Free The Mansions of Limbo by Dominick Dunne Page B

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 manuscript 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 fromtheir 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

T EARDOWN

    T eardown 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 encompasses Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and Bel-Air, and teardowns are rampant on almost every one of its fashionable 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 highpricedareas 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 shipping 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