At the End of It All

Vanessa Brown lives in a small house on Mulholland Drive with an amazing view of the San Fernando Valley.

When the weather’s clear, as it was this day, you can see past the flattened neighborhoods of Van Nuys all the way to the Santa Susana Mountains.

The house itself is an untidy mess, the way Vanessa’s life is at the moment, with papers and boxes and collections of things stacked on every available space.

Part of it has to do with a book she’s writing and some of it with seminars she’s trying to arrange for people working at the wrong jobs. The rest of it consists of just things.

Vanessa has lived in the place for 35 years and would like to remain there the rest of her days. At 66 and with two operations for cancer, she’s not sure how many days that might involve.

But there’s a problem more immediate than either age or illness jeopardizing her stay. The house is on the market as part of a divorce settlement. If it sells, she said the other day, she’s out on the street.

In fact, she’s already got her ’77 station wagon packed and plans to live in it if she has to. The back makes into a bed.

She leaves no doubt, however, that the house on Mulholland, with its spectacular view and its incredible mess, is where she wants to be.

I don’t blame her. The street is no place for a leading lady.

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Vanessa’s plight came to me through, of all things, a press release. She sent it out to nine different news organizations, including ours, announcing that the forced sale of her house was going to leave her homeless, promising “more updates as the fight steams up.”

A press release bearing her name is nothing new. She was one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies in 26 pretty good movies 40 years ago, and starred in “The Seven Year Itch” on Broadway in the early 1950s.

Photographs of her on the cover of Life and Cosmopolitan magazines reveal an elegant, dark-eyed beauty with the kind of body that rates a second look. But she was no bimbo.

In her childhood, she was one of radio’s laser-bright Quiz Kids and later worked as a reporter for the Voice of America. Her education includes a degree from UCLA.

In the days of her stardom, news releases were not an unfamiliar method of communicating with the press. But Vanessa Brown isn’t a headliner anymore. She’ll do a bit part now and again for television, but her theatrical career is mostly over. Even if it weren’t, a release relating to a custody battle over a house is something of a first even by Hollywood standards.

She issued it, she says, as a last resort to save the place they may one day have to drag her from.

After the court ordered its sale, she warned 25 potential buyers who came to look it over that she’d sue anyone who even made an offer on it, and that scared them all away.

So now she sits there in a flowered muumuu, like an angry goddess in a bad movie, daring fate to haul her away.

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This all comes about as a result of her divorce four years ago from Mark Sandrich Jr., a television producer-director and member of a well-known show-biz family. He left her, she says, and married one of her best friends.

I tried to talk to him about it, but all he’d say was she’s loose in the head. Vanessa insists that he’s the one who needs help, but I’m not going to play psychiatrist. It’s impossible to tell in this town who’s crazy and who isn’t. I’m not even sure about me.

The bottom line of all this is that there’s a court hearing coming up to determine whether or not the house will be sold. If it is, Vanessa says, she won’t get any money from it because it will all go to lawyers.

She’ll be left to live on Social Security and a show-biz pension. That’s about $1,200 a month; not enough, she says, to keep her off the street.

I don’t know if it is or isn’t. Vanessa Brown may be playing a role here, the way she did a long time ago when she was a star and her marriage was strong.

The reality is, hers was one of about 40,000 divorces that take place every year in L.A. County, and it has ended up as messy as the house she’s trying to save. That’s not a new occurrence in a society that’s traded love for relationships, but it’s still a sad way for a star to fall. No press release will ever change that.