BEVERLY HILLS - Darlings, polish your lorgnettes and hold onto your plumed hats, because Beverly Hills is fluttering once more with the rustle of gossip — the kind only a certain hillside haunt can conjure. Yes, that haunt. Falcon Lair, the storied perch where Rudolph Valentino once brooded like a cinematic falcon surveying his kingdom, is back on the market and asking a coy $10.99 million. And oh, what a tale those cypress trees could tell.
Reported by Allan R. Ellenberger for The Hollywoodland Revue
Falcon Lair was born in 1924, dreamed into existence for Valentino by society’s favorite architectural magician, Wallace Neff. Rudy, ever the romantic, named it after a swashbuckling film he longed to make — The Hooded Falcon — proof that even in real estate, Valentino couldn’t resist a dramatic gesture. The place had everything: imported antiques, Arabian horses, even six live falcons. A setting fit for silent-screen royalty… and my dears, he lived in it exactly one year.
When Valentino died in 1926 at the heartbreakingly young age of 31, the estate fell silent. But Hollywood abhors a vacuum, and soon its next grande dame arrived — Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress whose social orbit had all the polish of high society and all the turbulence of a well-shaken martini. Some called her eccentric, others whispered “dangerous,” and at least one headline likened her to Cruella de Vil — but she adored Falcon Lair, and for four decades it became her private kingdom in the hills. She held onto it until her death in 1993.
And then — prepare yourselves — the original Neff-designed mansion was demolished in the mid-2000s, leaving only the gatehouse, the caretaker’s cottage, terraced grounds, and those sentinel cypress trees. A tragic loss, like tearing the final page from a love letter.
But in true Hollywood fashion, there’s always a sequel. Falcon Lair rises once again — this time not as Valentino’s Mediterranean fantasia, but as an empty canvas, complete with approved plans for a 17,000-square-foot mansion designed by Appleton Partners with interiors by the ever-tasteful Mark D. Sikes. Listing agent Josh Flagg — yes, that Josh Flagg — calls it “a piece of American cultural history,” and for once the marketing matches the moment.
So what does all this mean, dear readers of The Hollywoodland Revue? It means that one of the great ghosts of Hollywood’s Golden Age is stirring. The place where Valentino wooed, where Doris Duke retreated from gossip columns hotter than a burning klieg light, where history and myth once danced together in silk slippers — well, it’s ready for its next close-up.
And between us hens, I’ll wager this: long after the new buyer bulldozes, rebuilds, renovates, or reimagines, those canyons will still echo with Valentino’s silent footsteps. Hollywood never forgets its idols — especially the beautiful, the tragic, and the impossibly glamorous.
My dears… Falcon Lair may be asking $10.99 million. But its legend? Priceless.