Category: Hollywood Blog

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The Balloon Route’s first significant stop was the beautiful garden owned by French artist Paul de Longpre, Hollywood’s “King of Flowers.” Considered one of Hollywood’s first tourist attractions, de Longpre’s mansion and garden sat at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga. H J WHitley had financed his home and offered his gardener to help landscap the property. “Tourists who missed seeing the Whitley Heights Pavillion were said to not have done Southern California.” H J Whitley depended on de Longpre to be the first stop when showing prospective Midwesterners Hollywood land for sale then as a finale they were taken to the Whitley Heights Pavillion. Pictured below is the whitley Heights Pavillion. Tourist would ride out on the Balloon Route to see the view and hear a lively concert,

Mr. and Mrs. Hobart J. Whitley have just returned from a trip to New York, where they spent several weeks. Their daughter, Mrs. Grace Whitley is in New York this season devoting her time to the study of art and music.

Grace Whitley in 1910

The Whitley’s have long been identified with the civic and social life of Los Angles, being among the pioneer residents of this city. Mr. Whitley years ago, in 1886 purchased large tracts of land in Hollywood and expended a good size fortune in development, subdividing, with homes and businesses etc. For years the Hollywood mansion of the Whitley’s was a show place, but it was moved away a few years ago to make room for a large structure, which now occupies the site of their home. Their beautiful residence now is on Whitley terrace in Whitley Heights Hollywood.

From Files of The Evening Herald and Express

News Synopsis 25 Years Ago Today November 1947

It was Albright who pointed out Dick Barthelmess house and told about those trysts with Talmadge, which the neighbors could vicariously enjoy when they occurred on the terrace; he also showed us the unhappy house in which the too – beautiful Miss LaMarr had lived until she perished in flames of Hollywood legend. Albright seemed to possess a mystical acceptance of Hollywood, easily blending scandal with eulogy. “Hollywood,” he declaimed in his peroration, holding our little group spellbound in the street, “is the repository of our entire civilization.”

Whitley’s own villa is one of the few that has the traditional Palladian facade: It stands above the street at the crest of 30 broad steps – two stories, symmetical, with white ionic columns on a porch guarded by two stone lions.

Back side of Whitley’s Home. See the Whitley Heights sign and Barnes Truck.

Valentino’s house was in the path of the freeway, and is gone, razed to make six lots, but from now on the integrity of the hill will be kept. Any new house must be in Mediterranean style, with red tile roofs.

More than once, on the tour, I overheard someone asking, “How did they ever get that grand piano up those stairs/”

Gloria Swanson llived in a house near Vallambrosa while making “Sunset Boulevard,” the movie that restored her career. Earlier, when he was in captivity at Warner Brothers as a writer, the Nobel winner William Faulkner excaped to the house to do his writing under the shelter of its sympathetic lady tenant.

Owned the past 31 years by Richard Whitfield, the house conceals a lush garden court that climbs to its upper levels – a little Eden of ferns, pine, lemon, orange, magnolia and philodendron.

James Albright, wearing a pink jersey shirt, tweed cap and brown corduroy pants, took our group over to show us the house once lived in by Chester Morris, famed as Boston Blackie, and a strange three-tierd house that had been occupied at various times by Rosalind Russell, Joseph Schildkraut and James Hilton, author of “Lost Horizon,” before the formidable character actress Beulah Bondi bought it in 1941. Miss Bondi lived in it till she died in 1981, going up and down twisting narrow stairways that might have come from one ot the gothic tales she sometimes played in. Perhaps her most famous roll was playing the mother in “Its a Wonderful Life”.

Albright had done his homework. Did we know that Chester Morris had given Charles Boyer his start in movies, getting him a two-line part as a taxi driver in a movie called “Red Headed Woman”?

In the 1940’s part of the fabled hill was cut through by the Hollywood Freeway, and Whitley Heights withdrew into its shell, like a threathened snail. Recently it was declared a National Historic Place – Hollywood’s first – and acquired some protection against alterations or additions that would change its character.

This character is exemplified by the Villa Vallambrosa, a three-story house built in 1929 by Eleanor De Witt, a wealthy and fastidious widow. Like most of the houses in Whitley Heights, it is not the usual symmetrical rectangle, but a collection of rooms and courtyards of various shapes and levels, fitted to the steep hillside.

Its next-to-last owner, a decorator who evidently in his white period, did everything white, including the dining room ceiling, which had been gold leaf and can not be restored. The present owners mercifully have covered or thrown out the white including the white shag carpet in the high-ceiling Italian living room. Also they have restored a framed photograph of the elegant Mrs. De Witt, in a cloche hat, looking pensive.

Thanks to relays of tireless and friendly Hollywood Heritage docents we picked up some facts, along with the legend. Whitley Heights was developed by Hobart J. Whitley, who bought the hill in 1899. He liked the architectural styles of the Mediterrean, thought they would be suitable to Southern California climate and hired architect, Arthur Barnes, to adapt them to his hill. Barnes did most of the houses built before 1930.

In the 1920s Rudolph Valentino and Francis X. Bushman lived just across the street from each other in Whitley Heights, on the small hill that rises above Highland and Franklin avenues.

Looking at the narrow street today, it is hard to imagine those flamboyant egos sharing it – Valentino in a phaeton with his silver cobra emblem and Bushman in hi lavender Rolls-Royce.