The New Movie Magazine (Jan-Jun 1934)

Hollywood's The strange story of Whitley Heights, where glamorous ghosts gather, rising high above the common world Blanche Sweet, still slim and romantic looking, is seldom heard of or seen in pictures. After many tragic episodes, Helen Lee Worthing is in a sanitarium. THERE is a hilltop in Hollywood where glamorous ghosts gather . . . some of them the ghosts of people who are still alive. There is an insidious charm about this spot possessed by no other residential district in the environs of Hollywood or Los Angeles. Stand on a balcony on Whitley Heights some deep blue, velvet night, when the perfume of orange blossoms and roses mingles ever so faintly with the fragrance of burning eucalyptus logs, and Hollywood stretches before you like a handful of jewels waiting to be scooped up, and you will know what I mean. Bel-Air, Brentwood, Beverly Hills and the Los Feliz estates have dignity, beauty, stability. Malibu offers fun, freedom and relaxation. But Whitley Heights has the ecstatic quality of impermanence. The houses cling perilously to the hillside. Bedrooms may be downstairs and kitchens upstairs. There is a profu Plwta by Wide H'oi Wallace Raid loved the hilltop, too. Memories of gay parties and Wally's Pan-like pranks still abound. . . . Above, one of the lasf pictures taken of Wally, with Wallace, Jr. Wanda Hawley lived in the house next to Eugene O'Srien — Wanda, blond and dimpled. By ELEANORE GRIFFIN sion of flowers and foliage. Red roses hang over small green gates. Hibiscus blossoms line the winding paths. Bright-colored birds dart from tree to tree, and when it rains you can watch the rain drops falling on the roofs below. People on the way up the ladder of fame live here, and people on the way down. Real estate men will tell you, and tell you truly, that on a clear day you can see a shimmer that is the Pacific, and that on summer nights your ears will be regaled with snatches from the symphonies in Hollywood Bowl. But the real estate man doesn't know that if you listen ever so carefully you may hear the eerie whine of Valentino's specially-built foreign roadster as it creeps up the steep hill that leads from Hollywood. The roadster lies in a junk heap somewhere, and Valentino, greatest of screen lovers, in a crypt, not even his own, a short distance from the foot of the hill. And, late at night, the fog creeps in from the sea to clothe the hill in silver and to enfold with loving fingers the graceful wraith of the toobeautiful Barbara La Marr, who traveled so far in the eight miles that stretch from the shabby cabaret on Main Street to the odd little pink house that still clings trustingly to the hillside. And if your ears are tickled by a vagrant refrain from a song you have almost forgotten . . . "Wally" Reid lived not far away, and impromptu orchestras composed of his friends were his chief delight. And strange unhappy fates overtook others who were beautiful, gay and gifted and who looked triumphantly down on Hollywood from this picturesque hilltop. TEN or twelve years ago so many celebrities lived on this one hilltop that a sightseeing bus laden with tourists made the almost precipitous climb every afternoon. Valentino lived there then in the blue honeymoon house to which he brought the exotic Natacha Rambova. Valentino, who in his brief career, enjoyed an adulation accorded no other actor in the history of the stage or screen. But the darling of the gods died at the age of thirty-one. Rioting lines, blocks long, waited to view his casket. Women all over the world wept. Two girls who had never seen him except 52 The New Movie Magazine, January, 193 A