Cary and Jennifer Grant’s Former House

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As I mentioned last month, back on May 28th I attended the Jennifer Grant book signing for Good Stuff, the actress’ newly-penned memoir about her late father, movie star Cary Grant.  Well, I finally finished reading the tome last weekend and I can honestly say that it is one of the best books I have ever read.  What an incredibly touching gift Jennifer has created for her father – and for her father’s countless legions of fans.  If you have not yet read Good Stuff, I cannot more highly recommend doing so.  I literally could not get enough of Jennifer’s words and stories and was pretty much drowning in tears by the time I came to the end.  Besides the heartfelt memories and sound fatherly advice from Cary that Jennifer shares in her book, my favorite aspect of Good Stuff has to be the fact that in it she refers to her childhood home by its street address – 9966 Beverly Grove Drive.  Oh, THANK YOU, Jennifer!  A woman after my own heart, I swear!  How I wish more celebrity authors would do that very same thing when penning their own memoirs.  Sigh!  So while out and about in Beverly Hills a couple of weekends ago, before I had yet to even finish the book actually, I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place.

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“9966”, as Jennifer lovingly calls her childhood home, is located high up in the Hills of Beverly, off of Benedict Canyon Drive, at the end of a twisty, turny, fairly remote street which overlooks pretty much all of Los Angeles.

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Needless to say, the view, which is pictured above, is pretty darn majestic.  Of it, Jennifer says, “We had a ‘You should see the view’ view.  Stunning.  From downtown Los Angeles all the way to the beach – oh, but please don’t.  All my life we had looky loos parking outside the gate and peering in through the metal bars.  Our home was on the Movie Star Maps.  Can’t blame people for wanting to see, really, but it was a disconcerting inconvenience.  People would park their cars in our driveway, just outside the gate.  Then they’d stand and gaze in and around the gate, hoping to catch a glimpse of Dad through the windows or in the backyard.  Dad, Barbara [Cary Grant’s fifth and last wife], and I likened it to being animals in a zoo.”

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To poke fun at their seemingly zoo-like existence, the trio posed for the above photograph in 1983.  Of it, Jennifer writes, “One of my favorite pictures of Dad, Barbara, and me is a spoof on all of this. In the midst of a rarely held family photo session (perhaps our only one), we decided to get a shot of us at the gate, mimicking our imagined status as displeased monkeys, our cheeks puffed and heads pressed through the bars. Of course, we did choose the outside of the gate as the imagined cave. We quite liked our own confines.”  Love it!

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That gate is pictured above.  Sadly though, as you can see, little else besides the gate is visible from the street.  And no, I did not try to venture up to it and peer in and around it to try to catch a better glimpse of the property as the looky loos in Cary Grant’s day did.  Winking smile

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Of her 4 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 7,602 square foot childhood home, Jennifer writes, “There’s a beautiful symmetry to the number 9966, as if it were the end and the beginning of a quotation.  The first time I remember seeing my father, and the last time I actually did see him, was at 9966.  One of my father’s priorities was providing me with a sense of permanence and stability.  The actual structure he chose was a farm-style house.  Our home atop a hill.”  According to Jennifer, while the house was luxurious, it was also “practical”.  She says, “Dad used to say that the state of your surroundings reflected the state of your mind.  Also, there could be an inverse correlation.  A clean atmosphere provides space for thought.  This has become a truism for me.  During college exams, regardless of my lack of sleep, my boyfriend used to marvel at the way I had to clean my apartment before studying.  A direct offshoot of 9966.”  She also says, “Dad wasn’t a fan of overly lavish displays, at least not in the worldly sense.  Our home was beautiful and not a mansion.  What did we need with a mansion?  Our parties were small parties.  We had a white, modern-looking oval table that at most sat fourteen.  You could see and hear everyone.  The mood was festive and intimate.  Barbara made scrumptious, home-cooked meals and decorated the table with her own arrangements of flowers.  Dad was so proud.  I understand why.  Our home had love, warmth, and personal care.  It was overflowing.”  The home was so beloved by the Grant family, in fact, that not only was it the spot where Cary married Barbara on April 11, 1981, but it was also where Jennifer tied the knot with her now ex-husband, Randy Zisk, in 1993.  When Cary sadly passed away in 1986, he left the property to Barbara and it appears that she still owns it to this day.

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Again, I cannot more highly recommend reading Good Stuff.  Just be prepared with a box of hankies when you get towards the end.

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On a side note – Located due west of 9966, across Benedict Canyon Drive, is Villa Bella, the Italian-style monstrosity that was built on the site of the now-demolished residence where Sharon Tate was murdered in the early morning hours of August 8, 1969.  The Tate house was leveled in 1996 by owner Alvin Weintraub, who subsequently built the ginormous 18,000-square-foot, nine-bedroom villa pictured above.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Cary and Jennifer Grant’s former house is located at 9966 Beverly Grove Drive in Beverly Hills.  You can purchase a copy of Jennifer’s book Good Stuff 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.