Haunted Hollywoodland, Part III: The Ghost with the Top Hat and Cane
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: December 5, 2009
The Hollywoodland Realty Office in 1923. The events described took place in the front courtyard and on the second floor/Courtesy Bruce Torrence Hollywood Historical Collection
Charisse Landise is a Beachwood Canyon resident and clairvoyant healing artist with a keen sense of the supernatural. We first met three years ago when I interviewed her on the significance of the Hollywood Sign for my documentary; since then we’ve talked periodically about Beachwood Canyon’s history and notable past residents. It was Charisse who had the vivid dream about Peg Entwistle described in Part I of my Haunted Hollywoodland series.
After I posted a piece on Busby Berkeley (“First House North of the Gates: Busby Berkeley’s Home in Hollywoodland”), Charisse called me to tell me about an incident that happened last November, when she was working out of the day spa above Hollywoodland Realty in Beachwood Village.
It was late afternoon but already dark when she arrived for a session and saw a male apparition sitting in the courtyard outside the Realty Office. He appeared to be in his late thirties and was dressed in narrow old-fashioned trousers and a top hat. He carried a cane.
Though Charisse didn’t recognize him, she felt he was waiting for her. Unable to get any answers about his identity or motives, she went upstairs to meet her client. Once inside, she felt his presence in the spa.
“He was definitely there as a curious witness,” Charisse says. “He was extremely fascinated with my healing procedure. I had the sense he had never seen anything like it. He was very unthreatening. I was challenged by the unexpected nature of his steady watchful presence.” The ghost observed her throughout the session and stayed behind after she locked up.
“I didn’t know that was Busby Berkeley’s house next door until I read your blog, but I’m sure it was him,” she said. Unlike the house, whose entryway is now hidden behind a gate, the Realty Office remains open to the street, as it was in Berkeley’s time. The fact that the ghost appeared to be in his late thirties seems appropriate, as Berkeley was at the height of his success during those years. And a top hat and cane would be obvious props for a choreographer of movie musicals featuring scores of top-hatted, cane-wielding dancers.
“Ultimately I was so grateful to have met him,” says Charisse. “His movie ‘42nd Street’ was why I moved to New York City when I was 18.”
Contact www.charisselandise.com for further information.
Haunted Hollywoodland, Part II: Sunset Ranch
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: November 22, 2009
Sunset Ranch and the Hollywood Sign/Hope Anderson Productions
Sunset Ranch occupies a hilly space at the north end of Beachwood Drive, where the Canyon meets Griffith Park. Although many people know it as a riding spot, few realize the ranch predates Hollywoodland, the 1923 housing development that abuts it. Before the property was developed by a real estate consortium headed by Harry Chandler, all of Hollywoodland was ranchland.
Unsurprisingly, horses were a big part of early Hollywoodland’s appeal. Residents of the new neighborhood were to have the best of both worlds: a peaceful country life and easy access to urban jobs and amusements. A radio ad outlined a typical day for Hollywoodland homeowners:
Listen–the horses are stamping in their stalls-the sea breeze kisses the hilltops-while the birds weave melodies of happiness on the open trail. Your day in Hollywoodland-in-California begins with a song, and for a brief hour you canter on the wings of the morning–a shower-breakfast-and away for a day at the office, to return at eventide to the calmness of the hills, and there below you, watch a myriad of millions of lights twinkling in the distance.
Residents also enjoyed a clubhouse and tennis courts near the north end of Beachwood Drive, where some sixties-era houses now stand. A jitney running from Beachwood Drive to the trolley stop at Franklin and Argyle ferried residents back and forth, a necessity in the days of one-car families. Though the clubhouse faded away during the Depression, limited car service from the Village bus stop to houses up the hill continued into the 1950’s.
Subsequent decades brought new construction, more residents and through traffic as Canyon Lake Drive connected Beachwood Canyon to Toluca Lake. Through it all, only Sunset Ranch remained unchanged, offering trail rides, boarding, horses for movies and itself as a shooting location.
Its most famous recent appearance was in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.” The scene in which the Cowboy delivers an ultimatum to the young movie director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is both surreal and frightening, as Adam drives his Porsche up a darkened Beachwood Drive, parks and enters a paddock lit by a single flickering bulb.
In 2006, I spent part of an afternoon shooting interviews and B-roll at the Ranch for my documentary, “Under the Hollywood Sign.” While the Ranch is not as scary in daylight as it was in “Mulholland Dr.,” it is believed to be haunted. I had already heard stories of a “weird, dark energy” from someone who spent a lot of time there as a child, but I didn’t have time to investigate because we were on a tight schedule. (I’d paid a $500 fee to shoot for two hours.)
My first inkling that it wasn’t going to be an easy afternoon was when my previously booked interviewee, a Ranch employee, got a serious case of cold feet and tried to back out. Somehow I persuaded her to go through with the interview and eventually coaxed an amusing story from her, about some clients on the dinner ride who, after too many margaritas, had a hard time staying on their horses. An employee overheard this and reported back to the manager, who sent an emissary to inform me that I couldn’t use the story and moreover that he would have to see a rough cut to “approve” the interview.
The manager soon appeared to give me the bum’s rush, claiming we would have to leave because another production company was coming to scout. I didn’t understand why that would be a conflict– location scouting and shooting occur there constantly–yet I sensed there was no point in arguing. We did another quick interview and left early, but not before I sent word that I would not be using the first interview. (The only interesting thing in it was the offending story and besides, I don’t let outsiders see rough cuts.)
Much later, I interviewed a former Sunset Ranch riding instructor who told me of spending the night in one of the rooms over the barn and hearing a man being hanged, along with choking sounds and the vibration of the rope. This was consistent with the Romeo-and-Juliet story I’d heard about a 16-year-old Mexican boy who worked at the ranch in the 1920’s. He fell in love with a Hollywoodland homeowner’s daughter and she with him, but it was an impossible situation given their class and ethnic differences, as well as the mores of the day. Despondent that he could never be with his true love, the boy hanged himself in the breezeway between the stalls.
Then there’s the strange, wafting scent of gardenias each autumn. Riders and ranch employees report smelling gardenias on the trails in mid-September, near the anniversary of Peg Entwistle’s suicide off the Hollywoodland Sign. No gardenias grow in the area, but Peg wore gardenia perfume.
On December 26th, 2007– a night when 90 mile-an-hour winds uprooted a stand of 70-year-old Torrey pines on Woodhaven Dr., just above the village–the Ranch was involved in a freak riding accident. The circumstances were these: an engaged couple had booked a private dinner ride for that night. It was a birthday gift from the man to his fiancee, a romantic night ride for the two of them, led by a guide. Though the woman an inexperienced rider, the guide inexplicably put her on a new, skittish horse; despite high winds, they set out for Toluca Lake. When the guide moved to the front along the narrow passage between Mt. Lee and Mt. Hollywood, the horse bolted, set off by the winds. The woman fell off ; despite her headgear (all riders at Sunset Ranch are required to wear helmets) she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and never regained consciousness.
Her grief-stricken fiance returned every night for two weeks to mourn at the place where she died. Although her parents filed a huge lawsuit against the ranch, accounts of the accident and the eventual settlement were somehow kept out of the news.
Sunset Ranch is understandably sensitive about its image, but the management’s efforts to censor bad news–and even a little story about dinner riders and margaritas–makes one wonder whether transparency might a better tactic. After all, secrecy can only underscore the impression that the Ranch is mysterious, haunted and possessed of a “weird, dark energy.”
Haunted Hollywoodland
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: November 7, 2009
Hollywoodland, circa 1926. The house featured in the article, with crenelated tower, is seen at center. Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific Collection.
Several years ago I met a woman who had unwittingly rented a haunted apartment in an old building on Hollywood Boulevard. After a month of torment by voices and things flying around the room, she moved out. Her theory was this: “A lot of people came to Hollywood to be in the movies and when things didn’t work out, they killed themselves.”
Hollywoodland has its fair share of paranormal activity too, but it seems to have to do less with tormented souls than people who liked living here and don’t see the need to move out simply because they’re dead. (See my previous piece on Felix Adler.)
My closest encounter with Hollywoodland’s spirit community came in 2006, soon after I moved in, when neighbors invited me to see their castle-like home. A monument to storybook architecture, the four-story house features crenelated towers and numerous balconies. Like most of Hollywoodland’s original houses, it has enormous walls of granite quarried in Bronson Canyon and a fairy tale atmosphere.
It was a very hot 4th of July; as the house was not air-conditioned, the many rooms I toured were uncomfortably warm. The notable exception was the library, which was at least 15 degrees cooler than the rest of the downstairs and probably 25 degrees cooler than the upstairs. Cool air flowed from an unseen vent, prompting me to comment on the room’s air conditioning.
“It’s not air-conditioning,” said one of my hosts.
I had already heard about the female ghost flying down a hallway toward one of them when they moved in. A mysterious figure in 1920’s clothing, she made periodic appearances until they renovated the library, which originally was so frigid that the carpenter wore a down jacket to do the work, until he quit out of fear. The owners finished the job themselves, after which the place warmed up considerably.
The ghost didn’t entirely disappear, however, because she took a liking to one of the owner’s visiting sons. The teenager would wake up in the morning to find small gifts–previously unseen silver spoons, napkin rings and lamp finials–on his bedside table, a pattern that continued after he started bolting the door from the inside. The spoons and napkin rings were engraved in a feminine font with three initials. My hosts had made a collection of the objects and showed it to me.
By then the ghost had stopped her visits. Perhaps because the boy had grown up, there were no more unexpected trinkets left in the night. The owners speculated the ghost was the original owner, perhaps a murder victim (they’d found a stain in the garage), but old newspapers turned up no accounts of a crime.
Because the house looks like an English castle rather than a Mogul palace, I walked by it hundreds of times before realizing it had been built for Theosophists. The cut-outs of crosses on the garage doors seemed merely decorative before I noticed, high on one of the towers, red lotuses on the stained glass windows and Moorish arches outside them. As far as I know, the castle is one of two Theosophist houses in Hollywoodland; all the others are below the gates, the bulk of them in the southwest corner of the Canyon, where the Krotona Colony was located.
The occult fads of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appealed to Theosophists and early Hollywood film stars alike, as both groups searched for existential answers. More than one Beachwood resident has told me stories of seances held during the teens and twenties in certain houses that have unexplained events to this day. And a psychic who lives in the Canyon has had vivid dreams about Peg Entwistle, who said in one, “There’s more life after death than you can imagine.”
Mary Desti Dempsey: Preston Sturges’s Mother of Invention
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: October 6, 2009
Preston Sturges, ages one to fourteen. His mother, Mary Dempsey, appears in pictures two and three./From "Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges," Touchstone copyright 1990.
Preston Sturges was born in Chicago in 1898 to a beautiful mother (and fabulist of the first order) named Mary Dempsey and an unreliable father named Edmund Biden, which seems straightforward but wasn’t, at least to Sturges in his early years. Because his father left the scene when he was an infant, his mother led Sturges to believe his stepfather was his biological father. She also claimed to have been 15 when Preston was born–she was actually 27–and 16 when she entered medical school, which she wasn’t, and didn’t. But those fibs were mere warm-ups for the Big Lie: deciding she was descended from Italian nobility–on the grounds that Dempsey had to be a mispronunciation of the princely “d’Este”–Mary Dempsey opened a cosmetics business in Europe called Maison d’Este. After threats of litigation from the actual d’Estes, she modified the firm’s name to Desti and used it as her middle name. Sturges summed up the situation by writing:
My mother was in no sense a liar, nor even intentionally unacquainted with the truth…as she knew it. She was, however, endowed with such a rich and powerful imagination that anything she had said three times, she believed ferverently. Often, twice was enough.
When Mary Dempsey was between marriages, she took the 2 1/2-year-old Preston to Paris, where she ostensibly planned to study theater. On her first day in town, Mary met a Mrs. Duncan whose daughter, Isadora, was a dancer. Isadora Duncan and Mary Dempsey not only became instant best friends but maintained a lifelong bond that outlasted their many relationships with men. Though Mary soon returned to Chicago to marry Solomon Sturges, she managed to exact an agreement to live with him only half the year. The remainder of her time–which often stretched well beyond six months–would be spent in Europe, accompanying Isadora to Bayreuth and other venues.
The result was that Preston Sturges not only spent his formative years in Europe but at one point, after being left for a long period with a French family while his mother traveled, spoke English with a French accent. After his adored stepfather divorced Mary in 1911, he spent nearly all his time in Europe. By the time his mother had married a Turk, learned a secret Ottoman skin cream formula from her new father-in-law and started Maison Desti, Preston was a full-fledged expatriate child, fluent not only in French and German but able to fend for himself during his mother’s frequent absences. The culmination of his European childhood involved running her shop in Deauville as a 15-year-old on summer vacation. When WWI broke out in August, he packed up the business and got himself to New York just ahead of the fighting. (His mother had gone to the front to volunteer as a medic, citing her non-existent Chicago medical credentials.)
Eventually mother and son were united in New York, but the pull of Europe was too strong for Mary to resist. One night in 1915 they were seeing Isadora off on a ship to Italy when she called from the deck, “Mary! If you don’t come with me, I don’t know what I’ll do!” Despite having no money and only the clothes on her back, Mary Dempsey walked up the gangplank, saying to Preston, “Do the best you can, darling. Keep things going. I’ll send you some money as soon as I can!”
Anyone familiar with Preston Sturges’ heroines can see where he got his inspiration. His movies are loaded with smart, hilarious and devious babes who bedevil the hapless and innocent men who love them. In “The Lady Eve,” Barbara Stanwyck plays a shipboard fortune hunter who snags a rich but naive heir (and snake expert) played by Henry Fonda. Madcap adventures ensue. “The Palm Beach Story” features two Mary Dempsey-like characters, the gold-digging runaway wife played by Claudette Colbert and the talkative, much-married heiress played by Mary Astor. A key scene in the movie, in which Colbert leaves the rowdy Ale and Quail Club car and returns to find that it, along with her clothes, has been left on the tracks, was taken from Sturges’s life. As a boy traveling by train through Germany, Preston and his mother had left their compartment–and all their belongings, including two dogs, some canaries and a parrot–for the dining car and come back to find it gone. This presented a problem, not least because–like Claudette Colbert–Mary Dempsey had left her purse in the missing car. Madcap adventures ensued. Fortunately,
…everything was straightened out when we pulled into Cologne, where a soldier with a bayonet was guarding our pile of stuff, with the parrot insulting him in French.
Preston Sturges inherited not only his mother’s enthusiasm for culture and her sense of humor but her impulsive nature. Like her, he married often and sometimes suddenly, as in the case of his third marriage, which occurred during a brief separation from another woman with whom he’d spent a decade. The maternal source of his behavior seems obvious, though apparently not to him. In his memoir Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges, he wrote:
And yet, except that she chose the schools in which I was placed and made a few wise remarks which I remember with pleasure now but thought totally inconsequential at twelve, Mother had absolutely nothing to do with my development or what I grew into. Strangely, Father, though he was not my true progenitor, had very much more to do with the shaping of my character than Mother ever had.
This jaw-dropping lack of awareness didn’t serve Sturges well in his personal life. He found domestic happiness only in his fourth marriage, which lasted from his early 50s until his death at 61. He had a talent for alienating friends and co-workers, abruptly cutting off relationships that had lasted for years. His hasty departure from Paramount, home to all his hits, was a mistake from which he never recovered. By the time he died of a heart attack in 1959, Sturges was struggling to pick up the pieces of a brief but astonishingly fertile and lucrative career. Twenty minutes before his death, he wrote:
…I have suffered so many attacks of indigestion that I am well versed in the remedy: ingest a little Maalox, lie down, stretch out, and hope to God I don’t croak.
Madame Blavatsky’s Seances: Theosophy’s Connection to Popular Occultism
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: October 2, 2009
The seance–Victorian ladies and gentlemen gathered around a table to speak to spirits through a medium–is a cliche of countless movies and old photographs. But it was also a huge fad throughout the western world during the second half of the nineteenth century. Modern seances are generally attributed to the Fox sisters of upstate New York, whose recounting of their communications with a household spirit led them to popular stardom.
Seances fascinated not just social outsiders and the bereaved but people of all socio-economic backgrounds and educations. The Society of Psychical Research, founded in England to investigate “allegedly paranormal phenomena using scientific principles,” counted among its members William Gladstone, John Ruskin and William James.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), a founder of the Theosophical Society, not only found seances appealing but practiced them to great effect before audiences in New York and Adyar, India, where she moved the T.S. headquarters in 1979. The conjuring of spirits drew potential converts to Theosophy; Blavatsky in turn gave seances an intellectual sheen by investing them with Theosophy’s mix of Western philosophy and Hindu and Jewish mysticism. According to Matthew Mulligan Goldstein, Blavatsky’s injection of intellectualism “turned spiritualism away from what had seemed in the 1850s its anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional direction, and set [it] on a path toward hermetic elitism.” (www.victorianweb.org)
Madame Blavatsky
So sensational were Blavatsky’s Adyar seances that the Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson to investigate in 1883. When he reported back that her spirits were conjured from bedsheets, mirrors and the like, Blavatsky was discredited. In 1885 she moved back to London, where she spent her remaining six years writing The Secret Doctrine, her spiritual masterpiece. She also found time to convert the woman who would succeed her as the leader of the Theosophical Society, the feminist and political radical Annie Besant.
In the Krotona Colony, seances seem to have had a divisive effect, since some Theosophists practiced them while others did not. They also seem to have alienated some potential converts–people who were drawn to the intellectual power of Theosophy but not its occult aspects.
Beachwood Canyon has a number of buildings that are said to be haunted; some of those were part of the Krotona Colony. Whatever one thinks of seances, it’s hard not to wonder about the relationship between occult rituals and paranormal phenomena.
In a future post, I’ll return to the subject of Beachwood’s haunted houses.
My Video History of the Hollywood Sign at AIC-Hollywood
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: September 28, 2009
AIC-Hollywood's Gallery in NoHo Arts District/Hope Anderson Productions
My new 15-minute video on the history of the Hollywood Sign will be featured with Ted VanCleave’s photographs at the Art Institute of California-Hollywood’s new gallery in North Hollywood. The show, which inaugurates AIC-Hollywood’s beautiful LEED Gold building, will run through the end of the year.
AIC-Hollywood/5250 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hollywood, CA 91601
The Double Indemnity House, from Book to Film to Reality
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: September 14, 2009
The "Double Indemnity" House/Hope Anderson Productions
Few houses in the movies are better known than Barbara Stanwyck’s Spanish Colonial in “Double Indemnity.” The director Billy Wilder first shows it in an establishing shot that highlights not only its architectural features but its distinctive site–a hilly corner lot on a sparsely-built suburban street.
Though the script states the house is in Los Feliz, it is actually located in the Hollywood Dell. I’ve always thought the house beautiful and well-suited to its penninsula-shaped lot, but Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who co-wrote the screenplay, could not have agreed less. Here’s how they introduce it in a voiceover by insurance salesman Walter Neff ( Fred MacMurray):
It was one of those California Spanish houses
everyone was nuts about 10 or 15 years ago. This
one must have cost someone about 30,000 bucks–
that is, if he ever finished paying for it.
Their opinion of the house plummets when Neff goes inside. Wilder and Chandler describe the interior as:
Spanish craperoo in style…. A wrought-iron staircase
curves down from the second floor….All of this,
architecture, furniture, decorations, etc., is
genuine early Leo Carrillo period.
James M. Cain, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, no doubt concurred because his own description is even more withering:
It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest
of them in California, with white walls, red
tile roof, and a patio out to one side. It was
built cock-eyed. The garage was under the
house, the first floor was over that, and the
rest of it was spilled up the hill any way
they could get it in.
Interestingly, Double Indemnity locates the house not in Los Feliz but in Hollywoodland, where Cain himself lived.
James M. Cain's House, to the left of the Hollywood Sign/Hope Anderson Productions
Whether Cain’s contempt for the house was based on some hatred of Spanish architecture or the fact that Hollywoodland began as a tract development– albeit an expensive one–is unclear. But it does seem ironic that he should have disparaged the place for spilling up a hillside when his own Norman-style house–five stories’ worth–spilled down another hillside a mile away.
In any case, the Double Indemnity House looks much better today than it did in “Double Indemnity.” Mature landscaping and the presence of other houses have softened its exterior, eliminating the sun-baked starkness that made it a believable setting for adultery and the hatching of a murder plot. And, as shown in a recent spread in the LA Times, the vibrant interiors have come a long way from the white walls and heavy Mission-style furniture featured in the film. In fact, the house radiates prosperity and warmth. At Christmastime, decked in wreaths, garlands and lights, it is among the most beautiful in the neighborhood.
Preston Sturges’s Hollywood House–and Its Two Locations
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: September 1, 2009
Preston Sturges/Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
I discovered Preston Sturges in the early 90’s, when I first saw “The Lady Eve” on video and became a huge fan of his movies. In 1998 I found myself celebrating his centennial at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which put on retrospective of his films. The crowds that showed up for opening night included such comedy luminaries as Paul Rubens and Steve Martin, as well as his widow, Sandy, and their sons. Even Eddie Bracken, star of “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Hail the Conquering Hero” was there.
It was around that time that I read Preston Sturges’s biography by James Curtis, Between Flops, (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1982) and learned that he had lived in the Hollywood Dell at 1917 N. Ivar, just north of Franklin. Though Sturges didn’t build the house, he certainly made it grand. In his posthumous memoir, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (Touchstone, 1990), he writes:
“Minutes after Bianca and I and a couple of servants moved in, I had construction started on a swimming pool, a barbeque house and a badminton court for the backyard. The place was in an uproar all the time with the racket of steam shovels, trip hammers, and concrete mixers, not to mention the carpenters and the dogs racing around between their legs, barking at the lot of them. The neighbors didn’t enjoy it and neither did we.”
That was in 1937, when Sturges was among the highest paid screenwriters in town. He was also under contract as a director at Paramount, where he pulled down $2,500 a week and would soon earn much more. Nevertheless he was always strapped for cash, not least because he owned two money-losing businesses, a restaurant on Sunset called Snyder’s and the Sturges Engineering Company, which made a ”vibrationless” diesel boat engine for which there was no apparent demand. (Sturges, a keen yachtsman, inherited his avid entrepreneurialism from his mother, a madcap expatriate whose cosmetics business, Maison Desti, was an intermittent success in Paris, Deauville and New York. Mary Desti Dempsey was also famous as Isadora Duncan’s best friend; she not only gave Duncan the silk shawl that, caught in a moving car wheel, would break her neck but designed and manufactured it, too. But that’s another story.)
Although as a money pit the Ivar house would be far surpassed by The Players, Sturges’s future theater/nightclub/restaurant, it was an expensive place for a relentless spender to own. Sturges writes:
“When I hired some tree surgeons to shuffle around the trees in the backyard of my house to make room for the pool, I discovered an even faster way to get rid of money.”
When I learned the address in 2000, I went up Ivar to investigate. What I found was not only no house but a non-existent property: where 1917 should have been, there was a tunnel running under the 101 freeway.
The former Sturges property on N. Ivar/Hope Anderson Productions
As Curtis’s book doesn’t discuss the fate of the house, I assumed it was torn down when the 101 was built. Then yesterday I read in Sturges’s memoir about the property’s seizure under eminent domain:
“…one day in 1950, the state did indeed condemn the property for the public weal and gave me six months to remove from it my house, the barbeque house, the small garage, the three-car garage with apartment, and some trees, and paid me $130,000.” The following year, “the house, cut into three sections…inched through the streets of Hollywood on the backs of huge flatbed trucks to the new lot Sandy and I had found at Franklin and Vista.”
Although Sturges didn’t give the address of the relocated house, I had read a description of it in Curtis’s book and knew what to look for: a rambling wood frame affair. I assumed it resembled the two shingle houses south of the tunnel on Ivar, one of which is pictured below:
The House next to Sturges's Former Ivar Property/Hope Anderson Productions
Today I took a camera over to Vista Street. Driving north of Franklin to the edge of Runyon Canyon Park, I saw one shingle house, but it was single-story and newer than the ones on Ivar. Then, heading south, I saw this house on the southeast corner of Franklin and Vista:
Preston Sturges's Presumed Relocated House on Vista/Hope Anderson Productions
Although its shingles are now white and its condition somewhat dilapidated, it matches the Ivar houses in vintage and spirit and is the only one of its kind on the block. I’m certain this is the Sturges house and had never noticed it before, as I always go north off Franklin, rather than south. Preston Sturges, who died 50 years ago last month, seems all the more vivid to me now.
As for the tunnel, a friend who lives on Ivar recently told me a story about it. Without knowing anything about the Sturges connection (or possibly about Sturges), he said the tunnel was so haunted that a few years ago, a certain religious group conducted two exorcisms on behalf of the neighbors. Though first exorcism didn’t work, the second, extra-strength version apparently did the trick.
Mary Astor at Moorcrest: the 1925 Publicity Photos
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: August 25, 2009
From Mary Astor’s second memoir, A Life on Film (Delacourt Press, 1967), come two previously unseen (at least by me) photos of her at Moorcrest.
In the first, she poses with her dreadful mother, Helen Langhanke. Helen, who made no secret of hating her daughter during her lifetime, underscored the sentiment by leaving Astor her diaries, which were a litany of viciousness and abuse. (Helen Langhanke’s diaries not only compounded Astor’s pain but, oddly, instilled the diary-keeping habit that would trigger the 1936 custody suit brought by her second husband, Franklyn Thorpe.)
Astor hated Moorcrest’s decor, which she called “unfortunate.” The red lotus keyhole windows and central arched window are clearly seen in the background of the photo, which appears to be the north side of the house. Here’s how the north facade of the master bedroom looks today:
Looking North to the Hollywood Sign from Moorcrest/Hope Anderson Productions
Far more glamorous and fun is the second photo. Astor poses in Moorcrest’s porte cochere with the family chauffeur and their Pierce Arrow limousine, both afforded by her earnings.
She was 19 years old, the family’s sole supporter and a virtual prisoner of her parents and Moorcrest. And though Mary Astor would attain freedom in three years, she wouldn’t reach the height of her stardom for another fourteen.
First House North of the Gates: Busby Berkeley’s Home in Hollywoodland
Posted by: underthehollywoodsign on: August 21, 2009
Catching the jitney outside Busby Berkeley's house, late 1920's/Collection of Bruce Torrence
You see it as you drive through the Hollywoodland gates, a large Spanish Colonial house directly ahead, though the road goes to the left. The property wraps around the curve, and the house is so blindingly white and prominently sited that it’s impossible to ignore. Unlike many old houses, it looks the same as when it was built in 1923, as pictures taken during Hollywoodland’s early years attest. (A gate now hides the front steps and the current garage doors lack the originals’ honeycomb details, but that’s about it for exterior changes.)
L-R: The Busby Berkeley House and Hollywoodland Realty Today/Hope Anderson Productions
The first house (and second building, after the Hollywoodland Realty Company) to be built in the Hollywoodland tract, it was owned by Busby Berkeley, whose name still evokes the glamour and inventiveness of the lavish musicals he choreographed and directed at Warner Brothers, Fox and MGM.
A native Angeleno and the son of actors, William Berkeley Enos (1895-1976) gave us such dance classics as “Lullaby on Broadway,” and “I Got Rhythm.” From 1933-1937 he directed and/or choreographed 14 Warner Brothers musicals, including “Gold Diggers of 1935,” ”42nd Street” and “Footlight Parade.”
His success afforded him the house on Beachwood Drive where he lived with his widowed mother, to whom he was devoted, and whomever he happened to be married to at the moment. (He had between four and seven marriages, depending on the biographical source.) His matrimonial success no doubt was hindered by his work, which required auditioning thousands of young female dancers for the 150 he would ultimately choreograph in each film. His drinking probably didn’t help matters, either. In 1935, while driving drunk, Berkeley caused a crash that involved two other cars and killed three people. He was acquitted of homicide charges after three trials, largely because he was his mother’s sole source of support.
While Berkeley was one of the biggest stars in Hollywoodland, his house was–and still is–arguably the least private because of its location in Village’s commercial district. Besides the Realty Office next door, the house boasts a bus stop directly outside, and has since 1925. The top photograph shows passengers transferring from the public bus to the Hollywoodland jitney, which took them further up the Canyon to their homes.
Berkeley was long gone by the time the actor Ned Beatty bought the house in the 70’s, after “Deliverance” had made him a star. During Beatty’s years in residence, large buses ran up and down Beachwood Drive, rather than the Dash buses that make the run today. The old buses were too big to make the U-turn in front of Beatty’s house and would grind and rev their engines in the attempt. On one occasion the bus actually became stuck, creating such a racket that an infuriated Beatty came out and hurled empty liquor bottles at it.
Like Busby Berkeley, Ned Beatty eventually moved to greener and less congested pastures. Still, many people still call the place the Ned Beatty House, though others prefer the original Busby Berkeley title.
While Busby Berkeley’s name would seem to evoke a more genteel era, his life was anything but. In addition to the vehicular homicide trials and many divorces, Berkeley struggled with suicidal depression after the auto accident. A serious suicide attempt after his mother’s death in 1946 made the newpapers and landed him in a mental hospital. Nevertheless, he survived to the age of 80, long enough to experience a career revival in the 1960’s. New generations discovered his films of the 1930’s and 40’s, which began to be shown on television and later found new life on video and DVD. By the time Berkeley died in 1976 in Palm Springs, his place in Hollywood history was assured.
