Unreal Estate
Money, Ambition, and the Lust For Land in Los Angeles
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- ¥1,100
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- ¥1,100
発行者による作品情報
Michael Gross is America’s best-known writer on the wealthy. Following his books 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery, he went west to the richest and most entertaining neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Holmby Hills, Beverly Park, to look at crazy cast of characters who brought them into being and occupy their most over-the-top homes.
Beginning with the founding of this fabled district on lima bean fields set against a stunning backdrop of impassible mountains and tracing how adobe huts evolved into $100 million mansions perched between the city and the Pacific, he reveals how the plutocrats of a century ago, oil and rail barons with lots of cash and little provenance, created the communities real estate agents would later market as the Platinum Triangle.
Outlandish, lavish homes began filling the landscape, and Gross uses some of the most extravagant and the stories of their owners and occupants over the course of the 20th century to open a window onto life and times of a town he calls "the Mecca of self-invention."
There are, of course, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Harold Lloyd, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, George Hamilton, Tony Curtis, Cher. But they share the stage with rough-hewn robber barons, Spanish land grant families, desperado oilmen and railroad titans, conglomerateurs, conmen and Ponzi schemers, porn producers, and Arab perverts, not to mention characters right out of the pages of the business section of our most staid broadsheets and the broadcasts of TMZ. If Gross’s own 740 Park had a baby with Valley of the Dolls, and it learned to read with a copy of Hollywood Babylon, it would be Unreal Estate.
Los Angeles, the city of angels, is also a city of dreamers and schemers whose stories will stir you to anger, fits of laughter and moments of sheer delight. You thought you knew L.A.? Michael Gross will tell you its best-hidden secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gross (Rogues' Gallery) offers a cultural history of wealth in his study of the moguls and mafiosi who developed Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and other ritzy neighborhoods of Los Angeles with a special focus on the houses they built. The aptly named Greystone (otherwise known as Wayne Manor), for example, was built by a prospector turned oilman, Edward Doheny, and finished in 1928. Greystone housed the Doheny family until the tragic death of son Ned and his friend Hugh Plunkett in what some supposed was a lover's duel. After the family moved out, Greystone lived on: the makers of There Will Be Blood, based loosely on the life of Edward Doheny, filmed in the basement bowling alley, "which boasted the requisite Prohibition-be-damned bar." Gross writes with an aficionado's zeal yet chooses facts selectively for their service to the story. It may take a chapter or two to adjust to a book in which the characters, however memorable, come and go, but the landscape remains the same. However, that's the point: these houses, totems of wealth and status, inhabited for a season when their inhabitants were flush, are the real characters and mainstays of La La Land.
