Celebrities Have No Off-Season for Moving
If you thought the moving season is over, think again.
With the beginning of school, the peak relocation time for people with children is at an end, but Hollywood folks move a lot all year ‘round.
And the word from Tammy Nason --whose family has owned Beverly Hills Transfer & Storage for 68 years--is that the moving season for many celebrities is just starting.
“I think we do more moving of celebrities during the off-months, starting now,” she said, adding, “of course, most of those we move do not have kids.”
From his Pasadena office, Lee Waters, who owns Lyon Moving & Storage, said, “Most people, whether they are celebrities or not, have to move in the summer if they have children. In this industry, we do 60% of our volume during the 100 days of summer.”
During the rest of the year, though, celebrities move more than other people, movers agreed. As actress Brenda Vaccaro sees it, “People in show business tend to be Gypsy-like.”
Why? The nature of their business? Celebrities aren’t 9-to-5ers. They rarely get gold watches for 25 years on the same job. Few entertainment jobs last that long. Then, too, people in show business tend to be creative, restless souls.
Mike Koven, a self-described “relocation engineer” in the Los Angeles office of Bekins Moving & Storage, suggested another reason celebrities move so much: “They redecorate and refurnish their homes so frequently that they often put their personal possessions into storage and move to temporary addresses for three to six months.”
An average homeowner might put the living room furniture in the back yard while painting the walls, then move everything back into the house the same day, he said, “but a celebrity is more apt to rent a house somewhere else, such as in Malibu, while they send the upholstered furniture from the home they own, say in Bel-Air, out to be re-covered.”
Celebrities also move back and forth from Los Angeles to New York so often, he’s noticed during his 18 years with Bekins, “that we could offer a shuttle service.”
Actor Paul Newman is typical of this bi-coastal type. He moves 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of personal goods every year to and from his homes in Connecticut and Malibu with Beverly Hills Transfer & Storage.
Moving goods isn’t all most moving companies do, though, especially for those who can afford it. “It is possible to go through a relocation without lifting a finger, with us doing everything, from A to Z, putting away makeup in a vanity and hanging up clothes in a closet,” Koven said.
The thing actress Vaccaro hates most about moving is unwrapping her collections of fine china and crystal. “It drives me crazy,” she said. “It’s like opening a Christmas present you can’t get to, so I have his (Koven’s) men do it.”
Moving costs range, Koven estimated, from $250 to $120,000, “depending on the extent of the services--how big the home is and how much the client wants to put into the move in terms of sweat.”
Unusual Requests
Some of the services requested by celebrities can be as unusual as the customers themselves.
Like Whoopi Goldberg’s. Since she had Nason’s company transfer her belongings about a year ago from the Hollywood Hills to Malibu, the comedienne has asked the firm to move antiques from small towns all over the United States to her beach home. “She collects Art Deco and out-of-ordinary pieces like a pair of lamps that look like cow udders,” Nason said.
A famous woman singer, whom Waters of Lyon Moving & Storage declined to name, had four grand pianos moved from her old home in Woodland Hills to her new one in Bel-Air.
Then there was the woman who asked Bekins movers to line drawers for her sterling silver. “And I had another customer who spent several thousand dollars last year to have us put Lucite hangers in her new Beverly Hills home,” Koven said.
Six-Month Move
When he arranged the move of game show producer Chuck Barris’ collection of 200-300 hats, each hat had to be individually boxed.
Michael Caine asked Koven to plan a move that took six months and three 20-foot-long containers when the actor and his wife relocated from a postwar house on a hilltop over Beverly Hills to a 300-year-old home just outside London.
Why did the move take so long? “They didn’t want to empty their Beverly Hills house all at once, because they felt it showed better to prospective buyers with some furnishings in it.”
Publisher Rupert Murdoch’s move from the East to Beverly Hills took even longer--nine months, Nason said, and it involved many truckloads of furnishings.
Michael Jackson’s Move
By comparison, next spring, singer Michael Jackson probably will send only one truckload to the Santa Ynez ranch he bought a few months ago, she said, because he plans to keep his other home in Encino.
Another order took less than one truckload, but what an order! It was requested by a well-known fellow Koven would only identify as “a TV action figure.”
“He didn’t want his mother to have to go shopping,” he remembered, “so he shipped 30 bags of groceries, including paper towels and cleaning supplies, from his condo in L.A. to her house in Lake Forest, Ill.”
