Bill Kay meets Merle Norman and a mighty organ

Millions of American women down the years haven't had the slightest idea that when they were reaching for their mascara or moisturiser they were helping to pay for one of California's strangest rituals.
At around 7pm on selected Saturday evenings, a crowd of fairly smartly dressed people, mainly old or middle-aged but some young, congregate outside an unmarked garage door near a factory in Sylmar, a small town nestling in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.
Without any announcement, the garage door starts rolling slowly up and the crowd moves inside to a basement museum of exquisite classic cars, as gleaming as the day they were built, mainly between 1930 and 1950.
But the regulars have seen these before. They ignore the cars and form a queue at a door inside. This leads upstairs to a startlingly grand pillared hall, brighly lite with huge mirrors and even more impressive old cars, Duesenberg, Packard, Pierce-Arrow, Mercedes and of course Rolls-Royce.
These are merely another distraction, though. The queuers politely jostle their way to the far end of the hall, where a spiral staircase awaits them. On a landing a pianola tinkles, giving the first clue of the evening's real purpose.
At the top of the stairs we enter another exhibition overlooking the grand hall, this time of vehicle memorabilia - statuettes, models, awards, photographs.
Beyond that lies a small door leading to yet another room, darker, again pillared, at the end of which is an enormous Wurlitzer organ, so big that the keyboard stands alone in the middle of the room, separate from the pipes which are housed in showcases along the far wall,
This is what we have come for: one of a series of free organ concerts in this fabulously luxurious setting, which with the car collection is all paid for by the Nethercutt Collection (nethercuttcollection.org), a not-for-profit organisation started by J.B. Nethercutt, who developed the cosmetics business from a cottage industry started by Merle Norman, his aunt.
Like the Huntington Library and Gardens, the Nethercutt Collection simply reflects the passions of its founder, which were cars, mechanical musical instruments and furniture. The museum and concerts are free to those who know about them, but not many do and the Collection hardly advertises.
But no expense is spared in maintaining the collection to the highest standard, and top organists from around America - last night it was Martin Ellis, an award-winning organist from Indianapolis, who played a mixture of mainly middle-of-the-road classics and popular tunes such as de Falla's Ritual Fire Dance, the Star Wars Cantina Parody Song, the Carpenters' Sing and the Petula Clark hit Downtown.
It made me wonder what it is about organ music that exerts such a fascination. Fairground organs are more understandable, because loud music is needed to compete with the din of everything else going on. But organ music was a great attraction on radio in the 1920s and 1930s, and its curious interpretation of music intended for other instruments still exerts a strong pull.
Organs such as the Nethercutt Wurlitzer are essentially computerised one-man bands, where it is almost an additional extra to have someone playing the melody on the keyboard for a live audience - this one could even remotely play a nearby piano as well as drums, cymbals and other instruments. Ellis was a superb performer, though, with the air of an orchestra leader rather than a pianist.
I am no musical expert, but there is something about the ringing chords and rhythms that brook no argument - you take or leave it, love it or loathe it. There is some novelty value in seeing what an organ can do to Downtown, say, but it almost seems an admission of weakness to succumb to the jangly rhythms of an upbeat pop song. Something slower like the Beatles' Yesterday could work well, though.
Maybe that is why older people gravitate to organ music - a more predictable pace, sometimes loud but never harsh, a sense of richness. But I can never get out of my mind the image of Terry Gilliam sitting naked at an organ on Monty Python, a rictus grin plastered onto his face. Yes, organ music can verge on the pompous.