70% of it in 2016, and then opened the first Los Angeles outpost in 2019. Fox was hired as CEO in 2020, and opened the fair in Seoul in 2022.
Those fairs all face stiff competition from the Art Basel fairs on each of those continents, as they compete for blue-chip galleries to exhibit and collectors to attend. So last year Frieze bought up more fairs: Expo Chicago and the Armory Show in New York. The latter gives the group a big shindig to complement the boutique-ish Frieze New York, which takes place at The Shed in Hudson Yards, a downsize from the giant tent that it once occupied on Randall’s Island.
Adding a fair in Chicago was a bit more surprising. I didn’t see it coming, even though I had a major inadvertent tip-off. I ran into Fox and Frieze fairs director Christine Messineo in line for the Chicago architecture boat tour in 2023, but it didn’t occur to me for a second they were doing anything other than admiring the skyscrapers by Mies van der Rohe and Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas—much less buying the art fair that was opening the next day.
“Ari’s from Chicago,” Fox said, leaning forward. “So there is a corporate love for the city.”
Fox is from England, and was educated at St. Paul’s School and then Cambridge. He moved to Los Angeles for his first post-college job, at a bank that was later bought by Bank of America.
“And I had the funnest, best time. I mean, really, I nearly moved here,” he told me. “I kind of fell in love.”
It’s fair to say he’s having an even more fun time now. Fox told me about the private homes he’s been in this week, spectacular homes with stirring architectural pedigree—some with real historical significance and some that are just really, really big. He wouldn’t say the names of the collectors who opened their doors to him, but I’d been to a few art-filled pads myself, and I’ll share my list.
Walmart heir Sybil Robson Orr had her annual cocktail party for Serpentine at her eight-bedroom mansion in the Bird Streets, with Lana Del Rey showing up to hang out with Hans Ulrich Obrist under the James Turrell skyspace installed in the roof. Former NFL player Keith Rivers had a party at his place, and Jason Swartz opened up the Sheats-Goldstein house—the original Lautner house and the newer additions, which include a nightclub and perhaps the world’s first infinity tennis court—to various trustees of local institutions. (James Goldstein, the house’s owner, eventually popped up on Instagram in Milan for Fashion Week.) The Getty Villa started as J. Paul Getty’s private ranch house—Frieze threw its kickoff party there Monday night, and there’s plenty of Greco-Roman sculpture dotting the immense property. And filmmaker Lorraine Nicholson (recent Vanity Fair contributor, daughter of Jack) invited the curator Jed Moch to install a bunch of works in her historic midcentury-modern home in Laurel Canyon.
“Frieze is just like an extremely important week for the city,” Nicholson said as the musician Beck and the artist Issy Wood and various Haim sisters filled the balcony of her home at the opening dinner. “I keep on going up to people and taking their hand and saying, ‘This is a very important week for the city.’”
The most coveted home-tour invite was to Jimmy Iovine’s 10-bedroom stunner across the street from the Playboy Mansion, for a benefit auction to raise funds for his school with Dr. Dre, the Iovine and Young Academy. Attendees didn’t even mind that they couldn’t really see much of the Beats cofounder’s art holdings, as the event was confined to a cavernous room that Iovine had converted into a skating rink for his wife, Liberty Ross, who just really loves skating.
“I’m glad you finally found a use for this room, Jimmy,” James Corden, the night’s emcee said drolly from the stage as Ed Ruscha, Benny Blanco, Brian Grazer, and the young music exec Justin Lubliner looked on.
Iovine came on next to kick off the auction, proclaiming, with utter confidence, “The stock market’s going up 5,000 points tomorrow, so spend it tonight.” Corden tried another tactic, saying, “I want you all to point out the richest person in the room.” Many fingers were directed at Iovine. The auction was put together by Sotheby’s and the LA dealer David Kordansky, and several of his artists—Hilary Pecis, Austyn Weiner, Chase Hall, Jennifer Guidi—watched with a combination of fear and intrigue as auction house reps bid their works up and up, with some breaking records.
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