Kathy Griffin’s House from “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List”

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When fellow stalkers Lavonna, Melissa, Beth, Kim, and Sandy came to town from Ohio for a little stalking vacay two weeks ago, they scored four tickets to the November 14th taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show and invited me to tag along.  A few days before the episode was set to film, though, Lavonna learned that not only would the cast of The Twilight Saga flicks be Ellen’s guests for that particular show, but that the entire audience would be treated to a free screening of the series’ latest installment, Breaking Dawn.  Because I am in no way, shape or form a Twi-Hard, I decided to sit this one out, as did fellow non-Twi-Hard Sandy, and the two of ended up spending the day together stalking from one end of Los Angeles to the other.  One of the places we stopped at was the hilltop abode that belongs to comedienne Kathy Griffin and that is featured regularly on her Bravo reality series Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.  The only problem was that, as you can see above, I had the incorrect address written down in my trusty “To-Stalk” notebook and Sandy and I wound up stalking the wrong house!  Not kidding!  As Pinky Lovejoy, from the Thinking Pink blog, would say, “FAIL!”

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I was informed of this location by a fellow stalker named Melissa (not the same Melissa visiting from Ohio), who had stalked the dwelling way back in the summer of 2009 and had emailed to tell me about it.  Melissa is a huge fan of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List and had scoured the internet looking for the comedienne’s home prior to a visit to Los Angeles.  And while she could not find its exact address, she did manage to track down some photos of the house on a blog in which the street name was mentioned.  She searched through the many pictures featured on the blog and, in true stalker fashion, keenly spotted an address number of “2968” on the wall of a neighboring residence.  Love it!  When Melissa emailed me to let me know about the property, she said that it was “across from 2968 Passmore Drive in the Hollywood Hills”.  My blondeness must have been in full effect when I copied the information to my “To-Stalk” list, though, because I somehow failed to take note of the “across from” part, and Sandy and I wound up taking pictures in front of the house numbered “2968”.  Doh!  After realizing my mistake later that same week, I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on back out to the Hollywood Hills so that I could stalk the right place.

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Kathy’s 4-bedroom, 5-bath, 8,098-square-foot home was originally built by a former Los Angeles City fireman/actor named Bernard Subkoski and his wife, Celeste Dickinson.  The couple purchased the half-acre vacant plot of land on which the dwelling now sits sometime during the late 1990s and construction on it took four years to complete.

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Bernard and Celeste dubbed their residence “Wings”, as, according to Bernard, it very closely resembled a bird in flight.  Due to medical issues, though, the couple was forced to put their dream home on the market shortly after it was completed and in April of 2004 it was purchased by Kathy for a cool $2.85 million. Kathy later sued Bernard and Celeste over some structural problems with the dwelling.

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As you can see above, located just outside of the main gate is some sort of statuary that was built to resemble the house.  I originally thought that the structure was a mailbox, but upon closer inspection it did not seem to have any sort of a mail slot, so I am unsure of what it actually is.

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The home, which in this stalker’s never-to-be-humble opinion is strictly A-List, is featured weekly on Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.

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The interior is also shown regularly.  Kathy temporarily moved out of the property in the Season 6 episode of the show titled “Toddlers and Remodelers” due to a massive remodel she had just commissioned.

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The home was also featured in an April 2009 OK! Magazine photo shoot in which Kathy posed in a bikini.  And it also popped up in the February 2006 issue of W Magazine, in the August 8th, 2005 issue of In Touch Magazine, and in an episode of MTV Cribs.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Kathy Griffin’s house from Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List is located at 2955 Passmore Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

The Pasadena Recovery Center from “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew”

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One location that I stalked with my good friends, fellow stalkers Lavonna, Beth, Melissa, Kim, and Sandy, while they were in town visiting from Ohio last week was the Pasadena Recovery Center from Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.  And while I had never before actually seen an episode of the VH1 reality series, which just finished up its fifth season, Beth is a MAJOR die-hard fan of it and the treatment facility was the Number One location on her Southern-California-To-Stalk list.  So after grabbing lunch at The Slaw Dogs – a Pasadena-area hot dog restaurant that has quickly become my most recent culinary obsession – the six of us headed on over to North Raymond Avenue to check out the famous rehabilitation center in person.

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Before doing research on the Pasadena Recovery Center for today’s post, I had incorrectly assumed that it had been founded by Celebrity Rehab star/executive producer Dr. Drew Pinsky, but as it turns out I do not think that the “Silver Fox” (as Chelsea Handler likes to call him) has much to do with the place outside of the filming the show.  In reality, the facility was started in 2001 by Dr. Lee Bloom, a former psychiatrist for the United States Air Force.  When Dr. Bloom passed away in 2008, his son Michael and daughter Alison took over the center’s management and they continue to run it today.

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I am very happy to report that the Pasadena Recover Center looks EXACTLY the same in person as it does on TV.  Before writing today’s post, I sat down to watch a few episodes of the series and found it to be highly addictive (pun intended).  It is a mesmerizing, compassionate look into the face of addiction and has made me more understanding of certain celebrities who I previously thought were pretty useless.  Bai Ling’s storyline, for example, was especially heartbreaking and, where I had before thought the actress was out-of-her-mind crazy, after hearing about her childhood I feel nothing but sorrow and empathy towards her.  That poor, poor woman.  It is amazing she is even able to stand after what she lived through.  Amy Fisher, on the other hand, is (in this stalker’s never-to-be-humble opinion) nothing but a heartless, sociopathic, spoiled brat who makes me want to put my fist through the TV, but I digress.  Winking smile Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew is a fabulous show and I highly recommend checking it out.

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All five seasons of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew have taken place at the Pasadena Recovery Center, during which participants move into the holistic treatment facility for 21 days in the hopes of beating their various addictions.

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The real life interior of the facility also appears regularly on the show.  You can check out some photographs of that interior on the Pasadena Recovery Center’s official website here.

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The backyard and pool area also show up quite frequently on the series, although there are, sadly, no images of those spaces featured on the facility’s website.  Besides Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, the Pasadena Recovery Center also appeared on the WE tv series Secret Lives of Women.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Pasadena Recovery Center from Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew is located at 1811 North Raymond Avenue in Pasadena.  Please remember that it is a working rehabilitation facility, with actual patients whose privacy needs to be respected at all times.  You can visit the Pasadena Recovery Center’s official website here.

Falcon Lair – The Former Estate of Rudolph Valentino

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Way back in December of 2009, I got an email from a fellow stalker named Todd who wanted to know if I had any information on Falcon Lair, the former Rudolph Valentino estate which he had heard was in the process of being torn down.  Amazingly enough, before receiving Todd’s email I had never before heard of Falcon Lair, nor did I know much about its legendary owner.  Rudolph Valentino, as it turns out, was the Brad Pitt/Johnny Depp – or, if you ask me, the Matt Lanter Winking smile – of his day.  The 1920’s Italian-born silent film star, who was dubbed the “Latin Lover” by the press, was so beloved by fans that on the day of his funeral in 1926 over 100,000 mourners lined the streets of New York near Saint Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church to pay their respects to the fallen icon.  So after reading Todd’s email, I immediately dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place to see if it was still standing.  Sadly though, it was pouring rain on that particular day and I was only able to jump out of the car for a brief moment to snap the above photograph and could not poke around the property to see if the estate had been razed.  And even though the mansion had remained at the very top of my “To Stalk” list ever since, the GC and I did not make it back out there until two weekends ago.

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Falcon Lair was originally built by Beverly-Hills-real-estate-developer George Read in 1923 and was purchased by Rudolph Valentino two years later for $175,000.  Valentino dubbed the property “Falcon Lair” in honor of The Hooded Falcon, a never-completed movie the film star tried to produce with his wife Natacha Rambova in 1924.  The isolated Benedict Canyon manse, which Valentino decorated with lavish antiques, fine art, and imported European furnishings, was to be the couple’s dream house, but sadly Natacha divorced him shortly after they moved in.  Sadder still, Valentino died from peritonitis less than a year later, on August 23, 1926, at the tender age of 31.  The estate was then sold and much of the land parceled off.  After a succession of different owners, Falcon Lair was purchased by heiress Doris Duke in 1953.  The reclusive Duke, who at birth had been dubbed “The Million Dollar Baby” thanks to her father’s extensive tobacco fortune, sadly passed away at the Lair on October 28th, 1993 at the age of 80.  Her death became a scandal when it was uncovered that Duke had not only made her butler, Bernard Lafferty, co-executor of her will, a job for which he was paid $500,000 a year, but that she had also bequested him a whopping $5 million from her estate.  Lafferty was eventually accused of playing a role in the heiress’ death, but those accusations were later proven unfounded.  In 1998, the Doris Duke Estate sold Falcon Lair for $2,294,000 and in 2003 the new owners began an extensive restoration and renovation project to bring the mansion back to its original grandeur. Sadly though, and apparently due to bureaucratic red tape, the construction was halted and the house put on the market shortly thereafter.  It was purchased yet again in 2006, at which point it was razed completely.  And with that another important piece of Los Angeles history was wiped away.

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During the time that Valentino lived there,  the 4700-square foot, two-level Falcon Lair boasted over 8 acres of land, 16 rooms, three master bedrooms, three baths, several fireplaces, a library, a detached four-car garage complete with a 120-gallon gasoline pump and upstairs four-bedroom servants’ quarters, a horse stable where Valentino kept his four Arabian horses, and extensive gardens filled with imported Italian trees.  Upon moving in, the star also had to construct a 9-foot cement wall surrounding the perimeter of the estate in order to keep out his more aggressive fans, who would often try to sneak onto the property.

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Sadly, all that remains of the original Falcon Lair today are the front gates . . .

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. . . and the former garage/servants’ quarters.

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If you head away from the property by driving west on Bella Drive and then east on Cielo Drive, you can see the retaining wall that Valentino had built to keep out his trespassing fans.

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And if you position Bing’s aerial map of the property facing south, you can catch a glimpse of the mansion before it was torn down, albeit not a very good one.

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You can also see an aerial view of the backside of the mansion on fave website Virtual Globetrotting.

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According to fave book Hollywood: The Movie Lover’s Guide, at some point in time the Falcon Lair stable was sold off and transformed into a private residence.  I was unaware of that fact at the time I stalked the place, though, so I unfortunately did not get any photographs of it.  An aerial view of the former stable/now house is pictured above.  You can read a more extensive history of Falcon Lair, as well as see some interior photographs of the estate, on the Rudolph Valentino Homepage website here.

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Directly across the street from Falcon Lair is the absolutely AMAZING John Lautner-designed Schwimmer Residence, where the Carter family (Backstreet Boy Nick and his siblings B.J., Aaron, Leslie, and Angel) lived during the filming of their short-lived 2006 reality series House of Carters.  (I apologize for the crap-tastic screen captures, by the way.  Unfortunately, I had to get them off of YouTube, which is why they are so fuzzy.)

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Sadly though, none of the Schwimmer Residence, which was built in 1982 and boasts 5 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, and almost 6,000 square feet of living space, is visible from the street.  Oh, what I wouldn’t give to see that house!  You can check out some great photos of the residence on fave website Zillow here and on the Plan It Locations website here.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Todd for asking me to stalk this location!  Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Falcon Lair, the former Rudolph Valentino estate, was located at 1436 Bella Drive in the Benedict Canyon area of Beverly Hills.  Directly across the street, at 1435 Bella Drive, is the Schwimmer Residence where the House of Carters reality series was filmed.  Rudolph Valentino’s former horse stables can be found at 10051 Cielo Drive, just down the road from Falcon Lair.  And just up the street from the stables, at 10066 Cielo Drive (formerly 10050 Cielo Drive), is Villa Bella, the mansion that was built on the site of the home where Sharon Tate was murdered.