HOLLYWOOD TOURS FEATURE A TOUCH OF CRASS

Are you one of the inquiring minds that simply must know the location of the house where ‘30s semi-starlet Lupe Velez died with her head in the toilet? If the answer is yes, then “It Happened in Hollywood . . . the Tour Inc.” awaits your call.

Conceived by Steven Vaught, a former political aide who left Texas in 1983 “to start a new life in California,” Hollywood Tours takes the intrepid sleazehound on a trip through the seamy side of Tinseltown. Highlights of this lowlife junket include the seedy apartment where Bela Lugosi died, the even seedier apartment where President Reagan once lived, and many stately mansions that look as though the grounds are maintained with manicure kits. (Rich people do naughty things too, you know.)

Commencing operations last June and relying on word of mouth as its only publicity, this burgeoning enterprise stands as living proof of the fact that bad taste is timeless. The basic Hollywood Tours route, at $35 a head, comes in a two- or four-hour version and focuses on the lurid tales of debauchery that Kenneth Anger dredged up for his underground literary classic, “Hollywood Babylon.”

“It seems that the more scandalous a story is, the more people like it,” Vaught observes. “The most popular spot on the tour is the house on Normandie where Albert Dekker hanged himself. People like it because it’s so bizarre. (If you want the unbelievably weird details, you’ll have to take the tour.)

“What these stories mean to people is their own business, but we certainly don’t intend to degrade any of the people involved. Hollywood is many different things, and we try to show a side of it that isn’t seen too often.”

The trashy gossip factor is not the only novelty Hollywood Tours has up its sleeve. It also offers a VIP tour (at $55 per person) that is conducted in a stretch limousine stocked with champagne, a Haunted Tour starting at the stroke of midnight and a custom service that allows the client to design his own tour. Given a few days to research your request, Vaught will develop a tour around a single star, a single movie, your favorite Raymond Chandler novel or anything connected with the history of Southern California that strikes your fancy.

“I’ve always been interested in old Hollywood, but I wasn’t obsessed with movies as I was growing up and I see myself as a historian rather than a film buff,” Vaught says. “I used to research this stuff for my own amusement and never dreamed it would turn into a business. People seem to be primarily interested in the luxury aspect of the limousine tour, but I wish our clients would challenge us more as far as requesting custom tours. So far, our clientele has been primarily local industry people, so I’m surprised we haven’t had more requests for special tours.”

One wonders how credible Hollywood Tours information is.

“I do most of the research myself and spend anywhere from three days to three weeks working on a new tour,” Vaught explains. “In verifying the information, I deal with each item differently. If something is printed in an authorized book, then we assume it’s true. If someone tells me something on the street, I’ll often go to great lengths in trying to verify it. Of course, you inevitably encounter people with versions of a story that differ from yours.

“The lady who now owns the Lupe Velez house, for instance, is not too thrilled with the Velez story. She’s lived in the house since 1948 and tells me that when she was a little girl, a policeman told her that no, Lupe didn’t die with her head in the toilet. This lady once admitted to me, however, that maybe the policeman was just trying to spare her feelings.”

Regardless of one’s taste for trash, anyone with an interest in local history can learn a thing or two from Vaught’s tours. The trek begins at company headquarters, behind the Berwin Center on Sunset Boulevard in a bungalow where Clark Gable once lived. Conducting roughly half a dozen tours a week, the company employs a dozen guides, most of whom also work for Universal Studios Tours. However, Vaught, with his boundless store of information about Southern California and great affection for the place, is the star guide.

Painting a verbal portrait of Hollywood as a lawless frontier town where the sun never set and the air was perfumed with the scent of orange blossoms, he does an excellent job of conveying the spirit of the times that spawned Hollywood Tours. Wending its way from Hollywood through Benedict Canyon and Beverly Hills, the tour travels through such magical little neighborhoods tucked away in the hills as Whitley Heights and Laughton Place, location of the Cecil B. De Mille house. Though unoccupied for 26 years, this sprawling California ranch-style residence is maintained as though the great man himself might reappear any moment. The calendar page is turned daily and De Mille’s tobacco humidor is kept freshly stocked. The tour is as much a lesson in evolving architectural styles as it is in Hollywood gossip, and first-rate examples of classic trends in Southern California architecture abound.

Vaught explains the company’s weekends-only Haunted Tour as “a bit more playful. It deals with rumors and ghost stories that have grown up around various spots in Hollywood.”

If grisly stories are to your liking, however, you needn’t necessarily resort to the Haunted Tour, as a number of terrifying tales are included on the regular route. One of them involves the Tate House on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, scene of the infamous Manson slayings--an incident that Vaught feels marked a turning point in the public’s appetite for tawdry tales from Lotusland. (This will come as news to the National Enquirer.)

“Our tour deals with classic Hollywood scandals and most of them are funny in that they reveal these supposedly glamorous stars to have been painfully human people who engineered their own downfalls. That certainly was not the case with the Manson thing. And yet--perhaps because it shows us that reality sometimes takes a really mean turn in the lives of the beautiful people--people do want to see the house on Cielo Drive. There’s really no access up that driveway, which is filled with dirt and parked cars, and I was told the house was torn down because no one would buy it.”

The Tate house is one of the few relatively contemporary sites included on the tour, despite the fact that the stars of 1986 certainly indulge in all the vices that put celebrities of the past on Vaught’s tour map. What has changed, perhaps, is the public’s capacity to be scandalized, and the fact that the star moniker seems a bit easier to come by these days.

“TV has put an end to the era of mythical stars,” Vaught laments. “Because of mass communications, we know so much about the stars of today that it’s kind of hard to put them up on a pedestal.

“The stars of Hollywood’s golden period were different somehow, and the ‘30s and ‘40s were filled with scandal because it was a time when people who’d been dirt poor suddenly became rich. They were treated like royalty and thought they could get away with anything. That kind of money, freedom and adulation wreaked havoc in many stars’ lives--as it continues to do today. Nine out of 10 stars handle their fame quite well, but some just can’t deal with it. And it’s the bad apples in the barrel that put us in business.”