The Mansions Of Limbo Part 2

"One of these days I just know I'm going to meet somebody with whom I would like to share my life," she said.

Later, as I was leaving, she called after me a variation on that line in Tea and Sympathy, "When you write about this, and you will, be kind!"

Jackie Collins is a high-school dropout and was a self-confessed juvenile delinquent at age fifteen. "I'm glad I got all of that out of my system at an early age," she said. She arrived in Hollywood at sixteen to visit her sister, then a contract player at Twentieth Century-Fox. Joan was just leaving to go on location for a film, and she tossed her sister the keys to her apartment. "Learn how to drive" was her only L.A. advice. Jackie said she started out her Hollywood life with Joan's famous friends and the friends she made herself-kids who pumped gas and waited on tables. She still draws on the latter group for inspiration. In all her books, there are characters who embody the underlying hostility of the have-nots for the haves. Chauffeurs and gardeners urinate in movie stars' swimming pools; hired waiters steal cases of liquor at A Group parties where they serve; butlers sell their employers' secrets to the trash press.

Jackie's style is different from Joan's, but it's style. Watch her walk into Le Dome for lunch, a superstar in action. Le Dome, on the Sunset Strip, is the hot hot hot spot for the in movie crowd to lunch these days. Outside the front door, fans with cameras wait for the stars. "Look this way, Miss Collins," they yell when we arrive, and she obliges, adjusting her head to the perfect angle, smiling the friendly but not too friendly smile that celebrities use for their fans. Inside, Michael Yhuelo, one of the owners, greets her with open arms and gives her an air kiss near each cheek. Waiters turn to look at her as if she were a film star rather than a novelist. She walks through the terrace room and makes a turn into the dining room to the table she has asked for in the far corner. "Hi, Mich.e.l.le," she calls to Mich.e.l.le Phillips on the way. "Hi, Jack," she calls to the columnist Jack Martin.

"I really love L.A.," she said. "In England, I grew up reading Harold Robbins, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler." L.A. to Jackie means strictly Hollywood, which she affectionately calls the kiss-a.s.s capital of the world. She loves the picture business, the television business, the record business, and the people in them, the stars, celebrities, directors, and producers. She is also a great partygoer, but more in the role of observer than partic.i.p.ant, someone doing research. Like all seasoned Hollywood people, she refers to Hollywood as "this town." "One of the reasons I've gotten along here is that I've never needed this town, or anything from anyone here." As she said at the writers' conference last summer, "Write about what you know." And what this lady knows about is Hollywood. Sue Mengers, the famed Hollywood actors' agent, now in semiretirement, called Hollywood Husbands the definitive book about Hollywood in the eighties. "Jackie got the feeling of this town better than anyone ever caught it. She understands it."

"I love what I do," said Jackie. "I fall in love with my characters. They become me, and I become them. They're part of me forever, even when I'm finished with them."

Her writing schedule is rigid. She works seven days a week, writing in longhand in spiral notebooks in a room she calls her study. On a good day she can write twenty pages. On a bad day she knocks off ten. When she gets to about seven hundred pages, she starts to bring the novel to an ending. She does not type; a secretary transfers her longhand to a word processor. Jackie is aware that her grammar is not always perfect, but that is the way she wants it. Once she asked her secretary to change anything she thought was wrong, and she then realized that her work lost in the translation to correct grammar.

"I never show anything to my publishers until after I finish writing the entire book," said Jackie. At the time I talked with her in December, she had not yet submitted Rock Star to Simon and Schuster, although it was coming out in April. Most books are not published until eight or ten months after submission. Confirming this, Michael Korda diplomatically said, "I would rather not have it this way." Only someone who has shown the same consistent success year after year could command that kind of leverage with a publisher.

Finally we get around to the subject of Joan Collins the novelist.

"Everybody wants to write a book once in their life," said Jackie about Joan's book, which she has not read. "If Joan can do it, good luck to her. She does everything well." She looked at her menu and continued: "I don't see Joan as becoming a novelist. I see it as a diversion for her. I've been a published novelist for twenty years. All eleven of my books have never been out of print." She thought over what she had said. "Of course, the fact that I've been offered the lead in a soap opera has nothing to do with her book!"

Joan Collins is the kind of woman you expect women to hate, but they don't. When her friends talk about her, they use the adjectives "indomitable" and "indefatigable." Her former agent, Sue Mengers, who handled the creme de la creme of Hollywood stars when she was still in the picture business, confirmed for me a story that Joan had told me. During Joan's down years, when the movie offers had stopped coming, Sue took Joan, whom she truly liked, out to lunch and told her she had to face up to the fact that after forty it was tough for actresses. "You have to realize that nothing more may happen in your career. Go home and concentrate on real life." Mengers went on to say that Joan cried a little that day, but she refused to give up. "Never," she said. "I'm so happy she proved me wrong," said Mengers. "Even Aaron Spelling, when he cast Joan in the part of Alexis, could not have imagined how strongly the public would take to her-especially women. The femme fatale number she plays is in good fun. In her own life, she has more women friends than any woman I know."

Joan Collins can carry on a conversation with you on the set of "Dynasty" at the same time she is being pinned up by one person, powdered by another, and having her hair sprayed by a third. She continues her conversation while she looks in a mirror that someone holds for her, checks her left side, checks her right, and makes a minute readjustment of a curl. She has been on movie sets since she was seventeen, and she retains the figure of a teenager and a bosom so superb that she recently had to threaten to sue the London Sun and News of the World after they reported that she had had a breast implant. She hadn't had a breast implant at all, and she got a retraction.

"Actually, I started writing novels when I was seven or eight," said Joan, about her new career as a novelist. " 'The Little Ballerinas,' 'The Gypsy and the Prince.' That kind of thing."

She is called to the set to shoot a scene with Linda Evans, a variation of half a hundred other confrontation scenes between Alexis and Krystle that have been shot in the six years that she has been on "Dynasty." Joan, as Alexis, paced back and forth in her office, reading a stock report, and Linda Evans, as Krystle Carrington, entered.

ALEXIS: What do you want, Krystle?

KRYSTLE: To go over a few things with you.

ALEXIS: Such as?

KRYSTLE: Your life.

ALEXIS: Is this some sort of joke?

KRYSTLE: I'm getting closer and closer to the truth of who and what you really are.

ALEXIS: I'm going to call security.

The director yelled, "Cut!" Joan returned to where we had been talking, and picked up the conversation as if a scene had not just been filmed. "I write in bed, on planes, under the hair dryer, on the set. Sometimes I write twelve to fifteen hours a day for a week, and then I don't touch it for a while. It's erratic, because it's a second career for me."

"Most of her ma.n.u.script comes in on the most extraordinary pieces of paper," says Michael Korda, who is working closely with her on her novel, as he did on her autobiography. "But every word is from her. Every revision. There is no ghostwriter, no helper, no hidden person. Her concentration is remarkable, given all the things going on in her life." Korda, the nephew of Sir Alexander Korda, the film producer, is an old acquaintance of Joan's from their teenage years in London. He remembers that when he was nineteen he took her to a party for Sonny Tufts at the house of Sir Carol Reed, but he adds that Joan did not remember this early date when he reminded her of it.

He thinks that when the two books come out the media will manufacture a rivalry between Joan and Jackie. "But if the time should ever come when the two of them are neck and neck on the New York Times best-seller list," he says, "I'm going to have a hot time of it."

March 1988

TEARDOWN.

Teardown is the new word on everyone's lips in what has become known as the Platinum Triangle, the prestigious residential area of Los Angeles that encompa.s.ses Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and Bel-Air, and teardowns are rampant on almost every one of its fas.h.i.+onable streets. Sounds of hammering and drilling fill the air, and the once-quiet drives are jammed with cement mixers, cherry pickers, trucks, and lunch wagons as one of the greatest and most expensive building booms in real-estate history takes place. If teardown is a new word to you, it means buying a house, very often a beautiful house, for a great deal of money, and tearing it down in order to build a bigger house, for a great deal more money, on the same piece of land, a process that results, very often, in the construction of houses that are vastly overscaled for the size of the property on which they sit. The value of the land alone is so high that people are paying $3 million and up for an acre.

"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 s.h.i.+pping 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 "h.e.l.lo, 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 friends.h.i.+p with her best pal, Lucille Ball. She used to swim in f.a.n.n.y Brice's pool in Holmby Hills, and can tell you every person who's lived in that house since f.a.n.n.y 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 Pica.s.so'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 sw.a.n.k 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 a.s.sociated 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 sw.a.n.k 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 Sh.o.r.e 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 s.p.a.ce. Just beautiful." Four different real-estate agents told me that "some j.a.panese" 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 j.a.panese, 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 mult.i.tudes 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 "att.i.tude," 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 G.o.d, 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 pet.i.t 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 gla.s.ses 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 j.a.panese 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, G.o.d, here's another call. I told them not to put calls through."

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 bal.u.s.trades 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-gla.s.s doors. The floor of the dining room has clear gla.s.s 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.

"h.e.l.l, 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 j.a.panese, 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-chteau-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 sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.s 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 chteau.

April 1989

HIGH ROLLER.

The Phyllis McGuire Story

One day several years ago I was lunching at Le Cirque, arguably New York's most fas.h.i.+onable 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 G.o.dfrey, 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate Fidel Castro, for his friends.h.i.+p 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.

Phyllis McGuire met Sam Giancana, according to legend, in Las Vegas in 1960, when the McGuire Sisters were performing there four times a year and pulling down $30,000 a week. Sam was a widower of fifty-two, and Phyllis, barely thirty, had already divorced Neal Van Ells, a radio/television announcer from Dayton, Ohio. Like many another Vegas performer, Phyllis had taken a liking to the gaming tables and had run up a hefty marker. As the story goes, Sam, spotting her, and liking her, went to Moe Dalitz, who ran the Desert Inn, and asked him how much the McGuire girl owed. Moe told him $100,000, a large marker at any time but enormous then. Sam is alleged to have said to Moe, "Eat it," meaning, in gangland parlance, erase the debt, which is different, of course, from paying the debt, but nonetheless it was a gesture not without charm and romantic appeal, especially since Sam followed it up with a suiteful of flowers. They fell in love.

For a time, the romance remained a well-kept secret, but wherever the trio traveled, Sam was there. In 1962, when the sisters were appearing at a nightclub in London, they were photographed there with their hairdresser, Frederic Jones, and Sam Giancana was also in the picture, with his arm wrapped around Phyllis. The photograph was flashed around the world, with enormous repercussions. The press and the public expressed a sense of outrage that the popular singer would a.s.sociate with a person like Sam Giancana. In a tearful interview with the late gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Phyllis McGuire denied the rumors that she and Sam had been secretly married in Sweden, and also swore that she was never going to see Sam again. In 1968, the McGuires performed for the last time as a trio on "The Ed Sullivan Show," broadcast from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Since then, Phyllis has occasionally appeared as a solo act, as well as in musicals around the country, most recently in Applause! in Atlantic City.

Sam Giancana's life was ended in 1975, while he was cooking Italian sausage in the bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen of his Oak Park, Illinois, home, by a shot from a High-Standard Duromatic .22 target pistol, with a silencer attached, fired into the back of his head. That shot was followed by a second, fired into his mouth after he fell to the floor, and then by a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh, which were fired upward into his chin, shattering his lower jaw, ripping through his tongue, and lodging in the back of his skull. The FBI believes to this day that the deliverer of the blasts was a friend of many years, who still lives in the Chicago area, and that Sam was murdered because he had refused to cut the Chicago Mob in on the gambling empire he had set up outside the United States, in Iran, Haiti, and Central and South America, as well as on five gambling s.h.i.+ps he ran in the Caribbean. Furthermore, Sam had become old, he was in poor health, and it was time for a change.

Long before then, Phyllis and Sam had ceased being lovers, but they had remained friends and she had visited him on numerous occasions during his eight-year exile in Mexico. Both the Mob n.o.bility and the show-business greats with whom Sam had hobn.o.bbed snubbed his Chicago funeral. Only Phyllis McGuire and Keely Smith, who had once sung with Louis Prima, arrived to pay their respects to Giancana's three daughters and to say farewell to Sam in his $8,000 silver casket.

For several years the McGuire Sisters have been planning a nightclub comeback. In February they performed at Rainbow & Stars in New York, and shortly after that, I made arrangements to interview Phyllis McGuire. "Don't mention Sam Giancana to her," people warned me, but not mentioning Sam Giancana when writing about Phyllis McGuire would be like not mentioning Richard Burton when writing about Elizabeth Taylor, or, in a more parallel situation, like not mentioning Nicky Arnstein when writing about f.a.n.n.y Brice. As it turned out, I didn't have to bring up Sam's name, because Phyllis McGuire brought it up first. Their story has all the stuff of which myths are made.

I arrived in Las Vegas with elaborate directions for how to get from the airport to Rancho Circle, the exclusive enclave behind a guarded gate where she has lived for years. "Past the Lit'l Scholar Schoolhouse," I read from my instruction sheet, but the driver said he didn't need any instructions. "Everybody in Vegas knows where Phyllis McGuire lives."

From outside, the place looked like a suburban ranch-style house built in the fifties, but all resemblance to ranch-style life ended at the front door, which was opened by a man wearing a gun in a holster under his open suit jacket. Paul Romines has been her bodyguard for fourteen years. I stood for a moment in the hallway. To the right was a dining room with a mirrored floor. Through a door was a men's lavatory with two wall urinals side by side. Ahead was a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, which separated the hall from the living room. The living room was one of the largest I have ever been in, so large that a forty-four-foot-high replica of the Eiffel. Tower did not seem to cramp the s.p.a.ce. Beyond that was a vast area which included the formal dining room and, to the right of it, a bar with twelve bar chairs. To the left was an area identified by the bodyguard as the Chinese area, and to the right an area he designated as the French area. The windows, he informed me, were all bulletproof and could take a magnum shot, and at the touch of a b.u.t.ton steel doors would drop from the eaves over all the windows, securing the house completely, fortress-style.

The floor of the living room was black and white marble. The rugs in the French area were Aubusson and Tabriz, and the walls were covered in rose damask. The chandeliers and sconces were Bavarian, with amber light bulbs. The mirrors on the walls were Venetian, and the chairs and sofas were all French, in multiple groupings, so many chairs that I lost count at sixty. That was when Phyllis McGuire came in.

She was dressed in a nautical style, with white flannel trousers and a white cashmere sweater with naval insignia on it. Her earrings were anchors. She was not at all what I was expecting, and from the moment she spoke I liked her. She was friendly, funny, gracious, utterly enthusiastic, constantly up, with boundless energy. And pretty, very pretty.

"Did anyone offer you a cup of coffee?" she asked. "Or anything?" She flung up her hands in mock exasperation and called into the kitchen, "Enice, take care of Mr. Dunne. And I'll have some coffee too. And some Perriers." She asked me, "Did you meet Enice? Enice Jobe? She's been with me for thirty-three years."

We sat on French chairs in the French area. "Is the music too loud?" she asked. "I can turn it down. Turn it down, Enice, will you, and put the coffee right here on this table."

I asked about the sisters, Dorothy and Christine, and she said, "We've been singing together since I was four years old. We sang in the car, using the winds.h.i.+eld wiper for a metronome. My sisters are the most incredible harmony singers. I can start in any key, and they pick it up." The sisters got their start singing in the First Church of G.o.d in Middletown, Ohio, where their mother, an ordained minister, was an a.s.sociate pastor.

"We were middle cla.s.s," she said. "My father worked for forty-six years for Armco Steel. He made steel before there were jet furnaces, working at an open hearth, shoveling in the pig iron. He wore safety shoes and long thick underwear, safety s.h.i.+rts and gloves, and a hard hat. At night after work, his clothes were coated with salt from his sweat. When my sisters and I started making money, we asked our parents what they owed, and we paid off everything. We made my father retire, and ordered a custom-made Cadillac with a gold plaque on it that said, FOR ASA AND LILLIE MCGUIRE, FROM DOROTHY, CHRISTINE, AND PHYLLIS. We sent them all over the world."

Looking around the French area, she said, "Some of this furniture is very valuable, and some is just personal to me. That Aubusson should be hanging on the wall rather than be on the floor. A lot of the furniture and the paneling came from the house of Helen Bonfils in Denver, Colorado. Her father was the editor and publisher of the Denver Post. She was one of the finest women I ever knew. That desk belonged to Helen's father."