Pickfair had some rich neighbors. Carl Laemmle, the half-pint immigrant from Bavaria who founded Universal-International, built an estate. So did Will Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Charles Chaplin. Chaplin is notoriously tight-fisted. After he’d furnished most of his home on Summit Drive, including his own bedroom, four or five other bedrooms remained empty. He had the head decorator of our biggest furniture store come to see the rooms and suggest their decor. Charlie had all the recommended furniture delivered and kept it for six months, ignoring the bills. Finally, the store repossessed everything it had “lent” him. He applied the same treatment to another store, with the same final result.
During this period, a titled Englishman with wife and entourage wired the Douglas Fairbankses that they’d be arriving at Pickfair with ten in party; could they be accommodated? Pickfair hadn’t room for everybody, so Mary telephoned Charlie, who said he’d take in six of the visitors.
But he’d forgotten that the furniture in his guest bedrooms had been carted off, leaving only an old chest of drawers and mattresses and bedsprings on the floor of each otherwise empty room. When the guests saw the accommodations he’d provided for them, they were astounded; imagined he must be some kind of crazy health faddist, and departed after one night for a hotel.
Harold Lloyd bought his acreage direct from Mr. Benedict himself—that’s the old-timer who put his name on Benedict Canyon. Then Harold bought more adjoining land from Thomas Ince until he had twenty acres of lawns and woodlands. After he married Mildred Davis, his leading woman in Grandma’s Boy, in 1923, he built a forty-room, Spanish-style mansion on the place, with ten bedrooms, two elevators, a theater seating one hundred guests, and a four-room dolls’ house complete with electric light, plumbing, and grand piano. Around the house he had kennels for his great Danes, a swimming pool with fountain, two reflecting pools, and a Greek temple.
Mildred loved it all, then took a second look at the front door and burst into tears. What was the matter? “No keyhole!” she sobbed.
The Lloyds still live there. When he opened the grounds for a local charity a few years ago, today’s generation of stars gasped at this glimpse of how thick the luxury could grow before income taxes gobbled up your pay checks. “How can he possibly afford to keep up this place?” Frank Sinatra asked me.
“Because he’s worth millions,” I said, “and he holds on to them.” That afternoon, though, $69,000 was raised for the Nursery for Visually Handicapped Children. At the suggestion of Walter Annenberg’s mother, when things got dull, I sold endowments for thirteen scholarships to the school at $1000 apiece.
Harold, who is in his late sixties, believes that you can take it with you. There is one servant, a helper and nurse for their grandchild, on the place which used to employ twenty gardeners. Mildred Lloyd does most of the cooking.
Stores and services soon crowded into and around Beverly Hills, to tap the golden stream that poured into the motion-picture industry. You could buy any kind of merchandise or service at a price. Saks Fifth Avenue, J. W. Robinson’s, W. & J. Sloane eventually opened up on Wilshire Boulevard. One lady got in ahead of them with a different kind of establishment on Sunset Strip, just beyond the town line; her girls, dressed to the teeth, were once taken on a conducted tour of the MGM lot. A Metro executive was appalled when, in a moment of confidence, she showed him a wad of rubber checks she’d been given by various male customers. They would have been a prize package for any autograph hound. He offered to collect the debts and split the proceeds with her.
“Oh no, I couldn’t allow that,” she said, shocked to the marrow. “It wouldn’t be ethical.”