Last week, we saw a lovely Beverly Hills house designed by Wallace Neff and built in 1926; it had just arrived on the market asking $6.995 million. One commenter complained, however, that there was no garage, and now we think we might possibly know why that is. On July 7, 1946, aviator and filmmaker (and later crazy person) Howard Hughes was manning the maiden flight of his XF-11 airplane when one of the engine propeller controls ran out of oil and "Hughes attempted to make an emergency landing at the Los Angeles Country Club. But his luck had run out, he dove downward short of the golf course, and into a neighborhood in Beverly Hills," according to the aviation history website Check-Six.com. Hughes hit two houses on North Linden Drive and one on Whittier Drive. One of the houses was 805 N. Linden, which at the time belonged to the actress Rosemary DeCamp ("best known for her role as James Cagney's mother in Yankee Doodle Dandy"). The plane "sliced through the bedroom where her and her husband, John Staler, were, and ripped across the couple's garage rooftop." Here, check it out in Martin Scorsese-directed reenactment form from The Aviator:
· Early Wallace Neff Spanish Colonial in Beverly Hills [Curbed LA]
· The Crash of the XF-11 [Check-Six.com]
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