The Mansions of Limbo

by Dominick Dunne

  Move over, Aaron Spelling. Someone with even grander plans than yours is moving in on your turf, and the only way to get an idea of the extent of this envisioned Shangrila is to see the property from the air: 157 acres of Beverly Hills land called Benedict Canyon Mountain, purchased about twelve years ago by Princess Shams for her brother the Shah of Iran as the site for a palace for his years in exile. Fate, however, had plans for the Shah other than retirement in Beverly Hills. Now the property is owned by Merv Griffin, the former big-band vocalist turned talk-show host and game-show entrepreneur, who sold his interest in “Wheel of Fortune” to Coca-Cola for $250 million plus. He then bought the Beverly Hilton Hotel for $100 million, and has subsequently built a greater fortune in radio stations and real estate, even vying with the formidable Donald Trump for supremacy in the Resorts International chain. At present Griffin lives in a handsome gray stone Georgian mansion in Beverly Hills, which is on the market for $20 million. The new pool pavilion for this temporary house was inaugurated with a lunch party for Mrs. Ronald Reagan, at which Griffin’s great friend Eva Gabor acted as hostess. “It’s a shame we had to back the gates with canvas,” said Waldo Fernandez, who decorated the house and designed the pavilion, “but there were too many people looking in and taking pictures.” Fernandez was also the architect for the very large weekend house Griffin built in Palm Springs, which burned to the ground the week it was completed and then had to be completely rebuilt. But nothing, absolutely nothing, can compare with the about-to-be-started house on the top of Benedict Canyon Mountain.

  I was driven there in the black Bentley of Waldo Fernandez, who also decorated the Bel-Air home of Elizabeth Taylor. Fernandez, fortyish, mustached, stylishly dressed by Giorgio Armani, will design Griffin’s mountaintop palace with views in all directions. Fernandez’s aide followed the Bentley in a Land Rover, and when we got to what will be the entry gates of the estate, we got out of the Bentley and into the Land Rover in order to negotiate the terrain. Fernandez was in charge of grading the mountain-top to the present seventeen flat acres, at a cost of $4 million. Three lakes are being built on it. At one point, the driveway will pass between two of the lakes. There will be two sets of gates for security, with armed guards at each. All cars will be stopped for clearance at both. There will be a guest parking area for ninety cars. There will be a helicopter pad. Permission to build the helicopter pad was secured only with the understanding that Griffin’s helicopter would service the hills in case of fire. And there will be all the other requisites of the good life: a theater, tennis courts, a gymnasium with a pool, not to be confused with the other pool by the pool pavilion. “We didn’t want to see the courts or the pool from the house,” said Fernandez. “There will be trails to those areas.” He pointed to another area. “The vineyards will be there.”

  The house, which will take from two and a half to three years to build, will be 60,000 square feet, 4,000 square feet larger than the Spelling house. It will be Palladian in style, with an atrium fifty feet by fifty feet by fifty feet in the middle. The facing will be limestone; the roof, red tile. The estimated cost of the building: $50 million.

  “I’ll soon be going to Europe to tag furniture for the house,” said Fernandez.

  “It all sounds very Hearstian,” I said, referring to San Simeon, the palace William Randolph Hearst completed in 1939.

  “It is,” said Fernandez. Looking over the beautiful acreage, he said, “It’s a dream of a job.”

  Despite all the hoopla connected with the Griffin estate, several highly placed people among the real-estate cognoscenti believe the house will never be built. “He’s got ten in it now,” they say, meaning $10 million. “You can buy Merv’s land and Waldo Fernandez’s blueprints for the house for $25 million.”

  But not to worry. There’s always Robert Manoukian, an international figure of Armenian descent, who is a trusted friend of the Sultan of Brunei, and who also acts as his emissary. He negotiated to buy the Beverly Hills Hotel from Marvin Davis for the Sultan. Manoukian’s new house, which is in the planning stages, is being designed by Budd Holden. It is to be built on 3.75 acres, on three descending lots, one of which was the old James Coburn estate, and, depending on whose version you believe, is going to be 58,000 square feet, 60,000 square feet, or 70,000 square feet. Fit for a king.

  “Which is the Reagans’ house?” I asked Brooks Barton in the helicopter.

  “There,” he answered, pointing down.

  “Where?”

  “There, that one.”

  “That little thing?”

  “Yes.”

  Spoiled now by mansions of all sizes, styles, and shapes, I peered down critically at the modest ranch-style structure that is the new home of the former president of the United States and Mrs. Reagan—modest, at least in comparison with the houses in the neighborhood. It is a one-story, three-bedroom house of about 7,300 square feet (roughly the size of Candy Spelling’s dressing room and closets), with pool, which friends of the Reagans bought for them for $2.5 million. Local rumor has it that Nancy Reagan does not enjoy having the house described as ranch-style. A block away on one side is the elaborate spec house designed by Budd Holden on 1.9 acres which recently sold for $15 million to the man from Hong Kong. On the other side is Jerry Perenchio’s French château.

  April 1989

  HIGH ROLLER

  The Phyllis McGuire Story

  One day several years ago I was lunching at Le Cirque, arguably New York’s most fashionable noontime restaurant, when my attention was drawn from my companions to three vaguely familiar-looking ladies of a certain age whom I at first mistook for triplets, since they were dressed identically in beige Chanel suits with matching bags, bracelets, pins, and honey-colored hairdos and were all speaking at the same time in an animated fashion. Seated at one of the very best tables, they were not unaware of the stir they were creating as they received the kind of deferential treatment from the sometimes haughty Le Cirque staff that Mrs. Astor or Mrs. Rockefeller might receive. The limitless curiosity of the socially inquisitive traveled from table to table: “Who are they?” And the answer came back, “The McGuire Sisters.” A snap of the fingers—of course! The McGuire Sisters, the beautiful trio from Middletown, Ohio, who had had thirty hit records and given command performances for five presidents and the Queen Mother of England. One of the most popular singing groups of the fifties, discovered and made famous by Arthur Godfrey, they had by then been long out of circulation.

  “Which one is Phyllis?” I asked the captain.

  “In the middle,” he answered.

  “Wasn’t she the—?”

  Before I could finish my sentence, he nodded, Yes, she was. If I had finished my sentence that day at Le Cirque, it would have been, “Wasn’t she the girlfriend of Sam Giancana?” Giancana, for decades one of the Mafia’s most notorious and highly publicized figures, was also renowned for his role in the CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, for his friendship with Frank Sinatra, and for his carrying on a love affair with Judith Campbell Exner at the same time she was having an affair with John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States.

  Phyllis McGuire met Sam Giancana, according to legend, in Las Vegas in 1960, when the McGuire Sisters were performing there four times a year and pulling down $30,000 a week. Sam was a widower of fifty-two, and Phyllis, barely thirty, had already divorced Neal Van Ells, a radio/television announcer from Dayton, Ohio. Like many another Vegas performer, Phyllis had taken a liking to the gaming tables and had run up a hefty marker. As the story goes, Sam, spotting her, and liking her, went to Moe Dalitz, who ran the Desert Inn, and asked him how much the McGuire girl owed. Moe told him $100,000, a large marker at any time but enormous then. Sam is alleged to have said to Moe, “Eat it,” meaning, in gangland parlance, erase the debt, which is different, of course, from paying the debt, but nonetheless it was a gesture not without charm and romantic appeal, especially since Sam followed it up with a suiteful of flowers. They fell in love.

>   For a time, the romance remained a well-kept secret, but wherever the trio traveled, Sam was there. In 1962, when the sisters were appearing at a nightclub in London, they were photographed there with their hairdresser, Frederic Jones, and Sam Giancana was also in the picture, with his arm wrapped around Phyllis. The photograph was flashed around the world, with enormous repercussions. The press and the public expressed a sense of outrage that the popular singer would associate with a person like Sam Giancana. In a tearful interview with the late gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Phyllis McGuire denied the rumors that she and Sam had been secretly married in Sweden, and also swore that she was never going to see Sam again. In 1968, the McGuires performed for the last time as a trio on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” broadcast from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Since then, Phyllis has occasionally appeared as a solo act, as well as in musicals around the country, most recently in Applause! in Atlantic City.

  Sam Giancana’s life was ended in 1975, while he was cooking Italian sausage in the basement kitchen of his Oak Park, Illinois, home, by a shot from a High-Standard Duromatic .22 target pistol, with a silencer attached, fired into the back of his head. That shot was followed by a second, fired into his mouth after he fell to the floor, and then by a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh, which were fired upward into his chin, shattering his lower jaw, ripping through his tongue, and lodging in the back of his skull. The FBI believes to this day that the deliverer of the blasts was a friend of many years, who still lives in the Chicago area, and that Sam was murdered because he had refused to cut the Chicago Mob in on the gambling empire he had set up outside the United States, in Iran, Haiti, and Central and South America, as well as on five gambling ships he ran in the Caribbean. Furthermore, Sam had become old, he was in poor health, and it was time for a change.

  Long before then, Phyllis and Sam had ceased being lovers, but they had remained friends and she had visited him on numerous occasions during his eight-year exile in Mexico. Both the Mob nobility and the show-business greats with whom Sam had hobnobbed snubbed his Chicago funeral. Only Phyllis McGuire and Keely Smith, who had once sung with Louis Prima, arrived to pay their respects to Giancana’s three daughters and to say farewell to Sam in his $8,000 silver casket.

  For several years the McGuire Sisters have been planning a nightclub comeback. In February they performed at Rainbow & Stars in New York, and shortly after that, I made arrangements to interview Phyllis McGuire. “Don’t mention Sam Giancana to her,” people warned me, but not mentioning Sam Giancana when writing about Phyllis McGuire would be like not mentioning Richard Burton when writing about Elizabeth Taylor, or, in a more parallel situation, like not mentioning Nicky Arnstein when writing about Fanny Brice. As it turned out, I didn’t have to bring up Sam’s name, because Phyllis McGuire brought it up first. Their story has all the stuff of which myths are made.

  I arrived in Las Vegas with elaborate directions for how to get from the airport to Rancho Circle, the exclusive enclave behind a guarded gate where she has lived for years. “Past the Lit’l Scholar Schoolhouse,” I read from my instruction sheet, but the driver said he didn’t need any instructions. “Everybody in Vegas knows where Phyllis McGuire lives.”

  From outside, the place looked like a suburban ranch-style house built in the fifties, but all resemblance to ranch-style life ended at the front door, which was opened by a man wearing a gun in a holster under his open suit jacket. Paul Romines has been her bodyguard for fourteen years. I stood for a moment in the hallway. To the right was a dining room with a mirrored floor. Through a door was a men’s lavatory with two wall urinals side by side. Ahead was a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, which separated the hall from the living room. The living room was one of the largest I have ever been in, so large that a forty-four-foot-high replica of the Eiffel. Tower did not seem to cramp the space. Beyond that was a vast area which included the formal dining room and, to the right of it, a bar with twelve bar chairs. To the left was an area identified by the bodyguard as the Chinese area, and to the right an area he designated as the French area. The windows, he informed me, were all bulletproof and could take a magnum shot, and at the touch of a button steel doors would drop from the eaves over all the windows, securing the house completely, fortress-style.

  The floor of the living room was black and white marble. The rugs in the French area were Aubusson and Tabriz, and the walls were covered in rose damask. The chandeliers and sconces were Bavarian, with amber light bulbs. The mirrors on the walls were Venetian, and the chairs and sofas were all French, in multiple groupings, so many chairs that I lost count at sixty. That was when Phyllis McGuire came in.

  She was dressed in a nautical style, with white flannel trousers and a white cashmere sweater with naval insignia on it. Her earrings were anchors. She was not at all what I was expecting, and from the moment she spoke I liked her. She was friendly, funny, gracious, utterly enthusiastic, constantly up, with boundless energy. And pretty, very pretty.

  “Did anyone offer you a cup of coffee?” she asked. “Or anything?” She flung up her hands in mock exasperation and called into the kitchen, “Enice, take care of Mr. Dunne. And I’ll have some coffee too. And some Perriers.” She asked me, “Did you meet Enice? Enice Jobe? She’s been with me for thirty-three years.”

  We sat on French chairs in the French area. “Is the music too loud?” she asked. “I can turn it down. Turn it down, Enice, will you, and put the coffee right here on this table.”

  I asked about the sisters, Dorothy and Christine, and she said, “We’ve been singing together since I was four years old. We sang in the car, using the windshield wiper for a metronome. My sisters are the most incredible harmony singers. I can start in any key, and they pick it up.” The sisters got their start singing in the First Church of God in Middletown, Ohio, where their mother, an ordained minister, was an associate pastor.

  “We were middle class,” she said. “My father worked for forty-six years for Armco Steel. He made steel before there were jet furnaces, working at an open hearth, shoveling in the pig iron. He wore safety shoes and long thick underwear, safety shirts and gloves, and a hard hat. At night after work, his clothes were coated with salt from his sweat. When my sisters and I started making money, we asked our parents what they owed, and we paid off everything. We made my father retire, and ordered a custom-made Cadillac with a gold plaque on it that said, FOR ASA AND LILLIE MCGUIRE, FROM DOROTHY, CHRISTINE, AND PHYLLIS. We sent them all over the world.”

  Looking around the French area, she said, “Some of this furniture is very valuable, and some is just personal to me. That Aubusson should be hanging on the wall rather than be on the floor. A lot of the furniture and the paneling came from the house of Helen Bonfils in Denver, Colorado. Her father was the editor and publisher of the Denver Post. She was one of the finest women I ever knew. That desk belonged to Helen’s father.”

  One thing I’ll say about Phyllis McGuire, she’s not hard to converse with. Raise any topic—with few exceptions—and she will talk away. She told me that one of the newspapers had called her a motor-mouth.

  “Do you want to see everything?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She took me through the house and grounds. There are eight acres and two guesthouses. “That’s where my sisters stay when they come here to rehearse. The rest of the time they live in Arizona. They came to Vegas during the week and went home on weekends while we were getting ready for the comeback. We worked six to eight hours a day. We worked out and did stretching exercises in the mornings and did three hours each afternoon with Jim Hendricks, our pianist. One night I had Altovese and Sammy Davis over to hear the act. Chris and Dorothy each have their own bedroom and television set, and they share the living room and kitchen.”

  Sister Dorothy is no stranger to romantic headlines herself, having engaged in 1958 in a steamy love affair with fellow Arthur Godfrey singing star Julius La Rosa, which resulted in a public scolding on-air by Godfrey. Although the cho
irgirl image was tarnished, that affair caused no lessening of the group’s popularity.

  Behind the main house, we came to a moatlike area where Phyllis’s twenty-three swans swim. “Those are the black Australian swans there,” she said. “That one is about ready to hatch.” Pointing to her tennis court, she said, “That’s where Johnny Carson learned how to play tennis. It needs to be swept,” she added, shaking her head.

  “Someone told me all the flowers in your garden are fake,” I said. She laughed and said, “Honey, I keep five gardeners.”

  In the pool house, noticing a crack in one of the windows, she picked up the telephone and called the main house. “Enice, tell maintenance there’s a crack in the window of the pool house. Have him replace it, will you?” A bit farther on, she said, “Over there’s my putting green. My waterfalls aren’t on today—sorry.”

  Back in the house, she took me downstairs. “This is my nightclub. It even has a neon sign. The carpet rolls up and it’s a dance floor underneath. The dance floor is in the shape of a piano. There have been lots of parties in this room. Over here is a blackjack table. Moe Dalitz gave me this table as a gift. I’ve taught more people how to play blackjack here at this table.”

  There is a beauty salon in the house, with several chairs and dryers so that the sisters, or houseguests, can have their hair done at the same time. In the health club, next to the beauty salon, are three changerooms and three massage tables next to one another, where three masseurs can work on three guests at the same time. “The steam room is always ready,” she said, peering into a window of the steam room.

  Her huge bathtub is part of her bedroom, and her closets are enormous. “This is all Chanel,” she said, pointing to one area. “Over there, it’s all Galanos, and there in that room is all Pauline Trigère.” It was a tour she was used to giving. “This is for my furs. The lynx, ermine, and sable are here. The older furs are over there. I keep a record of everything I wear so that I don’t ever repeat with the same people. All my clothes are on a computer. So are all the books in my library, and all the furniture. They’re all on video as well.”