My heart started to race, my eyesight flickered and I got blood-rush dizzy as I leafed through Jeffrey Hyland’s “The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills.” If glossy brochures full of apartment photos are property porn, then this book is real estate Viagra. Stuffed with luscious photographs of over-the-top homes, Hyland’s tome is a perfect holiday gift for the woman who has everything, or the man who wants it.
But it offers more than a damn-the-recession rush. Hyland, who is Rick (dad of Paris) Hilton’s partner in a West LA realty firm, knows whereof he writes, so this – a teardown and re-build of an earlier book he co-authored – is a solidly-researched and well-written history.
It is also spiced with enough anecdotes to make you wonder if the ghosts of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons aren’t whispering in Hyland’s ear. Like the story about what happened after William Randolph Hearst died at his home, Beverly House. Hyland recounts that Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies took a sedative and while she slept, his family removed his body and cancelled her newspaper subscriptions.
The only flaw: Hyland names none of the current homeowners. He tells us, for instance, that Casa Encantada in Bel-Air was built in 1924 for a nurse who inherited a fortune when her millionaire husband dropped dead – and promptly married his chauffeur. He doesn’t say that she sold it to Hyland’s partner’s grandfather Conrad Hilton, who sold it to Dole Pineapple’s David Murdock, who sold it to current owner, Gary Winnick of Global Crossing infamy. But that’s a small nit to pick when Hyland unlocks the gates of some of the lushest, most lingering-gaze inspiring homes on the planet.
Michael Gross is the author of “740 Park” and the forthcoming “Rogues’ Gallery, an exposé of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills
by Jeffrey Hyland
Rizzoli