CELEBRITY Homes in Pacific Palisades: Robert Taylor and His Upper Riviera Home

By MICHAEL OLDHAM | Contributing Writer

In 1956, actor Robert Taylor appeared on the then-popular TV game show “What’s My Line?” Taylor was one of the episode’s “mystery guests.”

During the segment Taylor was featured on, several basic questions were asked of the sharp-looking Hollywood star by the panelists.

“Are you in the world of entertainment or amusement?” Nebraska-born Taylor answered, “Yes.”

“Are you more [of] a flicker-type fellow … cinema actor?” The golden age leading-man star answered, “Yes.”

And if one of the panelists had asked Taylor if he was currently living in the Upper Riviera neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, he would have also answered, “Yes.”

By 1956, Taylor had already spent at least a full year residing high up in the Palisades on San Remo Drive, at the point where it circles around to connect with Casale Road. At this collision point, on the south side of San Remo Drive, sits the sprawling, 1954 contemporary-style home Taylor built for him and his second wife, Ursula Thiess. Taylor had married the younger Germany-born actress that same year.

Thiess supervised the construction of what would be the first joint home for the newlyweds. She watched as wood, red brick and rock walls were pieced together to create their sprawling home. Topping the house was a homey, shingled roof that has multiple chimneys sprouting out of its many angled slices.

By the time Taylor and his wife moved into their new house in 1954, he was in his mid-40s and had many well-known films behind him, including “Magnificent Obsession.” The 1935 film, where he played opposite Irene Dunne, would be Taylor’s first as a leading-man character, complete with his soon-to-be known signature combed back hair.

The nearly six-foot-tall Taylor went on to star opposite other leading ladies of the day, including Barbara Stanwyck in the 1936 film, “His Brother’s Wife.” Off screen, Taylor would marry Stanwyck in 1939.

Taylor once referred to Stanwyck as “one of the finest actresses in show business.” But a few years before Taylor became a Palisadian, the famous Hollywood couple would suffer a case of trouble-in-paradise and split, officially divorcing in 1951.

But the move into Pacific Palisades created a fresh start for blue-eyed Taylor on a number of fronts. By 1955—the year after his move in—the longtime MGM star not only had a new house and a new wife, but a new son.

Terrance was the first of two children the always clean-cut Taylor and his glamorous brunette wife, Thiess, had together. The San Remo house and property would make a half-acre-plus playpen for the new family.

Today, the four-bedroom house features a pool that sits beside a lush green backyard, with plenty of foliage keeping its privacy. This would suit the personality of Taylor, who, as a kid, “preferred being alone on the prairie or in the woods, to playing football with the gang.”

But Taylor, known as “the man with the perfect face,” could escape any visual limiting protections his house offered by simply going upstairs and peeking out of one of the dormer windows the structure featured, perhaps taking in a city view.

And while Taylor once admitted that he “was not—I still am not—gregarious,” he and his wife didn’t avoid their fellow Palisadians. The couple became close to one of their famous neighbors.

“Ronald and Nancy Davis Reagan lived almost next door in Pacific Palisades, and we became best friends,” Thiess once recalled.

For Taylor, living among the rich and famous crowd must have seemed like a far-fetched dream come true for the one-time struggling actor who once recalled an “awful night” early in his acting days of the 1930s, he realized he “had one thin dime in the world” to support his mother, grandmother and himself.

But even after hitting it big in Hollywood, Taylor confessed that others “seem to think I’m a millionaire, but I’m not.” He added, “I’ve saved a little money but every time a chance came along to strike it rich outside the movie business—like the real estate deals of some stars—I was always a dollar short or a day late.”

Taylor and Thiess would remain friends with the Reagans after they had parted San Remo Drive in the late 1950s for a ranch in nearby Mandeville Canyon.

Their daughter, Tessa, was born in 1959, and then-Palisadian Nancy would be named her godmother.

Taylor remained married to Thiess for the remainder of his life. In 1969, he passed away in Santa Monica.

Michael Oldham, co-author of “Movie Star Homes: The Famous to the Forgotten” and author of the novel “The Valentino Formula,” can be reached at hollywoodlandings@sbcglobal.net.