The Mansions of Limbo (9 page)

“We’re in a renaissance out here. There’s nothing like it in the world,” said the enormously successful realtor Bruce Nelson as he drove me around the various highpriced
areas in his pale yellow Rolls Corniche, in which the telephone never stopped ringing. “Excuse me,” he said at one point, stopping in the middle of a sentence to answer the phone and discuss a deal with a possible buyer for the house of a Saudi Arabian prince, which the prince had bought a few years earlier from the shipping and real-estate magnate D. K. Ludwig, reportedly the richest man in America until recent business reversals in the Amazon region of Brazil toppled him from that lofty perch to a current net worth of a mere $550 million.

“All the great homes here were built in the thirties,” Nelson continued after he hung up. “At that time, two-acre lots went for $15,000 or $20,000. Now the same property goes for between $7 million and $10 million, but without the house.” Nelson was not exaggerating. In fact, a few days later the
Los Angeles Times
reported in its real-estate column that a two-acre vacant lot in Beverly Hills had been sold by the film and record producer David Geffen for $7.45 million. Geffen had bought the land only a year and a half earlier for $3.85 million, and after having plans for a house drawn up had decided against building it. Even more amazing was the story of a young couple who had purchased eight acres in the Pacific Palisades for $6.5 million. Only two of the eight acres were flat; the rest was downhill. Yet even before the couple started to build, they had an offer of $24 million in cash for the land. And they refused it!

Real-estate agent Thelma Orloff, who was a show girl in the great days of the MGM musicals, holds court in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel at 8:30 every morning, before leaving for her office. Still statuesque, she arrives each day to a chorus of “Hello, Thelma” from the regular breakfasters at the counter. Thelma Orloff has been around a long time, first as a show girl, then as an actress,
wife, and mother, and now—stardom at last—as a real-estate agent
extraordinaire.
She recently celebrated fifty years of friendship with her best pal, Lucille Ball. She used to swim in Fanny Brice’s pool in Holmby Hills, and can tell you every person who’s lived in that house since Fanny died and what he paid. It is said that Thelma Orloff made the former television gossip celebrity Rona Barrett rich by turning over Beverly Hills real estate for her. As she drove me through the streets in her sleek black Cadillac, her comments on the houses of the famous were like an oral history of the area. “That’s Eva Gabor’s house, which is now up for sale; she bought it from Henry Berger after Anita Louise died. That’s Betsy Bloomingdale’s house, and up there next to it there used to be a one-story house that burned down; this developer bought it and has built a $7.8 million spec house, using every square inch of the land. Over there’s Bonita Granville Wrather’s house, which is about to come on the market. I went to Ann Warner with an offer of $30 million for her house, but she said, ‘Forget it.’ ” Ann Warner is the widow of Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers, and her magnificent house, set on nine prime Beverly Hills acres, is considered one of the great estates of the area. Mrs. Warner, who lives in virtual seclusion in a few upstairs rooms in the house, has turned down offer after offer for her mansion. One real-estate agent told me she would probably accept $25 million for it on the condition that she have the right to live there for the rest of her life, with everything as it is.

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.”