The Decline and Fiery Fall of a ‘Palace’

Both were created as monuments to love: one in a faraway land, the other in Southern California. Yet the Taj Mahal in India and the Egyptian Palace in Culver City had different fates.

One, built as a jeweled paean to romance by a Muslim ruler for his dead queen, was to become one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The other, constructed by a Chicago racetrack owner and oil tycoon reportedly for a young Egyptian princess, was lost in ignominy, turned into a gambling den and bordello in the years after its intended lady died en route to her California castle.

So the story goes. But the truth of a Culver City landmark and the Chicago man who built it is less romantic.

The saga of the Egyptian Palace--the neighbors called it that in spite of its Asian lines--spanned almost half a century and is just as much a mystery as the man who built it.

In the early 1920s, track owner Harry “Curly” Brown built the 20-room mansion at 9530 Lucerne Ave., where an apartment complex stands today. Brown was a man of legendary appetites and, by all accounts, his house was as ambitious and opulent as his tastes.

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King Tut’s tomb had just been opened in 1922, and the discovery influenced art and style the world over. Brown’s palace had life-sized copies of Egyptian tomb guardians flanking the leaded glass front doors, whose real gold locks opened onto the pink marble interior. Tapestries and carvings ornamented the house, and a mural of nudes adorned the ceiling of the master bedroom.

In the days before the state of the environment was a public concern, Brown dammed Ballona Creek for a backyard lake. A round swimming pool, 8 feet deep, lay only steps from the master bedroom.

Brown’s wife and children never lived in the house, and after his “princess” reportedly died, he rarely slept in the Egyptian Palace at all. Wherever he slept, he didn’t often sleep alone, by all indications. In the late 1920s, he took up with a Utah banker’s 16-year-old daughter.

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And for three years he was on the lam, pursued by federal agents for violating the Mann Act, the so-called White Slave Traffic Law, which makes it illegal to transport an underage female for immoral purposes. Brown’s sister would later say he was “very susceptible to the charms of the female sex.”

But Brown died in 1930 before the feds could catch him.

After his heirs fought it out in court over his vast estate, nightclub owner Frank Sebastian, who had his own brushes with the law over liquor and gambling, bought the Egyptian Palace. It quickly became his personal clubhouse, with a shady reputation as a venue for prostitution and illegal booze.

Among its patrons were movie people--Culver City’s oldest film studio was two blocks away. Sebastian hosted many swank, celebrity-studded parties at the Egyptian Palace. Its proximity to the studio--which was later bought by David O. Selznick and was the site of much of the filming of “Gone With the Wind”--made it convenient. Visiting stars treated it like a home away from home.

During the early Prohibition years, Brown had put in a wine cellar with a trapdoor; it led to a network of secret passages and tunnels beneath the house. Legend has it that the tunnels were connected to the studio, owned at the time by Hollywood legend Cecil B. DeMille. The Egyptian Palace became something of a star itself, appearing in several films, including a “Little Rascals” episode in which Spanky, Alfalfa and the gang play football in front of the house.

But Prohibition ended, and Culver City became domesticated. Police regularly staged raids when neighbors complained about the noise. In 1963, at a Halloween party, more than 50 people were taken in for disturbing the peace.

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The Palace changed hands more often than a poker game, and by the early 1960s, it had been a boardinghouse, a bordello, a flophouse, a haven for the homeless and finally a vacant paradise for vermin and rodents.

At last, the owners reached an agreement with the Fire Department: burn it down.

In 1964, a quarter-century after Culver City witnessed black smoke rising from the “burning of Atlanta,” another cloud of smoke appeared on its horizon as firefighters set the old Egyptian Palace aflame again and again during a two-day training program. And the nocturnal playground of Prohibition went out in a final blaze of glory.