Granted the Chance to Carry On

Each has come into a large sum of money, but none will be scouting choice property or living it up on Caribbean cruises. And they won’t be quitting their jobs. They couldn’t if they tried. Their work is inseparable from their lives.

The MacArthur Foundation has made sure that each can go on doing what she does best by awarding 1995 “genius grants” of $255,000 to $295,000 to three Los Angeles residents. For a while, anyway, each will be free to work without financial worries.

Allison Anders, 40, of Topanga Canyon, is an independent filmmaker. Octavia Butler, 48, of Pasadena, is a science fiction author. Susan McClary, also 48, of Mar Vista, is a professor of musicology at UCLA.

None knew she was in the running for the money, spread over five years and to be spent any way the recipient sees fit. (“But [the payments are] spaced out in such a way that you can’t think of running off to Costa Rica,” McClary says.) And even though their careers are disparate, their paths return to a common concern: an examination of society and its beliefs.

ALLISON ANDERS

‘If I’m Doing This for Love, I Wondered, What Am I Doing?’

Anders had just taken a long, listless, unhappy drive north before she picked up her fateful call. She had finished shooting her latest movie, “Grace of My Heart,” which deals with a young songwriter making her way through the world of pop music during the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and was in a free-fall of virulent self-doubt.

“I was at a breaking point,” she says. “I’d taken a vacation with my two children and was driving to Seattle to see my oldest daughter, but I couldn’t make it past Santa Barbara. I was frazzled, tired in a way that sleep can’t help. I didn’t know what kind of work I wanted to do anymore. I guess there’s a certain healthy kind of self-doubt where you wonder if you’re doing a story for the right reason. Maybe it hasn’t called to me.

“In the movie business, you’re always at war trying to do the thing you were hired to do. I sometimes think the executives would just as soon do away with writers and directors altogether, except that we’re here to take the fall if things go wrong. You can become ghettoized making movies. I’ve never made and lost more friends than I have in the past three years. I look around and wonder why a lot of the people do it. Is it for the money?

“At the same time, I was angry with myself. I know a lot of people are dissatisfied with what they do. I’m impatient with that. And boredom. You only have so much time. You only have so many callings. I realized that most people have had their inner voice beaten out of them. But I have a psychological need to be heard through my work. If I’m doing this for love, I wondered, what am I doing?”

Anders’ life has not been the stuff that dreams are made of. Her parents, “two battered souls” from Ashland, Ky., split up when she was a young child (everyone in her family, including Anders, is a high school dropout). Her stepfather regularly beat her up.

At 12, she was gang-raped in Cocoa Beach, Fla.

“I didn’t know it as rape at the time. I called it ‘the bad thing.’ But everyone knew about it. Somehow I was the one they blamed--even my teachers. My classmates thought some of the guys who did it were cute. It was ironic. Cocoa Beach was the space center. You had all these modern missiles and all these barbaric attitudes.”

Before she ran away from home in her late adolescence, Anders suffered a nervous breakdown and required hospitalization. Once she recovered, the strange characters that had commandeered her fantasy life gave way to less urgent voices. She went back to school. She began writing, and saw in movies “movement, music, character, places.”

At UCLA, she made a film called “Border Radio.” Then she made “Gas Food Lodging” and “Mi Vida Loca.” She’s one of four directors (along with Quentin Tarantino, Alex Rockwell and Robert Rodriguez) who have created segments for the upcoming “Four Rooms.”

Anders had just bought a house when the call from the MacArthur Foundation came. “They told me the grant was for me to keep doing what I’m doing, but if I wanted to, I could change careers. It’s all been a huge miracle. In my new house in the country, I can go out at night and look at the stars. I’ll write for the next year. I have two films coming out. Then we’ll see.”

OCTAVIA BUTLER

‘I Sat and Decided to Tell Myself a Story’

Butler’s 10 novels, which include “Kindred Spirit,” “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents,” have enlarged the science fiction genre by blending magical realism with a female African American sensibility, though Butler’s allegiance is to her own imagination.

“When I was very young I lived part of the time with my grandmother on a chicken ranch between Victorville and Barstow,” she says. “I got to enjoy the desert, where you could look in any direction and not see people. It feels as though there are no other human beings on Earth. If you never get away from the city, you can’t have that feeling.”

Butler’s early contemplation of blank vistas coincided with a natural storyteller’s bent for filling them up.

“I’ve been telling myself stories since I was 4 years old. I remember being punished for messing up a pair of shoes. My punishment was that I had to stay on the porch while my cousins were allowed to play in the street. You can imagine they really had a wonderful time, to rub it in. I sat and decided to tell myself a story. By the age of 10, I was writing them down. By 13, I was bothering editors.”

Her earliest writing took place in what she calls “my girl-and-her-horse phase--I wanted to be the horse.”

Then she began writing about romance. She knew nothing about either.

Then she saw a movie called “Devil Girls From Mars.” “When I realized that people could get paid for writing that terrible story, I knew I could do better.”

Butler’s first published and paid-for story came through a 1971 Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop, a kind of boot camp for writers.

Her most recent novel, “Parable of the Sower,” is set 30 years in the future and deals with what happens when the average person can’t get enough to eat.

“We seem to go through 30-year cycles of chaos and disillusionment, which I call the period of ashes,” she says. “Then we go through a period of reaction. We seem to do that over and over again. Right now we seem to be going through a period of disintegration.”

Butler describes herself as a hermit, and says reports that she educated herself at the public library are overstated. She graduated from John Muir High School in Pasadena, as well as Pasadena City College, and later “changed majors as much as I could” at Cal State L.A.

The MacArthur Foundation reportedly admires her uniquely African sense of myth and spiritualism as natural occurrences. But her prominence in science fiction literature has not always translated into a comfortable living.

“In ‘Kindred,’ a black woman goes back to the antebellum South. I gave her all my horrible blue-collar jobs. I’ve worked warehouse, food-processing and factory jobs. I’ve done telephone solicitation, which made me ashamed. But they did have an advantage over white-collar clerical jobs--I didn’t have to smile and pretend I was having a good time.”

The MacArthur award permits Butler to forge ahead on her newest book, which deals with “an immortal man and an immortal woman locked in an immortal struggle.” Now she’s financially free to see how it turns out.

SUSAN McCLARY

‘It’s Been a Profoundly Musical Century’

McClary was trained as a classical pianist, but her career as a musicologist began with the single question: How does music produce its effects?

“In school we dealt with harmonic structure and the organizational problems of a musical piece,” she says. “We did not talk about why it is we get a certain cathartic response from listening to a particular piece of music. Most musicians have been trained not to talk about this sort of thing.”

In time, McClary began to talk about it, but not until she finished her education, which began at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale--where both of her parents were faculty members--and continued through Harvard, where she received her master’s degree and doctorate.

McClary’s father was a veteran of World War II and, like many soldiers who absorbed European culture while surviving the unspeakable conditions of war, he came home with resolve about the future of his family. He bought his daughter a record player and saw to it that she listened first to classical music--mostly Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

She heard more than music. She picked up gleanings of history, sex, social conditions, the temper of the times from 16th-Century madrigal music to contemporary hip-hop. (At a Metallica rock concert she elbowed her husband--also a musicologist--and piped, “They’re playing Phrygian!” referring to the modal style of the ancient, extinct Indo-European culture.)

To listen to McClary’s lucid arpeggio manner of speaking is a reminder that art is always contemporary. Of 19th- and 20th-Century classical music she says:

“The 19th, which began with the Napoleonic Wars, was mostly Germanic. It was a tracing of heroic narratives that had to do with a particular force of subjectivity and a sense of self that came out of the French Revolution. You had a volatile social situation where your station in life is no longer taken for granted, you no longer had to stay in one place. It was an energy of self-development that imploded into the novels of Dickens and Balzac.

“The struggles of the self and how it’s constituted in time became absolute and rose up in the music of Brahms and Beethoven. A major crisis occurs in the early 20th Century, where these energies are spent. You hear in Schoenberg and Stravinsky a rejection of these old narratives.”

McClary has a sharp sense of humor and an iconoclastic view of what classical music presents beyond what it sounds like--both unforgivable traits in the academic music world, which sees her as a controversial figure.

Of her three books, her 1991 “Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality” drew the most sharply divided reactions.

“It amazes me that people who are perfectly comfortable deconstructing a novel are horrified when you do the same to music,” she says. “It’s as if they want to contain it in an ideal space.”

But it’s very difficult to keep sound out of terrestrial space. McClary has listened as attentively to blues pioneer Robert Johnson and rapper Ice Cube as she has to Francesco Cavalli, Philip Glass, and the guy and girl codes buried in movie music.

“It’s been a profoundly musical century,” she says, though her main interest now has turned to exploring the 17th, where many of the West’s current musical forms began. Her grant will provide for a new piano to send her on her way.