00:04
Mus White
I chose Stue i Strandgade med solskin på gulvet, Sunlight on the Floor by Vilhelm Hammershøi. He painted it in 1901.

00:16
Mus White
He was born in 1864, the same year my grandfather was born. My mother was the youngest of 13 children. And I think it's interesting to me to be attracted to a painting in my grandparents' age.

00:29
Mus White
This is a purified, clarified world. It's clean. The door has no doorknob. You can't get in there, but you can't get out of there either. It's enclosed like a poem.

00:43
Mus White
There's a stillness, which I appreciate and yearn for myself. I'm sure there were other things in the room, but he's taken out elements and reduced it to a haiku.

00:55
Mus White
Every morning I write a haiku. It's like an emotional diary. It's a feeling and it's a discipline that I like. I think he's a very disciplined painter.

01:04
Mus White
This is a privileged world that I could only dream of being in. This was the slums when I was growing up there. There's sunlight on the floor. I don't remember that. This is a different Christianshavn than I grew up in. I wanted that life. And I think I've gotten it in some ways.

01:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today our guest is Mus White, a Danish gallerist and writer. Welcome, Mus.

01:57
Mus White
Thank you.

01:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Actually, we should maybe say welcome to us, because we're in your house in Studio City in Los Angeles. Talk about where we are and what we will hear during our talk.

02:09
Mus White
We're close to Burbank Airport and the planes come by quite often. During COVID, there were very few planes and it was the most quiet time ever. And I knew the economy was getting better when they're flying every hour now, every half hour across my house. I can measure it by the flight across my house.

02:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And now we hear it. So this is a sign that the economy is good.

02:35
Mus White
Can you hear it now?

02:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah.

02:38
Mus White
It's coming. It's coming.

02:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It is quite an astonishing space, I have to say. Would you mind describing the room that we're in, or the house that we're in, so the listeners can get an idea of where we are talking to you, Mus?

02:52
Mus White
Well, this is my office, and it's filled with books. My Danish books are over there. And then I have a whole set of toys, stuffed toys that I have collected all over the world basically when I travel, and it becomes my little companion and I do little stories about them sometimes.

03:14
Mus White
And then I have a picture of Teddy Roosevelt up here, who's one of my all time favorite presidents, because he's smart and out of his mind, and he built all the wonderful parks in America, so he's one of my heroes. And then I have my cards that my husband has made me over the years, and they're very silly. They're all made of cardboard and I get them for anniversaries. It feels comfortable here for me and I have all my papers. Yeah, work papers, since I still work.

03:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And behind you there's a view of the valley in Los Angeles. Do you remember when you first set eyes on the house, and what made you and Stephen, your husband, pick this as your home?

04:03
Mus White
At that time we had just sold a house in Brentwood, and we were looking all over the city for something more manageable. We had a very large, almost mansion-like place, and I didn't want that any longer. And so we looked for a long time. And we saw houses that we liked. And then one day we walked into this house and we walked out on the deck out in back and looked out at the view. And it was instant love.

04:28
Mus White
We knew within 15 minutes that this was the house we would live in. It turned out to be more work to fix it up than we thought, but now it's like an old shoe. It fits us. I have my office on one side of the house. My husband has his very large office on the other side. We communicate by phone because we can't talk.

04:45
Mus White
And it just was a great house. We didn't have our children at the time. They had moved out. But my grandchildren, my twin granddaughters, basically spent their childhood here, they learned to swim here, and it was just perfect for us.

05:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's a very beautiful view, I have to say. You have many bookshelves, not only in your office, but in the whole house, filled with books.

05:09
Mus White
We built all the bookshelves in this house. There were no bookshelves when we moved in. My husband, he collects antiquarian books. And so we have very, very old, rare, rare books. I'm actually more into my literature books. We have a whole section up in my bedroom. And here too. I read a lot, even Danish literature. I try to keep up with it. When I go home, I get a Danish book to keep up with the language. And then we have the photography books.

05:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have books on Scottish photographer John Thomson, and American and German-American photographers Karl Struss and Lotte Jacobi, who all worked in the previous century. Talk about what this impressive collection means to you personally.

05:56
Mus White
John Thomson is interesting. It was one of our first collections of photographs and we had an exhibition at the Eastman House in New York and it also went to the Asia Society in New York. And now the collection is in Japan with the rest of it. There's a whole story behind that.

06:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is there a special interest in historical photography?

06:16
Mus White
Yes. When we had the gallery space, we did have contemporary artists. We had a stable of contemporary artists. But since we moved home and we are dealing out of the house, we don't really have the space to show contemporary artists, and it's not what contemporary artists would want. We have some in our collection, but mainly historical photographs.

06:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You and your husband opened a gallery in Los Angeles in 1975.

06:44
Mus White
That's correct.

06:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It closed in 1990 when you sold more than 30,000 images to the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum. That's quite an accomplishment, 30,000. Talk about the location of the gallery and the motivation to promote and preserve photographic art. What made you want to open a gallery of this kind back in 1975?

07:07
Mus White
That's an interesting question. We've had five locations. We opened up our first gallery across from the Blue Whale. This was a very small space, but it was mainly my husband. He actually has an MFA in film, but he began to be interested in photography, and he read a lot about it. He had a job at that time, working for the parole department as a parole agent-in-training, actually. And he was not happy with his job, and rather depressed.

07:38
Mus White
We had a friend Jim McQuarrie, who's a photographer, and he and Steve decided to open up a gallery together. Jim, in the process, dropped out, and Steve didn't know what to do. And at that time I've just gotten a job myself, as a probation officer. I said to Steve, quit your job, open a gallery, this is what your dream is, and I can support us.

08:04
Mus White
We had a four-year-old at that time. And we will manage. And so he quit his job, opened the gallery, with a Mortenson show that we got access to through our friend Jim McQuarrie, and we never looked back.

08:19
Mus White
I actually joined the gallery a year later, while I was supporting us. Steve was doing quite well, and somebody who was managing the gallery at the time, quit. I said, I'll take the job. Please let me take the job. I can do it. We've worked together ever since 1976, and haven't stopped.

08:38
Mus White
It was hard work. Steve traveled a lot and I had to take care of the children and the house and the gallery. And sometimes I would be in there till four o'clock in the morning just to hang a show and manage the gallery. And sometimes there was no money coming in and we would have to pay our employees — we had five employees at one time — before we could take money ourselves. And it was a constant struggle. But then in the early '80s, things began to ease up and it was better times.

09:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What made you such a good duo, professionally, you and your husband?

09:15
Mus White
I'll tell you why. Being married is difficult, really difficult, but being in business was not difficult. That was easy, because we had very different roles. My role was really to manage the gallery, manage the employees. I did the hanging and the shows. He did the buying and the selling. And he was very smart and very clever in terms of business. I'm a glorified bookkeeper and so it worked out very well. And I learned how to hang shows. I learned how to do that. That's an art form. I had to learn by the seat of my pants.

09:51
Mus White
Parallels and Contrasts was one of the first exhibitions we worked on. The New Orleans Museum started it. It went to Paris, it went to Copenhagen. Flemming Johansen, who was the director at the Glyptotek at that time, he came to see our collection, and he decided to do a thematic exhibition, all things from our collection. And I think it was one of the first photographic exhibitions ever at the Glyptotek, which was quite an honor. I never thought in my lifetime that we were going to have an exhibition like that.

10:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On your table I see this Van Gogh Museum book, The Photograph and the American Dream from 1840 to 1940. Was that an exhibition that you had?

10:37
Mus White
Yes, we had an exhibition there. We'd worked on the catalogue with Andreas Blum, who was the curator. He saw our collection and decided to do an exhibition in Amsterdam. And it was in 2001. It's about American photography and American photographs from that period. And it turned out to be a good catalogue.

11:00
Mus White
Bill Clinton wrote the foreword to it, which was a great honor. His ambassador to Holland introduced him to the exhibition. And it was shown here in Los Angeles too, at the Skirball. It became a traveling exhibition, really.

11:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You graduated in psychology from California State University in 1974. So that is not directly related to photography. How did your interest in photography start?

11:29
Mus White
I collect children's books, I always have, even when I was a child. I used to go down to the corner on Vigerslevvej, there was a book dealer there, I think his name was Juhl, and I would go in and I would buy books. And I loved children's books. And one of my first books that I got when I was very young was with photographs and I think it was called Lillefinger, it was about Greenland.

11:57
Mus White
And it was photographs of Greenland and it's a story about this little girl who's called Lillefinger. And I literally come home every day from school and read it. Every day I would read that book, and I was fascinated by the photographs, so I think that began very early. We didn't really have a camera in my house, it was not part of my upbringing. Being married to Steve, I went to a lot of films. And from there we went into photographs and it was a process and learning. I really learned a lot from him, I must say.

12:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned that you were a probation officer.

12:35
Mus White
Yes.

12:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you get into that?

12:38
Mus White
Oh dear. I guess I graduated in 1974 or 1975, something like that, in psychology. And in those days, there were no jobs. It was really impossible to find a job. But the probation office, they were hiring officers, and since my husband worked as a parole agent-in-training, I decided, I'm going to go for that job. 2,000 applicants, and nine people were hired, and I was one of them. Probably by mistake — I was the least suited probation officer you've ever met in your life.

13:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Why?

13:13
Mus White
I ended up working in juvenile hall with girls. I had no experience with racial issues. I mean, I grew up in Denmark. At that time, there were no such issues in my life. I didn't know the differences. The kids couldn't figure me out because I had this accent and I looked so different and they didn't know what to do with me. They just gave me a set of keys, and I was a probation officer.

13:36
Mus White
The key word in probation, especially in juvenile halls, is control. They went to school everyday. There were schools on the ground, and you had to organize their lives. You can't lose control of the kids, because they'll riot. And there were riots when I was working there, and some probation officers had to be taken to the hospital. They were beaten up and it was like being in a war zone. It was a very, very tough job.

14:00
Mus White
There was a lot of abuse going on in home, and I saw it up close. I can empathize with their situation and we could talk. And I think I'm a fairly decent person. It was more about controlling the kids.

14:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Eye-opening.

14:18
Mus White
Yeah. I managed because financially I had to survive. It taught me that I was stronger than I thought I was. I stuck it out for a year and then I quit. And that's when I started working with my husband.

14:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's go back to when you were known as Marianne Skov, and you decided as a young woman to move to California. You grew up in Copenhagen, Christianshavn and Valby, and you graduated from Vestre Borgerdyd Gymnasium in 1965. Then you took off to California. Why this move?

14:57
Mus White
The last year of high school, I met my husband.

15:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh, in Denmark.

15:01
Mus White
In Denmark. He was an aspiring writer at the time, taking a few classes at a university. I met him, and we fell in love. I met him in August '64, and in October, he asked me, would you like to come to California? I said, yeah, I would like to, but I'm not coming unless you marry me.

15:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow.

15:27
Mus White
And he was shocked. And he said, oh, okay. I wasn't going to come all the way over here unless, I knew—

15:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Smart.

15:36
Mus White
I was smart, yeah. I was smart.

15:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And it lasted.

15:41
Mus White
We've been married for 60 years now, this year, July 11th, 7-11, which is a lucky number, you know, in gambling, and that was the day we were married, and we would be married 60 years.

15:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Impressive.

15:55
Mus White
It is impressive —

15:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Very impressive.

15:58
Mus White
— because I was 17 when I met him.

16:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow. Talk about lasting love.

16:02
Mus White
Yeah.

16:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When did you become "Mus"?

16:09
Mus White
You know what moose means in English, and then he said, oh, but that means mouse in Danish. He thought it was funny, so he started calling me Mus. And I thought, oh, okay, I can live with that. I'm slightly regretful of it now because I'm known under that name in America.

16:24
Mus White
That's really how it started. And I think I just wanted to change my identity in a way, change myself and become somebody else. And I did that by moving to the States, if that makes sense to you?

16:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, of course it does.

16:38
Mus White
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

16:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And also it sounds very artistic, Mus White.

16:42
Mus White
People, I mean, they get used to it. My father-in-law refused to call me Mus for ten years. God bless his heart. But finally he gave in. He said, okay, everybody else does this, so I guess I have to do it too. And, so people adjust. Most of my friends don't even know my real name. Yeah.

17:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
California in 1965 was quite different from the times we live in now. It was the year that The Mamas & the Papas's "California Dreamin'" and The Beach Boys's "California Girls" came out. And David Hockney was painting swimming pools. But there were also the Watts riots and floodings, and Lyndon B. Johnson was the president and still at war in Vietnam. How did you experience your first year in Los Angeles? What was your Los Angeles like in 1965?

17:34
Mus White
Well, it was interesting because it was like slightly in a fog for a couple of years. I didn't drive. I had to learn to drive, and I was by myself a lot. I had no friends, and I was like a lost tourist in my new country, and I had to adjust. My husband went to work at that time. He was working in probation, and he went away for about three days a week, and I was home by myself.

18:00
Mus White
We had a small apartment in Beverly Hills, on Clark Drive. Actually, I thought the apartment was heaven to me because we had a bedroom, a living room, and a beautiful tiled bathroom. We had a beautiful kitchen. I thought I'd landed in paradise at that time.

18:17
Mus White
I was accepted into UCLA with a year of credit and I said, oh my god, it's bigger than my country, I can't go here. I just didn't want to go. And I'm probably the only person who ever turned down UCLA. I started going to City College on Vermont. I made friends there. I had wonderful teachers. I loved it. It was small enough for me to fit in there. I took English and that was a good thing. I really learned grammar.

18:46
Mus White
It was when the riots were going on. And I remember sitting in the classroom looking out at the lawn there and there were the Watts riots. But I can't say that I was scared. My mother was more scared. She was home in Denmark and she read about it and she thought, what are you doing over there?

19:04
Mus White
But I was removed from it. That was somewhere else, Watts was somewhere else. Politically, I just didn't understand what was going on. I was just happy to be here and even though it was close, I didn't feel touched by it very much.

19:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And the whole California dreaming?

19:25
Mus White
Oh, yes. That was perfect. That was perfect. I remember going on our honeymoon after we were married, we drove up to Ukiah, which was like a hole up there in Northern California, and we stayed at a motel. My husband wanted to show me Muir Woods. It was cheap to stay at this motel, and they had a pool with a wire fence around it, out to the road. It was paradise to me — oh my god, I'm in a swimming pool! So I just loved California. I just learned to adjust, learned to live with it, and learned to love it.

20:01
Mus White
It's a little more difficult these days than it was at that time. We didn't have the homeless problem as we do now. They didn't have the amount of people either. It felt like a small town, a very American town, which I loved. It was very different from San Francisco and other places, New York, which was almost European. Los Angeles was just different, a very American city, I think.

20:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have been living 60 years in California. So would you say that you are fully a California girl to use Beach Boys's words? So do you still feel that there is a significant Danish part of you?

20:44
Mus White
Both, yes. I have always loved California, but these days it's a little more difficult to love the whole country. But I've always felt Danish in many ways. I go back now almost yearly. I have family there, I have close friends. I feel very much at home there. But Denmark has changed too. It's a different country than when I was growing up. Very different, as you probably know yourself. Copenhagen itself is just turned into a spectacular city, I think. I mean, you go back and say, Oh my God, this is not the Copenhagen I grew up in.

21:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In a good way?

21:24
Mus White
I think in a good way. I think in a good way, yeah. I grew up after the war, and it was difficult times. When I grew up in Christianshavn, it was basically the slums I grew up in. It was water coming down the walls. We had no heat, the toilet in the backyard, no hot water. I slept on two chairs. My brother slept on the kitchen floor on a mattress, my little brother.

21:49
Mus White
And then going back and seeing the wealth and the culture and the theater and the life there, and everything is so sunny now. It wasn't sunny when I was growing up, so I think, yeah, in a good way.

22:02
Mus White
But then there's a whole other thing going on underneath, like the racism, which I didn't experience when I was growing up. I mean, I wasn't aware of it. I just never thought about it. And now it's there, I think. I sense it when I come home. And it's become much more conservative. When I was a teenager, it was the Vietnam War. We were all very radical. But, my God, now.

22:31
Mus White
Anyway, but I can still say that when I travel around there, I go out to Odense or other places, because I'm just happy to see the landscape and happy to breathe the air there, yeah. It's a conflict in some ways.

22:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And in front of you right now, you have a cup that says, "Living with a Dane builds character."

22:54
Mus White
Yes. One of my kids gave it to me as a gift. It was also a joke. But they are very proud and very pleased of their Danish heritage, even probably more than I am, even though they don't speak Danish. My daughter just went back there, one of them, to visit family, and my granddaughter, who also has been back there several times, loves it. I'm trying to tell her to go to university there. She's going to Bard right now on the east coast, but she's very attached to Denmark, too, and to the family.

23:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How come you didn't teach them?

23:28
Mus White
I was too busy, I think, and too lazy, probably. I mean, it takes an effort. It just felt awkward for me to sit and speak Danish to them. And I have an American husband. I know some people do it and they do it very well. I have friends who have done that. I must admit I regret it. They still blame me for it. How could you do that to us?

23:49
Mus White
Actually, I sent my granddaughter to a Danish school camp in the Midwest. They took her telephone away. There was a big shock. She's 14, 15 years old. And then nobody speaks English, only Danish. Danish cooking, Danish in this house. Every house had it. There was a Japanese house, there was a French house, there were all these houses. And she did learn to speak Danish pretty well.

24:14
Mus White
She came back and I said to her, oh, wasn't it wonderful? She said, yeah, it was a once in a lifetime experience. So I got the message.

24:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's funny.

24:27
Mus White
It's funny. She's so smart. She's so funny. Once in a lifetime.

24:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Don't do it again. Mus, you're also a writer.

24:37
Mus White
Yes, I am.

24:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In 2006, you wrote a biographical novel, Jasmine in My Hands, which was translated into Danish, Jasmine i min hånd. What made you want to write this, and why did you create the character Pia, a young Danish girl who goes through time like a space traveler, alternating between an impoverished childhood in Copenhagen and a privileged life in Los Angeles. Why did you choose that to tell your story? Why not just about Marianne Skov?

25:09
Mus White
I don't know — sometimes it's a fairly brutal book, and people in it have recognized themselves, and I just felt I wanted to respect their privacy. I wanted to make sure that they were not exposed somewhat. Even though I think it is a biographical novel, it's not a memoir exactly, because there are some things in it that's not real, and it's really written in a different way.

25:38
Mus White
It was just something in me. I just woke up one day and I started writing about my life. I would wake up in the middle of the night and write something and I had to put it down on paper. It was really an homage to my parents. I wrote it for them. Their lives were very, very difficult. And I felt that I hadn't given them enough respect, and I wanted to honor their lives.

26:06
Mus White
They worked very hard for me, it was not easy financially. And I went to gymnasium, and in those days, it was almost unheard of, a Valby working class family. I took my last exam, I think it was a Latin exam. I had a ticket, Steve had sent me a ticket to go to America that day, to go to New York. I'd never flown in an airplane before. I flew to New York.

26:34
Mus White
And I didn't go to my graduation. I did not even give my parents that pleasure. I mean, I was a very selfish teenager, and I've always regretted that. One of the biggest regrets that I have in my life. And somehow I had to get over it, and this was a way of doing that in some odd way. I dedicated the book to them.

26:57
Mus White
They were both buried in an unknown grave in Denmark. And I have later on gotten a gravestone for them at the graveyard where Hans Christian Andersen is buried, Assistens Kirkegård. A few years ago, my younger brother died, and he was buried there, and so I asked if I could get my parents' name next to him, and I did.

27:20
Mus White
To me that was very important. I'm not religious, but I just wanted to honor them in some ways. Because these are basically the forgotten people, my parents. They worked all their lives, it was after the war, and they had really tough lives.

27:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What did your parents do?

27:37
Mus White
My father was a mover. But after the war, he was unemployed a lot. I remember there was trouble. We had no money. Then he became a truck driver. He would drive to Germany or to Sweden, or do other things. Because he was not physically so much able to move furniture any longer. And my mother actually worked as a maid at the Palace Hotel for many years and as a housekeeper for different people.

28:05
Mus White
And I don't know why she did that. I can never figure that out because she herself came from a well-off family. But somehow I think after the war everything fell apart. She was never really trained for a job, I think, a real job. And she was a privileged child, in some ways, but she had to work. And it was tough.

28:268
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did your parents ever get a chance to read the book?

28:31
Mus White
No, they never read the book. My mother died when I was 24, and my father died when I was about 32, 33. They didn't live long lives, especially my mother, she was only 60 or 61 when she died.

28:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So, very young.

28:49
Mus White
So they never came to the States. Never. So that's the basic story. A lot of it is in the book.

28:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I know you also translated Hans Christian Andersen—

29:00
Mus White
Yes. Hans Christian Andersen, oh my god, yeah. He was immortal in my eyes. I just loved his stories. And later on in my life I got an opportunity to translate one of them, Det er ganske vist! into English. Translation is such an interesting process, I think, because you become the person in a way.

29:24
Mus White
I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would think about a word. I said, I have to find the right word. This is my responsibility to do it right. I mean, translators really rule the world, you know that. They do, because they can play around with words. And I think he was not very well translated into English. Translation, it's really the spirit of the word. You've got to find it. I love the challenge of that.

29:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When did you discover your love for literature?

29:51
Mus White
I went to Christianshavns skole. I was not one of the fastest readers. I don't think I was dyslexic, but certainly, I had a fabulous teacher, Hr. Jansen, and he guided me through it. And the moment I learned to read, I would read to anybody who came to the house. So I've always loved literature, loved reading, loved the library. The library in / på Christianshavn was one of my favorite places. I spent hours there as a child.

30:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
If you were to pick out three books that mean the most to you, that you would recommend to somebody to read, which three books would you choose?

30:28
Mus White
Oh my God. Out of Africa — it's one of my all time favorite books. Isak Dinesen is very interesting. Of course she wrote it in English, and it was translated into Danish, so I identify with that. I like Fante, Ask the Dust —

30:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And he's a Los Angeles writer.

30:47
Mus White
Yeah, he was a Los Angeles writer. Kerouac, On the Road, is probably one of my all time favorite books. It's like reading jazz. I like many American writers, really. I think Stegner is up there.

31:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And obviously Hans Christian Andersen.

31:04
Mus White
Also Hans Christian Andersen. I still feel very tied to him. I know he was awkward and strange, but there's something about him. And then he, of course, wrote other things, too. He wrote travel books, too. He liked to travel, except he didn't like to go on ships, you know that. He was terrified of the ocean.

31:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, he was not the most adventurous man.

31:25
Mus White
No, no. I know. But it wasn't easy to travel in those days, and he did do it.

31:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, he said to travel is to live.

31:31
Mus White
Yeah, he went to London, of course, and visited Dickens and people like that.

31:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, Dickens hated him.

31:37
Mus White
Yeah, I know that, I know that. They were not good friends. He just wanted him out of the house. Please let that man go home. I know, I know.

31:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's funny.

31:46
Mus White
It is funny. I wanted to talk about From the Mundane to the Magical, my collection of photographically illustrated children's books. When I came over here, I would go to the bookstores. And I started buying some books here and there, children's books. I met real collectors of children's books. Mainly, they were very rich men, and they paid a lot of money for their books, and I realized that I could never compete with them. 

32:12
Mus White
Then one day I was out in a bookstore with Steve. Oh, it must have been 40, 50 years ago.  We were at a bookstore and I picked up a book and there was a photograph in it, a children's book, and it was like a light bulb in my head. I can do this. I can collect this because this book was like five dollars, you know. Okay, this is my price range. We can do this.

32:36
Mus White
And so I started looking at books. And then I began to go to book fairs, and people would know that I collected it, and the market just jumped. And I acquired these books over 30, 40 years. Now at the end of my collecting period, I ended up paying several thousand dollars for books. I basically created the market.

33:01
Mus White
Again, my life is a lot of little fortuitous accidents. I was sitting and entering some of my books, and my friend who is a book dealer here, Michael Dawson, came to our house, and he said, what are you doing? I said, oh, I'm just entering my photographic books into the computer. There was no real internet at that time. He published a lot of bibliographies. And he said, write a bibliography and I'll publish it. I said, really, you will? Yeah, I will.

33:27
Mus White
So I said, okay. Took me ten years. I began to write the book, and it ended up being a bibliography called From the Mundane to the Magical. Michael kept his word. He published the book and it was a very big deal for me anyway, and it's in many, many libraries now because it's a first. It's very unusual that somebody creates a field of photographically illustrated children's books.

33:55
Mus White
And I feel as if I made a small accomplishment of some sort. And it was a collaboration of people. I had good friends and they would find books for me all over the world. Flemming Johansen, who was the director of the Glyptotek, used to drive around on his bicycle, and he loved to go to bookstores, too, and he would send me some Danish books.

34:15
Mus White
I'm not an academic, but it is an academic piece of work. It really is. I had to learn how to do a bibliography and it was a tremendous amount of work. I couldn't have done it without help from people and guidance. I made the mistake of making it international. Most academics zero in on a small area, English books or French books or something like that.

34:38
Mus White
That's typical of academia. But I said, Oh no, no, I made it just grand. And that's probably why it took so long. You know, I have Japanese books, I have Russian books. I have books from all over the world, basically. So that was the process.

34:54
Mus White
In the end, because of the bibliography I wrote, my collection is now at Princeton. I'm pleased with that because I didn't have to write a second bibliography. I let them deal with it. But also, it's an honor. I feel good about it. I can go on with other things in my life. I still have a few photographically illustrated children's books, but not many left. They went to Princeton.

35:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Impressive. What would you say makes you feel at home? What does home mean to you? This house, your personal space, but also in a broader sense. What makes you feel you belong?

35:31
Mus White
I have friends. I've created a life for myself. The house is very meaningful to me. It really is. It is my space. I'm comfortable in it. And I write a little bit about that in my book. In my life in Denmark, I had no control over the light switch. I worried about the light switch. It was just a small confined area and we had to accommodate each other.

35:55
Mus White
Here, it's mine. I can turn on the light switch when I want. To me, that's very meaningful. I call myself the queen of light switch in my book, because it became strangely meaningful to me to do that. I guess it's important. And I can surround myself with the things I love. I have enough space to do that. Nobody can tell me what to do.

36:19
Mus White
And yet, I know it's fragile. We had an earthquake the other day, everything could just disappear. I realize that it's maybe an illusion, but I don't mind living with an illusion sometimes.

36:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And the fires.

36:31
Mus White
There were fires, called the Sunswept Fires. And we were gone. We were out of the country when it happened, and that was unfortunate. I wished I could have been here just to decide what to take. We had other people coming to the house to take things out. There was two houses burned up here. It was about 300 meters from here.

36:51
Mus White
It was terrifying. I don't know how people live with that. I was trying to come to terms with that. There were several people who came into the house. It was very strange. They didn't even have the key, they just broke down the doors to help us. We were sitting on the coast of Africa, communicating with them, take this, take that, and trying to remember what I had in the house.

37:10
Mus White
One of my daughters, she came over. She knew I had quite a bit of jewelry. I said, I don't care about my jewelry. I care about everything else, take something else, but she didn't know. There were some funny moments there. I think I'm too old to start over again. I don't know exactly what I would do. I certainly wouldn't rebuild. I don't know. I don't know. I feel bad for people who have to make these kinds of decisions. I don't know.

37:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Everything here is part of your identity.

37:36
Mus White
It is, absolutely. It's an extension of myself, I feel like that. What I came from and what I am now— And I guess we all feel every day we are a different person, but I feel privileged. I've had a good life. We lived the best of times, I tell my husband that, we talk about that. Many people, like my parents and other people, have not lived the best and I don't know how my grandchildren's lives are going to be at this point. But being born after the war, I think we have been very fortunate in most ways, you know.

38:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And finally, my last question to you. You mentioned your parents. Where would you like your final resting place? Would it be in Denmark with your parents and your brother, or would it be here?

38:23
Mus White
No, I don't think so. I have this fantasy that it's going to be in the Hollywood Cemetery.

38:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that the one with Marilyn Monroe?

38:31
Mus White
Yes, yes, yes, it's exactly there. I doubt I'm going to end up there, but if I have to choose, why not? And I want to be closer to my children and family over here than I would be in Denmark, I think, in some ways. So, that's that.

38:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's that. And on that note, thank you so much for having us in your home in Studio City in Los Angeles.

38:57
Mus White
You're very welcome and thank you for coming.

39:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Mus White chose Vilhelm Hammershøi's Stue i Strandgade med solskin på gulvet or Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor from 1901 from the collection of the National Gallery of Art.