Streisand Center Puts a High Price on Conservancy

Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand sit like king and queen atop the list of the best selling solo recording artists of all time.

Both have starred in numerous movies. And both have devoted cult followings. From there, the way they are splits like a couple at Heartbreak Hotel:

Babs: Funny Girl. Elvis: Girls! Girls! Girls! Babs: black evening gowns. Elvis: Tiger Suit.

Babs: alive. Elvis: dead (maybe).

Then there are the places they called home. Elvis ended his life (maybe) at Graceland, a 14-acre estate beside a traffic-congested commercial strip in Memphis.

And until she moved a few years back, Streisand lived much of the celebrity part of her life in a 22-acre compound tucked down in remote Ramirez Canyon in Malibu.

Kitsch-rich Graceland has the Jungle

Room, wall-to-ceiling shag carpet and a faux-plantation style front. Streisand’s five-home compound is a monument to taste centered on The Barn, a rustic lodge with stained glass, singed wood paneling and a slate hot tub. No souvenir pecan logs for sale here.

But perhaps the most remarkable difference between the two homes is their current uses. An E-ticket to privately owned Graceland, complete with tours of Elvis’ 1956 purple Cadillac convertible, Hound Dog II Lockheed JetStar plane and home movie clips, costs $18.50.

A brief garden tour and peek in The Barn, however, sets you back $30--even though the home is headquarters to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the state agency dedicated to preserving public access to the local wild lands. That makes the property one of the priciest state-owned sites to visit; even Hearst Castle charges only $14 a tour.

How the $12-million Streisand estate with its exotic, landscaped grounds, a private gated entrance, colorful architecture and a tennis court with wet bar wound up as the unlikeliest of government office space for some 15 state park bureaucrats is a somewhat controversial story, though one that, to date, has not found its way to the front page of the Weekly World News, despite the players involved.

*

In 1993, after trying for more than five years to sell the property at the end of Ramirez Canyon Road, Streisand decided to donate it to the conservancy. At the time, the idea was to make the place a sort of ecological think tank.

Two things stood in the way: money and more money.

First, there was the issue of running the place. Streisand left no funds to maintain her grounds, and the conservancy, headed by ever-controversial Joseph T. Edmiston, had promised state officials not to spend any tax money on keeping up the place. That meant the property had to generate $160,000 per year to pay for water, electricity and gardeners.

That’s where the more money comes in. Ramirez Canyon is the sort of place where people like rock star Don Henley buy land. And the local homeowners association wasn’t too keen on the idea of hordes of people trooping through their isolated splendor.

When combined, those two realities ended any chance of the public or scholars visiting in busloads.

And they also killed the think tank, though Edmiston says Streisand has signed off on the idea that the ‘Streisand Center for Conservancy Studies” now consists of conservancy workers swapping ideas around coffee machines and map-cluttered desks.

This is sort of a think tank, he figures, because the officials stationed in the houses do in fact think there.

“There’s a lot of high-powered intellectual effort that goes into the most pressing conservancy issues every time we have a staff meeting,” Edmiston said. “We think, and Barbra thinks. That is fulfilling the mission.”

As a result, the conservancy finds itself with a headquarters that is the envy of other local park agencies. The state park system’s mountain headquarters, for instance, occupies a wholly unremarkable brown and beige two-story home squatting in the middle of Malibu Canyon State Park. Mustard and foxtails grow wild in a side lot. A few forlorn ceramic pots do their best to pass as landscaping.

National Park Service local headquarters is not much more appealing. Recently relocated from an office park a few hundred yards from the Ventura Freeway to Thousand Oaks, they occupy the old town hall and offer a sweeping vista of a nearby shopping mall.

Then there’s the conservancy. To get there, you drive down a potholed private road with 11 speed bumps and ford two separate stream crossings--a reason, at last, to own an SUV in Los Angeles.

The entrance to the compound is guarded by a wrought-iron gate fashioned into a pattern of lotus blossoms. A phone call, and you are buzzed in.

The compound itself is a startling display of what 39 gold, 25 platinum and 12 multi-platinum albums will buy you. How many park headquarters, after all, have had their buildings featured in Architectural Digest? Five homes dot the lavishly landscaped property, each with its own design theme. Most have hot tubs, outdoor grills and wet bars (no longer stocked, the staff swears.)

*

The Peach house looks like a Mediterranean villa done up, of course, in peach. The second floor is Streisand’s screening room, with a kitchen to the side that still has her espresso maker and six-burner catering stove. Most of the rest of her furniture was removed when she left the property.

Then there’s the misnamed “Barn,” in which no animals, with the possible exception of Eric Burdon, ever stayed. Built by toy makers and wood craftsmen from Northern California, each piece of wood in the barn was individually singed to give the wood a dark, used feel.

Streisand never lived in the Art Deco house, using it instead for entertaining. It has a pool and a bedroom intercom with buttons to call the bar and the master bath. The home’s color scheme is mauve and black. Even the plants compliment it. There are oleander, bougainvillea and even cactus with burgundy blooms.

Finally, there’s Barwood, which Streisand intended as a recording studio. Originally painted lavender with floral-patterned flooring, the home has been restored to its natural Douglas fir. Chunks of recalcitrant purple paint are still visible in the pine knots. On the second floor, in one of Streisand’s old bedrooms, is Edmiston’s office. A stone fireplace sits behind him. Sun streams through leaded glass in a cathedral ceiling.

The fifth home on the property is a former caretaker’s residence where one of the conservancy’s rangers now lives.

*

Long-range plans call for more public access to the place. Edmiston would like to build another road into the property and construct a hiking trail to connect with nearby national park land.

Even in the long term, however, the $30 admission cost won’t go down. As long as the center has to pay its own way, conservancy officials simply can’t afford to lower the costs to what a typical tax-supported park would charge.

And that means that, at least for now, the homes of Babs and Elvis also retain this distinction:

Hundreds of thousands of people will continue to visit Graceland. But Barwood will be lonesome tonight.