Sister Wendy has just convinced a Beverly Hills waiter to sing one of his songs. The patio restaurant where she is having lunch sparkles with Old Hollywood directors, Rodeo Drive shoppers and polished young faces ready for their close-up, but only one woman is being serenaded. The nun in the sensible shoes.
Somewhere between the poached salmon entree, the refills of bread and olive oil and the three glasses of wine, she elicited the young man's dream of composing a Broadway musical. Not only that, she reassured him she wanted nothing more than to hear him sing. He can't. He doesn't, he'd really rather not. But here he is singing, shyly, on one knee, beside her chair.
Such close encounters of the social kind are rare. At age 68, Sister Wendy Beckett lives alone in a trailer on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, England, where she rises in the dark morning to begin a day of silent prayer.
She entered the Sisters of Notre Dame at 16 but received permission from the Vatican 25 years later to leave that order and pursue a life of solitude. Since then she has lived as a hermit in Norfolk. She knew what she wanted long before age 16. Born in South Africa, the oldest child of a medical doctor, she chose her future at an early age.
"From the time I was 2, my parents knew I would be a nun," she says. "I always wanted to belong completely to God."
Most days in Norfolk, the only person she sees is the one who brings her food from the monastery kitchen. She lives on skim milk, rye crackers and coffee. Seven hours of prayer, hours more spent reading and writing, account for most of her time in the last 25 years. It is mesmerizing to watch her talk. She does it so well with so little practice.
Just how well, American television audiences have only begun to discover. The recluse in black and white stole hearts with her five-part series, "The Story of Painting," when it aired on PBS last year. A Scheherazade in a nun's habit, she weaves biography and cultural history with bits of gossip (Van Gogh wanted to be a minister but was rejected) and a few mildly shocking asides (her description of a nude with "lovely, fluffy pubic hair" is memorable).
She is in Los Angeles to research her next television project. The empire continues to expand. Her new book, "Nativity" (HarperCollins), with art from the Vatican Museum, arrives in stores in December. And a growing stack of videos on art are finding their way into book stores, museum shops and school libraries.
For all the curiosity about her dual life as a hermit and art critic, it is her teeth that get most of the attention. Large, square and white, they have been described with a snicker as her "signature," and compared kindly to a "varied and dispersed" family picnic. She speaks of them as if they were a technical difficulty.
Strange that no one comments on her eyes, which are accustomed to looking straight, but gently, into others, so attentively that she could make anyone feel as if he were the only other person in the room.
Her luminous face has encouraged captains of industry to tell their life's story, and movie moguls to serve cakes shaped like castles when she is a dinner guest. But it is her hands that reveal her deepest desires. She maintains her hands, small as a child's and unnaturally smooth, with constant prayer and the slow turning of art book pages.
As an art expert, she is completely self-taught "but seriously," she insists. (She is an Oxford graduate; her degree is in literature.) Most of what she knows about art comes from books. She never expected to see the originals.
"She's an extraordinary comfortable emissary for works of art," says Graham Beal, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who gave her a tour of the museum's highlights.
Her passion for the subject once nearly killed her.
"I have so many books, they toppled on me in the night," she says. How a nun vowed to poverty acquired a tower of art books is a story Beal can unravel. Sister Wendy has a knack for inspiring in strangers an unusual generosity.
"Twenty years ago I received a postcard from a Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, England," Beal says. "It was asking for a George Segal catalog." At the time, Beal was director of the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. While he was there, he sent several books to Norfolk without charge. When he moved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, postcards from Norfolk started arriving there.
When he finally met Sister Wendy at LACMA, Beal understood.
"I was impressed by the depth of her knowledge, even of artists who are not as well known," he says. "I guess I'm not the only one she's been writing to."
