Chemosphere Attraction

When you get married, you get a lot of new things. People buy you new dishes, new pots and pans, new forks and knives, new linens. If you never had crystal bowls, suddenly you’ve got them, and ashtrays, serving platters, quilts, pillows. It can amount to a lot of stuff, and where to put it all is the big issue. It soon becomes apparent that you need one more new thing--a big new house. * Now, my wife is fairly practical. Her way to buy a house involves consulting experts like mortgage brokers and real estate agents and bankers. Which is all well and good, if you’re willing in the meantime to live like characters in “Sanford and Son,” stepping around piles of wedding loot every day. * I say we need a bigger house now, this minute. And to hell with all the planning business. Let’s get a house that we can be proud of. No modest three-bedroom in the foothills will do. I want the big one behind gates, a million-dollar house of grandeur and proportion, with well-appointed, large-scale rooms whose elegant and heavy doors open noiselessly onto lush, expansive lawns and sparkling swimming pools, beyond which is an endless city lights view.

Never mind that I don’t have a million dollars to spend on a house, or anything else for that matter, because I don’t have a million dollars. I decide to visit open houses (my wife refuses to accompany me). I start to get a grim picture. I decide to scale back the requirements. The house doesn’t need gates if I get a good security system and feed my dogs a little less often. Grandeur and proportion can go. A pool isn’t necessary. I’ve always thought of lawns as something good, a city version of a spread (as in, “Everything you see, for 35 feet to the west--that’s my land. Now get off it.”). But if I must, I’ll give that up, too.

One thing I insist on is a view. A view means being above people, looking down on the masses, each of their lesser homes a mere twinkle in the night, part of a blanket of lights that I can look at each evening before I go to sleep to make me feel better about myself.

After reviewing my new criteria (basically: bigger, a view), I look at the newspaper again, and like a thunderbolt from the heavens, like an act of divine providence, I see the perfect house. It meets my strict new standard of excellence in that it is bigger than my current house and it may have what is the most incredible view available to man. It’s also got a hidden asset, something I never considered--architecture. I might not roam well-appointed and grand-scale rooms, but I’ll have architecture.

Famous architecture at that.

It is surprisingly easy to make an appointment to see it (although the broker I spoke with made it a point twice in our three-minute conversation to emphasize the price), and borrowing a Mercedes, I drive up twisting Hollywood Hills roads. Although I’d seen pictures of the house in architecture books and magazines, and from time to time caught fleeting glimpses while driving on Mulholland, I’d never seen the place up close and personal--it is almost mythical to me, a mirage. Up a long driveway shared by three other houses, I find the address. I park the car at a conspicuous angle in the driveway and wait for the agent to arrive.

Listed at just over a million dollars, the place is perched high in the Hollywood Hills and was designed by renowned architect John Lautner, who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright and has designed close to 100 buildings in Southern California, most of them private residences. While the others are also quite modern, sharing Lautner’s predilection for sweeping, unobstructed views, the Malin residence, better known as the Chemosphere, is arguably the most famous, not just as an oddity, but as an architectural benchmark.

It is one of those places people seem to know about, like Castillo del Lago in Hollywood (until recently Madonna’s house) or the Spelling mansion in Holmby Hills or the Witch’s House in the Beverly Hills flats, a place about which there is an aura of mystery and eerie intrigue. It’s a place that has stories, true and not true, attached to it, so that the mention of its name, or a glimpse caught while driving by, fires the imagination. I may not have a sparkling pool in which to frolic away long summer days, but I’ll have mystery.

Built in 1960 for engineer Leonard Malin and his wife for $22,500, the house looks like a spaceship. Not that I’ve ever seen a spaceship, it’s just that I’m sure it would look like this house. It’s a 2,000-square-foot octagonal pie in the sky, supported by a single 30-foot column and approachable by an electric funicular, kind of like a miniature Angels Flight. Lautner, always conscious of costs and clients’ needs, took a steep lot considered unbuildable and found a workable solution. He had a little help from the Chem Seal Corp. of America, which provided a then-in-development glue used to construct the roof. Malin was so impressed that he named his home after the firm.

Once up at house level, I expect all doors to slide noiselessly open, like on “Star Trek” or something, but in reality the house is quite normal, notwithstanding its shape. The living and dining rooms take up half the house, which makes for easy entertaining. Looking out at the breathtaking view, a slight vertiginous feeling comes over me as I picture the cocktail parties I’ll throw here. Tinkling music, twinkling lights, warm breezes, beautiful single women everywhere. I may not have a vast, lush lawn, but I’ll have a one-of-a kind crib in the sky that positively swings. And a funicular.

Never mind that my wife’s never going to go for this. Never mind that the beautiful single women do me no good. Never mind the bit about having a million dollars. This place is perfect.

The three bedrooms and 1 3/4 baths that take up the other half of the house have a surprisingly common feel, maybe a little angular for my taste. Architecture critic Reyner Banham called it “a standard developer’s tract-house” perched in midair. There’s shag carpet on the floors in some ubiquitous 1960s color. The closets are closets, the walls are walls. The ceilings are a bit unusual, with arched, exposed beams and a skylight in the middle like a microscope lens over a petri dish. But the only feature that really pops out are the angled windows that surround the structure. I half expect it to spin on an axis like the bar on top of the downtown Bonaventure Hotel. No chance. Lautner was meticulous about engineering, and the house hasn’t even suffered earthquake damage.

The real estate agent hovers somewhere near me, talking about Lautner, as I mutter something about maybe having difficulty qualifying for a loan, but she doesn’t hear me. I sink into the built-in couch that runs along one side of the living room. The whole house has a Jetsons vibe mixed with a little Sinatra and Sammy circa “Ocean’s 11”--the ultimate bachelor pad.

I knew about the Chemosphere and its reputation. Although it has had a fairly normal chain of custody for a house in Southern California (four owners in 37 years), one of the owners, a doctor, was murdered there in 1976 during a botched robbery. The Chemosphere was featured prominently in Brian De Palma’s darkly comic thriller “Body Double,” used as a vantage point for the film’s main character to witness a gruesome killing, and there has been an air of danger about the house since then. The present owner tried to sell it twice before, once for close to $2 million, then again a few years later for $1.5 million. No takers. Most recently, it’s been a rental property. Inhabited or not, the Chemosphere looms large in the city’s imagination, and it’s that kind of juice that makes it worth the big money.

I turn around and smile at the agent.

“This house isn’t for everyone,” she says.

“I’ll take it,” I say.

We shake hands and I tell her my business manager will call her in the morning to discuss the arrangements. She takes a last admiring look at the Mercedes (which I need to return soon), then drives off. I look up at the house and know I’ll be happy here, all of the wedding gifts tucked neatly away, and I can’t wait to break the good news to my wife.

And then we can discuss the small matter of where we’re going to get the million dollars to close the deal.