THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 51 FEBRUA RY 26, 2020
PREVIOUS SPREAD: WARNER PRESENT: COURTESY OF JEFF HYLAND. WARNER INTERIOR: HOLLYWOODHISTORICPHOTOS.COM/BISON ARCHIVES. SELZNICK
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PACIFIC NATIONAL BANK COLLECTION/LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY. CONSTRUCTION, STAIRCASE: DAVID SILVERMAN/HUNTINGTON MUSEUM. BEZOS:STEPHEN J. COHEN/WIREIMAGE.THIS SPREAD: WARNER: JIM BARTSCH/COURTESY OF JOYCE REY. DELFERN: COURTESY OF HILTON & HYLAND. GOETZ: COURTESY OF THE GOETZ FAMILY (4). SWIFT: NEILSON BARNARD/GETTY IMAGES. GOLDWYN: COURTESY OF RUSSELL ARCHITECTS. MAYER: JOHN SPRINGER COLLECTION/CORBIS/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES.1 Bill and Edie Goetz
circa 1950 on the ter-
race of their Holmby
Hills home by architect
Gordon Kaufmann,
who also designed
Greystone Mansion.
2 A page from Edie
Goetz’s notebook
shows the invite list
and menu at a 1975
dinner party held five
weeks after guest
Ronald Reagan left
office as governor
of California. Norton
Simon came with wife
Jennifer Jones, who in
the 1940s had an affair
with, and later married,
Edie’s brother-in-law,
David O. Selznick.
3 A recent aerial photo
of the Goetz estate,
which was purchased
by billionaire Nicolas
Berggruen in 2017 for
$41 million.
4 Goetz (at left) in
the 1970s with Fred
Astaire and Gregory
Peck (right). Both
actors began attend-
ing dinner parties at
the Goetz house in the
1940s. Edie’s favorite
dinner party size was
14 to 16 guests, though
the dining-room table
sat 22. Dinners were
always candle-lit, and
there was no chande-
lier in the dining room.
5 Edie (holding
umbrella) stood with
(from left) actresses
Rosalind Russell,
Mia Farrow and Ruth
Gordon outside Frank
Sinatra’s Palm Springs
home around 1967. The
Goetzes often joined
Sinatra and his friends
for weekend getaways
to the desert.a Renoir were secured) would rise upward to reveal projection
booth windows. Cooper Janis says the panel caused a stir in
Hollywood — opinions were mixed as to whether it was vulgar.
Tina Sinatra remembers touching the tutu of Edgar Degas’
bronze The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, which stood in the
hallway. “Everyone wanted to touch it,” she says.
“You couldn’t help it.”
Edie Goetz lived in the house for 41 years until
her death in 1988 at age 82. (The Goetzes’ art col-
lection sold at auction that year for $85 million.)
The home most recently sold in 2017 to Nicolas
Berggruen for $42 million. The two original 35mm film projec-
tors still stand behind the living-room wall.
They are reminders of a vanished time in the industry. In
1967, the Los Angeles Times profiled five couples who were
at the top of what it called “The Hollywood Establishment,”
including the Goetzes and Russell and Frederick Brisson. The
article recounted an evening at the home of the latter couple,
where one guest was Barbra Streisand (then a year away from
her big-screen debut in Funny Girl): “So loosened up was
one guest at a recent party ... that abruptly he said to Barbra
Streisand: ‘You haven’t made it yet, have you, kid?’ Even Barbra
was baffled and after an embarrassed silence, the guest added,
‘You haven’t been to the Goetzes.’ ”David Silverman writes about Hollywood real estate history at
lahousehistories.com.“You can read the whole history of Hollywood just from my
book of menus,” she once said. One dinner in 1948 included
Jack Benny, Ingrid Bergman, Claudette Colbert, George Cukor,
Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Huston, Deborah Kerr, Louis B.
Mayer, Ray Milland, Rosalind Russell and Loretta Young. The
meal included fried chicken, suckling pig, roast beef, spa-
ghetti and meatballs and sauerkraut and frankfurters. “It was
considered a coup to be invited,” says Maria Cooper Janis, the
daughter of Gary and Rocky Cooper (they built an A. Quincy
Jones house next to the Goetzes in 1954). Cooper Janis fondly
remembers Edie’s signature coffee ice cream bombe cake.
Robert Wagner grew up in Bel Air playing with the Goetzes’
two daughters and attended Edie’s dinners for 30 years.
“Everything was the best that you could have,” he recalls. Edie
was known for employing the best chefs in town (one left for
Universal Pictures’ commissary, which became known for the
finest food of any studio lot) and a butler who once served the
Queen Mother in Buckingham Palace.
After dinner, invitees adjourned to the aqua-
blue living room for a performance by fellow
guests (think Judy Garland duetting with Bing
Crosby) or a movie screening. Edie always sat
in the same corner of a sofa, and with the press
of a button, the drapes would close, the lights
would dim, a custom-composed fanfare would play from hidden
speakers, a 20-foot-wide screen would be lowered from the
ceiling and a panel on the opposite wall (on which a Monet and2 3SinatraMayer(^45)