![]() ![]() It was relaxed, warm and inviting, with cushy furniture in earth tones, a TV ( hi-fi, bar and black leather tables designed by my parents’ good friend Fanny Brice. The music room (BLT spot) became the second heartbeat of the house, after the kitchen, and reflected how we lived. She also created a media room when she winterized a solarium next to the living room. My mother was ahead of her time when she built a fifty-foot-long, eight-foot-wide, five-foot-deep, chlorine-free, indoor lap pool and painted the enormous white satellite dish green to blend with the trees. ![]() The informal architects, however, were my parents, who each made contributions that changed how we lived. We had the Airwick ready when Hollywood’s cigar smokers came for meetings. My mother often sat at the piano in a corner of the living room ’til dawn, composing songs for my father’s movies and stage appearances, like the Oscar-nominated Five Pennies, and penning those wildly intelligent and fast-paced gems so associated with my father. My parents preferred to entertain at home, and over the years they each developed their own style. My father, as he liked to say, would “flake out” on the couch for days at a time, watching talk shows, Julia Child and the Dodgers, and eating black licorice and BLTs. But for more than four decades “the house,” as we always called it, was an anchor, a place where we could retreat and get grounded in our own way. ![]() I finally sold it in 1992 after they had both died, and my life was elsewhere. My parents rented the house in 1949 and bought it a year later from the director Lewis Milestone, whose well- known films included Mutiny on the Bounty and Of Mice and Men. ![]()
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