Star Search : Maps at the Ready, Fans Home In on the Rich and Famous

Therese Trachsel was on a walk. Vinnie Cravero was on a roll.

“You need a map to find the stars’ homes,” Cravero said from his perch on a roadside parkway just outside the Beverly Hills city limits.

“I don’t have a car--I came here on the bus,” replied Trachsel, a tourist from Steffisburg, Switzerland. “I don’t think I can see much (by) walking.”

Not so, Cravero countered. Engelbert Humperdinck is just around the corner. Burt Reynolds is up the street. Eva Gabor is just over the hedge.

Unfurling one of his maps, Cravero took out a yellow marker pen and printed a series of dots across Beverly Hills.

“Stan Laurel, Gene Kelly, Carl Reiner,” he said. “Ray Bolger, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood--she died, he moved. Doris Day’s gone to Carmel. Milton Berle, Freeman Gosden, George Burns. Mitzi Gaynor, Ann Miller, Smokey Robinson, Shirley Jones.

“Here’s Lucille Ball’s house. It’s for sale. Here’s President Reagan. He’s been pretty quiet on the Middle East crisis, hasn’t he? Zsa Zsa the criminal is here. She’s got a new perfume--it’s called ‘Conviction.’ You just slap it on.”

Trachsel laughed. “I’ll take it,” she said.

Cravero grinned. He had found the way to another $6 sale in Los Angeles’ most unusual tourist business: star maps.

Rival map makers stationed salesmen and vending machines at more than 350 Hollywood-area locations this summer to dish out guides to visitors eager to glimpse a celebrity--or at least a celebrity’s house.

“I’m hoping to see a star. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t,” said Connie Calorafe of Guttenberg, N.J., who also bought a map after hearing Cravero’s spiel. “I want to see Kirk Douglas and Lucille Ball. She’s selling. But I want to see her.”

Calorafe seemed unaware that Ball died 16 months ago. In fact, the star maps contain hundreds of addresses that are marked with tiny asterisks that indicate that the celebrity is deceased.

“We’re looking for Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson,” said Gina Marin, 23, of Denver. She was sightseeing in a rented convertible with friend Laurie Colangelo, 24, also of Denver. Colangelo was also hoping to see where rock musician Sebastian Bach of the group “Skid Row” lives.

After a few minutes of cruising up and down Rexford, Crescent and Alpine drives past homes listed as those of Lionel Barrymore, Maureen O’Sullivan, Reginald Gardiner and Dick Powell, the pair folded up their map.

“We’re going over to Rodeo Drive to window shop,” Colangelo shrugged.

Star maps have been a fixture in Hollywood since World War I, when silent screen star Mary Pickford is said to have printed up the first one. It listed the addresses of stars who had volunteered with her to serve refreshments to servicemen.

These days, privacy-seeking celebrities are often more anxious to erase their names from maps than add them on.

“Groucho Marx, Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball wanted off, so I took them off my map,” said Al Diamond, one of five map makers competing for the tourist dollar.

Diamond, of Hollywood, hired 17 teen-age boys to sell maps on street corners this summer. He said he receives a steady flow of tips on new star addresses from messengers, pizza deliverymen and his past employees.

Map maker Vivienne Welton, who sells a guide that her father first copyrighted in 1933, said she updates her map four times a year as stars move in and out of neighborhoods.

“I verify my addresses,” said Welton as she sold a map to tourists Anja and Thomas Hendler of Augsburg, West Germany.

“I’ll go knock on a door and ask whoever answers if so and so gives autographed pictures. If it’s the star’s house, they’ll say you have to go through the studios for photos. If the star doesn’t live there, the person will say so.”

Each of the competing maps lists the former homes of dozens of stars. That leads to confusion among tourists--and consternation among the homes’ current owners.

One map suggests that an address on Carolwood Drive in the Holmby Hills area is the residence of both Sonny and Cher and Tony Curtis. In reality, Sonny and Cher have been divorced for years, Curtis lives elsewhere and the listed address is a vacant lot.

In Beverly Hills, homeowner Audrey Appel sees a steady parade of tourists stopping in front of her Elm Drive residence. They are looking for Robert Young, who moved out of the house about 15 years ago but is still listed on tourist maps.

“They knock on the front door, come into the back yard, pick flowers and take pictures of us,” Appel said. “We tried putting up a sign saying ‘Robert Young doesn’t live here,’ but the city made us take it down.”

A few blocks away on Maple Drive, tourists file past actor George Burns’ house, where he lives with his butler and housekeeper--a husband-and-wife team--and their son.

“George has never said anything about it, but I don’t really like it when people stop and stare and take pictures,” said the son, 13-year-old Anthony Dhoore.

“They film me with their VCRs and camcorders. I don’t like being looked at every day. I would never go out and do that. I’d feel weird looking at the homes of stars.”

Most visitors heed the admonishments printed on the maps to “please respect the privacy” of celebrities, however.

When a noisy pair of collies began barking from behind the gate to a Holmby Hills estate listed as belonging to singer Rod Stewart, visitor Franco Bella, 18, of Cagliari, Italy, backed away this week without taking a snapshot as he had planned.

Los Angeles city officials say there is little they can do to control sightseers.

“The celebrity does hold himself up to the public eye,” said Ted Goldstein, a spokesman for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office.

Beverly Hills officials have managed to control map sellers through an ordinance that prohibits solicitation of occupants of passing cars on major streets such as Sunset and Wilshire boulevards. Some less heavily traveled residential streets are excluded from the law.

It’s a safety issue, Effie Cogan, Beverly Hills assistant city attorney, said Friday. “It wasn’t enacted specifically to combat map sellers. . . . The ordinance is constitutional.”

Only one vendor has been cited since the law went into effect about a year ago, Cogan said. He is Freddy Marzouk, who purposefully challenged the ordinance by selling star maps next to Sunset Boulevard. Marzouk was found guilty at the Municipal Court level earlier this year but is appealing his case in Superior Court on Thursday, she said.

But map maker Welton, who lives in Van Nuys, said she carries copies of a 1976 state Supreme Court judgment with her when she sets up her ice chest, folding chair and bags of maps beneath a Carolwood Drive shade tree a few yards north of Sunset Boulevard. She is prepared to show the document to any policeman who confronts her about her outdoor “office,” located in Los Angeles, a few hundred yards west of the Beverly Hills city limits.

The unanimous court decision struck down as unconstitutional a Los Angeles city ordinance that prohibited the sale of star maps and other printed material on sidewalks and parkways. The ruling also overturned a 1975 contempt-of-court citation that carried a 10-day jail sentence for Welton.

A block away on Baroda Drive, map seller Cravero, who lives in Burbank, carries a legal document with him too. It is a notice to appear at a city hearing Sept. 18 to deal with a citation he received five months ago for allegedly blocking a sidewalk with one of his “Star Maps” signs.

“It’ll be dismissed,” Cravero predicted. Then he turned his attention to a more pressing matter: customer Joanah Lopez, 13, of Altus, Okla.

“Here’s Elizabeth Taylor. You see her gate and her window, but she’s a recluse. Madonna is right here. Rob Lowe’s over here,” he said, writing in the address. “Here’s the famous witch’s house. It’s been on that corner for 70 years. You have to see it.”

Joanah’s eyes widen. No, Cravero quickly explained. Real witches never lived there. The old house once served as a movie backdrop.