We take a detour of sorts out of Hollywood and head west a bit to Beverly Hills for:
The Street Where They Lived (courtesy of Vanity Fair and author Todd Purdum from April 1999):
One ordinary evening when the world was still young, the telephone rang at 1000 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, just as the family who lived there was sitting down to dinner. It was the next-door neighbor, wondering if the family was home, and asking the man of the house to leave the back door open.
A few minutes later, the unmistakable creaky sounds of America’s most famous bad violinist came floating through the big white Colonial house, and Jack Benny strolled into the dining room in his trademark Gypsy scarf. The hostess, a redhead by the name of Lucille Ball, collapsed in laughter, and her husband, Gary Morton, offered the perennial 39-year-old a tip.
“Which he took, of course—totally straight-faced,” Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, recalls, laughing all over again at the retelling, nearly 40 years later. “And he runs out the front door, because he knows just how long he has before the next tour bus to get home. And the next thing we hear is this voice yelling, ‘Mary … oh, Maaaaaaaary,’ because he’s locked out. And the next bus comes up, and imagine what those people must have thought: Jack Benny locked out of his own house with his Gypsy violin.”
It sounds like an episode of
I Love Lucy or
The Jack Benny Show, and it could have been. But it was just a regular real-life moment in the days when Beverly Hills still seemed more like Bedford Falls, and the two-block stretch of Roxbury Drive north of Sunset Boulevard was perhaps the starriest street in that small town. Ball and Benny were only the beginning of the gang that, at one time or another from the mid-30s through the 90s, lived the highest version of the California dream in this stately neighborhood, where the streets have the names of old English towns.
Just across Lexington Road from Lucy, on the same side of the street, the Jimmy Stewarts lived at No. 918, and across from them, on the west side of Roxbury, lived the Oscar Levants. Up from them were José Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney, who lived next to Ira and Leonore “Lee” Gershwin, who lived next to Agnes Moorehead, who played Stewart’s mother in
The Stratton Story. She was just down the way from Thomas Mitchell, who played Stewart’s befuddled Uncle Billy in
It’s a Wonderful Life. Eddie Cantor, Jack Haley, Hedy Lamarr, and Polly Bergen all lived on Roxbury, and so did Pandro Berman, the producer of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals at RKO. Diane Keaton, Peter Falk, and Clooney live there still. (Remember, the article was written in 1999).
It’s almost impossible to scratch the surface of Hollywood history without revealing a ribbon of Roxbury underneath. It’s the street where Russ Columbo, the 30s crooner who was Bing Crosby’s only rival, was accidentally shot with an antique dueling pistol, in the house where George Gershwin wrote “Love Is Here to Stay”—the same house where George Clooney began his career as a gofer and driver for his aunt Rosemary. (Rosemary says that in the 50s, when she used to record radio shows with Crosby in the house, he never wanted to set foot in the den, where Columbo had been shot.)
It’s the street where Citizen Kane’s mother and Cyrano de Bergerac lived on either side of the man who wrote “The Man That Got Away,” whose goddaughter, Liza Minnelli, named for another of his lyrics, celebrated her earliest birthdays in his elegant backyard. It’s the street where James Stewart grew sweet corn and tomatoes for the neighbors and walked the golden retrievers named for his twin daughters, Kelly and Judy.
“We had these Chinese people for our help,” Lucie Arnaz recalls, “and one day Mr. Stewart came by with fresh corn and cabbages at the back door. And he got the cook yelling, ‘She no home, she no home! No veg-e-table! We got veg-e-table man, come all the time!’ and she slammed the door in his face and wouldn’t take his present, and he had to go home and call and say, ‘W-w-w-aaaaaal, L-l-l-ucy … ’ ”
Art often imitated life. The Stewarts repeatedly played themselves on Benny’s television show. Benny and Ball appeared as guests of each other’s, Ferrer and Cantor as guests of Levant’s. Benny began his 1951 television season with a tour bus driving through Beverly Hills. As the announcer calls out the stars’ homes, the camera cuts to scenes of the stars themselves, until finally, 30 seconds before the show ends, the driver announces Benny’s home and Benny himself pipes up from the back, “Driver, I get off here.” In one 1955 episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy and Ethel bound off a tour bus and head toward what is supposed to be Richard Widmark’s house for the episode in which Lucy winds up in a bearskin rug, but the second-unit shot is of Ball’s own house.
“When I first visited Los Angeles before moving here, and took the obligatory movie-stars tour, I was struck by the fact that so many of the celebrities they mentioned were deceased,” says Michael Feinstein, the pianist and cabaret singer, who arrived from Columbus, Ohio, in 1976 as a piano salesman but soon found himself working as Ira Gershwin’s musical secretary. “And I realized that those tours really traded on nostalgia and memory, because that sort of glamour was long gone. Except, as it turned out, on Roxbury Drive, because such a collection of celebrities still lived there.”
“It was an amazing two blocks,” says Joan Benny, who grew up in the brick Georgian house that her parents built in 1937, complete with a mosaic octopus in the swimming pool, and who still dreams about “every inch of it. Jack Haley Jr. used to push me out of my carriage. He was a little brat. But then, so was I.”
Some of the most famous faces in show business lived side by side on Roxbury—without fear—amid the constant rumble of groaning buses filled with tourists, who called to them and rang their doorbells. The Bennys kept 8-by-10 glossies in a drawer of the hall table, “and if my father happened to be in the vicinity, he’d answer the door,” Joan Benny recalls. Kelly Stewart Harcourt remembers that to the end of her life her mother, Gloria, referred to the ritzy shopping area of Rodeo Drive just blocks away as “the village.”
How friendly people were,” Benny says, “and how open everything was.” People left their doors unlocked, and the worst worry was being stopped, as Clooney and Ferrer once were, for violating the Beverly Hills curfew by walking home from a party at the Bennys’ without ID. Lucy, dressed in full witch regalia with blacked-out teeth, handed out candy at her front door on Halloween, with a Desilu studio guard standing by, and Lee Gershwin made a daily pilgrimage to Nate ’n’ Al’s delicatessen in her Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Once, late in life, Mrs. G., as she was known to the Beverly Hills police, forgot where she’d parked, and a patrolman squired her around till she found the car.
“It was a rather small area, in which you lived very close to all of your friends,” says Fred DeCordova, who was a producer of Benny’s show and later of Johnny Carson’s, and who at 88 is still a special consultant to The Tonight Show. “I know there are great stars and all of that today, but in those days it was a much more tightly knit community.”
“It was an absolutely great time,” says the composer David Raksin, 86, who came to Hollywood in 1935 to help Charlie Chaplin write the score for
Modern Times, and who knew the Gershwins and Levants. “There was an aliveness which was wonderful. There was not the situation one finds now, where you never see your colleagues unless there’s a board meeting.”
Today, many of the biggest stars live in gated enclaves or on private streets without sidewalks in Pacific Palisades, with security cameras and bodyguards and phalanxes of functionaries to fend off stray fans and stalkers.
“You know, they’re all, like, living in Attica,” says the screenwriter Leonard Gershe, 76, who regularly had Christmas dinner at the Stewarts’, was a pallbearer at Benny’s funeral, and played poker at the Gershwins’ with Angie Dickinson and director Richard Brooks. “I mean, Jimmy and Gloria, they never had a problem. People did come to their door, but it was all very friendly. I don’t think, well, Leonardo DiCaprio is going to get away with that. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
For more of this great article:
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/arch ... bury199904