Architecture Wednesday: Judy Garland's Former Bel Air Estate

This is one of Bel Air's most famous houses as it is the former estate of Judy Garland and was designed by master architect, Wallace Neff. Sitting on nearly three acres of manicured grounds, this Traditional 1938 estate has been meticulously modified over the last decade by the current owners.

You enter through the circular, gated driveway and into a world of refined elegance beginning with the grand, iron staircase in  the foyer. Hardwood floors lined with custom Seagrass rugs are met with monochromatic, molded walls spanning between each storybook window; to the left is the living room, a peaceful classic feeling space, while to the right is the dining room. 

Just beyond is the chef's kitchen, a nod to the charm of the 1930s but with modern luxury and convenience offering top of the line appliances, expansive marble island and a sun-drenched breakfast nook over to the backyard. In addition, there is a family room and generously sized sunroom. 

Upstairs are five large-sized bedrooms, each with a private bath. The primary retreat features vaulted ceilings, a fireplace, dual walk-in closets, and lavish en-suite dressing room and bath.

Outside is an entertainer’s paradise; a brick-lined patio, sprawling lawns, a vine adorned staircase leading to the second tier where you find the in-ground pool with diving board, and pool house; the pool house was an original writer's cottage, fully restored, creating an idyllic setting to work from home.

It really is somewhere, over the rainbow …

Dwell

It's Snarkurday!

Kate del Castillo is the actress who accompanied Sean Penn to interview international drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán last year, but now Penn is trying to get Kate’s documentary about their trip—The Day I Met El Chapo: The Kate Del Castillo Story—removed from Netflix.  Why you ask? Perhaps it has something to do with del Castillo’s revelation that, right after meeting El Chapo, she and Penn banged because, you know, meeting a drug lord turns folks on:

“It was never a relationship. It was just business. And sex.”

In her documentary, del Castillo says she “fell” for Penn during their adventure, but Penn wants nothing to do with that storyline, and had one of his lawyers send a letter to Netflix saying “that blood will be on their hands if this film causes bodily harm.”

Wow. But they didn’t let the drama end there; Penn’s spokesman Mark Fabiani says:

“This is not about one person’s safety. These producers are propagating false and reckless fabrications for their profit. This is nothing but a cheap, National Enquirer-esque tale spun by a delusional person whose hunger for fame is both tawdry and transparent.”

Wait, so Sean Penn believes that people will die if this story stays out there; this story of him banging some D-list actress-documentarian? I mean, if every time Sean Penn banged an actress someone died, we’d all be dead by now. Am I right?

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Lock up your wives and daughters, sister and aunts, Harvey Weinstein is out of sex addiction rehab and he’s cured.

After one week at a posh rehab facility in Arizona for “sex addiction”—exposing himself to women, jacking off in front of women, grabbing women, climbing on women, attempting to rape women—the ladies now have nothing to worry about. After a quarter of a century of sexual harassment, of sexual assault, Harvey’s fixed himself.

Weinstein’s doctor—who may or may not be an unemployed actor looking for any kind of a break—says Harvey completed his one week of treatment for “psychological issues” and was ready to return to society fully cured.

Of course, when people began to question the validity of the One Week Cure, it was decided that Harvey will remain in Arizona for another month because “he doesn’t want excessive distractions and wants to continue working with his doctors.”

Oh, so it’s a Five Week Cure? Seriously; it’s classic white privilege because if Harvey Weinstein was a different color he’d have been in prison years ago.

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Someone check the video and get the police to confirm Taylor Swift’s alibi for where she was last Wednesday night because that was the night that, during Katy Perry’s concert in Nashville the shiz hit the fan.

It seems there was a bit of a malfunction junction at Perry’s show when, after performing “Thinking Of You,” Perry’s tie-dyed version Saturn got stuck in the air and she couldn’t get down; and Perry said:

“This is the first time I’ve been stuck in space! I know I’m kind of a space cadet, but actually, this thing is being stuck right now.”

No word yet on where Swifty was or why she was last seen carrying A Hello Kitty Tool-box.

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Oops!  Ewan McGregor has been caught kissing his “Fargo” co-star, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, in a London restaurant, and Ewan’s wife just might not be thrilled about it. It seems the 46-year-old father of four and the 32-year-old Winstead—who played his lover on the FX series—shared a passionate kiss at the Good Life Eatery and there are pictures to prove it.

Maybe this was Ewan’s of telling his wife their marriage was over because the Good Life Eatery is London’s version of LA’s Ivy, where celebrities go to be seen; it was at the Ivy during the height of their Bennifer-ness that Affleck and JLo often visited dressed to the nines and looking all lovey-dovey.

Perhaps, though, it’s all stuff and nonsense, because McGregor and his wife of 22 years, Eve Mavrakis, apparently called it quits in May but kept the news private, though they each posted photos to social media of themselves without their wedding rings on, which, you know, is the way of saying “It’s over.”

So maybe Ewan isn’t a cheater, maybe he just got a new love first except ... it was back in May, right about the time Fargo finished shooting that McGregor and his wife split, and that was the same time that Winstead announced her split from her husband of seven years, Riley Stearns.

Just sayin’.

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Gosh, Kathy Griffin will do anything for press.

This time she announced that she is firing celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom, who represented her after she held up a fake bloody head of _____, and stood by her side as she went rogue during a press conference. And in typical Griffin fashion she went all over social media to share the news that she fired her attorney:

“Dear @LisaBloom pls stop calling me. If you’d like to refund me the tens of thousands of $$ I wasted on your services maybe I’ll talk to you.”

Griffin ALLEGEDLY paid Bloom $40,000 to represent her for two days, most notably at that June press conference, where Griffin whined that she was the victim of bullying by the _____ family over that photograph. And of course, because this is two dimwits having a spat, Bloom lashed back with her own tweet in which she said in a lengthy statement that Griffin had reached out to her before the press conference:

“Her entire team (entertainment lawyer, criminal lawyer, and several others) approved in advance the statements she and I were going to make. Yet Kathy then during the press conference spontaneously chose to put aside the notes we had worked so hard on together. She said on camera ‘my notes are by the wayside and it’s all off the cuff’ and then ad libbed. I was sorry she made that choice but I respected her right to speak as she saw fit. She was, as she says, the widely panned for her comments. Now she blamed me.”

Of course she did, because Griffin does things and then blames everyone else for the repercussions.

She really needs to sit down.

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Faye Dunaway used to be a serious actress and was most often taken seriously ... then came Mommie Dearest and she either turned into a parody of Joan Crawford diva-ness, or else the diva-ness was already there and was only exacerbated by playing Christina’s axe-wielding mother. And now the weave workers at the Marie Robinson Salon in NYC have their own tale to tell.

Apparently Miss Dunaway believes she was overcharged for services rendered and went all wire-hanger on the salon when they presented her with a $3,000 bill and expected her, Miss Faye Dunaway, to pay full price!

“She claimed she didn’t know it was that expensive and then said, ‘I’m not paying that. I can’t believe how expensive this is. I’m only paying half!’… they took her half, but staff explained, ‘You’re going to have to pay the rest.’ And Faye stormed out screeching, ‘This is ridiculous!’ Everyone in the salon was aghast … Her hair looked great — so she should pay!”

Um, Faye, honey? Maybe when they began adding a full head of hair onto your head you might have pointed out you just wanted a retouch?

Dunaway is now doing damage control herself, telling Page Six:

“I’d prefer you not run [the story]. I’ve now paid the whole thing — but I will not be going back there because it is not the price they said it would be. So, I don’t know what to say to you except I didn’t throw a fit. I was just very alarmed at the amount they were charging me for the very small amount of hair work that they did.”

The salon said nothing; they just cashed the check before the stop payment went through.

Poor Faye; the two biggest highlights of her career are playing Joan Crawford so well that she started to think and act like her, and for blurting out the wrong Best Picture winner at this year’s Oscars.

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Last year Miles Teller did and interview with   Esquire in which the magazine called him “dickish.” And so he became the new Dickish Actor and is now telling us that it’s bothered him the whole time because ... oh, let’s have him tell it:

“I can’t put much weight into whether the public likes me because the more important thing is that, as an actor, I can truly say that there’s not a single director or actor who I’ve worked with who’d have a bad thing to say about me. I’ve never missed a day of work. I’ve never not known a line. ... I know the kind of brother I am. I know the kind of son I am. I’ve had the same friends since I was 14, 15. I’ve been with the same girl for four-and-a-half years. I have a dog. I know who I am, and it’s not who I was in that story.”

Wait, so he shows up to work on time, has a girlfriend and a dog and that makes him less dickish?

Try again, Miles.

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Oops, sexual harassment isn’t just a Hollywood problem; it’s everywhere, including the kitchen ...

New Orleans star chef John Besh is stepping down from his company, Besh Restaurant Group [BRG], after he and several of his colleagues were accused of sexual harassment. In a letter to restaurant staff, BRG announced that Besh was stepping down “from all aspects of operations . . . to provide his full focus on this family.”

Meaning he’s got some ‘splaining to do.

A lot, because there are some twenty-five woman who say that “several male co-workers and bosses [at BRG] touched female employees without consent, made suggestive comments about their appearance and—in a few cases—tried to leverage positions of authority for sex.”

One former employee claims she was pressured into a sexual relationship with Besh, though the married father says the affair was consensual ... which makes it okay ... ?

Seriously, men need to stop this shiz, and women need to speak up more.

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Eight years ago, The Weinstein Company announced they were working on a feature film about Judy Garland, based on the book Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, and was supposed to star ... gulp ... Anne Hathaway.

Eight years later that project went nowhere until recently when it was announced that a different Judy Garland biopic will be made and will star ... double gulp ... Renee Zellweger. The movie will be called Judy and will focus on Judy Garland’s final sold-out concerts at The Talk of the Town in London in the late ’60s shortly before her death.

Seriously? Renee will be Judy? I mean, I know they don’t want an impersonator but that up there—before and after plastic surgery—is supposed to be Judy Mother-Effing Garland?

Even with her new face she ain’t no Judy. Zellweger ruins everything.

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Merry Christmas ... Make The Yuletide Gay

A Christmas Song repost from last year ...

This song is one of my favorite Christmas tunes, so I thought I'd share it four different ways,with four different singers.

Kelly Clarkson, Leslie Odom Jr., Linda Ronstadt, The Carpenters, Ella Fitzgerald, and ending with Judy, who probably sang it first, and, in my mind, sang it best.




Merry Christmas ...

Make The Yuletide Gay

This song is one of my favorite Christmas tunes, so I thought I'd share it four different ways,with four different singers.

Kelly Clarkson, The Carpenters, Sam Smith, and ending with Judy, who probably sang it first, and, in my mind, sang it best.

Merry Christmas ...

Make The Yuletide Gay

This song is one of my favorite Christmas tunes, so I thought I'd share it four different ways,with four different singers.

Kelly Clarkson, The Carpenters, Sam Smith, and ending with Judy, who probably sang it first, and, in my mind, sang it best.

Merry Christmas ...

Gossip From The Olden Days

These days people say if you put something out there on this here internet-y thing, it’s out there forever and you can never take it back. Kinda makes me pine for the old days, when secrets died, or maybe just faded away like old ink on a page.

Fred Otash

Trouble is, though, sometimes those old secrets are still out there, not in the ether of the web, but in cardboard boxes in someone’s attic or basement, and those old stories, some never told, some often only told in hushed tones, are outed once more.

These are the stories of Fred Otash, a Hollywood private dick—I always wanted to type that—whose files were recently uncovered in boxes held in a storage locker in the San Fernando Valley by his daughter Colleen, and her business partner, Manfred Westphal, who grew up next door to Otash.

One of the files in Otash’s collection contains a recording of Rock Hudson’s only wife, Phyllis, questioning him about him being a :::gasp:::  homosexual:

On January 21, 1958, Rock Hudson's wife confronted him, demanding to know if he was gay and grilling him about a Rorschach test he had taken.

Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates

"You told me you saw thousands of butterflies and also snakes," she said "[A therapist] told me in my analysis that butterflies mean femininity and snakes represent that male penis. I'm not condemning you, but it seems that as long as you recognize your problem, you would want to do something about it." She also complained about "your great speed with me, sexually. Are you that fast with boys?"

"Well, it's a physical conjunction [sic]," replied Rock. "Boys don't fit. So, this is why it lasts longer."

Added Phyllis: "Everyone knows that you were picking up boys off the street shortly after we were married and have continued to do so, thinking that being married would cover up for you."

"I have never picked up any boys on the street," Rock insisted. "I have never picked up any boys in a bar, never. I have never picked up any boys, other than to give them a ride."

Fred Otash was a notorious Hollywood gumshoe who charged hundreds of dollars per day and spied on everyone from Hudson to Marilyn Monroe to John F. Kennedy, Judy Garland and Lana Turner. A former police officer, he was ‘the’ guy for Hollywood attorneys with high-profile clients. Mike Wallace called him the "most amoral" man he had ever interviewed, and Robert Towne used him for inspiration when he wrote Chinatown; "There were several people I drew on," Towne says. "But he was one of them."

After leaving the police force, he set up the Fred Otash Detective Bureau in Hollywood, where he worked as a freelancer and "fact verifier" for notorious L.A.  gossip magazine Confidential. Among the cases he allegedly worked on were Confidential's outing of Liberace and a gay pajama party with Tab Hunter.

James Ellroy, writer of L.A. Confidential, says "He was a con artist, bullshitter. He did a lot of bad things [including] revealing secret details, mostly sexual in nature, about the lives of celebrated people, causing them to endure personal shame, emotional hardship, financial privation -- and doing this for a living. … He was always talking about bugging [JFK brother-in-law] Peter Lawford's beach pad and getting the goods on Kennedy. He told me Jack [sexually] was a two-minute man.”

Otash is a recurrent figure in Ellroy's work and the subject of his recent e-book Shakedown, in which a fictionalized version of the detective looks back on his life from "Pervert Purgatory" and describes himself as a "rogue cop, private eye, shakedown artist. Soldier of fortune and demonic deus ex machina. The hellhound who held Hollywood captive. The man with all the sicko secrets you irksome earthlings want to hear."

But, enough about Otash, what about those celebrities upon whom he spied? For one, in his recently uncovered files, is an unpublished book that Otash penned about Marilyn Monroe’s affair with JFK; in it, Otash claims he overheard Monroe having sex with JFK:

"Marilyn wanted a mini-phone listening device," Otash wrote in his unpublished Marilyn, the Kennedys, and Me, noting he spied on her even while she was paying him to install recording equipment so that she could tape her own phone calls.

Monroe and the Kennedy brothers

"You could hide it in your bra. The microphone was a wristwatch. You could also put a suction cup on the phone. Later on, she wanted a sophisticated system put in her house. We wired up her phone because it started looking stupid with a suction cup."

Otash listened in on Marilyn having sex with Kennedy when he was watching Lawford's house in Malibu, allegedly while working for Howard Hughes, who was seeking general information with which to discredit the Democrats.

The files include notes that he left for Colleen, in which he says he was conducting surveillance of Marilyn Monroe on the day she died:

“I listened to Marilyn Monroe die,” he wrote, adding that he had taped an angry confrontation among Bobby Kennedy, Lawford and Monroe just hours before her death.

“She said she was passed around like a piece of meat. It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he made to her. She was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down. She’s in the bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.”

Otash claims he learned that Monroe had died when Lawford called him in the early hours of the following day and asked him to remove any incriminating evidence from her house. There is no record of what was removed, and the alleged tapes have since disappeared.

One of the files also centers on Judy Garland, who hired Otash to protect her after she split from her third husband, Sid Luft, in 1963. The actress even allowed Otash to move into her Holmby Hills home, where he befriended daughter Liza Minnelli and found a hidden stash of pills.

Note: a representative for Minnelli declined comment.

The files elaborate on an experience he outlined in his 1976 autobiography, Investigation Hollywood:

"I was shocked when I met Judy Garland the first time. She was no longer the little girl I remembered but a grown woman, puffy-faced and more than a little plump. ... I was only in Judy's house a couple of days when I realized that she was taking something. I wasn't sure if she was using narcotics or boozing it up. But she was obviously out of it most of the time."

Judy Garland and Sid Luft

He continued: "I gathered up all the bottles and locked them up. Then I began the search for pills. You wouldn't believe the cleverness of that woman in stashing her drugs so nobody could find them. And there were all kinds. Uppers, downers and some I didn't even recognize. They were stuffed into a hole she'd cut under the mattress and in rubber fingers tied at the top with the string tied again around the faucet of the washbasin. The pills were down in the crook of the pipe, and when she wanted them she just pulled them up by the almost invisible string. I dumped all that junk down the toilet and flushed it away."

When Otash confronted Garland, she demanded to know why he had destroyed the stash. He told her: "Narcotics and alcohol are the best evidence he [Luft] could ever produce in court. Believe me."

The detective also might have been involved in one of the most celebrated murders of the era, that of mobster Johnny Stompanato, though he gave various accounts of precisely how. Documents in the files indicate that Giesler—who represented movie star Lana Turner—called Otash and asked him to come to the actress' house the night of the gangster's death:

Stompanato had been dating Turner when, on the night of April 4, 1958, police were called to her house, where they found the gangster stabbed to death.

Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato

Turner's teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, then 14, took the blame, explaining that Stompanato had attacked her mother and that she had acted in defense—an explanation accepted by the courts, where the death was ruled justifiable homicide.

Westphal says Otash told him that he was on the scene of the crime before the police and actually removed the knife from the dead man's body, placing it in Crane's hand.

But then in 1991, Otash gave another account, saying: "Beverly Hills police chief Clinton Anderson once accused me of removing the knife from Stompanato's body, wiping off Lana Turner's fingerprints, putting on Cheryl Crane's fingerprints and then shoving the knife back into the body. Crazy."

And lastly, though I’m sure there are more stories in those boxes, we learn about Otash and Bette Davis:

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill

Within the files, there also are surveillance records dating from the time Otash was hired by Bette Davis to snoop on her husband Gary Merrill while she was in the process of divorcing him, after which two Otash operatives testified in court that they saw Merrill leave a Newport Beach, Calif., hotel while he "went out on the town" and made "flirtatious gestures with girls."

Fred Otash worked as a P.I. until his license was revoked by California's Bureau of Private Investigators, partly because of his connection to Confidential—whose reign of fear ended following a much-publicized libel case in 1957—and because of his association with several jockeys who were involved in a doping case.  His tapes have vanished, and now only his files remain as evidence of his secret activities. But more information may yet emerge.

On the night of his death, Otash left his West Hollywood apartment to attend a Friars Club dinner celebrating the completed first draft of his Marilyn book. He came home later that evening then, mysteriously, at around 4 a.m. called for a taxi to take him to LAX. 

At about 7 a.m., the taxi arrived, but there was no Otash. A doorman called Westphal's parents, who entered his apartment and found him lying face down under the kitchen table, dead of a heart attack, it later was concluded.

Soon after, like Otash had done for many of his clients, his own attorney Arthur Crowley, arrived and stripped the condo of its contents—including a red filing cabinet that contained material nobody close to the detective ever got to read.

Manfred Westphal: "He put a shackle on the door, emptied the condo, and nothing inside was ever seen again."

Until someone opened a storage unit in the Valley.

Like I said, you think what happens now never goes away? Well, that’s been going on for years and years and years, because every decade, every century, has a Fred Otash, and every Fred Otash knows where to hide his files.

via The Hollywood Reporter

My Ten Favorite Christmas Tunes: Judy Garland "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"

A Very Mel Torme And Judy Garland Christmas

A Very Judy Garland Christmas

Debbie Has A Garage Sale

You might call her a hoarder, and you might be right.
You might call her a savvy collector, and you'd be right about that, too.
Over the years, actress-singer-comedienne and Carrie Fisher's mom, Debbie Reynolds has been collecting Hollywood memorabilia. For a time it was on display at a casino museum in Las Vegas, but recently Debbie decided to sell some of the stuff.
Mama ain't gettin' any younger, you know.
So, she loaded up a truck and took some of her collectibles off to an auction house, and proceeded to make millions.
Millions. Like this:

Marilyn Monroe's dress from 'The Seven Year Itch' went for $5.658 million



Ruby Slippers from 'The Wizard of Oz'--though not ones worn in the film,
I'm guessing--went for $500,000



Judy Garland's 'Oz' dress went for ten-times it's estimate, and sold for $910,000.

Harpo Marx's hat and wig went for 45K.

Joan Crawford's 'Mildred Pierce' waitress uniform sold for $22,500

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp hat fetched $110,000

Marilyn Monroe's 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' gown went for $1.2 million,
proving she's the hottest dead celebrity.

Elizabeth Taylor's 'Cleopatra' headdress nabbed half-a-million dollars.

One of Madonna's Evita gown only garnered $22,500.
I always said she was no Marilyn.

So.......what did you buy?
What would you buy?
Me? I'd buy that Monroe drag, and pair it with the Harpo Marx hat and wig.
It would have been fabulous!
 
via Boy Culture