Peace, or the lack of it, not place is the real subject of Jean Stein’s map to the stars. The addresses featured — 905 Loma Vista Drive, say, or 1400 Tower Grove Road — will mean nothing to most British readers but their location, Beverly Hills, will raise more than an eyebrow, for the plots that interest Stein are part of LA lore. The once-desirable residences that tourists are shown around allowed Hollywood hotshots to escape from their adoring fans — but not their inner demons.
The owners — Edward Doheny, Jack Warner, Jane Garland, David Selznick and Jules Stein — needed mega-mansions to house their monstrous egos.
The story of Doheny, once the richest man in America, will be familiar to anyone who has seen There Will Be Blood. And, yes, we do get to see the pink and black marble ballroom and the bowling alley… The consumption — of caviar, champagne and beef Wellington on the beach — is suitably conspicuous.
So is the bad behaviour. For a man in the business of show, studio head Warner was hopeless at keeping up appearances. His control-freakery at home made him an appalling father — sometimes doting, sometimes distant.
Jennifer Jones, made and unmade by producer-hubby Selznick — she won an Academy Award for The Song of Bernadette — spent four hours having her hair and make-up done every day whether or not she was working. No surprise she was a neglectful mother. She did remember, though, to call her shrink before attempting to drown herself in the Pacific. But then she was sleeping with him.
Jones, apparently, never wore panties, a failing also of Jane Garland. The daughter of a failed actress who lived at 22368 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Garland liked performing knickerless handstands in restaurants. She may have been bipolar. When she felt a turn coming on she would cry: “There’s a rat in the refrigerator,” or even better, “mice in the icebox!”
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Jean Stein grew up at 1330 Angelo Drive. Her father founded the talent agency MCA. Previous owners of Misty Mountain include Katharine Hepburn, who used to shoot snakes in the living room. Rupert Murdoch owns it now.
West of Eden is a patchwork of undated testimony from relatives, friends and employees, all blithely ignoring the convention that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Thank God they do. Here is Cary Grant in gold lamé loafers, Dennis Hopper partying with Jane Fonda and The Byrds, Ronald Reagan as an FBI fink. The anecdotes come so thick and fast it’s like being machine-gunned with marshmallows. Gradually, though, the mood darkens, the catalogue of vulgarity, cruelty and insanity takes its toll. While the Technicolor tour is relentlessly fascinating, it is reassuring to be shown in black and white that, in La-La Land at least, with the millions comes endless misery.
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