NYSD readers have already heard ad nauseum how much I love L.A., having lived here for a number of years. Dyed in the wool New Yorkers (and many others) have no idea why I am so enthusiastic about the place, but I am. It has never lost its allure.

I first visited in August 1970, staying with my friend Erik Preminger and his wife Barbara. Coincidentally I had just read Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust which made a deep visceral impression on my imagination. And so, I was amazed to find, almost immediately, how much the place felt like the book; everything — the air, the light, the vibes, unreal, even fantastic and yet also with a sunny, yet gritty, dark side.

Gypsy Rose Lee had died earlier that year and left her estate to Erik, her only child. The house, a kind of Spanish/Norman concoction surrounded by thick green lawns and palms and gardens that Gypsy had planted and cultivated to beauty all by herself, the interior was bountifully decorated to within an inch – but not quite – of being a whore’s palace. It was a trip, an elegant yet quirky one, and everything a civilian first-time visitor would dream a star’s house to be.

A portrait of Gypsy Rose Lee reclining

Built in 1927 on a hilltop overlooking Beverly Hills, looking out toward the ocean, all the corners of the rooms were rounded as was the house’s center, with a winding stone staircase that led finally to the third floor, and a large and round guestroom, with curving bookcases filled with books (Gypsy was a big reader)(and writer of course) — and in the east/center of the room — a large, round, king-size bed covered in maroon velvet. From the casement windows to the west you could look across the canyon to Rock Hudson’s house, and to the north to the house of D.K. Ludwig. All this was exceedingly impressive to this easterner.

I knew from that first experience visiting that I would one day have to live here. Of course, I was experiencing Los Angeles in a very intimate, most fortuitous way, staying in the house of a famous person. And for Gypsy Rose Lee, fame was a job: she was a showman through and through. The house was filled with very good high Victoriana, French Regency and occasional middle mid-American furniture — tributes to the aforementioned styles. And an art collection. Joan Miro, Chagall, Malvina Hoffman, Dorothea Tanning, her husband Max Ernst, Picasso and quite a lot of a little known painter today, Julio de Diego, who was Gypsy’s third and last husband (she never married Erik’s father Otto Preminger). Famous to friends and family for being extremely tight with a buck, all of the art were gifts to the ecdysiast, as she was called by some wit.

The first morning after arrival, I came down for breakfast and Barbara Preminger told me she had just “seen” Gypsy at the bottom of the staircase. What? Barbara was coming downstairs to prepare breakfast and there, she said, was Gypsy, just standing there (she’d died about four months before), big as life.

“What did you do?” I asked, not really believing my friend telling me she’d just seen a ghost.

“I said ‘good morning Gypsy,’” she said, the way she would speak to her mother-in-law, with deference.

“And what did she do?”

“That was it,” Barbara said; “and she was gone.”

While Barbara was and remains to this day, an entirely credible person to me, I found it impossible to believe my trusted friend actually saw the ghost former chatelaine of this very exotic house. Just a few minutes before!!?? I have never known Barbara to be one who embellished or exaggerated, let alone lied, but still ...

Eventually Erik sold his mother’s house and many of her eclectic and precious contents. Several years later I read in one of the tabloids (probably the National Enquirer) that the couple who bought Gypsy’s house wanted to sell it because it was “haunted.”

Gypsy, they claimed, was always about, often slamming doors and knocking pictures off the wall, or leaving the frames askew. They’d tried everything to get rid of her ghost but tenacious lady that she was in life, she refused to go. Defeated, they sold the place. About ten years later, I was living here in Los Angeles, and I took a friend up to look at the place. I’d heard from a realtor that the next owners also had similar problems with Gypsy’s ghost. They too, put it on the market. For a long time it languished, was vandalized and neglected until it became a wreck and a relic. Finally it was sold. The buyer knocked the place down, leveled off the hilltop, and built a contemporary concoction twice its size in its place.

I don’t know where Gypsy’s ghost went, but this is Hollywood, there have always been ghosts, and where do they go?

Little Mary Pickford, the first movie star, circa 1920.

When I first lived out here, in the late 70s, one night I was invited to a dinner given at a restaurant by Ross Hunter, a very successful movie producer in the 50s and 60s (“Airport,” “Midnight Lace,” “Lover Come Back”). Ross loved Hollywood lore and over dinner was telling me about Mary Pickford, the movies’ first star, who also had a famous marriage with Douglas Fairbanks, the action adventure hero of the silents. It was Pickford, Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, then the three biggest stars in the business, who had the foresight (and temerity) in the early years of the industry to create United Artists, which for years after was an important studio.

Fairbanks left the fabled marriage for a beautiful European beauty, Sylvia Ashley, and devastated little Mary (she was something like four feet eight). She was a survivor, however, and she married a younger, handsomer movie swain of some stature (although nothing like Fairbanks’) named Buddy Rogers, and remained “happily married” for the rest of her long life. Although, according to Ross Hunter, who claimed he was given the story by a nightwatchman who worked in the Goldwyn Studios over on Santa Monica Blvd. and Formosa Avenue in Hollywood, little Mary never quite recovered from her swashbuckler’s abandonment.

According to the nightwatchman, according to Hunter, right up to the end of her life (she died in 1979) there were nights, very very late – after midnight, when Mary would be driven with her nurse, in her big black limousine, from her famous estate, Pickfair way up in Beverly Hills, down to the studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. There, with her nurse by her side, she would make her way over to one of the soundstages where both she and Douglas Fairbanks had worked when they were the United Artists. And on that soundstage, on these dark, late, solitary nights, lit only by a single standing lamp, little Mary Pickford would wander about tentatively and call out his name: “Douglas ... Douglas ... It’s Mary ... I’m here ...”

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford’s long gone now, as is Buddy Rogers, and Ross Hunter, and the studio night watchman. Mary’s famous house Pickfair was bought by Meshulem Riklis for his once-upon-a-time wife Pia Zadora and handed over to New York designer Peter Marino who transformed the Wallace Neff residence into something that had nothing to do with Pickford, Fairbanks, Wallace Neff or anybody else, even Zadora and Riklis.

And so, like Gypsy Rose Lee, as it is in Hollywood, as Norma Desmond demonstrated so concisely, it’s all been long replaced by tomorrow.

Saturday late morning, JH and I drove down to Santa Monica to get some breakfast and visit the Promenade on Third Street where they have the Farmer’s Market set up every weekend until 2 in the afternoon. The Promenade is closed off to cars and under the bright blue sky and the warm sun, Los Angelenos fill the streets, shopping, walking, looking, exhibiting themselves (often like characters out of Nathaniel West) and having a good time.

Afterwards we took a long and leisurely stroll on the pathway in Palisades Park when runs on the western side of Ocean Avenue, on the cliff overlooking the Pacific.

It was this part of Santa Monica – the beach – where the early moguls of the film industry built summer houses. It was known as the Golden Mile and all the big names were there – the Mayers, the Zukors, the Laskys, the Zanucks, the Thalbergs, the Talmadges and most of all William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies who occupied a 114-room beach house right on the sand where they entertained the famous and the infamous (although W.R. didn’t have much truck for infamous).

Catching up with life in New York during breakfast in Santa Monica

The Marion Davies beach house, as it was called, became a white elephant by the 1940s and was eventually sold for a sum in the low six figures, and mostly torn down. There are a couple of outer buildings that remain and belong to a beach club. The Louis B. Mayer house, which was built in the mid-1920s and was where he lived fulltime (the family moved to the Ambassador Hotel in the winter) until the 1940s when his daughters Irene and Edie had grown up, married and moved out, and he left his wife and moved out. After Margaret Mayer died, the house was purchased by Peter Lawford and his wife Patricia Kennedy, sister of the president. It was on this site that JFK, in town for the Democratic Convention of 1960 where he was nominated for the Presidency, visited and made his famous foray, bare-chested and in bathing trunks, into the Pacific while mobbed by hundreds of “fans” (and photographers). The Mayer house is occupied to this day by another family who’ve owned it for quite a few years.

JH, who is an enthusiastic newcomer to the experience of Los Angeles, was enthralled by the weekend scene, the people, the views and the astonishing beauty of this place, and shares his thrall in these pictures of our Saturday afternoon.

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