The Mansions of Limbo (10 page)

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 the 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.

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

O
ne 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.