Mineo Monday

Actor Sal Mineo is typically remembered for his role of Plato, the young boy seeking a father-figure who latches onto James Dean’s character in “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955).



Along with Natalie Wood’s character, the three form a somewhat dysfunctional family, with Mineo and Wood competing for the affections of Dean. They bond one night at an abandoned mansion, as they secretly hope to all find what they have been missing throughout their already troubled lives.



Sharp-eyed viewers will recognize the mansion as the same one that Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) lived at in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) with her ex, Max (Erich von Stroheim). The Getty mansion has long since been dozed.



But I digress…

While the censors of the 1950s would not allow any hint of Mineo’s character being gay, the actor’s performance made it very clear. In real life, Sal Mineo, he was quoted as saying, “I got a girl in every port — and a couple of guys in every port, too.” His life was tragically cut short in 1976 at the age of 37 during what was most likely a botched robbery. When it comes to celebrity deaths, no site is better than Scott Michael’s. During my last visit to Hollywood, I decided it was time to visit the spot where the murder took place. I texted Michael’s to narrow down the actual spot at Mineo’s West Hollywood apartment complex (known as the Hollyview Manor at the time) and within seconds, I received the photo below.



That’s a true friend. Below is how it looked the day I visited.



Michael’s pointed out to me that the odd sloping concrete shown in my photo:



…matches the one from the crime scene photo shot the night Mineo was murdered in the back alley of the complex:



This shot of a policeman looking for evidence was shot in the front of the building:



How the complex looks today:



Edited from Scott’s site:

Sal was renting an apartment in West Hollywood, at 8569 Holloway. Marvin Mitchelson, the famous lawyer, owned the building. On Thursday, February 12, 1976 at about 11:30 p.m., Sal returned home from the Westwood playhouse, where he was rehearsing the play, “P.S. Your Cat is Dead.” He parked his blue Chevelle in the garage, and just as he exited the garage a man with a knife confronted him. Mitchelson’s mom and neighbor Raymond Evans heard Mineo scream, “Help! Help! Oh my God!” Evans rushed to the scene and found Sal lying in a pool of blood trailing 10 feet to the sewers. Evans saw that Sal was losing color in his face and tried giving him mouth to mouth. The Sheriff arrived and found Sal in the fetal position. They turned him on his back, cut open his jacket and shirt to attempt resuscitation, but the stab wound was fatal. After 5 or 6 minutes of gasping, Sal was dead at 37. He was stabbed in the heart.…The case was still unsolved for a year and a half, until a Michigan prison inmate Lionel Ray Williams did a bit of bragging to fellow prisoners that he had killed the star. They pimped on him, and in 1979 Williams was convicted. He is serving 51 years to life. All for a random, botched robbery. Now he’s out – released after serving about 25 years.



A shot of Williams:



While searching on the web for more info about Mineo’s murder, I discovered a documentary film had been made that professes William’s innocence, saying that his incarceration was based on racial motivations rather than the truth. Documentary filmmaker Letitia McIntosh interviewed Williams himself, who claims he didn’t know Mineo and that it had to be somebody else. What McIntosh leaves out is that Williams confessed to numerous people (including a girlfriend and wife) to killing someone famous that night. If you can stand the staccato prose of James Ellroy, you can read his compelling account here.

What do I think? I wasn’t there. Not my circus. I just take photographs.

See more photos at my main website.

Chateau Christmas

The Lafayette Hotel in San Diego isn’t the only Daveland favorite place to get decked out for the holidays; the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood has tastefully put the red and green into their hallowed halls. When you enter this legendary landmark, you are greeted by poinsettias and wreaths.



Best looking poinsettias I have seen this season!



The entryway elevators just need a touch of mistletoe to complete the picture!



“Live” garland has been strewn around the stairwell rails. This must be hell to clean up!



The lobby desk:



In the lobby display, green surrounds the art and merchandise that will cost you some green to acquire:



In the bar/dining room area, more greenery:



The Christmas tree in the lobby restaurant which is my favorite place in the entire hotel:



The pool had its share of wreaths and poinsettias, too:



I dare you to find some that look better than these:



For brunch after my swim, the fluffy pancakes (which are truly fluffy, not just marketing speak) were accompanied by Meyer lemon butter. Off the charts sensational (note the famous Chateau bacon surrounding the plate).



See more Chateau Marmont photos at my main website.

Monday at the Mirador

Back in the day, El Mirador was a popular name in real estate. For Palm Springs, it represented the hotel that opened on New Year’s Eve, 1928. Set on 20 acres of prime desert property, according to vintage postcards, amenities included swimming, tennis, golf (the desert’s first!), riding, skeet and other sports that could be enjoyed all winter long in this “Garden of the Sun.”



The Spanish-Colonial Revival-style bell tower was a Palm Springs landmark.



A shot of the Olympic-sized swimming pool:



Closer…



Ah, desert living at its best. Lazy days by the pool.



How about the blow-up toy on the left? At first I thought it was a cheetah, but zooming in it appears to be a fish of some kind.



Anyone remember Eddy Howard?



The hotel/tower were featured in a number of advertisements, including this one for Hertz:



The hotel was converted into the Desert Hospital in 1972. The original tower burned down in 1989, but was rebuilt from the original plans. How it looks today:



Over in West Hollywood, there are the El Mirador apartments, built in 1929 and designed by S. Charles Lee:



Over the last decade or so, this building has been embroiled in historic preservation legal battles. When I walked by in December, it appeared that they were being renovated.



See more Palm Springs photos at my website.

The Schindler House

While on a Frank Lloyd Wright tour a number of years ago, we were also treated to the Schindler House (1921) in West Hollywood. As our bus parked in the residential neighborhood, I was not really impressed by the exterior of this “home” which was barely visible from the street behind the bamboo that shields it from passersby. The designer, Rudolph Michael Schindler, left Vienna in 1914 to study his craft under Wright. The die was cast when Schindler and his bride, music teacher Pauline Gibling, paid their first visit to Wright’s home in Wisconsin, Taliesen. As arch daily described it:

The experience had a significant impact on both Rudolf and Sophie–the manner in which the house and its rural surroundings coexisted in harmony appealed to them, and they began to dream of building a new studio home for themselves.



The recently married couple settled in Los Angeles, where they met Irving Gill, known as pioneer in the Modern Movement of architecture. Tired of the abundance of Spanish Colonial homes that were so popular in Southern California, Gill strove to build structures in pure as form as possible, rather than laden with ornamentation. From Gill himself:

It would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years, in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude.



Schindler embraced Gill’s tilt-slab construction, in which concrete walls are poured into molds and tilted into place on location after curing. For his own home, Schindler wanted a communal-type residence that would be shared with another couple. The plan for the house can be given a great deal of credit to his wife, Pauline Gibling, who met Schindler in Chicago in 1918. A wonderful New Yorker article gives the background:

Gibling studied music at Smith College before branching out into writing, criticism, education, and activism, had imagined a place like the Schindler House as early as 1916, writing of “a little joy of a bungalow, on the edge of woods and mountains and near a crowded city, which shall be open just as some people’s hearts are open, to friends of all classes and types.” Gibling set the tone for life at 835 Kings Road, fostering a bohemia that rivalled any in Greenwich Village.



The house was conceived as a “cooperative dwelling for two young couples.” Schindler would serve as the architect and Clyde Chace (who with his wife Marian was the other young couple) acted as builder. The house was conceived as (according to MAK Center):

…an experiment in communal living to be shared with another couple, Clyde and Marian Chace. There were four rooms, one for each person to “express his or her individuality.” The communal gathering areas were patios in the garden, one for each family. There was a shared kitchen and outdoor sleeping porches were provided on the roof. A guest apartment with its own kitchen and bath extended from the rear of the house.



The wives took part in the construction process, too, which improved upon Gill’s tilt-slab system by pouring smaller units of concrete which could be put in place without a crane; the seams between the concrete were glass, which had the added benefit of allowing more light inside. While that was the original intention, one thing I noticed while inside was that it seemed perpetually dark. It was probably not this way when first constructed and the landscaping was non-existent. The plethora of multi-level apartments that cropped up around it over the years also shield out the sun.



Completed June 1922, the two couples only lived here for two years. The Chaces moved to Florida after the birth of their second child, right about the same time that theatergoers were able to catch a glimpse of the house in the Buster Keaton film, “Sherlock Jr.” (1924):



Schindler and his wife split in 1927 with Pauline moving out. Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra moved into the Chace’s portion for a few years, and when he departed, Pauline moved back in and resided in separate quarters from her ex-husband until Schindler’s death in 1953.

The home is also known as the incubator for a number of other architectural masterpieces, such as the Lovell house (Neutra, 1929, Los Angeles), Pueblo Ribera Court (Schindler, 1925, La Jolla), the Jardinette Apartments (Neutra, 1928, Hollywood), and The Charles H. and Ethel Wolfe house (Schindler, 1931, Catalina Island).



Three years before her 1977 death, Pauline created a nonprofit organization, the Friends of the Schindler House, to help ensure the house’s preservation. The organization acquired the house in 1980 and began a program to restore the house, using its original 1922 comopletion date as the reference point. In 1994, the home turned into the headquarters of MAK Center for Art and Architecture, an independent satellite of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, in cooperation with the Federal Chancellery of Austria/Art Division and the Friends of the Schindler House (FOSH). The list of guests/residents that passed through the Schindler house is just as impressive, and included Upton Sinclair, Aldous Huxley, photographer Edward Weston, Frank Lloyd Wright (and his son, Lloyd), and composer John Cage.



It was a truly interesting idea, and the structure itself is very innovative; just not sure it would be for me.

See more Schindler House photos at my main website.

Tail O' the Pup

On the way to the Chateau Marmont from Beverly Hills High School (see previous post), I was coming down Santa Monica Boulevard and turning onto La Cienega. This is what I saw. THE GIGANTIC TAIL O' THE PUP HOT DOG!



I had first become aware of this iconic piece of architecture (?) when I saw it floating overhead during the opening of Steve Martin’s classic “L.A. Story” (1991). From the nearby signage today:

The famous Tail O’The Pup Hot Dog Stand debuted in Los Angeles in 1946. Originally located at La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard. Designed by architect Milton Black in 1939, this original building has been carefully preserved and fully restored to its former glory by the 1933 Group in 2022. From 1970–1971 this building was known as The Doors Workshop. It served as an office and rehersal (sic) studio for The Doors. The band used this space to record their sixth and final studio album LA Woman.



Wow! Talk about a historic building. It almost made me want a hot dog…but not quite. It definitely made me think twice about using spellcheck on my work. Please…fix this commemorative plaque!!



To avoid demolition, the beloved stand was moved into a warehouse in Torrance after the property it had been moved to was going to be cleared to make way for (you guessed it) more condos and apartments.



The 1933 Group purchased the structure in 2018 and reopened four years later. They were also behind the restoration of the Formosa Cafe. That alone earns them high marks in my book.



I definitely need to come back at night to see this sign lit up.



See more West Hollywood photos at my main website.