The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  In my early days in Hollywood, the grandest house of all to get into, once you had arrived socially, was the white Georgian mansion belonging to the late William and Edith Mayer Goetz. A famed Hollywood wit as well as a distinguished film producer, Bill Goetz was one of the earliest major art collectors in the film colony. His wife, Edie, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, the legendary head of MGM in its heyday, and the sister of Irene Mayer Selznick, who was once married to David O. Selznick, before he married Jennifer Jones, was a Hollywood princess in every sense of the word, and, as Mrs. Goetz, became the undisputed social queen of Hollywood for decades. Her chef knew no peer in the community, and her guest lists were carefully honed as fine ivory. No outsiders in Edie Goetz’s drawing room, ever. After dinner, there was always the latest movie, and as Mrs. Goetz’s guests settled back into the sofas and chairs of her drawing room, designed by William Haines, a screen was lowered at one end of the room, obliterating for two hours Picasso’s Mother and Child. It was heady stuff. Now the Goetzes are dead, their pictures have been sold in a recent auction that netted $85 million for their two daughters, and their lovely, graceful house is up for sale. Imagine my surprise, while having breakfast in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel, to hear it casually referred to as a teardown—a $12 million teardown, but a teardown nonetheless. According to Bruce Nelson, the Goetz mansion, though swank in the extreme in its day, now needs “everything done. The Leonard Goldbergs offered $8 million cash, and were turned down.” Another of the big realtors told me, “Streisand looked at it, but decided against it. Too much work.” In all probability, the purchaser, whoever he or she may be, will raze the house to build a bigger and grander one. It’s the trend. It’s in the air. The talk is so pervasive and persuasive that you find yourself agreeing with the logic of buying a $10 million mansion in order to tear it down and build a $20 million one.

  Some people will tell you that Columbia Savings in Beverly Hills started the teardown trend; a few residents will go so far as to say that Columbia Savings has just about ruined Beverly Hills. But the people who will always be most associated with the trend are the vastly rich television mogul Aaron Spelling and his wife, Candy. Over five years ago, the Spellings bought the old Bing Crosby house on one of the best streets in Holmby Hills for $10 million. It turned out that the cost of bringing the house up to date and redesigning it to the eighties needs of the Spelling family was prohibitive—it would be cheaper to tear it down and start over. The neighbors in the swank neighborhood were appalled, but the Spellings persevered. If all goes according to plan, they will finally be able to move into their French-style palace a year from now.

  The Spelling house is the most discussed house in the city, and all other houses are compared with it. As of this moment, it is the largest by far of the many large houses being built. There was a time when houses were talked of in terms of how many rooms they had, but now all such discussions are in terms of square feet. The Spelling house is, give or take a thousand square feet or two, 56,000 square feet, approximately the size of a football field. An acre is 43,560 square feet, so the Spelling place is roughly an acre and a quarter of house. Probably not since Ludwig of Bavaria brought his country to the verge of bankruptcy with the extravagance of his palace-building has a residence been as publicly criticized as the Spelling house. Television newscasters have hovered over it in helicopters, pointing out to their viewers that it is being built for a family of only four. Comedians tell jokes about it. The fact remains that if the Spelling house had not been so prominently placed, so visible to the public eye, it would have been far less criticized. Budd Holden, a former set designer on “The Dinah Shore Show” who is now designing many of the most expensive L.A. homes, though not the Spelling mansion, has said of it, “It’s mind-boggling, the space. Just beautiful.” Four different real-estate agents told me that “some Japanese” had secretly gone through the Spelling house and offered $52 million for it.

  “Do you mean the Spelling house is for sale?” I asked.

  “No, no, of course it isn’t for sale. But everything out here is for sale.”

  The mode of upscale spending is bewildering to longtime residents of Beverly Hills, who shake their heads in sadness at the evaporation of their once-charming community with its side-by-side potpourri of architectural styles. There is no remembrance of things past. “Beverly Hills has been destroyed. It’s gone,” one resident told me. New people moving in can’t tear down fast enough. “New money wants new houses,” said Stan Herman, a Beverly Hills realtor with eighteen agents working under him in an elegant office that sports a bar. Herman, who has a press agent and a press kit that lists the names of 131 famous people “who have lived in Stan Herman’s homes,” used to be married to Linda Evans of “Dynasty,” and he moves in the fast lanes of Beverly Hills and Malibu life. Over the years he has bought many houses, redone them, and then resold them at enormous profit. He bought, for instance, the house Frank Sinatra lived in during his brief marriage to Mia Farrow in the 1960s, redid it entirely, even adding one of his trademarks, a wall urinal in the marble master bathroom, and then resold it to the theatrical producer James Nederlander and his wife for over $4 million. Herman says that if he had just held on to it until the teardown period started, he wouldn’t have had to bother to do it over; he could have sold it for the same price without doing one thing. “There’s megabucks here today. The Australians, the Japanese, people from Hong Kong. The Taiwanese money isn’t here yet, but it’s coming, and, of course, the French and the Italians. These people build enormous kitchens, the size of commercial kitchens, but they never cook, because they go out every night, and only the maids cook their own dinners in them.” The big question everyone wants answered is, Who are these people who are knocking down all the houses and building new ones, putting as many square feet of house on the property as they can? Stan Herman said, “You’d think you would know, or should know, who someone is who has $10 million to spend on a house, but these days you don’t.”

  KEEP OUT signs are posted everywhere to prevent the curious multitudes from staring in. Any sign of unauthorized entry brings a foreman yelling “Uh-uh” in no uncertain terms, meaning “Out!” and the grander places under construction have uniformed security guards. However, by arriving on the sites in Bruce Nelson’s yellow Corniche and using “attitude,” as Nelson calls it, I was able to gain entry to a surprising number.

  Four of the most extraordinary new houses that I visited are being built by men in their early forties, most of them self-made men who acquired their fortunes during the Reagan years and who have probably been influenced by the flamboyance of Donald Trump’s highly publicized life-style. In one instance, two houses on adjoining lots were torn down to build one 24,000-square-foot home for the couple and their three children, three nannies, and four maids. In another, two houses on adjoining lots were gutted, rebuilt, and joined together as one, encircled by a miniature railroad for the owners’ two young sons. “You’re only this age once. You may as well do it,” one architect quoted his client as saying.

  “We’re talking all cash in these houses. There are no loans on any of them,” said Bruce Nelson. “Vast fortunes have been coming into the Los Angeles area for years now, but very quietly.”

  Standing in the curve of a sweeping staircase, looking out over the marble-columned hallway, I said, “My God, these people could give a dance in this hall.”

  The contractor who had let me in answered, “They don’t have to. There’s a discotheque downstairs.”

  “Who is the owner?” I asked.

  “He is not anyone you ever heard of,” said the contractor.

  Whoever these people are, they have not only a grand style in mind for their houses but also a grand style for the lives they intend to live in their houses once they are complete. In one petit palais under construction that I entered, the architect told me that the owner, described only as being “in airplane parts,” had been so impatient to show off his vast new structure
that he had increased the already large work staff of masons and bricklayers and agreed to pay them double and triple time to face the front of the mansion with red brick before Christmas so that he could give an outdoor party in the courtyard and let his friends see his work in progress.

  “This is the only place in the world where real-estate agents become stars. I’m writing a novel about it,” said real-estate agent Elaine Young. “What I’d really like to have is a three- or four-minute segment on the news dealing with real estate. When I first went into the business thirty years ago, there were only men in real estate, and older women. Real-estate people have been getting better- and better-looking. We just hired three new people in our office, two gorgeous girls and one handsome man. A man buying a $5 million house would rather buy from a beautiful woman than a homely one. It’s such a personal business—we’re in people’s houses, in their bedrooms and their bathrooms. I love what I do. I could have gone into show business, but I ended up making a lot more money than some of the producers I’ve dated. We’re sort of the periphery of show business.”

  A glamorous figure, Elaine Young lunches daily at the same table in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. An hour before I talked with her, she had been interviewed by another writer for another magazine. She was once married to the late film star Gig Young, who, years later, in the third week of a subsequent marriage, shot and killed his bride and himself in an unexplained mystery. Her hair is very very blond, her dress is very very pink, and her glasses have white frames. People turn to look at Elaine Young. “It’s awesome,” she said about the boom. “Every year I’ve said it can’t go up any more, and then it does. Nothing hurts California real estate. Nothing. The rest of the country can get into a recession and California doesn’t know. Even the earthquakes don’t stop it. Did you feel the earthquake last night? I slept right through it.”

  Four or five times during the hour we spent together, the captain in the Polo Lounge brought her a remote-control telephone. “I told them not to put calls through,” she said each time, and then took the call and transacted some business. “The Burt Reynolds house is up for sale for $6 million, and I’ve got some people interested,” she said. “Burt’s moving to Florida lock, stock, and barrel. It’s the Japanese who are driving up the prices. They don’t want anything over five years old. Even an older house redone they’re not interested in. That’s why there’s so many tear-downs. The Koreans are pretty much the same. I don’t believe the prices! I have rentals for $40,000 a month. And there’s no end in sight. Oh, God, here’s another call. I told them not to put calls through.”

  In Europe, in the fifteenth century, laws called sumptuary laws were created to limit the excesses of the rich: the tower of a castle could be only so high, the length of a jeweled train only so long. “These people don’t know when to stop,” said Bruce Nelson about the new builders. “There are only two or three really great architects working in all this boom. What you’re getting mostly is schlock. Look at this house. French balustrades and Corinthian columns. Everything is overbuilt. They don’t know that the essence of elegance is simplicity. It’s hard for them to stop. Now water is the new status symbol. I don’t just mean Jacuzzis and very, very large swimming pools. Waterfalls are becoming very popular, and lakes.”

  At this point we drove into the courtyard of a $30 million spec house. I had been reminded by one real-estate agent to explain that a spec house did not mean a spectacular house, although it might very well be spectacular. A spec house is a house built on speculation, for sale to anyone with the necessary bucks. This $30 million spec house was being built right next door to an almost matching house. They were being built by two former business partners who reportedly no longer speak. Each house has a tennis court that is cantilevered out over Coldwater Canyon. The houses can be seen for miles around, and have caused outrage in the neighborhood. One Beverly Hills society figure, who lives directly below them, said, “I know it’s terrible to talk about money, but my husband had to have $50,000 worth of shrubbery put in our lawn to block out those two monstrosities.” The one I was allowed to enter has more gigantic marble columns than Hadrian’s Villa. The master suite has his-and-her bathrooms of unparalleled luxury, with Jacuzzis, sunken tubs, and etched-glass doors. The floor of the dining room has clear glass panels that reveal an indoor swimming pool below. Leaving through the front door, which is eighteen feet high, the real-estate agent pointed to the house next door and said to me, “Imagine spending $30 million on this house and having that ugger right on top of you.”

  “Do you think this will sell?” I asked.

  “Hell, yes,” he said. “We’re at the beginning of this boom. We’re not at the end of it. No matter what happens to the economy, these people won’t be affected.”

  The real big shots are taken by helicopter to look at property. That includes the very rich Japanese, members of the Saudi royal family, and agents representing the Sultan of Brunei’s family. “I sold one house to a man from Hong Kong,” said Bruce Nelson. “It always surprised me that he never wanted to see it when he was in town. Then I was told it was a subterfuge for the brother of the Sultan of Brunei. He paid $15 million for the house, but he’s never moved in.”

  Brooks Barton, the patrician real-estate broker who is the first vice president of Coldwell Banker, spent hours in the air showing places to Sir James Goldsmith, the international financier, before Goldsmith abandoned the idea of living in Los Angeles and settled on Mexico instead. “The economy of Southern California is incredible, and growing all the time,” Barton told me as he pointed out the Jerry Perenchio estate below. Although any spread with two acres is referred to as an estate by most brokers, there are only four major estates left that have not been broken up into smaller lots. One of them is the aforementioned Ann Warner estate. Another is the former Conrad Hilton estate in Bel-Air, which, like the Warner place, has nine acres. Now owned by the tremendously rich widower David Murdock, who is listed by Forbes magazine as being worth “well over $900 million,” the property was described by one broker as “the perfect estate. You can’t see it from the road. The driveway goes into a proper courtyard. The house opens onto the gardens.” Another is the Knoll, considered by many to be the most beautiful house in Beverly Hills. The Knoll was built in the 1950s and lived in for many years by a Doheny heiress, Lucy Doheny Battson, whose family at one time owned four hundred acres in Beverly Hills. In 1975 Mrs. Battson sold the house for what was considered at the time the astronomical price of $2 million to the Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, who sold it six years later to the country-western star Kenny Rogers for $13 million. Rogers in turn sold it three years later to the Denver oil billionaire Marvin Davis for $20-plus million. Davis, who owned Twentieth Century-Fox Studios briefly and then sold it, and owned the Beverly Hills Hotel briefly and then sold it, and his popular wife, Barbara, are cutting a wide social swath in both the film community and the group that hovers around former president Reagan and Mrs. Reagan. The Davises’ annual Christmas party in their new house is said to outdo for sheer splendor and movie star attendance any other party in the community in years and years. The last of the four great estates is the Bel-Air showplace known as the former Kirkeby house, which became well known around the world as the house in the television series “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Driven to despair by the constant tourist traffic past the place, the late Carlotta Kirkeby very much regretted ever having let the house be used. The French-château-style mansion is now owned by Jerry Perenchio, the former talent agent turned sports promoter who was later partners with television mogul Norman Lear until he sold his interests to Coca-Cola for $485 million. Perenchio paid $13.5 million for the estate, then bought the house on each side for an additional $7 million in order to protect his property. He is living in one of them until the big house is finished; he tore down the other to build a new driveway. Perenchio is doing what in real-estate circles is called a total gut job on the elegant mansion, keeping the shell of th
e house but realigning and opening up the inside—all under the supervision of Henri Samuel, the great Parisian decorator, who also guided to completion the magnificent apartment of the socially visible John and Susan Gutfreund in New York.