Los Angeles Magazine

2001

L.A. Postcard: The War of the Rose Bushes

Before there was Bel Air, before Beverly Hills, before Malibu, there was Whitley Heights - the first celebrity kingdom. It was here in the Hollywood Hills amid the windy streets of pastel-painted homes that Gloria Swanson loaned her villa to William Faulkner so that he could write better and, presumably, faster, where William Randolph Hearst first bedded Marion Davies, where Valentino practiced his swoons, and where Jean Harlow, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields and Cecil B. DeMille called home.

Although Whitley Heights today is a slingshot from funky Hollywood Blvd. and is sandwiched between two freeways, it retains a Mediterranean style and ambiance. It is a favored nesting place for the industry's international set such as directors Bernardo Bertolucci and Australian Phillip Noyce, the bohemian guard and the 20-something crowd of rising stars. The Coppola family owns three houses here: independent director Sofia, commercial director, Roman, and one for their late son Gio's daughter, Gia and her mother Jackie de la Fontaine. Eccentrics and iconoclasts abound. One resident has a bronze bust of his own head mounted on a column outside his home with a plaque reading: "Prince Poet Flatley - Estate of Mind"

For generations, residents have doted over their 1920's landmark homes and in 1992, horrified by the tacky mansion building mania in Beverly Hills, they created the Hollywood Preservation Overlay Zone to keep the barbarians at bay. All residents must now receive prior approval before making any exterior changes to their properties from the five member HPOZ board, - which includes three residents, an architect and a city planner.

But another Hollywood tradition - melodrama - also flourishes in the Heights. Indeed, lately the bucolic serenity of the Heights has been shattered by all manner of accusation, denunciation, epithets, breast-beating and threatened lawsuits as a cadre of residents claim that the HPOZ is not pursuing preservation but rather some nasty unneighborly vendettas.

Not that pricey, internecine squabbling is new to Whitley Heights. Seven years ago, the Heights voted to gate their community to protect it from the encroaching rabble of Hollywood Blvd. With each of its 200 residents paying $4,000, electronic gates were installed on the hillside entrance to the community. But the idea did not sit well with the adjacent and far less grand neighborhood known as Whitley Depths. Incensed at being excluded, the Depths sued the Heights. The Depths triumphed and gleefully had the gates torn down. Adding to the pyrrhic defeat, no one got a refund.

In the current drama, the HPOZ is accused of maliciously meddling in the lives of residents. Comedienne Caroline Skakel Pinkey (yes, Ethel Kennedy's niece) was told to relocate a gate to her home. Screenwriter/ gallery owner Laurie Frank, who had imported 12 sets of 18th century hand carved Moroccan doors and windows from Marrakech, expressly for her home - formerly Maurice Chevalier's - was forbidden from using all but one of them. And Sofia Coppola has been ordered to replace the garage door and railings from her property.

Writer Michael Szymanski, whose home faces Bette Davis' former manor, says that after spending a month repainting his home, he was sent a notice informing him white house paint had an "unacceptable texture." Spurred by a neighbor's complaint, the HPOZ ordered him to remove it and repaint at an additional cost of $8,000. Asked what would happen if he did not comply, Szymanski claims that a city planner at an HPOZ meeting told him, "You got to jail." (TK response) When the same neighbor continued to complain about the flowerpots decorating his stairs, Szymanski says he dutifully replaced them with redwood flower boxes. "But then he said they were the wrong color," said Szymanski. "So I painted them white. Then he said they couldn't be painted but had to be stained."

In a letter to the city, the neighbor complained that Szymanski was warned in advance of his making his alterations. "I will no longer stand by and watch my neighborhood and hill be destroyed by a residence not following established HPOZ guidelines," the neighbor wrote.

Syzmanski, who retained a lawyer to accompany him to HPOZ meetings, offers an unusual theory to explain his woes. A vocal advocate for bisexuality, he says that the real agenda here is not building code issues but that his neighbors, a gay couple, resent his pan sexuality. "It's a case of reverse homophobia," charges Szymanski. "One cannot be whimsical. I really think that I am going to sue for harassment." Moreover, he charges, his complaining neighbors have "illegal shower curtains hanging outside their house."

The coup de gras for the neighborhood though was the edict against the garden of Mijanou Bardot (yes, Brigette's sister) and her husband, Patrick Bauchau, the debonair star of Twin Falls, Idaho and the TV series The Pretender. Once the home of George Sanders, their Mediterranean rambling villa was the historical model for the party house portrayed in L.A. Confidential. Over the last ten years, the couple transformed their front yard from a hill of dying ivy into a terraced slope of over 3000 exotic plants, fruits trees, fountains, trellises, arbors and roses. But owing to the insistent complaints of one neighbor, the garden was cited by the HPOZ for horticultural impurity. The couple was ordered to "remove all lattice structures, and restore frontage as front yard" in order to "maintain a view of house." In short, demolish the garden and put back the ivy ground cover.

Bauchau, Bardot and their supporters responded that the complaining neighbors, a screenwriter named Jim Geoghan and his wife, Ann a HPOZ board member, escalated a personal animosity into a scorched earth, (as it were), vendetta. "I did not file the complaint," said Jim Geoghan. "I didn't have to. Someone else did but I told him that whatever he's doing, it's against the law."

But according to Bauchau and his gardener, Ramon Garcia, Jim Geoghan approached the two of them on the street about a year ago. "He started saying offensive things about how he doesn't like me and how he hates the French," said Bauchau. "He was going to spit in my face, but at the very last second, he thought better of it and he spat on the windshield of my car. Whenever he sees me on the street usually at sunset when he takes his walk, he says things like, `I hate your show. It stinks! You French faggot actor!" "Well, I am not French,ú sniffed Bauchau, the Oxford educated son of Belgium's foremost philosopher, when relating the incident.

"I hate the French?" laughs Geoghan. "I've been to Paris five times. And I have never seen his show." And au contraire, says Anne Geoghan, it was Bauchau who "threatened the life of my husband." "Yes, he said he was going to kill me," says her husband. "Absurd," says Bauchau, sounding ever so much like Charles Boyer.

Tim Street-Porter, an architecture photographer and writer, is a current board member and his wife Annie Kelly was previously a board member, strongly support the HPOZ and call service on it a thankless job. "Perhaps some of the nay Sayers should taker a drive around Beverly Hills, a once beautiful community ruined by oversized steroidal mansions in the 80's and 90's," says Street-Porter, "(which is) an example of what can happen without the protection which the HPOZ bestows." They say that they unsuccessfully championed Frank's Moroccan doors and the Bardot/Bauchau garden. "The garden was quite beautiful which is exactly why we ignored the complaint for two years," says Kelly. "But then Annie Geoghan took the matter to the city. This really is a personal feud that got tangled up in the HPOZ. " Anne Geoghan fumed over the matter when asked to comment on the garden. "He's unrelenting. He's an actor and he wants attention. Its ridiculous. The house was illegal," she said, and then demanded that her name not appear in this story, despite her public capacity as a HPOZ board member.

The HPOZ rebels say that violations are issued randomly and eagerly point out a12 foot tall iron fence in front of the Geoghans as a "height violation" as well as an untended shrub as a "bush violation." Michael Mekeel, HPOZ's chairman until this spring, declined to return all calls but his wife and architecture partner, Fran Offenhauser defended the HPOZ as "volunteers who give unstintingly of their time to preserve this neighborhood that simply follow up on complaints from neighbors. If these people want their neighborhood to look like Home Depot, they can vote the HPOZ out." She conceded that the Geoghan fence is too tall but says that it predates the HPOZ jurisdiction, but added that she found the Bauchau garden "tacky and ridiculous."

Last year, the rebels say that the Geoghans chained a petition to their gates, soliciting signatures to force another resident to repaint their home. (Jim Geoghan said the petition was in response to a neighbor who had painted their home an unsightly dark color and sought to institute "a color palate" for the HPOZ.) "It was like the edict of Nantes," says Frank who describes the HPOZ as "the design police" and Mekeel as a "historic hysteric." "Don't they understand that we live in Hollywood?" she says. "This is the land of make believe."

Others charge that Mekeel had a conflict of interest. "People know that if they want to get approval," says Szymanski, "that it would be best to hire him." Offenhauser confirms that her husband is the architect on four homes in the neighborhood, but denies the charge.

Szymanski also points out what others only whisper about: the schism between the A-list talent and the B - and C -list. "It's jealousy - picking on people who are higher profile here from people who have nothing to do but walk around with their little notepads jotting down things that don't conform, " he says. "Really this has become the Serbo-Croatian conflict," says film producer Jan Sharpe, who is married to Noyce, and lives in Rosalind Russell's former rambling mansion, "because everyone who lives here is so very theatrical."

Soon the Garden Feud took root beyond Whitley Heights becoming the cause celebre of the Hollywood cognoscenti. "Patrick's garden is a portrait of a man's mind and soul," said a distraught Bernardo Bertolucci. "I cannot believe that anyone could consider for one moment destroying this spiritual experience of an entire life embodied in that beautiful metaphor in his garden on Whitley Terrace." His wife, Claire Peploe, the director of Rough Magic, spoke of the homeopathic qualities of the garden; "Whenever we are in L.A., we pay a restorative visit to the garden. I would have lost my mind without that garden."

Scores of written testimonials, penned in several languages, poured in. "It is always with pleasure that we pass by your garden," rhapsodized director Barbet Schroeder while a shocked Wim Wenders consoled the grieving couple, "I couldn't believe my ears when I heard you were asked to change your garden and tear things down€my thoughts are with you." Screenwriter Michael Tolkin gushed, "the garden represents everything we should aspire to." "I hear the boredom of one relentless person has led to the denouncing of your beautiful landscape,ú opined independent directors, Mark and Mike Polish while auteur Vincent Ward wrote darkly "I cannot help but think €of book burnings." Roman Coppola expressed espirit de corps: "Your garden to me seems to capture the essence of ourneighborhood." And Brigette Bardot, who hadn't been this distraught since her cat caught a cold, wrote with great fervor: "Your garden is ravishing! Viva Patrick! Viva son jardin! Down with the evil deadbeats! I kiss you!"

Regrettably for the cause, the Bauchaus do not own their home. Their landlord said he was sent a notice to comply or be fined. "I am staying neutral,ú he said, adding "but you have to know that you can't plant grass up there without asking permission." The Bauchaus began by making some concessions by removing a fresco of a unicorn deemed to be offensive but fought to save the garden. "We thought of the garden as a gift to the community," says Bauchau, who estimates its cost at over $50,000. "So we are shocked. Really its like occupied France. Is it too strong to compare this with the Nazis? Then it is Vichy."

In May, Bardot and Bauchau decided they no longer had the strength to fight any more. They made the requisite changes- tearing out most of the trellises, dismantling pergolas, and slashing back the foliage. Then they were no longer sure if they wanted to live there - and even bought a cabin in Lake Malibu - though they say that they have no immediate plans to move.

As the HPOZ searches for a new architect/chairman, the squabbling continues. The latest feud concerns a proposed garage renovation and whether permit parking should be instituted. At a June meeting, there were speeches, insults, sobbing, and walkouts.

Earlier this year, an anonymous four-page missive arrived at the home of each Whitley Heights resident. It concluded, "If our houses are to be perfect, our bodies should be as well. What about a neighborhood dress code? And let me be the first to initiate the idea of a BPOZ, a Body Preservation Overlay Zone. That way we can keep offensive body types out of the neighborhood. And it's only the beginning. Have you noticed that certain of our dogs are without pedigree? Need I say more? Warmest regards, neighbor. Your neighbor."