I felt like I was inside a ’40s noir classic, complete with a voiceover narrator—It was late at night…I was driving on a steep and winding slice of Chautauqua Boulevard…My headlights were trading off hits on dirt hills, tree clusters and metal guardrails…I finally came to Corona Del Mar, the road where Golden Age star and one-time Hollywood leading lady Deborah Kerr once lived.
Yes, the refined Scotland-born actress Kerr, who starred in such classic 1950s films as Separate Tables and From Here to Eternity, once lived in the Huntington in Pacific Palisades.
The first time I drove out to 15040 Corona Del Mar in the Palisades was in 2003 while working on a movie star homes book. The address was Kerr’s former home. When I arrived all those years ago, I was sorely disappointed to see the home had disappeared, only dirt and weeds in its place.
Fast forward to November 2013, I am casually reading an Architectural Digest piece on Kerr’s Pacific Palisades home. The article noted that the house was originally built as a guesthouse that, according to Kerr, “had never been used” prior to her moving into it, circa 1950. The guesthouse was part of “an even larger mansion” the article stated. This last piece of information got me thinking.
Maybe in 2003 I was looking at the address of the “mansion,” not Kerr’s house. (I couldn’t remember where I had researched the address, but it probably was a source dating back to the 1950s—a city directory or celebrity address book.)
Maybe the source I had gotten the address from had Kerr’s house address mistakenly listed simply as the same one carried by the main “mansion” house and that Kerr’s “guesthouse” still stood, but now with a separate address. Stranger things have happened on my movie star home hunts over the years.
So, after studying the magazine photo showing an elegant looking Kerr sitting on a patio lounge chair in the backyard of her Palisades home, I set out to see if it was still standing. Arriving at night, I parked
across the street from the address that I had first visited some 10 years ago.
Leaving my car, I crossed Corona Del Mar and walked up to padlocked metal gates that protected the property. Peering through the middle space of the gate, I only saw dark space where a home once stood. The background of the empty lot was much more eye catching – a moonlit Santa Monica bay.
I backed away and spied on the only immediate adjacent house to my right and could see it all lit up. Although it matched the basic design of the Kerr house in the photo, it was clearly not her house and more than likely, I was looking at part of the main “mansion” to Kerr’s “guesthouse.”
A few days later, I returned to the property to take some daytime photos of that ocean view that Kerr spoke of missing decades after moving out of the home. I held my camera over the long, thick white stucco fence with spooky wrought-iron arrows shooting out the top of it and snapped away.
An eerie-looking crater can be seen where Kerr’s house once stood. Below but hidden from my vantage point was busy Pacific Coast Highway and past it, in view, the blue of the ocean.
I questioned three female passersby about the home that no longer stood on the property. All were surprised to hear that Deborah Kerr had once lived there, even the one woman who said she’d been living in or around the area for years.
One of the women told me that the house was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1990s. Still, another one told me that the house that no longer stood was part of a series of homes that made up one big estate, thus backing the concept that Kerr’s home was once a guesthouse.
No matter the circumstances, Deborah Kerr’s Pacific Palisades house is gone. I wonder if, before she had passed away in 2007, Kerr had known the fate of the home she had spoken of remaining “forever in my memory.”
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.
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