Free You Must Remember This by Robert J. Wagner Page A

her death in 1979. Douglas Fairbanks died in 1939, so I never met him, which I regret—he was a golf fanatic, so we would have had plenty to talk about.

    After Doug and Mary, other stars followed. The area was now officially open for movie business, and the lawns and gardens of the Beverly Hills Hotel were frequently used for locations. Harold Lloyd, who would become a close friend and mentor of mine, would shoot scenes from his film A Sailor-Made Man there in 1921, and Charlie Chaplin would make The Idle Class right across the street, in Sunset Park.
    The movie studios themselves soon followed. In 1925 William Fox bought 108 acres on the western border of Beverly Hills. Hisstudio had been located at Sunset and Western in Hollywood since 1915, but Fox was an expansion-minded man and needed more space. Three years later he christened Fox Movietone Studios.
    King Gillette, the founder of the shaving company, sold his first Hollywood house to Gloria Swanson, then commissioned a beautiful Spanish Colonial Revival house in Malibu Canyon from Wallace Neff.
    The Gillette/Swanson house was at 904 North Crescent Drive, just north of Sunset and across the street from the main entrance to the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was a modest little cottage—115 feet wide and 100 feet deep, with twenty rooms spread over four acres. There were five bathrooms and an electric elevator to take you to the second floor. There was also a thousand-square-foot terrace that overlooked the lawns and a sweeping garden of acacias and palm trees.
    The walls were hung with tapestries and draped in peacock silks. The mistress’s bathroom was done in black marble with a golden tub. There was a movie theater and a large garden. When she entertained, butlers were dressed in full livery. Swanson was all of twenty years old when she bought the place from Gillette in 1919, and she was evidently seeking to replicate the swanky society dramas she was making for Cecil B. DeMille.
    It was a dream palace, different from Pickfair, but equivalent in terms of its impact.
    After Fairbanks and Chaplin built on the street, Tom Mix started construction on his own six-acre estate, at 1018 Summit Drive. It had a wall around the property by the side of the road, so you couldn’t see too much of it, but you could always tell it was Tom Mix’s house—there was a large neon sign mounted on the roof that flashed the letters “TM” to the night sky.
    The Gold Rush was on.
    Beverly Hills construction skyrocketed 1,000 percent within five years. Will Rogers was named honorary mayor of the town, and in his inauguration speech he announced the prevailing ethic, which would define show business: “I am for the common people, and as Beverly Hills has no common people, I’ll be sure to make good.” He then promised to give the city’s nonexistent poor bigger swimming pools and wider bridle paths.
    A house that was almost equal in fame to Pickfair belonged to Rudolph Valentino. Falcon Lair was located off Benedict Canyon Drive, past Summit Drive, at 1436 Bella Drive (now Cielo Drive). Falcon Lair was aptly named, because it was situated on eight acres on a promontory below which you could see the sparse (at the time) lights of the city below. Valentino paid $175,000 for the house and property in 1925, and was so compulsive about spending that he had only enough money for the down payment. He asked Joe Schenck, to whom he was under contract, for help in buying the place, because its owner didn’t want to accept the actor’s personal note—for good reasons, as it turned out. Joe was an obliging man, so he cosigned the loan. Valentino would live in it for a little more than a year before his sudden early death. But in that year he spent a huge amount of money he didn’t have, redecorating the main house, putting up a nine-foot taupe wall around the property, building stables and kennels, and adding servants’ quarters over the garage.
    Falcon Lair was Spanish in style, with a red tile