$5-Million Encino Spread Is Gift Idea Fit for a Duke : $5.5 Million Will Get You an Estate Fit for a Duke
Last year you gave her the Learjet with the Louis Quatorze cabin furniture.
The year before that it was that cunning little island of her own in the French Antilles (the one you had the skywriter “monogram”). The Christmas before that--the year she had Adam--you made her feel so much better about the stretch marks by giving her her weight in diamonds, a perfect carat for every adorable pound.
And then, when you had just about given up hope of finding something to top Christmases past, you discover that the perfect present is for sale right here in the San Fernando Valley.
For $5.5 million (and I just bet they’ll come down), you can buy her a duchy of sorts, the 5 1/2-acre Encino estate once owned by the Duke himself, the late John Wayne.
Actually Wayne, who purchased the wooded estate in 1950, sold it in 1964 to the Ronald Millers (they put in the trash compactor). The Millers--she’s Walt Disney’s older daughter, Diane--were looking for a place to settle down, and Wayne was thrilled that the property was so easy to sell.
The estate, built in 1939, is nice enough , of course, with its guest house and three-tiered garden and pool and screening room and lighted championship tennis courts. Heaven knows, the kids always loved racing their horses around the equestrian ring. And, needless to say, it’s south of the Boulevard (although just barely, if the truth be known).
But when Duke first decided to sell the estate in 1964--shortly after he told reporters gathered at the Encino residence that “I licked the Big C!”--he was afraid it would languish on the market.
‘White Elephant’
As he later explained to biographer Mike Tomkies, author of “Duke,” “I was taking a good hard look at my life, and I realized that, if anything happened to me, leaving that big sprawling place to Pilar wasn’t the best thing I could do for her. It was either worth a hell of a lot to someone who wanted it for seclusion, or it was a big white elephant unless you were making a lot of money, which Pilar wouldn’t be if I went.”
Pilar, of course, was the Duke’s Peruvian-born third wife, mother of the three youngest of his seven children.
The Encino house had been Duke and Pilar’s personal suburban Eden. He proposed there, she accepted there, they flew back from their sunset wedding on a Hawaiian beach to honeymoon there, the kids were babies there. Indeed, on the awful day when Wayne was told by his La Jolla doctors that he had lung cancer, he called Pilar at the house and put off the inevitable revelation by telling her that he didn’t have anything worse than mysterious Valley fever.
In a sense, the house made their marriage possible.
Wayne was still wed to the second Mrs. Duke, the former Esperanza (Chata) Bauer, when he met Pilar, who was also married. Chata was living in the Encino compound with her mother, resisting divorce in stereotypical Latin spitfire fashion, according to several Wayne biographers.
Incriminating Doodles
Wayne had a Valley private investigator put on her trail. It led to a bedside memo pad in the second-floor master suite where the detective found the imprints of incriminating doodles in Chata Wayne’s own hand. As Maurice Zolotow and other Wayne biographers recount, Chata had Nicholas Hilton, heir to the hotel fortune and a one-time Mr. Elizabeth Taylor, as a house guest while Wayne was in Hawaii filming “Big Jim McCain.”
The telltale memo pad bore the name “Esperanza Hilton” 10 times, “Chata Hilton” nine times, “Mrs. Nick Hilton” four times and “Chata and Nick” three times. An apparently heartbroken Wayne testified during the subsequent divorce proceedings that what really hurt was that he had always had a fondness for Chata’s scribblings.
He added: “Only then it was ‘Chata and Duke’ and ‘Mrs. John Wayne’ she doodled.”
Whether it was Chata’s graphological infidelity, or Wayne’s testimony that his response on learning of it was to throw up that turned the trick, Wayne got his divorce and cut a relatively painless financial deal with his outgoing mate.
Quick Thinker
Although Wayne’s biographers disagree on the details of the Duke’s proposal to Pilar, they agree that it took place in Encino. In “Shooting Star,” Zolotow describes a candlelit dinner in the Colonial-style main house in February, 1954. The pair were enjoying rare roast beef and a bottle of Chateau Latour ’47 when Wayne said, “Pilar, you know how I feel about you. I want you to marry me. Will you?”
“I’ll have to think it over,” she answered. Apparently a quick thinker, she promptly added, “I have thought it over. The answer is yes.”
Wayne’s butler, J. Hampton Scott, then popped the cork on an optimistically pre-chilled bottle of Dom Perignon. According to Zolotow, Wayne then offered to sell the estate he had bought to share with Chata if Pilar didn’t think she could be happy there. Biographer Tomkies writes that Wayne made the thoughtful offer not at the table but while the pair were enjoying the view of the grounds from the driveway. In either case, Pilar assured her future spouse, “I could be very happy here with you.”
As the new mistress of the manse, Pilar redecorated, then invited a priest to the house to bless each of its refurbished rooms. According to Zolotow, the cleric gasped at the Duke-sized master bedroom.
Wayne was in Japan, filming the epic John Huston flop “The Geisha and the Barbarian,” in January, 1958, when the Encino house caught fire. Pilar was awakened at 3 in the morning by the barking of the family dachshund, Blackie. She fled, carrying two of Wayne’s favorite things, his 22-month-old daughter Aissa and the vintage Cavalry hat he wore in “Red River” and other Westerns. Assured that his family was safe, Wayne sent his wife a check with a puckish note: “For the girl who really has nothing to wear.”
The house suffered about $75,000 worth of damage, apparently exacerbated by the fact that Pilar had opened the windows of the smoke-filled upper rooms before she ran to safety. Like her husband, she responded playfully to the near-disaster. As Zolotow recounts, Wayne was awakened in his Japanese hotel by a telegram that read, “HOW DO YOU LIKE ONE-STORY HOUSES?”
Pilar nursed Wayne at the Encino house after his left lung was removed in 1964.
But people’s lives change and suddenly their houses don’t fit anymore.
Wayne’s cancer led to personal reappraisal. He licked his five-pack-a-day cigarette habit. With his box-office clout as well as his health in decline, he may have sensed that the estate would be a painful reminder of the past, best time. When he surveyed his land from the driveway, he no longer saw the perfect backdrop for his destiny.
“We should completely reorganize our lives,” he told his wife one night at dinner. “Let’s make a fresh start.” They sold the Valley estate to the Millers and later settled into a house with a view of the ocean in Newport Beach. The couple separated in 1973. Wayne died of cancer in 1979. Pilar still lives in Newport Beach.
Anticipating that leaving the Encino estate would wrench Pilar, Wayne secretly arranged to have the movers empty the house while the family was staying--not yet permanently, Pilar thought--in Newport Beach. Biographer Tomkies reports her observing afterward: “I’m glad he did it that way, painlessly, because, if I’d gone back to Encino then, the sight of the place would have brought back so many good memories that I would probably have changed my mind and never left.”
OK, so you may not be able to fill the Duke’s boots. But for $5.5 million you can definitely follow in his footsteps.
