Life in The Riviera

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Spent 10-Plus Years Making a Home at Westridge

By MICHAEL OLDHAM | Contributing Writer

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. began his film-acting career as a young teenager in the silent film

era of the 1920s. He was not just another struggling actor—no—for the suffix “Jr.” that followed his name had importance in his budding but ever-ascending Hollywood career.

Fairbanks Jr. had to prove himself to be worthy of film roles, all while apprenticing under the shadow of a Hollywood giant: His father was Douglas Fairbanks, the swashbuckling star of such films as “Thief of Bagdad” (1924).

And Fairbanks Jr., who was raised by his mother, was not close to his father: “I will confess that my father was never a father to me. He was more like an older brother.”

But Fairbanks Jr.’s father was more than a superhero superstar of silent films. His father gave little Douglas another Hollywood shadow to grow up under, a famous stepmother named Mary Pickford.

Pickford is generally known today as the most-famous silent film actress of all time. She was often referred to as “America’s Sweetheart.”

As Fairbanks Jr. once put it, “My father and Mary Pickford were the reigning stars of not just Hollywood, but of the world. Well, to bear my father’s name was hard enough, but to work in pictures to boot was pretty foolhardy.”

Born in 1909 in New York City, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was just a 9-year-old kid when his father divorced his mother, Anna Beth Sully, in 1919. A few months later, his famous father married Pickford.

As a kid, Fairbanks Jr. would often pay visits to Pickfair, his father and stepmother’s world-famous Beverly Hills estate.

Acting and life in general were made more difficult for Fairbanks Jr. due to his famous father.

“I was a shy, awkward sort of a boy,” Fairbanks Jr. once said. “And my father’s frequent absences from home, along with my hero worship for him, made me even shyer.”

But, little Douglas persevered.

Little did Fairbanks Jr. know that in the 1925, the same year his breakout film “Stella Dallas” was playing in movie houses, his own future and prestigious estate was being built in Pacific Palisades.

In 1925, a house on a seven-acre parcel of land, just east of what today is Will Rogers State Historic Park, was built. The Spanish colonial revival was designed by Mark Daniels, a respected Westside architect.

Fairbanks Jr. would buy the sprawling Spanish home in 1939. It sits high up on Amalfi Drive in The Riviera. He purchased the impressive property despite maintaining a humble philosophy: “I have never cared about keeping up with the Joneses.”

By 1939, the six-foot-plus Fairbanks Jr., with hazel eyes and a comb-back head of dark-brown hair, was a well-known actor in his own right. He had long since escaped the massive cloud that his legendary father had inadvertently placed over his screen career.

So, perhaps the move into The Riviera was Fairbanks Jr. making his own personal statement, via a land and mansion grab. The man had now lived 30 years of life and had earned the right to be called a movie star, apart from his celebrated last name.

And while his father may have once called home Pickfair, Fairbanks Jr. would give his own new home a name, one that remains 79-plus years later.
Fairbanks, Jr. named his newly purchased Amalfi Drive home Westridge. The reason was simple: “Since it faced west and was perched above a canyon.”

For Fairbanks Jr., the year 1939 was a very busy one, both in his personal and professional life.

He would marry for the second time. In April, he married Mary Lee Eppling, having been divorced for several years from his more-famous first wife, actress Joan Crawford. His film-legend father would pass away in December.

The year would also see Fairbanks Jr. star, along with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, in “Gunga Din.”

After Fairbanks Jr. and Eppling took possession of their new house, they would remodel it. They hired famed architect Wallace Neff, and grew out the house and improved the existing structures. The couple also improved the grounds surrounding their physical buildings.
After much work, the couple could finally sit back and enjoy their canyon and ocean views. Fairbanks Jr. claimed he did not consider himself to be a particular party-scene type of guy.

“I am not a socialite, though I seem to have got the reputation for being one,” he once said. “I have some very good friends who happen to be in so-called ‘society,’ but society as such is a bore and holds no fascination for me.”

Still, Fairbanks Jr. and Eppling’s guest book for Westridge had a compilation of many celebrities.

From 1939 to 1952, visits to Westridge included such luminaries as Cole Porter (a regular visitor), Cecil Beaton, David Selznick, Pickford, Deems Taylor, Daryl Zanuck, Gary Cooper, Basil Rathbone, Lord Mountbatten, Clark Gable and many others.

And while he may have claimed shyness, Fairbanks Jr. could entertain, on occasion, with a clever or witty remark.

He once quipped, “I was only saying to the Queen the other day how I hate name dropping.”

And while Fairbanks Jr. was serving his country in WWII via navy duties, he and Eppling rented Westridge out to Cary Grant and his wife, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.

Fairbanks Jr. and Eppling returned home to Westridge after the war in 1946. The couple would pack their bags again for London in the early 1950s, leaving their beloved Westridge for good—ending the Palisadian chapter of his life.

Michael Oldham, author of “The Valentino Formula,” can be reached at hollywoodlandings@sbcglobal.net.