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25
House in Hollywood
from the settings of big motion pictures you have who built his "crazy house" with his own hands.
Wooldridge
Hollywood's strangest home belongs to no architectural period — it is a jumble of many. The owner says that if any one but himself had
built it, he couldn't stand it.
"Never thought of it !" McDermott replied. Chaplin, being considerable of an artist with the brush, proceeded to paint the sluggish flow of crimson on the wall. Ghastly decorations, perhaps, but not out of harmony with the atmosphere.
"You must get a splendid view from the roof," Chaplin remarked.
"Yes !" the owner replied, enthusiastically. "Go up and look !"
Syd hunted around for the stairs. "How do you get there?" he asked. "Just pull the right side of the bookcase," his host replied.
A slight exertion caused the cabinet to swing to one side, revealing a stairway leading to a room above, and there a window opened onto the roof. To the left there was a sheer drop of two hundred feet to the floor of the canyon. In the distance, possibly thirty miles away, the Pacific shimmered in the sun. On the side of a near-by hill was the home of John Bowers, and just beyond that the residence of King Vidor.
"Let's go down in the well \" McDermott said to me, the day I was looking through his home.
It was the strangest proposal I had ever heard from a man trying to exhibit the marvels of his residence. Just what I could gather down in a well, outside of a possible ducking, I could not see. But as I stood there, McDermott stepped nimbly inside and began going down a ladder and, of course, I followed. My host stood on dry ground at the bottom, and with the aid of a flash light walked through a door at the side and began traversing a tunnel. I followed. Presently, we came to another door, which opened readily at his touch, Continued on page 107
A huge, slant-eyed goddess, modeled in plaster, was salvaged from a set of Nazimova's "Salome."
A table McDermott placed in his living room had originally been built for "Robin Hood."
The great oaken door was taken from Norma Talmadge's "The Song of Love."
A wooden pulley above a well — in the living room of the house — came from Mary Pickford's "Tess of the Storm Country." A fence was plucked from the scraps of Rudolph Valentino's "The Eagle." And three small cannons on the parapet had originally been made for "The Sea Hawk."
It was taking a lot of time to assemble all these things, so, after acquiring the cannons, McDermott decided to make a bigger and bolder stroke. He loaded the entire fo'castle of a property ship onto a truck and hauled it to his hill. There it was anchored and now is a dining hall.
All his friends kidded about his home, yet every one wanted to see it. Syd Chaplin came one day to inspect it. He noticed two plaster heads on the wall which appeared to represent Arabs.
"If these birds have been decapitated," said Syd, "why blot out the blood flowing from their chopped-off necks?"