Year: 2013

Ray Combs’ Former House

One Haunted Hollywood location that I learned about back in January thanks to the fabulous book Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites, which was written by fellow stalker E.J. of The Movieland Directory, was the Glendale-area home where former Family Feud host Ray Combs was taken into custody shortly before his 1996 suicide. I was an avid watcher of the Feud during my teenage years and remember being heartbroken upon learning of Ray’s death, so I was, of course, immediately intrigued. I ran right out to stalk the residence just a few days later and have been absolutely itching to blog about it ever since. So here goes.

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Ray Combs was born Raymond Neil Combs Jr. in Hamilton, Ohio on April 3rd, 1956. He met his future high school sweetheart/wife, Debra, in the first grade. During his senior year at Garfield High, Ray was class president, a Boys State representative and the lead in the school play. Talk about most likely to succeed! After graduating in 1974, he received a nomination to West Point, but turned it down to instead embark on a two-year Mormon mission in Arizona. Upon his return, he married Debra and became a furniture salesman in Indianapolis. The job didn’t float his boat, though, and in 1982 he packed up his family and moved to Hollywood with stars in his eyes. He quickly gained success, winning an L.A. stand-up competition in 1984 and then an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1986, after which he received a standing ovation. Following that performance, he was offered a job hosting The Family Feud. Ray and Debra subsequently purchased a two-story, six-bedroom, two-bath, 1,987-square-foot home located at 1318 Sonora Avenue in Glendale in 1988. The dwelling, which sits on 0.26 acres, was originally built in 1925 and boasts a swimming pool and spa.

In early 1994, due to poor ratings, producers decided to let Ray go and bring back former Feud host Richard Dawson. Click below to watch Ray’s final appearance on Family Feud, in which a contestant fails to earn a single point during the Fast Money round, causing the comedian to say, “You know, I’ve done this show for six years and this could be the first time that I had a person that actually got no points and I think it’s a damn fine way to go out. Thought I was a loser till you walked up here and you made me feel like a man.” Then when the credits start to roll, Ray bolts from the stage, leaving the winning family cheering by themselves.

This clip is also amazing, by the way.

As is this one. But now I’m really getting off topic.

1994 was not kind to Combs. Besides losing his hosting gig and almost-$1-million-a-year paycheck, the comedian was in a car accident in July that rendered him temporarily paralyzed and left him with lingering spinal pain. Sadly, 1995 was no better. His family home of over 11 years in Ohio was foreclosed upon and he and his wife also separated and filed for divorce. Ray subsequently moved into an apartment in North Hollywood, while Debra and the couple’s six children remained at the Glendale residence.

According to the Find a Death website, on the night of May 31st, 1996, Ray telephoned Debra from his apartment and informed her that he had swallowed some pills. She called 911 and Ray was taken to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank (which I blogged about here). He contacted Debra again early the next morning informing her that he was being released and that he needed a ride home. During the drive, Ray became agitated that Debra wanted to take him to her place and wound up jumping out of the car – barefoot – and running onto the Ventura Freeway where a passerby picked him up. According to the Los Angeles Times, he was then taken to a friend’s residence and appeared to be “in a rage.” He told the friend that he was going to his family’s home “to hurt his wife and destroy the place.” His friend called the police and notified them of Ray’s plans. Detectives then made their way to Debra’s house, where they found Combs destroying furniture and bashing his head against walls. The comedian was again taken to a hospital, this time Glendale Adventist Medical Center, where he was placed on a 72-hour suicide watch. It did no good. In the early hours of June 2nd, Combs tied his bed sheets together and hung himself from a rod in the closet in his room. He was found by a hospital orderly at 4:10 a.m., dead at the age of 40.

At the time of his death, Ray had accumulated a debt of $500,000 (not including the $470,000 mortgage on the Glendale home), largely amassed from the failure of two shuttered comedy clubs he had owned in Ohio. According to an October 1996 People magazine article, the Glendale property was foreclosed upon shortly thereafter and Ray’s family subsequently moved into a two-bedroom rental. During that time, Johnny Carson, the man largely credited with giving Ray his big break, sent Debra a check for $25,000 along with a handwritten note that said, “I understand you are having some problems. I hope this will ease the burden.” Unfortunately, I could find no information on the Combs family whereabouts today.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to E.J., of The Movieland Directory, for writing about this location in his book Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Ray Combs’ former home is located at 1318 Sonora Avenue near the Kenneth Village area of Glendale.

October 10, 2013
The Cecil Hotel

Los Angeles magazine’s The Crime Issue had me absolutely drooling when I received it back in July, especially Steve Erickson’s article “Sleep Tight,” which detailed the bizarre 2013 death of 21-year-old Canadian tourist Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel in downtown L.A. I was glued to every single word Erickson wrote and, upon finishing the article, immediately headed to my computer to find out more information about the case, which is easily one of the most haunting and peculiar ever to touch the City of Angels. Then, when I came across the insanely eerie surveillance footage of Lam in the hotel’s elevator – the last images taken of the young woman alive – I knew I had to cover the place during my Haunted Hollywood postings and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk it just a few days later.

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The Cecil Hotel was constructed sometime during the 1920s (there are varying reports online stating that it opened in 1924, 1925 and 1927 and I am unsure of which year is correct). The fifteen-floor property was originally billed as an upscale hotel for business travelers, but when the Great Depression hit just a few years after its founding, the Cecil’s business took a severe downturn. By the 1950s, the site had become a sanctum for transients and criminals and was eventually converted into a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) establishment, offering rooms with shared bathrooms to long-term residents at low rates.

In May 2007, the structure was purchased for $28.5 million by a development company who had plans to turn it back into a hotel. Renovations were started in which the lobby was restored to its original grandeur (the result was fabulous as you will see at the end of this post) and three floors of rooms converted into a modernized “boutique hotel/youth hostel hybrid.” Sadly though, the city stepped in and halted the project mid-way through, claiming that the property was a “residential hotel” and that the owners would have to find replacement housing for any displaced occupants. Lawsuits followed and the Cecil wound up being turned back over to the lender. It is unclear as to what is to become of the locale in the future, but at the present time the site offers both long-term and short-term accommodations, and a rather odd dichotomy.

Despite the partial renovation and grandness of the lobby, seediness still dogs the Cecil. A 2008 Los Angeles Times article states, “Fresh Monet, Picasso and Kandinsky posters hang on the vivid yellow, red and blue walls next to the elevators on each floor. But around the corner, reality hits: The rooms are small, bugs scamper across the floors and in the dim hallways, one sometimes encounters guests who have been using drugs or alcohol.” Steve Erickson actually spent the night at the hotel before penning his “Sleep Tight” article. (Um, no thank you!) Upon checking in, he snagged his neighbor’s DO NOT DISTURB sign to hang on his own door because, as he says, “When someone knocks on your door at the Cecil, it isn’t room service.” When he returned to his room after a dinner at Cole’s restaurant (which I blogged about here) a few hours later, the sign was gone – stolen by another wary hotel guest. Erickson describes the property as such, “If you aren’t at the Cecil to hide, or to look for the city you’ve occupied but never known, you’re probably a foreign traveler stranded by expectations, inconsolable for a glimpse of Hollywood or the beach that the travel guide promised is only ‘minutes away.’ The Cecil hasn’t been minutes away from anything worth being minutes away from for decades.” Yeah, I’d say that pretty much sums the place up.

The Cecil has had numerous brushes with darkness over its eighty-plus-year history. In 1985, Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, lived on the hotel’s top floor in a $14-a-night room. Austrian journalist/serial killer Jack Unterweger moved into the property in 1991 in what many believe was an homage to Ramirez. He killed three prostitutes during his tenure there. The structure has also been the site of at least three suicides and one unsolved murder. Its most bizarre incidence of the macabre, though, has to be the disappearance and death of Elisa Lam.

Lam, who was traveling alone, checked into the Cecil Hotel on January 27th, 2013 while on a California holiday. She spoke with her family back in Vancouver daily during the trip. Then, on January 31st, she vanished without a trace. Detectives investigating the case were at a loss until they asked to see the hotel’s surveillance videos, on which was footage of Elisa acting extremely strangely in the Cecil’s elevator the night of her disappearance. In the video, which you can watch by clicking below, the young woman, seemingly both petrified and playful, is shown haphazardly pushing buttons for every floor, hiding in a corner, jumping in and out of the elevator, speaking to someone real or imagined just out of the camera’s view, and inexplicably flailing her arms and hands about. The feed is honestly one of the most haunting things I’ve ever watched in my life!

Lam’s body was not found until almost three weeks later, when, on February 19th, a maintenance worker headed to the Cecil’s roof to check the water tanks after several guests complained of low water pressure in their rooms. He discovered Lam’s naked body at the bottom of one of the property’s four 8-foot tall, 4-foot wide tanks. (And yes, hotel guests had been bathing in, brushing their teeth with, and drinking the water from that tank while Lam’s body was decomposing. Talk about an absolute nightmare! The incident triggered some rather humorous Yelp reviews, though, including the admonition, “Worst. Swimming. Pool. Ever.”) Despite the eerie video and mystery surrounding her disappearance, the coroner’s report ruled Lam’s death an “accidental drowning” and listed her bi-polar disorder as a contributing factor. Um, what now? Detectives were unable to explain how the young woman entered the roof area, which can only be accessed with a key, although they speculated that she climbed there via a fire escape. But did she do so naked? If not, then where are her clothes? And how does one theorize a tiny woman scaling an 8-foot tall water tank, opening the lid, climbing inside, and then shutting the lid back over herself ALL ON HER OWN? Accidental drowning, my foot! While the case is now closed, I have a feeling that the mystery surrounding it will never quiet.

Besides being the site of real life horror, the Cecil hotel is also a filming location. In 1977, the structure was where a taxi cab driver named Lawson (James Sutorius) killed a prostitute (Juno Dawson) in the Season 5 episode of Kojak titled “A Strange Kind of Love.” As you can see below, the exterior of the hotel looked quite a bit different back then.

Although the “Cecil” sidewalk sign (which you can see a photograph of here) still looks the same.

The interior of the property seen in Kojak bears no resemblance whatsoever to the interior of the Cecil hotel today. As you will see in a minute, the new owners did one heck of a remodel!

Fellow stalker Walter also informed me that in 1978 the exterior of the Cecil appeared in the background of the Season 4 episode of The Rockford Files titled “Dwarf in a Helium Hat.” Thanks, Walter!

The property has also been used in no less than three episodes of the television series Castle. It first popped up in 2009 in the Season 2 episode titled “When the Bough Breaks” as the supposed fancy New York building where Dr. Cameron Talbot (Reed Diamond) lived. Only the interior of the lobby area was used in the filming. (Like I said, the renovation was really quite spectacular.)

That same year, a bike messenger was struck by a hit-and-run driver in front of the Cecil in the Season 2 episode of Castle titled “Kill the Messenger.”

In 2011, the site popped up once again in the Season 3 episode of Castle titled “Nikki Heat,” as the supposed New York-area Beaumont Hotel. And while IMDB also states that the property appeared in the Season 1 episode of Baretta titled “The Half-Million Dollar Baby,” I was unable to find a copy of the episode with which to verify that claim.

On a Halloween side-note – this past Saturday I attended the bachelorette party for Miss Pinky Lovejoy, of the Thinking Pink blog, which took place at Disneyland, my favorite place in the entire world. I just about died upon arriving at the park’s gates and seeing the decorations pictured below. Halloween and Disneyland together was almost more excitement than this stalker could handle!

Check out the autumn leaves used as a bow in Minnie’s hair.

For those who have never been, Disneyland is an absolutely magical place during Halloween. Who am I kidding? Disneyland is an absolutely magical place any time of year, but it is especially so during Halloween.

Um, LOVE IT!

Add to that the fact that a Starbucks FINALLY opened inside the park – right on Main Street – and my head was about to explode! As my mom said, now Disneyland truly IS the Happiest Place on Earth.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The Cecil Hotel is located at 640 South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles. You can visit the property’s official website here.

October 9, 2013
Rockhaven Sanitarium

Back in early September, while doing research on filming locations in Montrose, I came across this 2011 Crescenta Valley Weekly article about a vacant former mental institution named Rockhaven Sanitarium. My interest was immediately piqued, of course (y’all know how much this stalker LOVES herself some abandoned properties), and I thought the site would fit in perfectly with my Haunted Hollywood postings – especially once I discovered that none other than Gladys Baker Eley, mother of Miss Marilyn Monroe, called the place home for almost a decade and a half. So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk it while the two of us were in L.A. last month.

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Rockhaven Sanitarium, which was also known as the Screen Actors Sanitarium, was originally founded in January 1923 by a nurse named Agnes Richards. After witnessing firsthand the poor treatment of the mentally ill while working in both San Bernardino’s Patton State Hospital and the Los Angeles County General Hospital (which is ironically where Gladys Baker gave birth to Norma Jean on June 1st, 1926), Richards decided to open her own “secluded sanctuary” to treat ailing women with dignity in a home-like setting. She leased a two-story building with a stone façade (hence the name “Rockhaven”) on Honolulu Avenue in Montrose for $125 a month and took in six patients, whom she called “residents.” By the next year, the number of residents had grown to 24.

To house the growing number of residents, Richards began purchasing neighboring homes, as well as constructing new buildings on adjacent vacant land. She also eventually bought the original stone dwelling. By 1940, the expanded site, which was one of California’s first private mental health institutions, consisted of 15 Craftsman and Spanish Revival-style buildings, 12 lots of land totaling 3.3 acres, facilities to treat over one hundred patients, a small hospital, a dining hall, and a professional kitchen. The gorgeous grounds, which won a landscaping award in 1966, featured gardens, towering oak trees, grottos, ponds, flowerbeds, fountains, shaded patios, statuaries, and meandering footpaths. Richards believed that beautiful surroundings were necessary to the healing process and Rockhaven was nothing if not idyllic.

As depicted in the documentary “Rockhaven: A Sanctuary from Glendale’s Past,” which won a Los Angeles Area Emmy Award, the sanitarium was not your typical mental health facility. Thanks to the fact that residents were taken on regular excursions, rooms were decorated by interior designers, holidays were celebrated, and patients allowed to wear their normal clothing, Rockhaven was a place where troubled souls could lead normal, even happy lives.

As Richards began to gradually withdraw from running Rockhaven in 1956, her granddaughter, Patricia Traviss, took over daily operations. Patricia continued to run the facility until 2001, when she retired and sold it to the Ararat Home of Los Angeles. Ararat transformed the property into a nursing home, but, claiming it was too difficult to maintain, wound up closing its doors in 2006. In a bit of a macabre twist, when Rockhaven was shuttered, for whatever reason, many patients’ belongings were left behind as if their owners were planning to return – clothes remained hanging in closets, greeting cards and flowers stood on shelves, and framed photos lingered on nightstands. When the city of Glendale purchased the site for $8.25 million in April 2008, they gathered together all of the lost belongings and put them into storage for safe keeping. And while there were originally plans to turn the historic location into a community center and public park, when the economy took a downturn, that project had to be put on hold. The future of Rockhaven is, sadly, now up in the air. In the meantime, the city, the Historical Society of the Crescenta Valley and the Friends of Rockhaven maintain and care for the location.

Due to its bucolic quality, several notables sought treatment at Rockhaven including Billie Burke (aka Glinda from The Wizard of Oz), bandleader Babe Egan, dancer Marion Rose, Broadway actress Peggy Fears, Clark Gable’s first wife, Josephine Dillon, and, as I mentioned earlier, Gladys Baker. (It has been said that actress Frances Farmer also spent some time at Rockhaven, but I believe that claim to be just a rumor.)

Gladys was admitted to Rockhaven Sanitarium on February 9, 1953. She remained there for the next 14 years, thanks to a $5,000-a-year trust fund that Marilyn had set up for her. During her tenure there, Gladys attempted suicide several times and even escaped from the facility in 1963, by tying bed sheets together, climbing out of an 18-inch closet window and scaling a fence. She then walked 15 miles to Lakeview Terrace Baptist Church in Pacoima, where she was found the following day. During yet another eventful escape, Gladys somehow or another got married!

In 1967, Gladys was released to her daughter Berniece Baker Miracle, Marilyn’s half-sister, who lived in Florida. She passed away in Gainesville 17 years later, on March 11, 1984, at the age of 81.

You can check out a video of Gladys taken during her later years by clicking below. It is absolutely eerie not only how closely she resembled her famous daughter, but also to catch a glimpse of what Marilyn would most likely have looked like as an elderly woman.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Rockhaven Sanitarium, the former home of Marilyn Monroe’s mother, Gladys Baker, is located at 2713 Honolulu Avenue in Montrose.

October 8, 2013
The Former Menendez Family Home

Just around the corner from Vincente Minnelli’s former abandoned mansion (which I blogged about yesterday) is the palatial Elm Drive residence where on August 20th, 1989, brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez (then 22- and 19-years-old, respectively) shot and killed their parents, entertainment company executive Jose and housewife Mary Louise, aka “Kitty.” (I honestly cannot believe that the murders took place in 1989! I would have guessed them to have occurred far more recently.) The case that followed would become one of the most-famous and most-watched of the century, rivaled only by that of O.J. Simpson – which is ironic, but more on that later. I first became interested in the Elm Drive house earlier this year while reading the book You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, one of the chapters of which was written by actress Robin Greer whose husband, businessman Mark Slotkin, custom-built the property.

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The Mediterranean-style home was originally constructed in 1927, but was completely redesigned by Slotkin in 1974 and became his and Robin’s primary residence. Slotkin’s rebuild featured six bedrooms, eight baths, 9,063 square feet of living space, a pool, a tennis court, and a two-story guest house with its own sitting room, full bath, bedroom, and two-car garage. And here’s where the irony comes in. Greer and Slotkin were longtime friends of O.J. Simpson’s, and Robin reportedly hosted Nicole Brown Simpson’s baby shower, when she was pregnant with Sydney, at the Elm Drive manse in 1985. How’s that for eerie? Robin even states in You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again that Nicole named Sydney after Robin’s character on Ryan’s Hope. In October 1988, after Mark and Robin decided to divorce, the estate was put on the market and sold to the Menendez family. They would live in it for less than a year. (Ironically enough, Robin was also at the center of a very interesting – and heartbreaking – Los Angeles Times story about an autograph collector’s unsuccessful quest that caught my eye this past July.)

On the evening of August 20th, 1989, Erik and Lyle murdered their parents with shotguns while the couple sat on the couch in their den watching The Spy Who Loved Me. Jose was shot five times, Kitty nine. The brothers, feigning grief, claimed that the killings had most likely been conducted by the mob. Their strange behavior was a red flag to investigators, though. Just three days after the murders, Lyle and Erik began blowing through their inheritance, going on extensive shopping sprees and ultimately spending over $1 million in six months time. Their purchases included a $64,000 Porsche, a Rolex watch, $40,000 worth of clothing, and, oddest of all, one of Lyle’s favorite restaurants in Princeton, Chuck’s Spring Street Café. Erik wound up confessing the crime to his therapist, L. Jerome Oziel, quite fittingly on Halloween day 1989. When Lyle found out, he became infuriated and threatened Oziel. The therapist taped some later conversations with the brothers and Oziel’s mistress informed police of the recordings in March 1990. The brothers were arrested that same month and charged with multiple murder for financial gain. The first trial, in 1994, resulted in hung juries, but they were both convicted and given life sentences during their retrial in 1996.

The Elm Drive house has been sold twice since the murders – first in 1993 to mystery television writer William Link and then in 2001 to a telecommunications executive named Sam Delug. Thinking about a normal family living their day-to-day life on the premises, I am reminded of the following quote by crime novelist Denise Hamilton from her article “Bringing Out the Dead” which was printed in the July 2013 issue of Los Angeles magazine: “And I wondered, Do bricks and mortar retain memories of crimes committed in airless rooms? Can violence sear a pattern into walls that no layers of paint can cover? Is this small patch of earth forever cursed?” Thankfully though, it looks like the macabre history of the house has not prevented Mr. Delug from celebrating Halloween, as you can see in this photograph on the Find a Death website.

Some sort of construction took place at the residence in 2002 (as you can also see on Find a Death) and the interior was reportedly gutted, but the exterior still looks pretty much exactly the same today as it did when Jose and Kitty owned it. Oddly enough, though, a gate that used to surround the property was taken down during the remodel. With a dwelling as notorious as this one, you’d think the owners would have wanted to put a fence up, not take one down!

And while there are rumors that Elton John, Michael Jackson, Prince, and members of the band U2 all rented the mansion at different points in time, being that Mark Slotkin sold it directly to Jose and Kitty, I do not see how that could be possible – unless, of course, they were tenants prior to the home’s 1974 rebuild.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The Menendez Brothers’ former house is located at 722 North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills.

October 3, 2013
Vincente Minnelli’s Former Abandoned Mansion

Back in February 2012, a fellow stalker named Kayleigh emailed me to ask if I knew anything about the “creepy” mansion located on the southeast corner of West Sunset Boulevard and North Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills. Her email stated, “There’s very little information on it online other than the fact that Liza Minnelli battled her former step-mother over it. It stands out because all the houses in that area are gorgeous, but this home is unkempt, looks abandoned and is just plain scary.” I did not have any intel on the property – in fact, I had never even heard about it before – but hello! Unkempt, abandoned, scary, AND a celebrity tie-in? Count me in! I contacted fellow stalker E.J., of the Movieland Directory website, who I figured would have the lowdown on the manse’s history and I was right – he had a boatload of information to share. Somehow though, I failed to stalk the place in time for last year’s Haunted Hollywood postings. So, believe you me, it was at the very top of this year’s list and I finally dragged the Grim Cheaper out there in early June.

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I do not know what it is about abandoned properties that makes this stalker’s heart go pitter-patter, but I could NOT have been more excited as we pulled up to the mansion.

Liza’s father, famed musical director Vincente Minnelli, moved into the six-bedroom, six-bath, 5,877-square-foot Hollywood Regency-style estate – which was originally built in 1925 and was later re-designed by architect John Elgin Woolf – at some point following his 1951 divorce from Liza’s mother, actress Judy Garland. Liza split her time evenly between both parents, spending six month of each year at Vincente’s house, which boasted a motor court, a pool and a 0.98-acre plot of land. According to Richard Alleman’s book Hollywood: The Movie Lover’s Guide, the director commissioned artist Tony Duquette – whose whimsical Dawnridge residence I blogged about in August – to build a large playhouse for Liza in the backyard. Alleman also states that the young girl’s closet was filled with tyke-sized reproductions of costumes from The King and I, Gone with the Wind and An American in Paris. In her 1984 autobiography Knock Wood, actress Candice Bergen said, “I remember always asking to go to Liza’s to play dress-up because in her closet hung little girls’ dreams.” The state of the house today, though, is the stuff nightmares are made of!

The estate’s first brush with darkness came in 1986. On July 25th of that year, Vincente, who was suffering from emphysema, took his usual after-dinner nap. Sensing something was wrong due to his pallor, Minnelli’s wife, Lee, whom the director had married in 1980, called 911. Paramedics rushed to the scene and Vincente was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead upon arrival. He was 83. And while the mansion was willed to Liza, it was stipulated that Lee would be permitted to reside there – or at a comparable place – at Liza’s expense for the rest of her life.

In 2000, Liza decided to put the property on the market – unbeknownst to Lee. It sold for $2.75 million two years later and Liza subsequently purchased a $450,000 condo for her step-mother to live in. Lee wasn’t going anywhere, though. A battle ensued in which Liza ended up firing the mansion staff and shutting off the estate’s electricity, at which point Lee sued her. The lawsuit, referring to Liza’s recent wedding to David Gest, stated, “While defendant is honeymooning all over the world, having fed 850 of her closest friends a 12-foot cake, plaintiff is alone in a cold, dark house, at age 94.” You can see some photos taken of Lee at the dwelling, which was starting to dilapidate, during that time period here. Liza eventually had the power restored and the sale finally went through in 2006 –after a four-year escrow. A mediator ruled that Lee would be allowed to stay on the premises until her death, with Liza paying rent to the new owners, who would not be permitted to move in until Lee passed away.

When Lee did pass away three years later, on November 11th, 2009 at the age of 100, the new owners apparently set about making arrangements to tear the mansion down and build a Mediterranean-style estate in its place. The project was scrapped, though, in 2010 due to difficulties with the Beverly Hills Planning Division. Supposedly a restoration of the property was then scheduled to begin, but, as you can see below, that never occurred, either.

And while it seems that some sort of work was done on the property in recent years, as evidenced by the dumpsters and utility truck visible on Bing aerial views, for whatever reason it was stopped and the residence has been left untouched ever since. (How eerily awesome is that pool, by the way? LOVE IT!)

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Kayleigh for telling me about this location and to fellow stalker E.J., of The Movieland Directory website, for informing me of its history!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Vincente Minnelli’s former abandoned mansion is located at 812 North Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills.

October 2, 2013
Tom Neal’s Former House

Upon first moving to the Desert in January, I started seriously perusing the book Palm Springs Confidential, which the Grim Cheaper’s boss had purchased for me several years prior. One locale mentioned in the tome that immediately piqued my interest was the former Little Tuscany Estates residence of Tom Neal, where, on April 1st, 1965, the ex-actor/onetime prizefighter shot and killed his third wife, Gail Evatt. (Her name is also sometimes reported as being “Gail Bennett” and, unfortunately, I am unsure of which moniker is correct, but for this post I’ll stick with Evatt.) Figuring the place would fit in perfectly with my Haunted Hollywood theme, I dragged the GC out to stalk it in July and have been itching to blog about it ever since. So here goes!

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Tom Neal’s acting career began on Broadway in 1935. The Illinois native, who had boxed quite successfully while attending Northwestern University, enrolled in Harvard Law School shortly thereafter and, upon graduating in 1938, migrated to Hollywood to pursue his dream of being on the silver screen. He landed his first film role that same year as Aldrich Brown in Out West with the Hardys and went on to play bit parts (mostly tough-guy characters thanks to his boxing background) and later star in over 180 low-budget, B-rated productions. His success garnered him quite a bit of wealth, a two-acre estate in Bel-Air and a romance with actress Barbara Payton. It was that romance with Payton that triggered his downfall. In 1951, the starlet told Neal she was leaving him for a new paramour, actor Franchot Tone. Neal did not take the news well. He beat Tone severely, giving him a broken nose, a concussion and a ten-day hospital stay. Payton later married Tone (though that was short-lived) and Neal was blacklisted by Hollywood. He wound up moving to Palm Springs, where he worked first as a host at the Doll House restaurant and then as a landscaper.

In 1961, Neal married Gail, who worked as a receptionist at the Palm Springs Racquet Club. (I blogged about the Racquet Club here.) The two moved into the four-bedroom, two-bath, 1,624-square-foot rental pictured below in early 1965. The ranch-style home, which was originally built in 1947, sits on 0.29 acres.

On the afternoon of April 1st, Tom and Gail began to argue. The couple had been separated for about ten weeks and Gail had filed for divorce on March 11th, unbeknownst to Tom. In the midst of the argument, Gail apparently headed for the living room, where she attempted to nap on the couch. Neal followed, accused her of cheating on him and wound up shooting her in the head with a 0.45-caliber pistol. He later claimed that Gail had grabbed the gun, pointed it at him and it had accidentally fired, striking her, during the course of a struggle, although the evidence did not reflect his account. Whatever the true story may be, Neal did not call the police, but, according to Palm Springs Life magazine, instead headed out to Tirol restaurant in Idyllwild for dinner. While there he informed two friends that he had just killed Gail. Apparently, neither of them thought to call the police, either.

The police were finally telephoned at 6:30 the following morning by Neal’s lawyer, James Cantillion, who informed them, according to Palm Springs Life, that a woman “had expired or was seriously injured” at 2481 Cardillo Avenue. Neal was indicted for murder two weeks later. After a twenty-day trial and a ten-hour jury deliberation, the former actor was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to up to 15 years in prison and ultimately served seven before being paroled on December 6th, 1971. Upon his release he moved to North Hollywood, where passed away from a heart attack eight months later. Neal was 58.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Tom Neal’s former house is located at 2481 North Cardillo Avenue in the Little Tuscany Estates neighborhood of Palm Springs.

October 1, 2013
Ferndell Nature Center

It’s that time again, my fellow stalkers! Time for my annual, month-long Haunted Hollywood theme! And yes, I do realize that October 1st is not actually until tomorrow, but I just could not wait one more day to get started! So here goes! My first Haunted Hollywood locale is actually one of my very favorite spots in all of Los Angeles – a peaceful little idyll named Ferndell that is tucked away inside of Griffith Park. And while the place could hardly be described as spooky or sinister, because it played a role in one of L.A.’s more fascinating unsolved mysteries – the 1949 disappearance of actress Jean Elizabeth Spangler – I figured what better time than now to blog about it.

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According to the non-profit group Friends of Griffith Park, the twenty-acre site now known as Ferndell was originally a meeting place for the Tongva-Gabrielino Indian tribe. The group dubbed the canyon “Mococahuenga.” In the early Twentieth Century the area became a part of Griffith Park and in 1914 park workers began planting ferns there. Pathways, bridges and waterfalls were added shortly thereafter and by the 1920s, the shaded oasis had become an immensely popular weekend attraction for native Angelinos and visitors alike.

Today the peaceful twenty-acre glen is marked by a quarter-mile gravel trail, meandering streams, terraced pools, over twenty small waterfalls, 17 footbridges, more than one dozen different fern varieties, and vast canopies of pine, palm, sycamore, ash, and redwood trees.

There is also a fabulous café named Trails located just outside of Ferndell’s rear entrance.

Sadly, Ferndell was allowed to fall into decline over the years – due mostly to the layoff of maintenance workers in the 1970s and 2008 budget cuts – and in 2012 the Cultural Landscape Foundation declared it one of the United States’ 12 most threatened landscapes. Friends of Griffith Park is currently working to restore the site to its original grandeur, although I can’t really imagine it looking any prettier than it already does.

The place is honestly one of the most picturesque spots I have ever laid eyes on. In fact, my very favorite picture of my dad and the Grim Cheaper was taken there back in 2008.

Ferndell’s beauty does not at all mesh with the unsolved mystery that has been linked to it for over 60 years. At around 5:30 p.m. on October 7th, 1949, stunning bit-part actress Jean Spangler left her apartment in the Park La Brea area of Los Angeles, telling her sister-in-law that she was on her way to meet her ex-husband. (That statement was later proven to be a lie – Spangler never met or had plans to meet her ex-husband that night.) She was spotted by a store clerk shortly thereafter at the Original Farmers Market at Third & Fairfax. The clerk said that Jean appeared to be waiting for someone. At around 7:30 p.m., the starlet made a phone call to her sister-in-law saying she would be home later that night. She was never seen or heard from again.

On October 9th, Jean’s purse was found just outside of the Ferndell entrance of Griffith Park. One of the straps had been ripped loose, suggesting a struggle.

Most cryptic of all, though, was the fact that a handwritten note was discovered inside the purse that read, “Kirk: Can’t wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away,” (The unfinished note ended with a comma, leading police to believe that she was interrupted while writing it. Although the mark is not discernible as being a comma in the screen capture below, all articles I’ve read on the subject report that the note ended with a comma and not a period.) Over 150 officers and volunteers searched the park, but no other sign of Spangler was found. One of Jean’s friends later informed detectives that the actress was three months pregnant at the time of her disappearance and that she had been considering an abortion. Police were never able to locate a “Dr. Scott,” though, and it has long been assumed that his name was a pseudonym being that abortions were illegal in 1949.

Because Spangler had recently completed filming a small role in Young Man with a Horn, which starred Kirk Douglas, there were suspicions that he might have been the Kirk mentioned in the note. He denied having any sort of relationship with her, though. Spangler also had ties to several mobsters and other underworld types, which caused the investigation to take numerous twists and turns – all of which led nowhere. The LAPD still considers Jean to be a missing person and her case remains open to this day.

Jean’s disappearance was the subject of a 2001 Mysteries & Scandals episode, which you can watch by clicking below.

Thanks to its picturesque quality, Ferndell has long been a favorite of location scouts. According to the book Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer’s Guide to Exploring Southern California’s Great Outdoors, The Young Rajah was shot at the park in 1922. Unfortunately though, I could not find a copy of the silent film, which starred Rudolph Valentino, to make screen captures for this post.

According to The David Janssen Archive, Ferndell was where Dr. Richard Kimball (David Janssen) fell into a stream in the pilot episode of The Fugitive, which was titled “Fear in a Desert City.”

In the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was titled “Encounter at Farpoint,” Ferndell masqueraded as the “woodland simulation” where Commander William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes) talked to Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) about being human.

The episode featured some amazingly realistic special effects, as you can see below.

I am fairly certain that the “woodland simulation” scene was shot both on location at Ferndell and on a soundstage. As you can see below, the stream that Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) fell into in the episode was quite wide and deep. Being that I have never seen a stream of that size at Ferndell, I believe that a fake one was created for that portion of the scene at Paramount Studios where the series was lensed.

Ferndell was also featured in the Season 1 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine titled “In the Hands of the Prophets” as the Bajoran Monastery of the Kai garden where Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) met Vedek Bareil (Philip Anglim) for the first time.

Ferndell once again masqueraded as the Bajoran Monastery of the Kai garden in the Season 2 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine titled “The Circle.”

In the 2012 romantic comedy Ruby Sparks, Ferndell is where Calvin Weir-Fields (Little Miss Sunshine’s Paul Dano) both envisions Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan) riding her bike while looking at the ceiling of his therapist’s office (hence the weird vent patterns visible in the screen captures below) . . .

. . . and where he later jogs with his brother, Harry (Chris Messina).

Ferndell pops up briefly in the Summer musical montage scene from 2016’s La La Land.

I have also long suspected that Ferndell was the spot where my girl Miss Marilyn Monroe posed for photographer Ed Henry in 1950. You can check out those pictures, which were not released until 2009, on the Life magazine website here. Unfortunately though, I have not been able to verify that hunch.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Ferndell Nature Center is located at 2333 Fern Dell Drive, inside of Griffith Park, in Los Feliz.

September 30, 2013
Dean’s House from “License to Drive”

For no particular reason and seemingly out of the blue, I got on a License to Drive kick a couple of weeks ago and was absolutely floored to come across a page on fellow stalker Geoff’s 90210Locations website that detailed almost all of the locales featured in the movie. The only spot missing was the Shakey’s Pizza Parlor where Les Anderson (Corey Haim), Dean (Corey Feldman), Charles (Michael Manasseri), and Mercedes Lane (Heather Graham) wound up after almost getting into a car accident in the middle of the 1988 flick – a location that I am now bound and determined to track down! Anyway, the place that I was most elated to see on Geoff’s site was the barn-like house where Dean lived in the film as it was a locale that I had always wondered about. So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk it while the two of us were in Los Angeles three weekends ago.

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Dean’s house popped up three times in License to Drive. It first appeared in the scene in which Dean and Charles called Les to congratulate him on getting his driver’s license. I am not sure what room of the house this scene was supposed to have taken place in. While I originally assumed that it was Dean’s room, the fact that there is a water heater and washing machine/dryer visible in the background (LOL!) gives me pause. And while the space looks like it could be a garage, it does not match the garage that is shown later in the movie.

The house next popped up towards the middle of the flick, in the scene in which Les enlisted Dean’s help in removing some dents that Mercedes had made in the hood of his grandfather’s Cadillac. It is during that scene that Dean convinces Les to go to Archie’s Atomic Drive-In (which I blogged about here), where “there’s five girls for every guy – and we’re not talking dogs. We’re talking bunnies!” LOL

And finally, the residence was featured at the very end of the movie in the scene in which Les dropped Dean and Charles off at home early in the morning following their wild night out. In that scene, the property’s real life 6313 address number was visible on both the front curb and light post. Love it!

While quite a bit has been changed in the twenty-five years since License to Drive was filmed, the dwelling is still very recognizable from its onscreen appearance.

As is the garage area.

In real life, the four-bedroom, four-bath, 3,591-square-foot house, which sits on 0.38 acres, was originally built in 1953 and last sold in July 1998 for $715,000.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Geoff, from the 90210Locations website, for finding this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Dean’s house from License to Drive is located at 6313 Riggs Place in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles.

September 27, 2013
Joyce’s House from “Little Black Book”

Last week, while doing research on locations from fave movie Little Black Book, I decided to watch the “Live & On-Air: The Making of Little Black Book” DVD special feature in which the filming of a deleted scene happened to be shown taking place in front of a house that I immediately recognized. I had actually stalked – and blogged about – the home back in March 2010 thanks to its appearance in Father of the Bride Part II. (You can read that post here.) Because I had written the column so long ago, though, I decided the residence was most-definitely worthy of a redux and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk it this past weekend while the two of us were in L.A.

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Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I first discovered the residence a couple of years back while strolling along Madison Avenue in Pasadena on our way to stalk the house Babe Bennett (Winona Ryder) supposedly lived in during her childhood years in Mr. Deeds. Mike noticed the picturesque property – or “Thanksgiving home” as I like to call such idyllic dwellings that always seem to bring to mind images of family holidays – immediately and commented that it had to have been used in a movie at some point. So when fellow stalker Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong blog, happened to send me screen captures of the place a few weeks later while on a quest to track down some minor locales from Father of the Bride Part II, I recognized it right away.

The charming five-bedroom, three-bath, 4,466-square-foot home, which was originally built in 1905, sits on 0.46 acres and last sold in June 2009 for $2,580,000. The residence, which looks like it was made to be in movies, features two game rooms, a garden room, a pool, a spa, a library, and a three-car garage. You can check out some great interior photographs of the place here.

As you can see from the side-view images pictured below, the house is actually much larger than its façade would lead you to believe. It’s absolutely ginormous!

In the “Live & On-Air: The Making of Little Black Book” special feature, the scene shown being filmed in front of the residence involved (I believe) Stacy (Brittany Murphy) leaving a note at the home of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, Joyce (Julianne Nicholson). No dialogue could be heard in the segment, but as you can see below, an envelope with what I think is the name “Joyce” on it was visible on the front porch. I am guessing that the scene was to be featured at the end of the movie and most likely entailed Stacy apologizing to Joyce for lying to her and humiliating her on national television. Because it wound up on the cutting room floor, though, and because no deleted scenes were included on the DVD (BOO!), I guess we will never know for sure.

Even though only a small portion of the home’s front porch was shown in “Live & On-Air,” I still recognized the place immediately. Yes, I’m that good.

Not surprisingly, thanks to its massive curb appeal, the house has been featured in numerous productions over the years. In Father of the Bride Part II, which premiered in 1995, it was where father-to-be George Banks (Steve Martin) witnessed a stranger saying good-bye to his son before leaving for work.

In 1995’s Bye Bye Love, the residence was where Susan (Amy Brenneman) lived. Both the interior and the exterior of the property were used in the flick.

In 2007, the home stood in for the supposed Medora, Wisconsin-area residence of the Tolchuck family – Justin (Dan Byrd), Claire (Lindsey Shaw), Franny (Amy Pietz), Gary (Scott Gordon-Patterson), and Pakistani foreign exchange student Raja (Adhir Kalyan) – in the pilot episode of Aliens in America. Oddly enough, though, only the interior of the house;

a few close-up shots of the front porch;

and the backyard appeared in the episode.

For the establishing shots of the residence’s front exterior, a different house – located at 6337 Larch St in Vancouver (thank you to fellow stalker Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong blog, for the address!) – was used. This was due to the fact that Aliens in American’s pilot episode was shot in Southern California, but production moved to Canada once the series got picked up. To avoid the confusion of using two different exteriors when the show started airing, producers just swapped in an image of the Canada house for all of the establishing shots shown in the pilot episode.

In “Live & On-Air: The Making of Little Black Book,” the residence directly across the street from Joyce’s was also briefly shown, which got me to thinking that it might have been the dwelling used as Stacy’s childhood home in the flick. In real life, the Frederick L. Roehrig-designed abode, which was originally built in 1908, is known as the Lincoln Clark House and it is a City of Pasadena Designated Landmark Property.

Only a very limited portion of Stacy’s childhood home can actually be seen in Little Black Book. In the beginning of the movie, there is a brief shot of a young Stacy (Katie Murphy) watching her father from a window as he leaves her mother. In that scene, a unique, multi-limbed tree is visible on the side of the path that Stacy’s father walks down. As you can see below, there is a very similar-looking tree located on the side of the walkway at the Lincoln Clark House, as well. And the window that is located just beyond it resembles the window that Stacy looked through in the scene.

The porch area of the Lincoln Clark House (which you can see a close-up photograph of here) also closely resembles the porch that appeared in the montage clip showing Stacy’s boyfriends throughout the years.

The interior of Stacy’s childhood home was also featured in a few scenes at the beginning of Little Black Book. As you can see below, the three-paneled window that appeared onscreen is a match to the Lincoln Clark House windows. And the steep roofline is a match, as well. Without seeing interior photographs of the Lincoln Clark House, though, there is no way for me to say with any certainty whether or not it was used in the filming.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Joyce’s house from a deleted scene in Little Black Book is located at 639 South Madison Avenue in Pasadena. The Lincoln Clark House, which I think may have been used as Stacy’s childhood home in the flick, is located directly across the street at 646 South Madison Avenue.

September 26, 2013
Emmys 2013

I spent this past weekend in L.A. enjoying a whirlwind of activities including the bridal shower for Miss Pinky Lovejoy, of the Thinking Pink blog, some pre-Emmy parties and the 2013 Emmy Awards. And while I had a blast, I did not get home until late last night and therefore did not have time to write a new post for today. I do promise to be back tomorrow, though, with a whole new location. And I also promise to post my Emmy pics as soon as I get a free moment.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

September 24, 2013