Dawnridge, 1949. The iron obelisks on each side of the front door were moved to the Tony Duquette Studio on Robertson Boulevard where they were covered with abalone shell. The obelisks returned to the gardens at Dawnridge in 1975.
Dawnridge, 1949. The iron obelisks on each side of the front door were moved to the Tony Duquette Studio on Robertson Boulevard where they were covered with abalone shell. The obelisks returned to the gardens at Dawnridge in 1975.
Dawnridge, 1975. Tony covered the façade with lattice and painted it pink with white trim and coral edges; In 2018, I painted the lattice emerald-green and covered it with ivy.
Tony Duquette grew up between Three Rivers, Michigan, and Los Angeles, California. As a child, he would amuse himself by building “estates” in the side yards and empty lots next to his family’s homes. These miniature constructions made of twigs and painted cardboard were theatrically lit with birthday-cake candles. After construction was completed, The Witch Boy (as his friend Eudora Welty later called him) would invite his family and friends to an “unveiling,” where he would dramatically light all the tiny candles, creating a brief moment of magic. “I would invariably become small, becoming one with my miniature worlds,” Tony once told me. “I could play for days within the realms of my imagination and fantasize an entire culture living within the boundaries of my estates. I would spend days creating streets and houses, while imagining the lives that went on there.” He never told me if these estates had names.
Later in life Tony would amass ten fully furnished houses, all of which he did name: Fiddler's Ditch, later renamed Dawnridge; Cow Hollow (his pre-1916, San Francisco birdcage Victorian); Beeglesville; Frogmore; Ireland (named for the home’s façade, which was salvaged from an eighteenth-century Irish storefront); Doorchester (which was constructed entirely out of old paneled doors); Horntoad; China (a conglomeration of gilded Chinese carvings); Hamster House; and Chat Thai. Through these houses, he brought the magic of his childhood estates to life. To achieve some of these he needed an architect and found one early on, even before he owned land to build upon.
Caspar Johann Ehmcke was born in Munich, Germany, in 1908, making him older than Tony by six years. When Caspar was nineteen, he moved to Stuttgart to study architecture at Stuttgart Technical University. After graduating, Caspar immigrated to the United States, and shortly after arriving in Los Angeles in 1938, got a job at Bullock’s department store where he specialized in store planning and design. It was through Bullock’s—where Tony worked designing store interiors—that the two future collaborators would meet. As fate would have it, Tony and Caspar rode the streetcar together to and from work each day. It was during this time that Caspar would tell Tony of his Bauhaus-style, modernist training in Germany and his plans to build streamlined houses in Los Angeles. Tony, in turn, would tell Caspar of his ideal house: a pavilion d’amore, a small Venetian palazzetto, a folly de luxe. What Tony described was the antithesis of anything Caspar had ever dreamed of building. “Someday, you’ll build it for me,” Tony insisted. It was a dream Caspar hoped Tony would forget.
Caspar Ehmcke (left) and Tony walk to work at Bullock’s department store in downtown Los Angeles, c. 1938; The engraved invitation newlyweds Tony and Elizabeth would send out for parties at Fiddler’s Ditch, c. 1949.
While Caspar worked away at store planning and design, Tony’s job at Bullock’s was to change the store interiors four times a year. His directive from the store’s owner, P. G. Winnett (my great uncle), was to make the customers forget about Southern California’s lack of seasons. “In those days, if women in New York were wearing tweeds and furs, the women in Los Angeles were also wearing tweeds and furs, even if it was one hundred degrees in California,” Tony said. “The minute the customers walked through the doors, it was my job to dupe them through the store interiors, temperature, and music into thinking it was summer, winter, spring, or fall!” Tony’s remuneration for conjuring up the seasons like a modern-day Merlin was an extravagant paycheck of fifteen dollars per week, on which he fed, clothed, and housed his mother, father, and three siblings.
Tony left his secure job at Bullock’s after meeting Elsie de Wolfe, the first lady of American design, in 1940. De Wolfe, also known as Lady Mendl, had fled the Nazi occupation of Paris with her husband, Sir Charles Mendl, and eventually made a new life in Los Angeles after briefly living in New York. A very young eighty-five, she told her friends who begged her to stay that she “was moving to Hollywood to be with the royalty of America . . . the movie stars!” As fate would have it, de Wolfe was introduced to Tony through their mutual friends William “Billy” Haines, James Pendleton, and director Vincente Minnelli, and the rest was history. After claiming Tony as her exclusive discovery—and proclaiming him a genius—she hired him to decorate her new house in Beverly Hills, which she named After All. Taking Tony under her wing, Elsie made it her mission over the next ten years to make him famous worldwide.
Tony met his wife, Elizabeth Johnstone, in 1942. He was in the army, and she was a freelance artist working for Disney. They fell in love and moved in together. Elizabeth was nicknamed Beegle by Tony because she encompassed the industry of the bee and the soaring poetry of the eagle—she was an artist whose talents seamlessly complemented his own. One day in 1949, their friend Mary Pickford told them, “If you’d just get married, I’ll pay for the wedding!” That was all Tony had to hear; a free wedding sealed the deal and the couple was married at Pickfair, Pickford’s fabled estate, in Beverly Hills. Pickford was the matron of honor and her second husband, Academy Award–winning actor Charles “Buddy” Rogers, was best man. All of Hollywood was in attendance, including Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Cobina Wright, Gloria Swanson, Agnes Moorehead, Vincente Minnelli, Adrian, and Arthur Freed. Sir Charles and Lady Mendl were also there.
Tony in his studio at Bullock’s with the giant posters he created for a Mexican-themed event, c. 1937.
Elizabeth at Dawnridge, 1949.
It was with marriage in mind that Tony finally commissioned Caspar to build his dream house, Dawnridge, as a gift for his bride. Caspar had left Bullock’s the same year as Tony to complete a housing project for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and would eventually work on the new Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Navy Test Facility, and an earthquake-proof high-rise for the Sears Roebuck department store. In 1945, he had started his own practice that focused primarily on commercial buildings, including a new recording studio for Decca Records. When a friend of Tony's, photographer Johnny Engstead, announced plans to build a new studio for himself, Tony insisted that the only architect for the job was Caspar Ehmcke. When Tony made an aesthetic proclamation, his friends always heeded his advice.
Before Ehmcke could go to work on Dawnridge, Tony had to purchase the land. Independently, two good friends—one a real estate agent, the other a banker—had approached Tony and said, “When you’re ready to build your dream house, call me!” Shortly thereafter, Tony found a canyon lot high above Beverly Hills, just up the road from Pickfair, and told them about the property. All their friends thought Pickford had given the Duquettes the land as a wedding present, but that was not the case. When Tony showed the lot to the real estate agent, she said, “I love you too much to sell you that property. It doesn’t have a front yard; it’s on a hillside. You’re an artist, and you obviously don’t know what you’re doing. If you buy this property, you’re going to lose your shirt. I refuse to sell you the property.” Undeterred, Tony went to the banker, who said, “I love you and Beegle too much to lend you the money to do this project. You’re an artist, and you obviously don’t know what you’re doing. It has no front yard, it’s on a hillside, and you’re going to lose your shirt. I won't lend you the money; it’s too risky.” “But for $1,500?” Tony asked. The land was only $1,500 in 1949. A child of the Great Depression, Tony understood value, and despite his friends’ warnings, he purchased the property and proceeded to build the house. That’s when his parents jumped in. “Don’t build the bedroom wing,” they told him. “You’re going to lose your shirt.” And so, unfortunately, he heeded their advice and didn’t build the bedroom wing.
Dawnridge was to be Ehmcke’s first residential commission, but built to Tony’s very Venetian specifications. It was a thirty-by-thirty-foot box that was divided into a large twenty-by-thirty-foot salon that Tony called the Drawing Room and three ten-by-ten-foot boxlike rooms across the front: the entrance hall, its adjoining vestibule with a small powder room, and the kitchen. A staircase in the double-height Drawing Room led up to a ten-by-thirty-foot balcony above the entrance hall and its adjoining rooms that had originally been intended to access the bedroom wing that wasn’t built. Instead, it opened onto a small terrace above a one-car garage, an amenity that didn’t interest Tony, who soon turned the garage into a dining room. Under the staircase to the balcony was a staircase leading down to two tiny bedrooms and bathrooms built into the slope of the hillside. “It’s like an apartment on its own ground,” Tony used to say euphemistically about the house.
That was Dawnridge, originally christened Fiddler’s Ditch after the ravine that ran through the back of the property. It was an elegant, small house that magazines called “the Grandest House in Beverly Hills,” and when Tony’s society friends saw it, they all wanted one too, albeit bigger. Ehmcke went on to design dozens of Hollywood Regency–style houses, as well as a handful of Modernist residences, for those friends, but his first residential commission was destined to become his most famous. Tony and Beegle hosted a whirlwind of parties and visitors during their first year in the house, including the famous French collector of houses Paul-Louis Weiller (Tony would later design a house for him in Paris), the Mendls, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, Arthur Freed, Fred Astaire, and Loretta Young. The guest lists were formidable. Fiddler’s Ditch was christened with a Bal de Derrière, or a Bustle Ball, where all the ladies wore gowns with bustles. The Bal de Derrière was followed by numerous dinner parties, replete with divertissements such as the noted Indian dancers Sujata and Asoka, as well as Balinese dancers, balalaika orchestras, and troupes of Chinese acrobats. At the events, the house servants wore eighteenth-century liveries that Tony had purchased from Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger, who moved to Los Angeles during the war from her home, Palladio’s historic Villa Malcontenta in Italy.
Newspaper clippings about the Duquette wedding at Pickfair, c. 1949.
The Duquettes only lived at Dawnridge for one year before moving to Paris, where Tony was invited to exhibit his work in an unprecedented one-man exhibition at the Pavillon de Marsan of the Louvre Museum. When they returned from Paris, Tony and Beegle moved into their old studio on Fountain Avenue and, in 1956, they purchased the former Norma Talmadge Film Studio at the corner of Robertson Boulevard and Keith Avenue, an area adjacent to Beverly Hills known as Sherman (now West Hollywood). Their plan was to turn the abandoned and condemned building into their studio, work-rooms, and residence. Tony immediately commissioned Caspar to draw up the plans for the new Tony Duquette Studio, where the couple would live and work for the next twenty years before moving back into their beloved Dawnridge.
The Duquettes stayed close friends with Caspar, often recommending him to friends such as Technicolor executive Pat Frawley and his wife, Gerry, and Tony always used him when he needed an architect for a design job—like when working for Doris Duke at Rudolph Valentino’s Falcon Lair. In the 1970s, Tony and Elizabeth asked Caspar to design a house at Sortilegium, their Malibu ranch. The Duquettes were enthralled with an eighteenth-century church they’d seen in Austria that was laid out in a trefoil design, and Caspar drew up plans for an incredible house and built an interesting model, but the Malibu house was never realized.
Between 1950 and 1975, while the Duquettes lived in their grand studio, Dawnridge was home to a series of distinguished tenants, including Marlon Brando, who rented their house while he was filming Julius Caesar; Eva Gabor and her husband Dr. John Elbert Williams; and Glynis Johns. Nancy Oakes (Baroness Hoyningen-Huene) also rented the house. The last long-term tenant in the house was the notorious Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who provided us with plenty of stories to dine out on.
The invitation to, and newspaper clippings regarding, the Bal de Derrière, or Bustle Ball, given by the Duquettes with their friends Mr. and Mrs. William T. Riley, 1950.
Beegle (far left) with screenwriters Richard Sale and Mary Anita Loos during a party at Dawnridge, 1949.
Indian dancer Asoka provides the entertainment after dinner, 1949.
Tony later asked Vincente Minnelli to hire Asoka and his partner, Sujata, to dance in the MGM film Kismet, for which Tony designed the costumes; A footman waits by the front door with his mural counterpart, 1949.
Tony and Beegle in front of Dawnridge, c. 1949.
In the 1960s the Duquettes acquired the house next door to Dawnridge, which they called New Dawnridge. They furnished and rented it to celebrities and friends, such as agent and film producer Freddie Fields. In 1974, after Tony had just finished redecorating Dawnridge following Mengers’s ten-year tenancy, New Dawnridge burned to the ground, the first of four major fires that the Duquettes endured. I was working for Tony and Beegle at the time of the fire, when a body was found in the debris. I told the Duquettes, “Wait until they discover that the person was dead before the fire started.” And she had been! After the fire, Tony, Beegle, my future bride Ruth, and I high-tailed it to South America to avoid the coroner’s inquest and get away from all the complications. I recently found the telegram that our secretary sent us while we were in Lima, Peru, stating that the death was incurred at the hands of another rather than by accident. It was foul play that involved the two men who were renting New Dawnridge.
While it was a hardship, the destruction of New Dawnridge opened up space for the garden terraces that would truly transform Dawnridge into a large estate. Meanwhile, more immediate plans were in motion. Tony and Beegle had decided to move back to Dawnridge, and in 1975 they commissioned Caspar to design the bedroom wing—actually, just a two-car garage with a bedroom above it—that had been set aside when the house was first built. Day by day, as the Duquettes moved in their favorite collections, I watched the house become more personal. Dishes that had been used by high-paying tenants were replaced with eighteenth-century Chinese export porcelains, antique carpets covered the floors, and the interiors were filled with precious objects and antiques. Rooms evolved: The small downstairs bedrooms were expanded by glassing in the area beneath the Drawing Room’s exterior balcony, a new kitchen extension and a glassed-in porch were built onto the new garage, the old kitchen became a larger powder room, and the old garage became a dining room.
An article published about Nancy Oakes, who rented Dawnridge from Tony and Elizabeth, 1950. Nancy was the daughter of the gold mining tycoon and governor of the Bahamas, Sir Harry Oakes, whose mysterious murder has yet to be solved.
Beegle surveying the destruction after the fire at New Dawnridge, 1974.
After the Duquettes moved back to Dawnridge, the studio on Robertson Boulevard continued as the headquarters for their business and the venue for parties, where they entertained in great style. Dawnridge became more private; only their closest family friends were invited for intimate dinners. However, there were exceptions to the rule—sometimes they would open the doors, throwing caution to the wind, and host fabulous parties, like the one Tony gave for his goddaughter Liza Minnelli. These were star-studded and spectacular, like old Hollywood in its most tinseled days. Like his mentor, Elsie de Wolfe, who didn’t believe in dining rooms, Tony would serve dinners all over Dawnridge—in the Drawing Room, on the balcony, and in the one-car garage, which had been magically transformed into a mirror-and-malachite-encrusted dining room. The garden, now arranged on three levels and studded with fantasy pavilions and sculptures, was where alfresco lunches and dinners took place. At night, chandeliers and lanterns sparkled from the branches of flowering trees.
Tony’s vision for the garden was singular. Using architectural fragments rescued from the backlot of MGM, he created a series of pagodas and temples, garden follies, platforms, terraces, a tree house, and dozens of lit sculptures. The garden was the scene of legendary parties over the years, with guests including Glenda Bailey, Miuccia Prada, and Angela Missoni. At one party, George Hamilton donned Tony Duquette jewelry, and at another Italian Vogue editor Grazia d’Annunzio was so enchanted by the ambiance that she came back to photograph Tony and Dawnridge for Italian Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue, and Vogue Gioiello. Jean Howard, Loretta Young, Jean and Maggie Louis, Rudolph Nureyev, John and Dodie Rosekrans (who went home with fifteen original Tony Duquette necklaces), James Galanos, Gustave Tassell, Irene Dunne, Mary Martin, and Janet Gaynor were also constant visitors.
Tony Duquette Studios, with the original obelisks from Dawnridge placed on each side of the stage, c. 1965.
Beegle (far left) with my wife, Ruth, and me, c. 1980.
Stepping into the garden, people were apt to ask, “Where am I?” Tony loved this about the property, and said, “It’s only minutes from the Beverly Hills Hotel, but it’s impossible to tell that you’re not in Japan, Austria, or Southeast Asia!” Tom Ford was so impressed by what he saw that he used the house as a location for a Gucci campaign. Other companies followed suit: Bulgari with Julianne Moore, Abercrombie & Fitch with Bruce Weber, and Gucci, once again, with Tom Hiddleston.
In 1985, Tony and I purchased a massive historic synagogue in San Francisco. It didn’t take us long to remodel the vacant, vandalized, and condemned building into the Duquette Pavilion, where we would showcase Tony's work. During the remodeling, Tony and Beegle moved to their house in San Francisco, Cow Hollow, and rented Dawnridge to his client and friend Beverly Coburn, the ex-wife of Academy Award–winner James Coburn, whose house Tony had decorated in the 1970s. While she was in residence, and just a few weeks after the Duquette Pavilion in San Francisco burned to the ground, Dawnridge caught fire again. This was Tony’s third fire at all of his properties, and the damage to the house was severe. It was at this time that Tony, Beegle, and I redecorated Dawnridge to the way it would appear in the 1990s.
Elizabeth Duquette died in 1995, four years before Tony. In 1990, Tony and Beegle had given Ruth and me the contents of Dawnridge as a gift and paid the gift tax on it. After Tony’s death in 1999, we purchased Dawnridge. Ruth and I felt strongly that we ought to preserve Tony’s unique works and residence. In order to settle the estate taxes and satisfy obligations to Tony’s heirs, we decided to sell our household goods to get the money to buy the property. To do this, we had Christie’s hold the largest house sale in American history. The exhibition was kicked off with a gala for five hundred guests that raised $1 million to benefit the Decorative Arts Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The sale took place over three days in a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, where more than two thousand objects were sold.
The Monkey Room, 2018. Tony never had the opportunity to enjoy the space that overlooked the gardens, as he had only used it for storage.
After the sale, I redecorated Dawnridge using objects, furniture, and works of art created by Tony and Beegle, mixed with some of their favorite antiques that I had kept. I once asked Tony, “Why don’t you show your own work in your house?” He didn’t have an answer, but I imagined he thought that if he surrounded himself with valuable antiques, people would assume he was rich. Of course, he was wealthy, but only because of his investments in real estate. He once told his friend William Matson Roth, who owned Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, “With all my talent, the only thing that’s made me rich is my real estate.” Roth said, “That was your talent!” which made Tony laugh. He never tired of telling that story.
Ruth and I used Dawnridge for parties while we continued to live in Hollywood, but after several years, we finally decided to build a house next door. We sold our Tycoon Georgian and moved into Dawnridge while our new home, Casa La Condesa, was under construction. In 2011, when Casa La Condesa was finished, we turned Dawnridge back into a party house and made it the headquarters for our decorating and jewelry business.
The only regret I have is that Tony was never able to enjoy the glassed-in porch that became the Monkey Room. Tony always had a pressing need for storage, and after he created the room, he put embroidered Indian tent panels on the ceiling and filled it with stuff. After he died, it only took me a few hours to clear the room and turn it into a sitting room. At the time, I thought about how much Tony would have liked sitting in that room, with its three walls of glass overlooking the gardens. It was the only room at Dawnridge that was never finished in his lifetime. Today, it’s used as a dining room. One night, I asked our friend Terry Stanfill, “Why are the dinners in this room always so successful?” She answered, “It’s because the ceiling is so low, and the oval table is conducive to conversation.” She opened my eyes. The low ceiling—a mere seven-and-a-half feet high—caused the guests to feel as if they were “tearing from the same beast,” as Tony used to say. “It’s primordial, with the votive candles lighting the guests’ faces from below, like the flames from a campfire.”
—H.W.
