If you've never visited the Greystone Mansion and Park in Beverly Hills, a city-owned estate and gardens, here's a quick look inside the Gothic English-style home built for Ned Dohey by his father, oil baron Edward Doheny. Today marks the anniversary of the murder of Ned Doheny, and suicide of his secretary Hugh Plunkett. One of the rumors is that Plunkett and Doheny were lovers, with the former shooting the latter on the night of February 16th, 1929, after Doheny went back to his wife, but as LAist.com points out, there are many theories about what happened. That blog has more of the backstory about the murder, but more about the home: Completed in 1928 at a cost of $3.135 million, the 55-room home was designed by architect Gordon Kaufmann, also behind the Hollywood Palladium and the Los Angeles Times building on 1st Street, while the landscaping was done by Paul Thiene.
Dozens of well-known movies--from “Indecent Proposal” to “Austin Powers: Goldmember”--have been filmed at the estate. The park is open to the public, while the home is available for special events (additionally, tours of the home can be arranged).
And naturally, at one point someone looked to develop the area and knock down the home. Via a 2007 Los Angeles Times story about the home during the filming of "There Will Be Blood" (the film is based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, which was "loosely" based on Edward Doheny's life, according to Crooks and Liars) "In 1955, when the children were grown, Lucy [Doheny] sold the property to a Chicagoan who had plans to subdivide and demolish the house. The city of Beverly Hills stopped the scheme by buying the historic estate in 1965 and -- hoping to get upkeep and repairs -- leased the mansion to the American Film Institute from 1969 until 1982 for a dollar a year."
· Today in LA history: the Doheny murder [LAist.com]
· History of Greystone [Official Site]
· 'Blood' work: digging up a mansion's mystery [LAT]
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