T
his 1957 beauty, designed by E. Stewart Williams, F.A.I.A., has a fascinating history. It was built by Robert Kenaston, husband of retired silent movie star Billie Dove, as a wedding present for their son, Roderick. The gesture was lavish, but affordable; Bob Kenaston was heir to a mining fortune, and had enjoyed considerable success on his own as a rancher and real-estate investor. He and Dove maintained two homes themselves, one in Pacific Palisades, another in Palm Springs.
The present came with the pleasantest of strings attached: Bob Kenaston told his son that the house was his on condition that he not take a job- that he relax, enjoy the house, and enjoy life. While it's not known if the elder Kenaston was serious, the house was certainly a 1950's playboy delight. Built in a "U" shape around a pool, the house was constructed of stucco, corrugated aluminum, glass, and local rock. The rock was so central to the concept that one wall of it was carried right into the pool itself.
It's not known how long the younger Kenastons enjoyed the place. Bob Kenaston died in 1973, and it seems that Billie Dove may have taken up residence in the house with son Roderick for a time. However, by the 1990's, Dove had retired to the comforts of the Motion Picture Country Home (MPCH), in Woodland Hills, California- a retirement/convalescent center and hospice funded by contributions from people in the picture business.
In 1993, the Kenaston house was purchased by new owners who undertook many needed repairs, and remodeled it extensively, decorating the house in a playful, ironic style. In 2003, the house was acquired by its current owners, who have worked to restore the house to its 1950's feeling. A new- and enormous- kitchen has been incorporated into the design, to accommodate present-day entertaining needs.
The success of the restoration can be seen by the fact that the house is in demand as a location for movies and TV productions that could benefit from a helping of 1950's cool. Recently, it was seen in the reality TV show, Boy Meets Boy- it was the house the dates lived in during filming. The house's present condition is probably better than at any point since it was new. It's somehow fitting that its revival is being partly funded by our fascination with those cool, lost days when Dino, Peter, Frankie and Sammy ruled this fabled stretch of desert.
Old Hollywood, Rat Pack Hollywood, and New Hollywood- what more history could a house ask for?
Billie Dove walked out on Hollywood at the height of her fame, spent three years as Howard Hughes' girlfriend, and was a Palm Springs legend for decades. Born Lillian Bohny of Swiss immigrant parents in 1903, Dove began her career in the "flickers"- those cheaply made silent movies made in and around Fort Lee, New Jersey in the days before Hollywood became the film capital of the world. At only sixteen, she was selected by master showman Florenz Ziegfeld as one of his showgirls for the legendary 1919 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. Today, showgirls are anonymous Vegas chorines. In 1919, you could not get more famous than Ziegfeld could make you. Dove's beauty was the talk of a jaded New York, which eventually led to offers for more prestigious movies out West, in Hollywood.
Dove spent much of the 1920's as a star of silent movies (The Black Pirate, a 1926 two-strip Technicolor silent with Douglas Fairbanks, was one of her biggest hits; she photographed superbly in the primitive process). She gained great popularity, and eventually married one of her directors, Irving Willat. The advent of talkies affected her career, as it did so many others, not because anything was wrong with her voice- it was fine. But talkies generated a crop of fresh faces for fans to fall in love with, and "The Dove" had been around a while. There was a slow, barely perceptible decline, and then Billie Dove ran afoul of M-G-M and star Marion Davies.
The movie was 1932's Blondie of the Follies, produced by Davies' lover, William Randolph Hearst of Hearst Castle fame. Unbeknownst to the public, Marion's movies were not regular M-G-M movies- they were made by a special company called Cosmopolitan Productions that rented studio space from M-G-M, and they were financed by Hearst. The reason for the arrangement was simple: Hearst was determined that his lady love should be a star, and Davies was considered an uneven, less-than-bankable talent by the studios themselves. Indeed, one of Marion's movies, Five O'Clock Girl, was locked away in studio vaults, never released, so bad that taking a total loss on the picture was considered preferable to the career damage it might have done Davies. (To be fair to Marion, she was a very capable comedienne, with some genuine hits to her credit- it was just that Big Daddy Hearst kept putting her into the romantic costume dramas he liked, and at which Davies was not that good.)
For Blondie of the Follies, Billie Dove was hired to play a second female lead to Davies' starring role. Shooting went very well, with Dove's performance being highly praised by everyone who had witnessed it on the set, or had seen it in rushes. It seems that it was too good- when Blondie premiered on September 1st, 1932, Billie Dove got the shock of her life. Much of her performance was gone, consigned to the cutting-room floor, and what remained had been edited in such a way that Dove's character became unsympathetic. It seemed obvious that Hearst had not wanted anyone outshining Marion Davies on film. Billie made up her mind: if that was how she was going to be treated after eleven years as a star, she wanted no more part of Hollywood. She vowed not to make more films, and with one minor exception, kept her promise. For good measure, she divorced Irving Willat, and began seeing Howard Hughes.
By 1933, her romance with Hughes had run its course, and Dove found a new love- rancher and millionaire Bob Kenaston, who built this month's feature house for their son, Roderick (Dove and Kenaston also had an adopted daughter). Financially very comfortable, the elder Kenastons maintained two houses- they spent summers in Pacific Palisades, and wintered in Palm Springs. The marriage endured for many years, with a few bumps along the way. Dove attempted to return to movies in 1963, with an uncredited bit part in that year's Diamond Head, a movie that didn't do anything for her career, or anyone else's.
After Bob Kenaston's death in 1973, Billie Dove devoted herself full-time to her favorite pursuits- writing poetry and painting. Despite having been retired for decades, her spell endured with the public; she was one of the legendary stars chosen for Life Magazine's February,1980 issue, which told what had become of many stars who had been out of sight for a while. Photographed by famed Vogue alumnus Horst P. Horst, Dove was pictured with one of her own paintings, and a Peter Max "Dove" poster inscribed to her by the artist. Unlike some of the other 1920's and 1930's stars featured in the issue, Dove was absolutely recognizable, and still beautiful at 76.
Her last few years were spent at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California, where she died at age 94, of pneumonia, on December 31st, 1997. She was still getting fan mail right up to the time of her final illness. Marion Davies and Hearst had prevailed on Blondie of the Follies, but it was Billie Dove's beauty and charm that won in the end, still capturing the imagination of audiences six-and-a-half decades after her retirement. That's a star.
SOURCES
The Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com
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