In the 1990s, the American economy changed for the better. With the fall of the Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern Europe, trade boomed as technological advances brought revolutions in computing and telecommunications, and a growing economy paired with low inflation and low unemployment created huge corporate profits, turned financial markets into money machines, and spawned a new class of the megawealthy who brought home sums that would have been incomprehensible to earlier generations. One result was that most entertainment figures were pushed out of the market for the great estates of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Holmby Hills for good. Their places in the area’s highest-priced homes were taken by the natural inheritors of the oil- and land-rich pioneers who had built the communities for their own ilk. Though the old-timers might be surprised at fortunes seemingly conjured out of the ether of financial manipulation or made on the backs of borrowed and other people’s money, they would surely recognize their kinship with the latest sort of folk who surreptitiously compare the size of their mansions as if they were genitalia.
“Hollywood did itself in by becoming a subsidiary of multinational corporations,” says another local rabbi. “Movie executives have become well-paid working stiffs.” There are exceptions that prove the rule, but generally speaking, the Hollywood types who still dabble in these real estate waters are or were proprietors of entertainment companies, not working stiffs. The Bell brothers of Bel Air own lucrative soap-opera franchises. Misty Mountain, Fred Niblo’s old eagle-eye-view estate high atop Angelo Drive, is owned by Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., and below it on the same street, the cofounder of Dreamworks, former music executive and beau of Cher, David Geffen, another collector of high-end real estate, bought the 9.38-acre Jack Warner property with its white-columned colonial mansion in 1990 for a reported $47.5 million; he is only its second owner.
The most famous remaining show business house in the Triangle was the monstrosity built in 1990 in Holmby Hills on the site of the Gordon Kaufmann house on South Mapleton Drive, which was previously owned by Edna Letts and Malcolm McNaghten, Bing Crosby, and Patrick Frawley. The wildly successful television producer Aaron Spelling and his wife Candy bought the property in the early eighties for a reported $10.25 million, along with an adjacent lot, at the suggestion of Marvin and Barbara Davis (both couples were eyeing The Knoll at the time). Its demolition, called a tear-down in Los Angeles, and replacement by a $55 million W-shaped, 56,500-square-foot behemoth that the Spellings called The Manor, complete with bowling alley and beauty salon, was memorialized in The New Yorker by Joan Didion, the most edgy and erudite observer of life in the Southland.
She wrote that The Manor became “not just a form of popular entertainment but, among inhabitants of a city without much common experience, a unifying, even a political, idea.” While “people who make movies still have most of the status, and believe themselves keepers of the community’s unspoken code—of the rules, say, about what constitutes excess on the housing front,” Didion continued, things had, in fact, changed, a change she compared to “an anomaly in the wheeling of the planets.” This sea change was enough to inspire bewilderment, denial, grief, envy, and other deadly sins among those who made movies: Despite their awesome self-regard, they were not the center of the universe in Los Angeles anymore (if they ever had been). Television moguls had overtaken them.
After Spelling’s death, his widow put the house on the market for $150 million.35 It was sold in June 2011 for $85 million to a trust benefiting Petra Ecclestone, a former model and British reality TV star and the daughter of Bernie Ecclestone, the billionaire owner of Formula One racing. The Ecclestones are throwbacks to an earlier generation of Triangle estate owners. More typical now are the men who bought Greenacres in 1993, 141 South Carolwood in 2002, and Hilda Weber’s Casa Encantada in 2003. All three are mere businessmen, barely known outside the corporate worlds they sprang from, but like Ecclestone’s father, they possess fortunes of a size only the rarest and most successful television producer could even imagine.