Free You Must Remember This by Robert J. Wagner

was all impossibly romantic. So Chaplin stayed.
    After they married, Fairbanks and Pickford added another wing to the house and a second floor, and they ripped out most of the interior walls. Fairbanks’s plans were as grand as his movies, and he grew restless because the process was taking so long. So he moved in lights from his movie studio and hired enough workers for three eight-hour shifts. Fairbanks also landscaped the property beautifully, with hundreds of trees and shrubs, and added aswimming pool complete with a miniature sandy beach. Below the house was a stable that held six horses.
    Christening their new home Pickfair, the couple moved in, and the world began beating a path to Beverly Hills. The house was decorated in a sedate style—the carpeting in Pickford’s bedroom was a pale green, as were the silk curtains, while the dining room had a beamed ceiling, watered silk wallpaper, and a sideboard that held a good silver tea service.
    The hall next to the living room had a beautiful terra-cotta tile floor for dancing, and the pale green of the bedroom was replicated in the living room, which had accents of yellow drapes, a couple of antique vases converted into lamps, and a nice Oriental rug over the hardwood floor.
    A lot of the furniture—all dark wood and heavily carved—came from Los Angeles department stores. Eventually, the house was redecorated in a more eighteenth-century French tradition, although Fairbanks’s enthusiasms virtually define the word “eclectic.” He spent a good deal of money on Frederic Remington paintings. Once he paid five thousand dollars—a fortune at the time—for a prize German shepherd, and was probably the first American movie star to develop a passion for English tailoring, about which more later.
    Unfortunately, parties at Pickfair could be a trifle sedate—Fairbanks didn’t drink, and didn’t want anyone else to drink, either, perhaps because his own father had been a drunk, perhaps because he was worried about the long history of alcoholism in his wife’s family, which eventually afflicted Mary—the great tragedy of both their lives.
    In those early years Fairbanks was quite the scamp. Frank Case,who ran the Algonquin Hotel in New York and knew a thing or two about the hospitality business, was a good friend of Fairbanks’s, and told some stories that demonstrated both the star’s boyish exuberance and how empty Beverly Hills was at the time.
    According to Case, Fairbanks would climb into his Stutz Bearcat, shift into neutral, coast all the way down Summit Drive, and make it to the studio on Sunset and Vine without ever having to actually start his car. Occasionally, if he got bored, he’d skip the roads and cut across empty fields. Once, Fairbanks suggested that he might run alongside the car instead of sitting in it, just to keep things interesting.
    These two people, both born into the lower middle class, became the hosts for kings and queens of Europe—Lord and LadyMountbatten honeymooned at Pickfair, and every year a procession of dukes and duchesses descended to visit their dear friends Douglas and Mary. At other times they hosted Albert Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babe Ruth, and H. G. Wells.

    Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in their swimming pool at Pickfair.

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    By greeting royalty as equals, they became royalty themselves, and some of that trickled down to the rest of Hollywood.
    If I’ve spent a lot of time on Pickfair, it’s a measure not only of the eminence of its owners, but of the formal yet approachable country gentleman style of the house, which became a sort of model for Beverly Hills, and for many of the developments that followed down through the years. Fairbanks and Pickford themselves set the example for world-class movie stars as they lived their lives with a stately dignity.
    Chaplin lived at 1085 Summit Drive for the next thirty years, until he left America for Switzerland. Mary Pickford remained at Pickfair until