TOURISM : She’s Mapped Out an Astronomic Career

If you’ve come to Los Angeles in search of Richard Gere, then Betty Merjil can’t help you. “We don’t have him,” she said. “My sister’s coming down to visit from Vegas, and she wants to find him, but there’s nothing I can do.”

But if you’re looking for Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas or, perchance, Barry Manilow, then Merjil is your woman. Johnny Carson? Roseanne Arnold? Buddy Hackett? With barely a second thought, she can have you on their doorsteps.

It isn’t that Merjil is so tight with all those folks. In fact, she’s never met any of them. But she is among the world’s leading authorities on where Hollywood celebrities live. The 62-year-old great-grandmother is the unofficial (and unheralded) dean of the city’s “star map” vendors.

Merjil has spent most of the last 15 years standing on the same street corner, hawking the guides, which list the addresses of movie stars, TV personalities and a wide array of entertainers past and present. Then again, it’s a pretty nice corner, a lush, green intersection in Holmby Hills, on North Mapleton Drive--just north of Sunset Boulevard and a stone’s throw from Casey Kasem’s place and a couple of blocks north of Aaron Spelling’s mansion.

In a way, she inherited the family business. Before Merjil took over the post in 1979, her mother, Frances Ward, worked the same spot for a quarter of a century.

“I don’t come out like I used to if it’s rainy and cold,” Merjil said. “But almost every day, I’ll be here. I love it.”

For $6 (plus tax), Merjil sells what is labeled “a guide to Starland estates and mansions, a fascinating trip through Movieland.” The guide, updated quarterly to account for the fluctuations of celebrity geography, shows areas of Bel-Air, Beverly Hills and Holmby Hills, and lists the addresses of more than 200 living and deceased stars, from Jack Nicholson and Lou Costello to Henry Mancini and Helen Reddy.

What’s new on the map?

“Well,” Merjil said one recent afternoon, reviewing one of her maps, “we’ve got Sylvester Stallone on Beverly Drive. Frank Sinatra is back with us--he bought the house from Mel Brooks. Tom Cruise is on Beverly Glen. And one more. Rod Stewart up on Laurel Way.”

The other news in the star-map industry is that business is off. Merjil can’t remember it being worse. “It started to slip off in ’91 after the riots,” she said. “We thought it would pick up after that, but you know, it really hasn’t.”

Merjil and other vendors speculate that the proliferation of private van tours may be contributing to the dearth of buyers for the maps. A 10-map day is a good showing for Merjil. “But yesterday,” she said one recent day, “I came out and sold one map. And on Saturday I sold four. That’s bad for a weekend.”

Merjil buys the maps from Vivian Welton of Van Nuys, whose father, Wesley G. Lake, started publishing the guides in 1936. Welton, who occasionally hawks the maps herself, is perplexed by the slow sales.

“I guess it’s the recession mostly,” she said. “And, of course, people hear about the crime and everything. It’s been awfully slow.”

You might think that someone who carries around the addresses of Elizabeth Taylor and Steven Spielberg would spend her spare time dining at Spago or carousing at Bel-Air cocktail parties. But Merjil’s work is hardly glamorous. Mostly, it involves long hours waiting in her Dodge van for motorists to show some curiosity.

To pass the time, she writes letters and reads People magazine and the National Enquirer. But there are occasional perks. Merjil has had her share of brushes with fame. Peter Falk once asked her for an address. Faye Dunaway once stopped to chat. “Pia Zadora did a whole thing in her white limousine,” Merjil recalled. “She gave me a nice autographed photo of herself. Color, too--not black and white.”

Still, Merjil says, she’ll never top her mother, who regularly had chats with Elvis Presley. (The King owned a home around the corner from the vendor’s outpost.) “He called her ‘Sunset Annie,’ ” she said. “He’d come by here all the time and talk to her.”

All the map vendors have their own stories about celebrity encounters. Welton once sold a map to Marilyn Monroe--but didn’t realize it was the movie star until someone pointed it out months later. Bill Divine, who sells Welton’s maps a few blocks east of Merjil, laughs when he remembers the time he met Jay Leno.

“A bunch of customers had stopped. He drove up and yelled: ‘Help me, I’m lost! I can’t find my house!’ ” recalled Divine, who works around the corner (according to the map) from Barbra Streisand’s spread and Walt Disney’s last home.

The map vendors need a Los Angeles business license and must stake out their own sales spot. On a couple of occasions, Welton has had to defend her turf from interlopers.

“We just stood in front of them and gave our maps for free, so they didn’t last long,” she said. “We’ve worked too hard to have someone come and take our business away.”

Surprisingly, few celebrities stop the vendors to complain about their listings on the maps. That may be because the maps bear an admonition of the sort that might show up at a national park or a zoo: “Please Do Not Disturb the Celebrities.”

And Merjil discourages harassment. “We tell people just to drive by,” she said. “Don’t climb the fences, don’t stop. Take a picture, enjoy and keep going. That’s what tourists are supposed to do.”

She says there’s nothing she’d rather do. She loves the work and the contact with people.

“So many people are so disappointed in so many things when they visit Los Angeles,” she said. “So if I can make it a little more pleasant and happy for them, then I feel good.”

How long will she hold out?

Her mother worked the corner until she was 72, and Merjil plans to keep working for a few years. But she has big plans for her retirement.

“My dream is to travel to Memphis,” she says. “I want to visit Graceland.”