CELEBRITY HOMES: Billie Dove, Eddie and Margo Albert Lived in the Palisades

Legendary silent-screen actress Billie Dove lived in a Pacific Palisades home on Amalfi Drive, south of Sunset. The New York-born Dove had built the Spanish hacienda-style house in 1933. This was during a period of changing times for the one-time Ziegfeld Follies dancer and showgirl who, by then, had appeared in over 45 movies. 

In 1933, Dove would marry her second husband, oil executive Robert Kenaston. This was after her 1930 divorce from director Irvin Willat, a divorce made easy when Howard Hughes paid him more than $300,000 to grant the actress a divorce. It was also made easy since Dove had spoken of her domestic life with Willat as “not the sort of love you have in marriage.”

Dove would become involved with the then-studio mogul Hughes, both romantically and professionally. The voluptuous Dove would star in the Hughes produced 1931 movie, The Age for Love.

Billie Dove’s romance and movie-making with Hughes would not last, but for a few years. With her new husband Robert and her new address at 719 Amalfi Drive in the Riviera, the screen star retired from Hollywood. “I had seen some of the other girls try to hang onto their careers after they had started to slide,” Dove explained in 1962. “I vowed that would never happen to me. So when I got married, it was very easy to quit.”

Dove, who the fan magazines dubbed “The American Beauty,” had retired with the intention of starting a family when she moved into the one-acre Amalfi property. She and husband, Robert, would raise a son and an adopted daughter together. Besides raising kids in her retirement, Dove enjoyed painting and golf. Dove and family could enjoy her home in the Palisades in the summer while spending some winter days at her second home in Palm Springs.

Decades before her death in 1998, Dove sold her Pacific Palisades home to actor Eddie Albert who would make a home there with his wife, Margo.

Born in 1906 in Illinois, Eddie Albert was both a movie and television star. Albert is best known for playing in the long-running television series that began in 1965 called “Green Acres” and for his film role as a sadistic prison warden in the 1974 film, The Longest Yard. In “Green Acres” he played the part of Oliver Wendell Douglas, a lawyer who transforms himself into a farmer. Albert once said in an interview about the series, “I knew it would be successful. It’s about the atavistic urge and people have been getting a charge out of that ever since Aristophanes wrote about the plebs and the city folk.”

Margo Albert, who also went by the single name of Margo, was born in 1917 in Mexico where she danced in nightclubs before the age of 10. By the 1930s, she had found her way to Hollywood, making notable marks in films roles such as playing the young girl leaving Shangri-La in the 1937 classic, Lost Horizon.

Later in her career, Margo would work in television, appearing in such shows as “Perry Mason” and “Rawhide” in the 1960s. The actress was a well-known community activist by the time of her passing in 1985.

Eddie and Margo were married in 1945 and they would live for decades as a couple on Amalfi. There, the happy couple could walk to the outer edge of the expansive backyard and enjoy a view of Rustic Canyon below. And while the backyard would also double as a playground for the couple’s two children, it and the front grounds of the house would offer gardening opportunities for Eddie, a green thumb.

Neighbors were likely to find vegetables, such as corn, growing where lawn might have been. Grass was the “normal” choice for homeowners at the time. He also enjoyed caring for flower gardens on his land.

Eddie Albert would become a beloved figure inside the community of Pacific Palisades, serving as its Honorary Mayor in the late 1990s. Amalfi Drive would be the last home for Eddie, who passed in 2005.

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.