Reel Estate Brokers
Finding a favorite dead star on the Web
Dissatisfaction fell over me like raining bank safes. Until this, I hadn't known what I didn't have. Now I knew I would never be happy until I:
A) bought a house with a swimming pool, and,
B) moved the swimming pool over a little bit.
Now, count us among the horde that's obsessed with the Homes of the Stars.
It's an obsession that goes back before the talkies, and one that's lasted for decades as tourists and locals alike shell out dough to kids hawking star maps from their corners at the foot of the hills of Hollywood and Beverly. Today, list among the benefits of the Web the fact that you can now do your gawking the lazy way, thanks to a number of sites devoted to the homes -- on the ground and in the ground -- of the stars.
You should know, if you're new to this, that stars' homes are frequently much more impressive than the stars themselves. Meet a celebrity in person and the typical reaction is "I didn't know he was so short." See a star's home and the typical reaction is "What does Stretch need with 17 rooms, 19 baths and an indoor skeet-shooting range, never mind vaulted ceilings?"
You should also know that these celebrity homeowners are caught in that most puzzling dilemma of the stars: how to guard and protect their cherished privacy while making a huge spectacle of themselves and showing off all their cool stuff.
This matter is best resolved by allowing looky-loos glimpses of the exteriors of their homes, as well as providing them with breathless descriptions of all the treasures that lie within, but Internet visitors don't get in any more than the traditional coach-borne tourists of less technologically advanced times were allowed to parade through the stars' homes. In real or cyber life, you rarely get past the driveways of the rich and famous.
So, we're left with... well, Driveways of the Rich & Famous, a Web site (www.driveways.com) that delivers nothing other than what it promises to deliver. Scroll down the list of more than 100 famous names, then click, and you're presented with an almost invariably anticlimactic image of that star's driveway. The collection runs from the cracked and messy driveway at Nicolas Cage's San Francisco digs (his Bel-Air driveway is way nicer) to the elegant gated entrance to Keith Richards' Weston, Conn. mansion, to the way over-the-top gaudy drive of Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas.
And don't think that death is the great equalizer when it comes to property. We all end up in the same coffin, figuratively speaking. But a tour of graves of the stars shows, rather spectacularly at times, that some celebrities actually manage to take it with them when they go. The site Find a Grave (www.findagrave.com) is a compendium of the Last Homes of the Stars, and you'll find some pretty swell digs here, including Howard Hughes' exclusive gated community in Houston and Mary Pickford's chiseled marble orgy of virgins, cherubs, infants and doves in Glendale, Calif.
Much of the dope on celebrity homes comes from Web sites that are companion pages to traditional media. Perhaps the most popular feature of the Los Angeles Times is Hot Properties (www.latimes.com/class/realestate/hotprop), which details real estate transactions of the stars, with descriptions of the bought or sold celebrity cribs. You can cruise through the Hot Property archives until you become completely despondent over your lack of a home with a sauna or a pony path or an indoor hockey rinks or -- look at this: In the Spelling place, there are so many rooms, that one's given over entirely to gift-wrapping. These are the Joneses up with which the rest of us simply can't begin to keep.
You'll find similar news on the homes of the rich and famous in the Hollywood suburbs of Las Vegas, via the Las Vegas Review-Journal (www.lvrj.com) where you can read about the desert homes of Buddy Greco, Robert Goulet and Dick Smothers, and Chicago, by way of the Chicago Tribune (chicagotribune.com), where you can keep up with the real estate dealings of Joan and John Cusack, Jerry Springer and Michael Jordan in that paper's Upper Bracket column.
My favorite, though, is Al Jolson's afterlife estate at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, Calif. Easily seen from the 405 Freeway, the entire hillside, practically, is Jolson's memorial. It includes a towering dome inset with a mosaic featuring Moses, plus a life-size statue of the Jazz Singer in his trademark bended-knee pose, and a waterfall that cascades over ebony steps into a glistening pool. It's a striking monument not only to Jolson, but to star culture in general.
If we could make but one suggestion: The pool should be moved to the right, just a smidgen.
