by Jean Stein
I didn’t really know Mr. Wasserman, to tell you the truth, but I remember being at a meeting at Universal and looking out the window and thinking, Oh my god, this place is a kingdom. You are on top of this black tower looking out, and it is a very powerful feeling. And I got it. Lew Wasserman sat at the end of that table, holding court, and I looked at him and thought, This guy thinks he’s a king; this is what this is all about. I had just gone to see the Dalai Lama recently. The Dalai Lama is also known in the world of Tibetan Buddhism as a king, but in a completely different direction. In Buddhism they talk a lot about illusion, and how basically we are living with illusions all the time and we get lost in our illusions, our samsara. We don’t live in the truth, and that is our problem, that is why we keep bumping up against things. And here were these two kings from two different kingdoms: one is the king of creating illusion on top of illusion, and the other king—the Dalai Lama—is about breaking through the illusion. It was like a revelation. Hollywood is very powerful, and very real. No matter how make-believe it is, it is real, and it moves and shakes and it is not something to mess around with. It is a real force. But it was like in Star Wars, where the forces of light and dark come together and fight. You could see Lew Wasserman and the Dalai Lama facing off.
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BETTY BREITHAUPT: I think the last time I saw Mr. Wasserman was in 1998, and he was in the commissary, and you could see that his mental capabilities were diminished. He smiled a lot then. I had never seen him smile. The girls would always have to find somebody for him to have lunch with. And he had his table in the commissary, and a certain waitress, Anne. He always ate the same thing, I think.
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WENDY VANDEN HEUVEL: I went back to Misty Mountain years later to see what artifacts I could find. Sneaking around when no one was around in the basement, I felt a little like a scavenger. I found these trunks from old Hollywood full of top hats, photos, dresses, and boas. The trunks had stamps on the outside from all the places that my grandparents had traveled: Paris, London, Madrid, Buenos Aires. It was like being transported back to a different time. That time had elegance, class, very remote from the Hollywood of today. There was an artistry and a beauty to it. Beaded ball gowns, tails, spats, dickeys, monocles. Imagine Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire.
I found one of Nonnie’s hats that had twelve skunks smelling roses on top of it, with a black lace veil hanging down the front. It was hysterical. She also had these very classic pillbox hats, and the floppy ones with a flower on the side—what I imagine the ladies wore to the racetrack. There were photos of her and her friends dressed for masquerade balls or just laughing, smoking, drinking, having a good time. The stuff in the trunks had this musty mothball odor like it hadn’t been opened for a very long time. Actually the whole basement spooked me. It was a screening room and recreation area with a pool table in a side room. It was all done up to entertain, but nobody was there to entertain. It felt so empty, ghostly. I could hear the silence and little creaks as I walked. I had my memories of what it had been like—light coming from the projector, Popop on the phone telling the projectionist to start the movie, screams from the scary pictures, the pool balls clacking, my friends joking around. We saw Great Expectations in that room, you know the old one in black and white. That room was very Miss Havisham, only scarier.
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DOROTHY STEVENS: Sometime after your mother died, I was upstairs in my office one afternoon when the big bell rang. I answered the gate phone, and this very crackling voice said, “May I speak to Mrs. Stein?” And I thought to myself, This is strange, and I said, “Well, Mrs. Stein isn’t here. I’m the secretary, may I help you, please?” And she said, “I’m Katharine Hepburn, and I want to come in. I just want to walk all around the back of the property.” “Just a moment, please, I will call my security man to come down to open the gate.” Because I was very careful about whom I let in, and especially since she wished to speak to Mrs. Stein, I became more cautious. This was during the time when Miss Hepburn was here in Los Angeles doing a tribute to Spencer Tracy for MGM TV.
So I rang the phone to Barney’s room, and I said, “Barney, there’s someone speaking down there with a very crackling voice, and uh, she says she’s Katharine Hepburn. I hesitated to open the gate, I certainly don’t want to insult this lady, so will you go down, and if it is Katharine Hepburn, by all means let her come in.”
So Barney jumped up and went down the long curving driveway. He told me later that as he got in sight of the gate, he saw Katharine Hepburn hanging on to the rails of the gate peeking through like a little squirrel. So he opened the gate. And Barney told me that he walked up with her and she had such a fast stride that big Barney, who was well over six feet, could hardly keep up with this little lady.
I did go downstairs, and yes, there was Miss Hepburn, dressed in her usual wear—a pair of slacks much too large, a very large pair of walking shoes which flapped along as she walked, a topcoat, also large, a sweater, hanging on her back and tied around the front, with the two sleeves knotted under her chin. Her hair was done in the usual Katharine Hepburn style, pulled up in a little knob on the top of her head. And I said, “Well, good afternoon, Miss Hepburn. I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting at the gate.” “Oh no, no,” she said, “I know that you can’t just let any old riffraff in.” And I said, “Well, Miss Hepburn, I would hardly consider you riffraff. The next time you come visit us, just say ‘Golden Pond,’ and the gate will open all by itself.” She laughed and said, “I’ll do that, I just will do that.”
She was reminiscing as we went through the entire home. It turned out that she had rented it for a short time in 1935 just prior to the time when Mr. and Mrs. Stein purchased it. But she loved the place. We were in the living room, and she said, “Do you ever see any snakes in here?” And I said, “Snakes. Oh no.” “Oh yes,” she said, “when I lived here, every once in a while a little snake would come crawling out.” And I said, “Oh my goodness, what did you do?” She said, “Oh, I just grabbed my little rifle and went boof, boof, and I shot him.” She told us that it was really way, way out in the country then, and quite wild. She said she would sit out on the patio and have her tea, and the deer would come right up and almost eat out of her hand.
Marvelous lady. I just couldn’t believe this crackling little voice down there, you know. I later heard she had tried to get into the house other times, when no one was home. You have to be extra cautious here. There’s so many people who play tricks on homes. They might say they’re going to deliver flowers and they have a gun in the bouquet, you know. That’s a very common trick here in Los Angeles.
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JEAN STEIN: When I visited the house a few years after the estate sold it to Rupert Murdoch, it was a shock to discover nothing had changed. The Murdochs had even put up family photographs of parties at the house from the forties and fifties on the wall leading down to the screening room. I felt like an apparition as I described the cast of characters to Murdoch’s estate manager, William Scheetz.
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WILLIAM SCHEETZ: Mr. Murdoch just moved right in, and everything kind of stayed. I’d go to cook something, and I’d look for a recipe, and the first book I pulled down, it had your mother’s name inside, Doris Stein, and her favorite recipes circled, with little notes. And we ate with the same utensils, and cooked with the same pots and pans.
I was the one who thought of putting up your father’s photos. Well, I was the one who found the photos. And I showed them to Mister, and he said, “These have quite an interesting history. We could make this into a coffee table book somehow.” He does own HarperCollins, you know. You couldn’t get the guests down the staircase because they’d be staring at the pictures. “Where could you buy this kind of thing, you know? Wherever could you find decorations like this, which are so unique to the house?” I also saw the pictures of your coming-out party.
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JEAN STEIN: That was from another lifetime. Judy Garland sang “
Over the Rainbow.”
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DAVID “PREACHER” EWING: I just came along for the ride. It was like you were at an exhibition. I mean, it’s like being dead and coming back and seeing somebody occupying your life. I thought it was amazing that William Scheetz opened up every nook and cranny, like, you know, the china closet, and it was, “Here’s your mother’s china.” It was almost like he was going to open up her lingerie drawer and pull out her corsets. They had this DirecTV dish, ’cause at one point Murdoch owned DirecTV, right? The dish was up on the roof, and right next to it the old TV antenna, old style from the fifties, and William Scheetz said, “I don’t know why they left that up there.” And I said, “Because it was the Steins’.”
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FIONA SHAW: There were many remarkable elements inside the house. On the piano in the living room, there was a photo of Rupert Murdoch and his family, which was surreal, obviously, for an outsider. I didn’t even let my eyes look at the photograph, I was so embarrassed. I was thinking, Oh, it’s Rupert Murdoch—oh, and his family.
And then the house manager, William Scheetz. I felt that as soon as the Murdochs were gone, it was his house. He ruled it. I got this terrifying view that he danced around, you know, a bit like a toy coming alive at night. And he was obsessed with the history of the house and obsessed with the people who were in it. And obsessed with Jean and her father and mother. But I did feel your father and mother in it, and a chaotic daughter running around.
William Scheetz kept taunting you, saying, “Do you know how much this is worth?” He was very cross at you for leaving it all behind. He couldn’t resist telling you the price of everything, which he knew because Christie’s had come in to appraise the furniture. “These chairs are worth two and a half million dollars each,” and, you know, “This dust is worth twenty dollars.” We should have just looted the house and filled up the rental car.
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WILLIAM SCHEETZ: I was more the decorator of the house, you know. Mr. Murdoch doesn’t worry about anything tangible in his environment. You can put him in a garage with a telephone and a chair, and he’d spend the day and do his normal thing. Give him a pencil and a pad of paper, and he’s happy as can be. He doesn’t care where he works. I think everything’s in his head. And I think that was the reason why a lot of things never changed in the house, because he had no reason to change anything. He appreciates things the way they are. And he’d get lots of compliments on the house, so many.
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JEAN STEIN: Lew Wasserman had told Rupert Murdoch that all the possessions in the house would be his when he purchased it. I thought he was supposed to be negotiating for my family.
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JOAN DIDION: Your father’s partner, old Mr. Wasserman. Of course he was negotiating for Mr. Murdoch. Of course he was. Of course he was.
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BARRY DILLER: I bought the house for Rupert Murdoch a few months after Doris died. Rupert was looking for a house in California. He went up and saw the property and then he went off to Australia. Lew and I talked, and Lew said to me, “I think it’s going to go quickly, so if Murdoch wants it, you should do something.” So I called Rupert in Australia, and we talked about it, and he said, “Yes, I don’t want to lose it.” I said, “Well okay, if you’re serious….” He said, “I’m serious. If you can get it, get it for me.” So I called Lew back, and I think, if I’m not mistaken, the price was six-two or six-seven, something like that, and I asked him if they could keep whatever furniture that belonged in the house. And Lew said fine, and we closed the deal. And I called up Rupert and I said, “You bought the house. It is amazing.” That dining room that I had lunch and dinner in plenty of times when your parents were alive was exactly the same. The silver, I think, was the same. I bought the silver as part of the house price. I negotiated the deal with Lew.
It was much less than the forty-seven million that David Geffen gave for the Jack Warner house, but what nobody knows about is that he bought the house with every single, literally, every single thing. He said to Barbara Warner, he said, “I don’t want to negotiate with you about anything. I want everything, everything, everything that’s in the house is mine.” Later he sold much of that to Time Warner for an awful lot of money, ’cause the house had all of Jack Warner’s memorabilia, his archives, essentially. His Academy Awards, all sorts of stuff. David did very well on that. But anyway, there was a big difference between the price he paid and the price Rupert paid.
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DAVID “PREACHER” EWING: The best part with William Scheetz was when we were outside the house and I asked him, “Do you have a gun?” And he said something like, “I pack one in the house because of what happened down there in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I could just see the hordes coming up the mountain, like the pillagers in Frankenstein.” My other favorite thing was when I found Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History in the guest room downstairs, and Scheetz said Murdoch had read it from cover to cover.
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WILLIAM SCHEETZ: A friend gave me a copy of The Nation because one of his clients subscribes to it. I showed it to Mister. It was a full-page ad for The Nation itself. And in one corner it had a picture of your daughter. And it said, “Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation.” And then in the opposite corner there was a picture of Mr. Murdoch. And it said, “Owner of practically everything else.” And down in the center of the ad it said, “Subscribe now to help with the de-Murdochization of the world,” or whatever. Yes. I showed it to Rupert. “That’s Jean Stein’s daughter.” “Really?” And I said, “And look at what it says about you: Owner of practically everything else.” “I wish I was,” he said.
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KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The ad had a picture of me and a picture of Murdoch as if it was a prizefight—and it was an announcement of independence: “The antidote to Murdochization—Give friends and relations The Nation this holiday season. Independent since 1865.”
There was a background to the ad because The Nation’s first ever glossy centerfold was in 1996, and it was the National Entertainment Complex, five octopi, and one of the five octopi was News Corp. And with Murdoch, it wasn’t only because of his right-wing views, but the sense that he was this octopus engulfing the world with his ideas and his power and his money. And I did see in it the irony of my grandfather, because in the 1940s The Saturday Evening Post had called his company MCA “the star-spangled octopus.” And now Murdoch owned a piece of our family history. It’s like The Ghost Goes West, right? Remember that great movie? I remember seeing it in my grandparents’ screening room. I loved that movie. Murdoch literally bought the bricks, mortars, even the photographs, in order to give himself the cachet that Popop had, right? Sure, he paid for the house, but in a way he seized bits of property that would make him feel like the Hollywood mogul. It’s so eerie, because it’s like a ghost movie or a haunted house, where the former inhabitants are on the walls having a grand old time. To me, Misty Mountain now doesn’t have the sense of mystery or the Hollywood glamour that it used to have. The house is supposed to be in perfect condition, but all the stuffing in those outdoor patio chairs had been ripped out. A big great horned owl had chewed up eight of them in the course of a few minutes. Maybe it was angry. Angry at Rupert Murdoch. It flew down to attack and made a big racket. According to William Scheetz, you could hear it out there like a monster. I remember my grandmother, always going crazy about the deer eating her roses, you know? And then my grandparents would just have more fences built.
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JOE JOHNSTON: I was a gardener for the Steins, and I stayed on when Rupert Murdoch bought the property. One time when the Steins still lived here, I came down to the pool and there was a black guy there. And he says, “Get off my property.” This man, this stranger, says to me, “Get off my property.” And I says, “This is not your property. What are you doing here?” So he walked away, and I went to find Charles, the butler, and I says, “You better lock the doors and everything.
You got a stranger on this property.” And then Charles told Mister, and Mister was inside. In the house. We had a .22 rifle there that we used to shoot squirrels with when they’d knock all the nuts down and demolish things. And I grabbed that thing. And then I found the guy sitting on a seat up on the top porch, you know, where Mister had his office. So I says, “You better get out of here right now.” And he didn’t. Anyway I ran downstairs and as soon as I got in the driveway I hear this person saying to me, “Drop the gun.” And I turn around and there’s the LAPD officers. And then they ended up grabbing this guy up on the porch and they brought him downstairs, and that’s when your dad comes out through the kitchen. And your dad says, “This is not your property. I am putting you under a citizen’s arrest.” And they took him away. I don’t know who this guy was. He wasn’t a bum. Just a regular guy, a stranger.
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WILLIAM SCHEETZ: There were homeless people living in the hillside right under the property. And they had all their little possessions, books and food, but stuff that wasn’t old and it was all organized, maybe a blanket or something to sit on or sleep on. And we think that they were sneaking into the greenhouses on the cold nights to get warm. They had been drinking water but then not closing the tap all the way. And then the gardeners would say, “Wait a minute, this was closed yesterday. Why is it running now?” We locked the greenhouses and changed the locks and moved their piles of stuff, and then it stopped.
The neighbors to the south put up a fifteen-foot-high fence separating our two properties, because of the mountain lions. And within the first two weeks an animal coming in with its cub jumped on it and bent the top of the fence trying to get in. And now they have security full-time in their backyard at night and cameras and some kind of contraption that sprays water if it senses movement, big jets of spray. It’s a humane thing. So in the meantime our Rhodesian ridgeback went to live back in New York because that was the one who was the hunter and was chasing it. Lucy, she’s the one who got in a fight with the mountain lion. I remember it was thousands of dollars to have her fixed up.