The Eames office is an old garage near the Venice tracks.

Ray Eames (her) and Charles Eames (him) have been inventing and designing and making film in that garage for 35 years. Charles will be 70 years old next year, having just spent this year celebrating America’s birthday with an international touring exhibit called “The World of Franklin and Jefferson.”

Models for that show, due at the County Museum of Art in November, sit on the workbenches. Pieces of previous shows—“Mathematica” for IBM in 1961, “Nehru” in 1965—hang on the walls. Eames chairs, America’s most famous chairs of plywood, plastic and leather, are plunked on the floor and are pictures on the walls. Curators at UCLA are busy preparing a retrospective exhibit of what’s gone on in that garage, to open in December.

The Eameses are being forced to look backward and forward at the same time. By preference, mostly forward.

There’s the matter of how to deliver Franklin and Jefferson to Mexico. There’s the business of assuring proper color reproduction in the book that grows out of the exhibit. There’s the final editing to do on Charles’ spectacular multiscreen slide show of the tall ships when they dazzled New York harbour. There’s the decision about exactly where to end the handsome film on Franklin and Jefferson narrated by Orson Welles and Nina Foch.

The chairs for Herman Miller, the shows for IBM, the films for television, the toys for pure fun all come out of this garage, this 35-year marriage of a woman trained in painting and a man trained in architecture.

Charles was saying they came to Los Angeles in 1941 “because we didn’t know anybody here and we didn’t want to know…” He didn’t finish his sentence because Ray laughed, waved her arm and erased the words before he said them. Of course, he admitted, they came to know and like people here, treasure people here, but Southern California is a place where people can invent their own lives on their own schedules.

The Eames experience suits two of my prejudices about people and place.

The first is about marriage and how well, how often, it seems to work when woman and man share the same career as well as the same morning coffee. John and LaRee Caughy make social causes together. Ruth and Richard Carter make movies together. Ariel and Will Durant make history together. The two Eameses built their own Pacific Palisades house together, a now-classic 27-year-old example of how to take machine-made parts from technology and assemble them into something warm, a place personal. The two Eames do their shows and films and furniture together.

The second prejudice is about the sort of artists who select Southern California precisely because it does not have cliques and claques and incestuous colonies of people picking each other’s brains. Los Angeles does not celebrate much; maybe the movie stars hardened the city against idols. So the Eameses, who didn’t have a following here when they arrived from Michigan, are still free to work here without paying respects at cocktail parties. Almost all of their commissions have come from the East; the distance between sponsors and producers is deliberate.

But some times are social times. The Eameses wanted a few people for a preview of the Franklin and Jefferson film; they liked it but it was about 30 minutes long and their usual bias is to project everything they want to show in 10 minutes.

Bill Lacy of the National Endowment for the Arts was in town; he’d be a helpful critic. So would Elaine Jones who did a publicity for Herman Miller in Los Angeles. And A. Quincy Jones, the architect who designed the new Miller plant in Michigan. Elaine and Quincy are another couple of people who, while married, operate out of the same office. The Eameses’ own in-house editor, Jehane Burns, would also be there.

The evening began with birdcalls. Charles had just bought a new toy that broadcast different coos at the touch of different buttons. The child in him remains pure.

Then came the slide show on the tall ships, shot by Charles from a power boat. The Eames eye is incredible. The still photographs come closer than television—right up alongside the old bowsprits, just under the heels of crews clambering up the masts.

The small audience applauded. Ray went out of the screening room to find some brie and crackers. Charles accepted the good reviews awkwardly, with self-deprecating comments about the music and the way of his handheld camera. He is once-in-a-while troubled by critics, as when a New York newspaper suggested Franklin and Jefferson did not belong in an art museum. He is more frequently troubled by how to handle compliments.

Dinner was called for a corner of the garage where the Eameses keep their reference library. Grand cold soup with dill. Crepes, cooked on the premises. Followed by an enormous platter of fresh melons and fruits.

Elaine Jones wanted to see “Tops,” an old favourite Eames exercise. Back to the screening room. We saw “Tops” and a delicious film of a Billy Wilder film being made and a short movie of the Paris opening for Franklin and Jefferson and the new Franklin and Jefferson film that dramatizes the show itself.

The Eameses have obvious affection for both those inventors of America. For the considerable abilities in science as well as language. For Franklin’s highly developed craft as a printer. For Jefferson’s refined talent for architecture.

One Jefferson quote sticks in the skull for 1076. As soon as the Declaration of Independence was signed, Jefferson was rushing back to the Virginia Legislature: “…the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war, we shall be going downhill.”

Ray and Charles Eames had not wanted to make a hero film for the Bicentennial. They chose two men to avoid the problem of celebrating just one. They included a segment on the other leaders of those early days to put. Franklin and Jefferson in context. They opted for history instead of eulogy. They scoured archives and museums and private collections. They compiled their own pictorial collection of 18^th-century America as it still stands. Their story starts in 1706 when Franklin was born; it joins with Jefferson at his birth in 1743; and it runs a total of 120 years until Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826.

The result is rich, heady stuff which is bound to be one of those rare television specials that people indeed remember as special.

The guests straggled out of the Eames film festival, making long congratulatory goodbys. Ray fielded them with grace. Charles could only wonder why everyone was able to sit still so long.

Perhaps it was the rare treat of being with two people who have illuminated our lives while delightedly designing their own. Maybe it was merely the comfort of sitting in Eames chairs.