Clark Gable locations – IAMNOTASTALKER

March 7, 2013March 6, 2013

Clark Gable’s Former House

Speaking of Clark Gable . . . another location that I stalked recently was the Encino-area ranch where the “King of Hollywood” lived for over two decades. I first read about this locale, as I did yesterday’s (the Playa del Rey house where Judy Lewis, Gable and Loretta Young’s secret love child, was born), in fellow stalker E.J.’s book Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites. So, while doing some solo San Fernando Valley stalking a few days before my and the Grim Cheaper’s big move to the desert, I figured I might as well stop by the residence to check it out.

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Clark Gable’s ranch was originally built in 1933 for director and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Raoul Walsh. Gable and his then girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, Carole Lombard visited Walsh at his 20-acre property, which featured a nine-bedroom main house, a detached garage, citrus groves, alfalfa fields, a barn, a pigsty, a henhouse, and horse stables, and absolutely fell in love with it. When they heard that he was planning on selling the site, they jumped at the chance to purchase it, which they did in 1939, shortly after their nuptials, for a cool $50,000. According to E.J., at the time, the home’s entrance was located on Petit Drive (as you can see in this 1940 census, the original address was 4525 Petit Drive; it is now 4543 Tara Drive) and the property was surrounded by acres upon acres of orchards and fields. Tabloids quickly labeled the two-story clapboard residence “The House of Two Gables”.

Lombard tragically passed away in a plane crash just two years later, on January 16th, 1942, and it is said that Gable never recovered from his grief. Shortly after her death, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was sent to Europe to fight in World War II. Upon his return to America in 1944, he thought about selling the ranch, but ultimately decided to keep it and wound up living there with his fourth and fifth wives, Lady Sylvia Ashley and Kay Williams Spreckles, respectively.

Sadly, on November 5th, 1960, while changing a tractor tire in the ranch’s driveway, Gable suffered a heart attack. The following morning, he was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian hospital, where he passed away ten days later, on November 16th, 1960. Despite being married to Kay at the time, the actor was interred next to Carole Lombard at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. Spreckles and John Clark Gable (Kay and Clark’s son and Clark’s only legitimate child, who was born four months after the actor’s death) continued to live at the ranch until 1973, at which point it was sold to developers. Financier Michael Milken later bought the place in October 1977 for $587,500 and it appears that he still owns it to this day. According to Zillow, the dwelling currently boasts seven bedrooms, nine baths, 7,093 square feet of living space, and a 1.17-acre lot.

As you can see below, the home’s wooden exterior archway . . .

. . . and crookedly-placed white picket fence still look exactly the same today as they did when Gable lived there. Sadly though, little else of the place is visible from the street. And while the house still stands in much the same form as it did during Gable’s time, the twenty acres that once surrounded it were subdivided during the 1980s and transformed into a housing tract named the Clark Gable Estates. The streets in the neighborhood, Tara Drive and Ashley Oaks, were named in honor of Gable’s most famous movie, Gone with the Wind, which I think is so incredibly cool. I wonder if someday a community will be named after my man Matt Lanter. One of the streets could even be dubbed “Liam Court”!

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Big THANK YOU to E.J., from The Movieland Directory website, for finding this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Clark Gable’s former house is located at 4543 Tara Drive in Encino.

March 6, 2013March 6, 2013

The House Where Judy Lewis, Loretta Young and Clark Gable’s Daughter, Was Born

Today’s locale is easily one of the coolest I have visited in my 13-plus years of living in Southern California, which is ironic being that it is comprised of mostly vacant land. I am talking about the one-time location of the house where Judy Lewis, the secret love child of screen siren Loretta Young and movie legend Clark Gable, was born. I learned about the spot in fellow stalker E.J.’s book Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites and, although I knew next to nothing about Loretta Young at the time, was immediately intrigued. So I added the address to my To-Stalk list and began doing some preliminary cyber-stalking to see what the residence looked like now. When I went to Google Street View, though, it only showed miles upon miles of what looked like vacant swampland. I emailed to E.J. to ask if he knew what had happened to the area and he replied with a link to this CurbedLA article about the so-called Ghost Streets of Playa del Rey. Well, believe you me, although I was sad that Judy Lewis’ birth house was no longer, hearing that Los Angeles had its own ghost town had me salivating and I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there just a few days later.

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As the story goes, Loretta Young and Clark Gable met on the set of the 1935 film Call of the Wild. She was 22 and single, he was 35 and married to his second wife, Ria Langham. The two quickly began an affair that had Hollywood tongues wagging and it was not long before Loretta was pregnant. In order to hide the pregnancy, which she thought would destroy both her and Clark’s careers, the young star took off to Europe for an extended vacation with her mother, Gladys Royal. The rumors did not stop, though, and reporters followed Loretta and Gladys’ every move. Mother and daughter wound up secretly returning to L.A. and Loretta immediately went into hiding at a rental property that she and Gladys owned at 8612 Rindge Avenue in Playa del Rey. At 8:15 a.m. on November 6, 1935, Judy Lewis was born. Loretta returned to her mansion in Bel Air shortly thereafter and Judy was left at the Rindge Avenue house in the care of a nurse. She remained there until July 1936, at which time she was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Infant Hospital in San Francisco. Loretta “adopted” Judy about five months later. Rumors, of course, circulated around the adoption and as Judy grew up and came to resemble her famous father more and more, those rumors only caught fire. As you can see below, there is absolutely NO denying that Judy Lewis was Clark Gable’s daughter. It was not until Judy confronted Loretta at the age of 31 (at Loretta’s home in Palm Springs, which I am now going to have to stalk!), though, that the star admitted she was Judy’s biological mother and that Gable was her biological father. Such an incredibly sad story.

And while Judy states in her book that she was born at “8612 Rindge Street” in Venice, I have been able to surmise (with about 99.9% certainty) that, because there is no Rindge Street in Venice, Judy’s former house was actually located at 8612 Rindge Avenue in Playa del Rey, a neighborhood about two miles south of Venice. I believe that Judy’s former residence is the one denoted with a pink arrow in the historic aerial view, circa 1952, below.

Judy’s former house was located in Surfridge, an affluent seaside community that was founded in the 1920s by Minneapolis-born real estate developer Fritz Burns. The neighborhood, which was situated overlooking the Pacific Ocean, immediately attracted celebrities including Cecil B. DeMille and Carmen Miranda, who had custom homes built there. In 1928, a tiny airfield that was mostly used to host air shows was constructed on a plot of land neighboring and just east of Surfridge. That airfield eventually became Los Angeles International Airport, what is now the sixth busiest airport in the world. You can see LAX in the background of the photographs below. It is almost shocking how close it is to the former Surfridge neighborhood.

As LAX began to expand in the 1960s, Los Angeles World Airports started to purchase - and subsequently tear down – houses in the Surfridge community.

More than eight hundred residences wound up being razed, but, for whatever reason, roads, sidewalks, retaining walls, and street lights were left intact creating a spooky, almost surreal neighborhood of cracked streets that wind through empty lots. Today, the area encompasses between 302 and 470 (depending on which newspaper article you are reading) fenced-in, vacant acres.

And while Los Angeles World Airports considered developing the site by building an 18-hole golf course, a sand dune preserve and a viewing station to watch planes take off and land, those plans wound up being thwarted for a variety of reasons. All that exists on the property now is a 200-acre butterfly preserve where the once-endangered El Segundo blue butterfly now flourishes. According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, a portion of the site is set to be restored in the near future, though, whereupon several ghost roads and ancient foundations will be removed and native plants brought in to return the area to its pre-developed state.

In the meantime, it’s a great place to watch planes take off and land, not to mention an intriguing stalking location.

You can check out some great photographs of the Surfridge neighborhood before it was razed here and here.

The abandoned Surfridge community is even a filming location. The site was featured in the music video for the Azure Ray song “New Resolution”.

You can watch that video by clicking below.

Thanks to fellow stalker Jeff, I learned that the Surfridge neighborhood was also featured in the climax of the 2011 thriller In Time, although a little CGI trickery was employed to change the background of the scene. You can read about the exact areas of Surfridge that appeared in the movie on the Seeing Stars website here.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Big THANK YOU to E.J., from The Movieland Directory website, for telling me about this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The house where Judy Lewis, Loretta Young and Clark Gable’s daughter, was born was formerly located at 8612 Rindge Avenue in Playa del Rey.

October 4, 2012September 29, 2017

Alfred Hitchcock’s Former Home

I tend to get a bit overexuberant when it comes to stalking Haunted Hollywood sites each year and typically wind up with more locations in my stockpile (or should I say stalkpile? Winking smile ) than there are days in October to blog about them. In fact, it would be safe to say that I have enough spooky locales left over from years past to cover all of this October’s posts, not that that will prevent me from stalking new ones, of course. Anyway, one location that I have had waiting in the wings for quite some time now is the first house that Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense himself, lived in upon moving to Los Angeles in 1939. I learned of the locale thanks to the 2009 book Dial H for Hitchcock, the fifth in Susan Kandel’s fabulous Cece Caruso mystery series. I absolutely love Kandel’s novels because, not only are they fun and suspenseful, but they always feature numerous real and historic locations – one of which, Thelma Todd’s Roadside Café, I blogged about during my Haunted Hollywood postings back in 2008. In Dial H for Hitchcock, biographer/part-time detective/heroine Cece Caruso, who has been commissioned by her publisher to pen a book on the Master of Suspense, heads out to several of his former residences in order to “commune with Hitch’s spirit”. Kandel provided the addresses of the homes in the novel, so I, of course, immediately added them to my To-Stalk list and ran right out to stalk them shortly thereafter.

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According to Kandel, in 1939 producer David O. Selznick convinced Alfred, who was by that time already a successful director, to migrate with his wife, Alma, and daughter, Pat, from their native England to Southern California. Selznick first rented the family a three-bedroom apartment in the Wilshire Palms building (which was once located at 10331 Wilshire Boulevard, but has since, I believe, been torn down). Shortly thereafter, the Hitchcocks learned that their good friend Carole Lombard was moving out of a French Country-style manse she was renting in Bel Air, so Hitch decided to take over her lease and relocated his family there that October.

Carole Lombard had first moved into the abode in 1936, after realizing that her home at 7953 Hollywood Boulevard was not conducive to the affair she had just begun with a married Clark Gable. So she leased a much more secluded residence at 609 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air. You can check out a photograph of Lombard and Gable that was supposedly taken inside of the home here. After finally marrying Gable on March 29th, 1939, the two purchased a ranch in Encino, began renovating it and finally moved in that October, at which point Hitch took over the lease. The Hitchcocks remained in the home until the Spring of 1942, when they purchased a larger Colonial-style manse located two miles away. (And don’t worry, I also stalked that abode and will be blogging about it tomorrow. Smile ) According to this website, Shelley Long also lived in the St. Cloud Road residence at one point in time, although I have been unable to verify that.

The property, which was originally built in 1926 and boasts 5 bedrooms, 6 baths, 4,357 square feet, a 0.76-acre plot of land, a swimming pool, a fish pond, parking for over 20 cars, a chef’s kitchen, and a private guest house, last sold in December 2007 for a cool $7.85 million. It appears to have been remodeled at some point thereafter and, from the description of the place in Dial H for Hitchcock, was quite possibly in a state of disrepair for a brief period of time, as well. The book reads, “Considering the neighborhood, 609 was a dump. I wasn’t sure anybody was even living there anymore. The driveway was strewn with leaves and yellowed newspapers. The gate stretching across it was covered with brown canvas so you couldn’t see in. However somebody had cut a little hole at the bottom. Someone with an avid interest in the former residents, perhaps.” (A stalker, maybe? Winking smile ) And while that description may have been conjured up for story purposes and not the actual state of the house at the time of the writing, Google aerial views do show that the yard was torn up at some recent date. I am very happy to report that the home was in nice shape when I stalked it earlier this year, although, sadly, not much of it is visible from the road.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Alfred Hitchcock’s former home is located at 609 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air. After finishing his second presidential term in January 1989, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, moved into a house located just up the street at 668 St. Cloud Road.