You Must Remember This (14 page)

The story goes that the last parcel of the property belonged to
Will Rogers, which Hearst wanted for the tennis court. The land was worth about five thousand dollars, but Rogers found out who the buyer really was. By the time they were through negotiating, Rogers got a hundred thousand dollars for his parcel.

To give you some idea of the scale of Davies’s place, it had five buildings, a hundred ten rooms, fifty-five bathrooms, and thirty-seven antique fireplaces. For one party in 1937, to which I was unaccountably not invited, they installed a merry-go-round on the grounds.

The Beach House was small only in comparison to Hearst’s San Simeon, which was situated on 240,000 acres. But you couldn’t make movies and commute from San Simeon, so Hearst simply built his mistress an equivalent in Santa Monica. While the exterior was Neocolonial in design, inside it was eclectic. There were vast rooms on the first floor, a ballroom, a theater, dozens of bedrooms on the second floor—a random succession of grand rooms that had no connection to one another.

As with San Simeon, Hearst’s decorating principle was simple: he bought entire rooms out of various European castles and installed them in Davies’s new house. The dining room, drawing room, and reception hall came from Burton Hall in Ireland. Then there was a ballroom from an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo. A tavern in the basement had been a pub in the Elizabethan era, and sat fifty. Davies herself lived on the top floor of the main building, with a spectacular view that looked out to sea and up the coast.

There’s a story that gives you some idea of the scale on which Hearst and Davies lived. It seems that Davies had ordered a twenty-four-by-one-hundred-foot custom rug for the movie theater on the second floor. After misadventures with the shipping, the rug finally arrived, and it was found that there was no possible way it could be brought inside the house.

The beach-side facade of Marion Davies’s Santa Monica home, known as Oceanhouse.

Everett Collection

No problem. Davies simply ordered part of the wall to be removed; then the rug was lifted into the house by crane, and the wall was rebuilt. It sounds like the type of, well, off-the-wall thing that today would be done only by Arab sheikhs residing in Dubai. In that era, Hollywood
was
Dubai.

The Beach House was a popular site for theme parties—Pioneer Days, or Tyrolean, or whatever incongruous thing they could dream up. One time Davies threw what she called a “Baby Party,” for which all the guests had to dress up as children. Joan Crawford came as Shirley Temple, while Clark Gable made an appearance as a Boy Scout. (It was an echo of a similar party in the 1920s, when
Alla Nazimova appeared in diapers and Wallace Reid came as Buster Brown.) Perhaps the most creative party involved an invitation demanding that couples arrive wearing exactly what they had on when their romance began. Lee Tracy and his wife came in a shower curtain.

Once, Norma Shearer showed up as Marie Antoinette for a party billed as all-American. Norma’s hoop skirt was so huge that seats had to be removed from her car before she could get in.

Davies was a good-natured woman, greatly loved by everybody who knew her, but Shearer was a thorn in her side. Like Joan Crawford and most of the other actresses on the MGM lot, she was jealous of Shearer’s ability to land film roles simply because she was married to Irving Thalberg. And now this.

Davies told Shearer she’d have to take off the dress if she wanted to enter the party. The two women got into it, but Shearer got her way. Hearst may have been running a publishing empire, but Irving Thalberg ran production at MGM, where Marion was making her movies.

And that wasn’t even Shearer’s most aggressive look-at-me display. Hedda Hopper once told me about a party that Carole Lombard threw. It was supposed to be a white ball—nothing but white gowns on the women. The event was to be held at the restaurant Victor Hugo—the perfect setting for such a lavish display. Norma came late, as was her wont, but that wasn’t what proved so devastating: she was wearing a bright red gown.

It was all a reenactment of the climactic scene in Bette Davis’s
Jezebel
, but the people at the party weren’t amused. Shearer had gone far out of her way to show up the hostess, and that was simply bad form. Like Marion Davies, Carole Lombard had a widespread
reputation for being a salt of the earth dame, but she was livid and stormed out, followed closely by Clark Gable.

I went to school with Norma’s son, Irving Thalberg Jr., who brought me over to the house one day to meet her. She was in bed, where Irving had led me to believe she spent a great deal of her time, resting up so she could look radiant at parties. She was sweet, and signed a still for me, which I still have. But stories like the one Hedda Hopper told me indicate that to get between Norma Shearer and something she wanted would have been a very bad idea.

Marion Davies lived at Beach House until World War II. At that point Hearst became worried about a Japanese invasion. Don’t laugh—there was a great deal of fear in California about just such a possibility. Spielberg’s
1941
wasn’t much of a movie, but it was based on fact. Davies moved back to San Simeon and her house in Beverly Hills. But because she disliked San Simeon—she thought it was gloomy—she spent most of her time in Beverly Hills. Years later, long after Davies had died, that house became famous when it was used as the location for the home of the movie producer played by John Marley in
The Godfather
. A horse’s head in Marion Davies’s old bedroom!

Hearst’s empire contracted radically during the Depression and afterward. Part of it was the economy, and part of it was that he was extremely conservative at a time when the dominant philosophy was the New Deal. He couldn’t afford both places, so the Beach House was sold for six hundred thousand dollars—which might have paid for one of the ballrooms—and he held on to San Simeon.

In 1947 Beach House became a hotel, called Oceanhouse, but the venture failed and the main house was demolished in 1956; three years later the property was sold to the state of California. All that’s
left of one of the great mansions of California’s past is one guesthouse, which had been used by Davies’s family. Still later the property was taken over by Wallis Annenberg, who turned it into a public community center. I’ve gone there with my grandson Riley, holding his hand and reflecting on the vast palace that once stood on the spot. Someday, when he’s old enough, I’ll tell him all about it.

Small beach cottages helped launch the decorating career of Billy Haines. Haines had opened an antiques shop in 1930 while he was still under contract with MGM. He had an innate understanding of his potential market; Hollywood had attracted thousands of people from all over the world, most with very limited educations but with boundless ambitions. They needed to be led, but gently. The antiques shop displayed Haines’s antiques in complete room settings, so that people without the gift of visualization could see what the chairs or couches or vases would look like in context. And of course it also allowed Haines to sell extra pieces, and sometimes entire room ensembles.

After his acting career ended, Ben Lyon became the head of talent at 20th Century Fox. Ben told me that it was he and his wife Bebe Daniels—not Joan Crawford—who had given Haines his first commission as a decorator.

Lyon had a cottage with about thirty feet of beach frontage, and he told Haines to make it sufficiently attractive so they could rent it for extra income. Haines enclosed the porch, making it part of the living room, and decorated everything in red, white, and blue. His bill for everything, including the furniture, was twenty-five hundred dollars.

Because Haines had been a star himself, he had an intimate
understanding of a star’s mentality and a star’s needs. Basically, he made them feel special. Plus he knew how to gain a star’s trust—perhaps the most valuable quality a designer (or, for that matter, a director) can have.

Once Haines was done redecorating Carole Lombard’s house, the drawing room featured six shades of blue velvet and Empire furniture. Her bedroom had an oversize bed in plum-covered satin, with mirrored screens at either side. The dining room had satin curtains that trailed on the floor. The result was every bit as sleek as Lombard herself, and totally feminine. That was the way Carole lived until she married Clark Gable, who would have felt out of place in such surroundings.

Haines did Lombard’s and Joan Crawford’s houses for free, as a favor to friends, figuring that the Hollywood scuttlebutt would bring customers to his door.

In 1935, he moved his shop to Sunset Boulevard, quite close to all his prospective clients in Beverly Hills. I remember driving by Haines’s imposing double-doored entrance hundreds of times over the years. On either side of the doors were large glass niches with oversize glass vitrines.

Very
posh.

Haines’s next big commission was George Cukor’s house. “It looks just like a Hollywood director’s home ought to look,” said Cukor when he beheld the results.

In 1934 Frank Lloyd Wright declared that California’s “eclectic procession to and fro in the rag-tag and cast-off of the ages was never going to stop.” This was his way of declaring defeat; he had been trying to class up the joint by designing several homes in the area:
the Hollyhock House and three other concrete-block Mayan-style houses, designed and built between 1919 and 1924. They’re splendid examples of Wright’s midcareer style—and they’re all still standing—but they only added to the stylistic confusion of LA.

Hollyhock House is located at the corner of Sunset and Vermont—not known as a particularly great neighborhood now, but in 1919, when ground was broken, it was virgin territory. It was commissioned by Aline Barnsdall as a home that would overlook an artist’s colony and theater complex. Wright was always juggling multiple projects, so when construction began he was spending a great deal of time in Tokyo, where he was designing the Imperial Hotel. While Wright was traveling, so was Barnsdall, and the distance bred a lot of disagreements, which only increased when they met face-to-face.

“How can you put a door there?” she’d yell. “I don’t like it and I won’t have it. Change it!”

“No!” Wright would yell right back. “That’s the way it’s going to be! I won’t change it.”

She’d insist, and he would go ahead and do what he wanted to do. It was like a bad marriage. The upshot was that Barnsdall lived in the house only for a year, after which she offered it to the city as a public park and art center.

While all this was going on, Los Angeles was exploding in all directions. The population had grown from 576,673 in 1920 to 1.2 million in 1930. Four hundred thousand of those people had arrived in the space of just five years. All those newcomers had to live somewhere, and the Southern California real estate boom was quite probably the largest and most loosely managed in history.

Meanwhile, areas farther west, such as Brentwood and Pacific
Palisades, had begun to attract some movie people as Beverly Hills began to be afflicted with tour buses and gawkers. Will Rogers had come to dislike the town because it was getting too congested for him—the population that had been all of 634 in 1920 was 17,428 in 1930. A one-room schoolhouse at Sunset and Alpine had been torn down, and a one-car trolley on Rodeo Drive had also vanished. A great debate raged for a time about whether or not a dime store should be allowed to open on a street south of Santa Monica Boulevard; ultimately the issue was decided in favor of the dime store.