Bel-Air Babylon
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 7, 2007 Last modified: Friday, August 31, 2007 1:14 PM PDT
Only in Pacific Palisades...Photo by Robin Venturelli
BEL-AIR VIEW: There has been murder and mayhem in this wealthy paradise and a police blotter takes us back in time for a look at its dark side
By Jan Marlyn Reesman
Dark Times In The Verdant Hills. A police blotter, detailing Bel-Air’s blackest takes us back in time and returns us to the present-day as we follow the foibles and fates of the rich and famous...The hills, canyons and twisting roads of Bel-Air and environs are powerful, beautiful, and verdant, but at times they are truly foreboding. Life is often lead in extremes here...and sometimes those extremes have been soaked in darkness. A police blotter, detailing Bel-Air’s blackest takes us back in time and returns us to the present-day as we follow the foibles and fates of the rich and famous...
Montgomery Clift
Benedict Canyon/Bel-Air: May 12 of 1957, Liz Taylor and then-husband (number two) Michael Wilding were having a dinner party and Monty reluctantly accepted the invitation. He was one of the first to leave; afraid he would not be able to see his way home on the winding Benedict Canyon. He followed behind the car of friend Kevin McCarthy. Monty veered off the road and his car collided into a telephone pole.The accident left Monty with a broken jaw and nose, a crushed sinus cavity, two missing teeth, and severe facial lacerations, which required plastic surgery. Alerted by Kevin McCarthy, Taylor raced to Clift’s side and kept him from choking to death by removing two of his teeth, which had become lodged in his throat. Or so the story goes.
George Reeves aka Superman
1579 Benedict Canyon Drive, Beverly Hills: on June 16, 1959. George Reeves, TV’s “Superman,” was found dead of a gunshot wound. His relatives believed he was murdered, and disputed the official ruling of suicide. At his funeral, he was laid to rest in the same suit that he wore on the TV show as “Clark Kent.”
Ernie Kovacs
Santa Monica Blvd. and Beverly Glen Blvd.: Jan. 13, 1962. Kovacs was coming home from a party for Milton Berle, driving his white Corvair south on Beverly Glen, when he tried to negotiate a left turn onto Santa Monica Blvd at 50 mph. He may have been trying to light one of his trademark cigars at the time, since one was found next to his body. Whatever, he lost control of the car on the rain-wet street and the driver’s side of the car smashed into a utility pole, killing him instantly. Twenty years later, Mia Kovacs, daughter of comedian Ernie Kovacs and singer/comedienne Edie Adams, was just beginning a career as an actress when she was killed in a vehicle accident on Mulhullond Drive.
Sharon Tate
10050 Cielo Drive (now changed to 10066), Beverly Hills: August 9, 1969. the Manson Family cult slaughtered actress Sharon Tate and five others. This house had been the home of Henry Fonda and was the site where Cary Grant & Dyan Cannon honeymooned in 1965.
Ennis Cosby
The Skirball Center Drive exit to the northbound San Diego (405) Freeway: January 16, 1997. Actor/comedian Bill Cosby’s 27-year-old son, Ennis Cosby, was shot and killed. Ennis had been heading north from West L.A. on the 405, to visit a friend in the Valley, when his car had a flat tire. It was 1:45 a.m. He pulled the car off onto the exit leading to Mulholland Drive (in the Sepulveda Pass), and while he was fixing the flat on the west shoulder of that road, just off the freeway ramp, a stranger shot and killed him for no apparent reason (perhaps during an attempted robbery). An 18-year-old wannabe gang member from Orange County, Mikail “Michael” Markhasev, was arrested
for the crime, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
Robin Cranston
Beverly Glen Blvd. near the Four Oaks Restaurant: In 1980, While crossing Beverly Glen on foot, antiwar activist Senator Alan Cranston’s oldest son Robin Cranston was struck by a car and killed. Robin was 33. Sally Harmony, secretary to G. Gordon Liddy during 1972 testified about Robin Cranston early in the Watergate hearings. His name was on the Gemstone papers. Senator Cranston died on New Year’s Eve, 2000 at age 86.
Robert Blake and Britney Spears
Beverly Glen/Starbucks: 2007 Found notnguilty of murdering his wife, Robert Blake has moved to the Beverly Glen area of Bel-Air and spends his afternoon’s sitting outside the local Star Bucks with many of his male buddies. Always in black and sporting his black cowboy boots and cowboy hat, he goes usually un-noticed by the paparazzi who pass by him several times a day as they follow Britney Spears in her Mini-Cooper. Brittany drives back and forth from her Mulholland home on her daily visits to the local tanning salon and pet store. You’ll recognize her by the 7-10 SUV’s that trail close behind, cameras hanging outside their car windows.
Wilt Chamberlain
Mulholland Drive, Bel-Air. On October 12, 1999, Wilton Norman “Wilt” Chamberlain died at age 63 at his custom built home. All the doorways were 12 feet, or higher. The pool was half in the bedroom and half outside. In his second autobiography, “A View from Above”, the lifelong bachelor claimed he had sex with 20,000 women. For this to be true, he would have had to have sex with more than nine women a week, starting when he was 15 and continuing for 40 years.
Watch for some more memories of times that neither the sun nor the moon shone over the Westside as we continue, in upcoming issues, with Beverly Hills Babylon
and Brentwood Babylon.
