For Party-Goers, Tito’s Hilltop Is a Spatial Odyssey

As Dennis Tito spent the final hours of his eight-day space odyssey floating weightlessly aboard the International Space Station on Saturday night, hundreds of miles below 250 guests flocked to his hilltop aerie in the Pacific Palisades.

Guests had paid $1,250 each to wander through Tito’s 30,000-square-foot mansion, an otherworldly island of real estate that floats above this glittering city like a spaceship. The event, staged as a benefit for UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation, also included an elaborate four-course meal prepared by chefs Daniel Boulud of Daniel and Cafe Boulud in New York, Michel Cornu of Far Niente in Napa Valley, Hubert Keller of Fleur de Lys in San Francisco, Julian Serrano of Picasso at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel and Sherry Yard of Spago Beverly Hills.

This was the second time Tito has lent his neo-Gothic castle on the hill--where he has lived since 1990--to the organization for the annual fund-raiser. But this year, as the 60-year-old Tito orbited somewhere above in his spacesuit, elegant guests at the sold-out event sipped sour apple martinis and pondered the Santa Monica billionaire who rocketed from relative obscurity to front-page news last week after paying $20 million to become the world’s first space tourist.

Tito lives here, with his exquisite European antiques, tapestries and chandeliers, tennis court and pool. He works out in a private gym that rivals Gold’s, and runs along a well-maintained jogging track.

But the sprawling mansion offers few clues to the mysterious, little-known Queens native who defied NASA and convinced the Russians to give him a joy ride in space. Tito’s home is stunning, although somewhat impersonal.

On Saturday, the only overt sign of the man was a silver-framed portrait offered for sale at the evening’s silent auction. It showed a smiling, bald Tito in his spacesuit, the bubble helmet pushed back, an American flag sewed onto his left sleeve, his name written in Russian and English on the collar. The photo was shot in Kazakhstan just before takeoff.

Tito has a masters in aerospace engineering, and early in his career he worked as a rocket scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developing trajectories on the Mariner 4 mission to Mars and the Mariner 5 mission to Venus. In the late 1960s he quit his government job to found Wilshire Associates, an investment firm that now manages $10 billion in assets by using mathematical tools to analyze market risks.

On Saturday, guests valet parked in the exclusive neighborhood below and were shuttled to the hilltop site aboard small buses. Like a top-secret military installation, increasingly frequent “No Trespassing” signs warned away intruders. At the front entry--a circular drive with a fountain in the middle--patrons disembarked to wander wide-eyed into Tito’s home. The air seemed thinner here.

Though he wasn’t present, Tito was on everyone’s minds. “NASA was sure sour grapes on this whole thing,” said Jonsson center board member Wesley Lester to his cocktail companion near the lily pond. “I think he got his money’s worth just out of the publicity. He’s been in papers all over the world every day for a week.”

By the turquoise-blue pool, next to the striped chaise longues alongside the Greek Revival pool house, a cluster of guests sipped cocktails and mulled over whether the trip was worth the price. “Twenty million to get to the moon, that’s not bad,” said one woman. “It’s as much as a piece of furniture in there,” added another.

“Did you see the armoire?”

“Well, at least as much as the roof,” said the first woman. “It’s all slate.”

A January 2001 copy of National Geographic sat in the library: “The Body in Space.” Nearby, a place was marked in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s book, “It Takes a Village.” Somebody had been reading it.

If virtually every trace of the man was pushed out of sight, one thing was clear: Tito loves space and gadgets. TV remotes, the likes of which are rarely seen, sat idle in two rooms on coffee tables, a hint of a giant screen hidden tastefully behind a mirrored door in one room, a vast armoire in another. Off the edge of a sprawling lawn, a gazebo was suspended above the city on a narrow peninsula of land like a space station, with a floor that spinning slowly above the city. A sofa sat in the center.

“That’s where he practices,” one guest joked.

A set of switches embedded in the gazebo wall offered musical selections: classical, jazz, New Age, rock. Another switch activated a heat lamp. Some guests mused about whether the frogs croaking into the night air from the lily pond were real or recorded, an example of sublime technology.

As they finished their preparations, the nation’s best cooks wandered down for a look at the view, spinning the center of the gazebo manually, like boys pushing a merry-go-round. The meal was served on the tented tennis court, after which guests boarded the shuttle bus to head back down to their cars.

On the other side of the world, the Soyuz capsule carrying Tito and the cosmonauts landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan.