A True-to-Life Version of ‘Down and Out in Beverly Hills’ : Downtrodden Woman Evicted From $1-Million Rodeo Drive Fixer-Upper Tries to Start Anew

Down and out? I think she’s very high to be honest with you. She really has the joy of life, the love of God and the love of her neighbor.

--Msgr. Peter Healy, pastor of Good Shepherd Catholic Church, describing Frances Hipp, one of his parishioners who was homeless in a Beverly Hills alley until she was taken in by a wealthy family.

It was Frances Hipp’s third night of being down-but-not-out-of Beverly Hills. After owning a home on chic North Rodeo Drive for 25 years--in the city’s high-priced “flats” not far from such celebrity neighbors as Fred Astaire, Mervin LeRoy and Gene Kelly--she had been evicted. Foreclosed. Thrown out of the fixer-upper she bought in 1957 for $47,000 in cash and never fixed up.

Appeared to Have Been Mugged

But on this cold January evening in 1983, Hipp herself became the fixer-upper. She doesn’t recall exactly what happened, but by morning she appeared to have been mugged. She was found lying face down and covered with blood, not far from what had been her home, a property presently valued at about $1 million even in its dilapidated state.

Suddenly, Hipp--a strong, devil-may-care type who had worked as a military transport ship stewardess, chauffeur, department store saleslady and movie extra appearing in scenes with Elvis Presley and Liza Minnelli--was in need of as much repair as her old house.

How does an independent woman who’s managed to buy a home on Rodeo Drive with her life’s savings and then reside there for 25 years find herself literally in the gutter?

According to Hipp, whose husband was killed in an explosion shortly after they were married, she had faced an extended series of emotional and financial misfortunes over several years: the death of her parents, taking out a $75,000 first mortgage to pay overdue bills and then being unable to keep up with the payments, the sudden disappearance of her only child and, finally, a wide assortment of rotten advice.

Faced with foreclosure and barely enough money to feed herself, she concluded the street was the only place to live. She claims she never even considered moving to a shelter for the homeless, reasoning that if she left her neighborhood she’d never regain possession of her home.

So she stuffed a few belongings into the shopping cart she’d taken to pushing around the neighborhood after her BMW conked out. And, becoming the closest thing to a roving squatter, she began circling her block with the cart and her only companion, an Irish setter named Ginger.

Now 66, Hipp remembers much from those frightening nights of January, 1983, in detail as chilling as their late-evening temperatures. Now relaxing in one of the lavishly appointed living rooms at the home of the family that rescued her, she is remarkably unemotional, recalling her experiences in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner.

‘You Just Keep Walking’

“You’re walking until 2 or 3 in the morning to keep going. You just keep walking around the block all night long,” she said in a close approximation of the Queen’s English, explaining that she was born in Victoria, British Columbia, before her family moved to San Francisco when she was 6.

“You knew how to open the gate of one of the neighbors’ yards,” she continued. “You slept on the concrete inside. To my good fortune, my neighbor was in New York. You could use the portable toilet they had there for the construction workers. But you had to be up and gone before 6 because you didn’t want them to see you.”

Dressed in a well-worn Fila jogging suit donated by yet another concerned neighbor, Hipp repeatedly refers to herself indirectly, speaking of her time on the streets almost exclusively in the second person.

“You feel like there is no tomorrow. The despair is terrible. The loneliness is overwhelming. You’re walking around in old blue jeans and bare feet. You can’t go home because you don’t have a home. There is no place to go.

”. . . I knew that at 10 o’clock at night, Smith’s Food King on Beverly Drive reduced the price of their roasted chickens. They knew about the food stamps I was on. And they allowed me to use their baskets. I would also drop by Nate ‘n’ Al’s and get two little tubs of salad and an onion roll and share it with Ginger,” she said, sipping from a dirty plastic glass containing coffee and vodka, a glass that’s almost always by her side.

She explained her drinking as a matter of “constant sipping. Cigarettes and alcohol have been the only way I’ve been a taxpayer in the last eight years. Vodka is the least harmful (hard) liquor, according to my late husband who was a doctor. I’m not a person who belts down drinks two or three at a time. I pretty well hit a certain plateau. It’s to keep my anger down. Otherwise you would go mad with anger if you’ve suffered the indignities I have.”

Hipp is a little foggy as she tries to recall how she was mugged, but Poppy Paulos, the 37-year-old woman who rescued her, clearly recalls the events of the following morning.

“About 7 o’clock, I heard the sirens in the street,” Paulos said, sitting near Hipp in the auxiliary living room of her home, which was once owned by Greta Garbo. “I was one of the few people who knew Frances was living in the alley, because she’d asked us for real estate advice. I went running out, thinking it might be Frances. I saw her lying face down in the street, bleeding profusely from the back of the head.

“The paramedics wanted to know who she was and I told them that she actually lived in Beverly Hills, but unfortunately she had been evicted from her house, wrongfully so. Obviously something had happened to her in the alley.

”. . . They wanted to take her to County USC-Medical Center because she had no money. She begged me, ‘Please, don’t let them take me there. If they take me there I’ll never see my home again.’ We were afraid it was still possible to commit people (to a mental institution) if you thought they were not all together. So I said, ‘Let me be responsible for her.’ ”

Thus began a remarkably similar, true-life version of the film “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” which appeared in movie theaters three years later and was based on the Rene Fauchois play, “Boudu Saved From Drowning.”

Hipp’s wounds turned out to be superficial and in no time the Paulos’ housekeeper had bathed and cleaned up their new guest, who now was lodged in the cabana next to the pool. Although Paulos decided not to tell her husband, Fred, about Hipp’s arrival (“Finally I heard screaming going on in the next room and I realized he’d learned the news”) she did let the family’s children in on the secret right from the start. When Tom, then 15, first saw Hipp, he did not hide his shock: “She’s going to give our dogs fleas.”

The line is almost identical to one that appeared in Paul Mazursky’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.” The assorted similarities, coincidences and ironies do not stop there. Just as Nick Nolte, the film’s bum, arrived with a dog at a home inhabited by a pure-bred, if neurotic, pooch, Hipp and Ginger, the Irish setter, moved into a home dedicated to raising championship show dogs.

(Bette Midler and Richard Dreyfuss’ Scottish border collie Matisse may have needed a psychiatrist, but the Paulos’ dogs have had the best trainers, handlers and groomers from birth. As Poppy Paulos describes the situation, “I have thought about getting a psychiatrist for the dogs, but we haven’t had to.”)

Like Nolte’s Jerry, Hipp is an articulate, street-smart and increasingly likable individual. She attended college (UC Berkeley) but dropped out in her freshman year due to illness and never returned. Instead, she says she held an assortment of adventurous jobs, including chauffeuring three-star generals around the Bay Area, crossing the Pacific 16 times as a military transport ship stewardess and helping actress Agnes Moorehead teach drama to youngsters.

Recalling her adventures, she proves herself an entertaining if windy storyteller. (A brief sample: “On board the ship, we used to put on skits to entertain the passengers. I played a mermaid one time and I didn’t flop. I had to wear this green-sequined costume, the most gorgeous thing you ever saw, and while I had it on, they had a fire and boat drill. What you are you going to do when you’re in a fish tail?”)

Hipp says she met her husband, whom she recalls fondly and whose military medals are pinned to her clothes, on one of those sailings. As for their son, all she will say about him is that she did see him briefly recently, on the street. “We’re divorced. As far as I’m concerned right now, our association is over.”

But 61-year-old Fred Paulos didn’t get to hear any of Hipp’s woes or her playful recollections until several days after she moved in. Like “Down and Out’s” Dave Whiteman, played by Richard Dreyfuss, Paulos is a self-made millionaire. (Dave was into coat hangers; Fred grew up in East L.A. and now owns more than 500 apartment units in the Mid-Wilshire and Hollywood areas.)

Car Used in Film

In addition to leaving household management duties largely to their wives and housekeepers, both Fred and Dave also drove the same car--the very same 1973 classic Rolls Corniche convertible. (Without knowing what it was going to be used for, the Pauloses rented their prized Rolls to “Down and Out’s” production company and were later astonished to find it in a film about a couple who save a bum from the streets. Not only did Nolte, as the charming vagabond, ride in the Rolls, but so did Hipp, especially when she had to show up at court.)

Her court appearances--which after a six-month stay at the Pauloses finally enabled Hipp to resume living in her own house--were hastened by Fred. He readily admits he was not pleased by Hipp’s presence in his household and did everything he could to swiftly straighten out her legal and financial problems.

“I never worked so hard to get a problem solved in my life,” he said, adding that Hipp’s legal difficulties are still far from over.

Like many of the events surrounding Hipp’s financial misfortunes, eviction and subsequent homelessness, her fight for her house has been so twisted and Byzantine that after more than eight years before the courts, the matter has still not been finally decided.

Prior to her eviction, Hipp had attempted to sell her house to two separate buyers, both of whom have since laid claim to the property. According to attorney Al Kaufer, a partner with Nossaman, Guthner, Knox & Elliott , who has provided pro bono consultation on Hipp’s case, it’s still not clear who will wind up with the house.

As Kaufer explained, “Fred is a client of mine. He mentioned to me that this poor, old lady had this problem with real estate that she owned. It sounded all very confusing to him and to me. It happens to be my area of specialty.”

In short, Kaufer talked with the attorneys of all three parties who claimed a right to the house, including an attorney who has been working for Hipp on a contingency basis. Because no agreements were reached, the case went to trial, but was then reversed on appeal. As Kaufer put it, “It’s now going back to trial again and we’re trying to structure another settlement.”

At one point, attorneys were urging Hipp to testify that she was mentally incompetent when she agreed to sell her home to two separate individuals. But she would have none of that.

“There’s no doubt I was emotionally distraught,” she said of the time leading up to and including her nights on the streets. “They wanted me to say I was incapacitated, that I actually needed a conservator. To begin with, it would be perjury. I’m not going to say that.”

Whatever happens, Poppy Paulos is convinced her family has already been vastly rewarded by what it has learned from Hipp. For just as in the film Jerry the bum enriched the lives of the Whiteman household in strange and wondrous ways, Poppy feels that Hipp has touched each member of her family a little differently.

Especially 9-year-old Nicholas, whom Hipp wound up walking to school every day. When a fire occurred in Hipp’s home (after she’d moved back in) and she came to stay with the Paulos’ again, their pool area was being remodeled and the cabana was unavailable. So Nicholas volunteered his miniature log cabin for her stay and later helped Hipp tidy up her further damaged house.

“She had these mice living in her house. They ate all her food up,” he said. “So one day I bought some mouse traps and set them off. We got three the first night. . . . She also taught me a lot about nature. We planted a Victory garden.”

Added Poppy, “Some of my friends thought it was terrible that I allowed Frances to walk Nicholas to school, but I felt Nicholas could only benefit from being around her. I feel Nicholas has a big heart and Frances is responsible for that.”

‘Great Conversational Tool’

In 18-year-old Tom’s view, Hipp is “a great person and her aesthetics are kind of strange. But she’s considerably better dressed now. I like Frances but I’m not thrilled when I see her because I know she’ll talk to me as long as possible. Honestly, I don’t think she’s benefited us other than we’ve had a great conversational tool. Every person who comes into this house hears about Frances.”

Fred has similarly mixed feelings about Hipp. And he points out that the virtual overnight psychological transformation of “Down and Out’s” Jerry did not occur in the real-life scenario he witnessed. “She’s not your energetic working stiff. She doesn’t do so much as rinse a tea cup,” he said, allowing that Hipp was not required to help around the house. “But you know, because Poppy has organized the whole neighborhood to help her, there are now neighborhood parties, which we never did before here. In this neighborhood, everyone was sort of aloof. But now everybody knows everybody. . . . When we first got involved with Frances, people thought of her as a leper, a subhuman person.”

Noted Poppy, “Now they treat her with a lot more respect. We didn’t try to change Frances. We try to accept her as she is.”

Indeed, Hipp has become something of a local celebrity. Now it’s not just Monsignor Healy who’s known to stuff a $20 in her pocket. More than $1,000 in cash was collected by Poppy to aid Hipp.

Two young women who jog by Hipp’s home every day have begun taking her new Irish setter, Big Red, with them while they run (Ginger died). The two work at the Elizabeth Arden salon and have offered Hipp a complimentary day of beauty treatment, but she’s steadfastly refused.

In addition, at Christmastime, baskets for Hipp repeatedly appeared on her doorstep, delivered by a wide variety of her admirers.

Even the mayor of Beverly Hills has become involved, and helped make it possible for Hipp to cut through some red tape when she was moving back into her home after the fire. Said Mayor Charlotte Spadaro, a friend of Poppy’s, “I’m certainly sympathetic to her cause. I would like to be helpful if I can in this case.”

As for Hipp, she’s certainly doing better but remains a long way from many people’s notions of peaceful living and contentment. Though she’s back in her home, it’s not heated and many of the windows are broken. She routinely wears several layers of clothes inside and sleeps sitting up in a chair, wrapped in an electric blanket.

A small television plays almost 24 hours a day. Out in the front yard are parked permanent reminders of her rather precarious existence: two rusted shopping carts and a small wagon.

It’s hard to tell if she’s really happy. But there’s no doubt that she’s overwhelmingly grateful to the Paulos family and loves that she’s still included at their dinner table and at their parties even though she no longer resides with them.

‘She’s My Buddy’

Steve Fuller, a “roof artist” who’s putting a custom-designed, wood-shingle roof on the house next door, has gotten to know Hipp well during the last few months. He contends she’s a genuinely joyful individual.

“She’s a good lady. She’s my buddy,” he said, borrowing a cigarette from Hipp. “We chat for hours. She can tell you everything that’s happened on the whole block for the last 40 years. She’s a happy person. You can’t break her spirit with the conditions she’s been living in.”

Apparently not. It may also prove next to impossible to get her to move away from those conditions, if that is eventually decreed by the courts. As she puts it, “I’m going to sit on my property. Everything I have in the whole world is tied up in this property.”