Notable Residents

Long before Hollywood learned to manufacture scandal, Marguerete Favar had lived a life that was enough to make a dozen scripts. A dancer whose beauty blazed across the vaudeville circuit from sea to shining sea, her life ended in a murder that remains one of the decade’s most sensational unsolved crimes. It was also one of its most decadent.

In December, the poinsettia comes to the doorsteps, the church aisles, the store windows and the dinner tables by some form of instinct. It is so familiar, its origins seem at once mythical and lost. But behind that explosion of red and green is a quiet immigrant tale of loss and resilience, Hollywood soil and a Swiss-born farmer named Albert Ecke, whose patient experimentation and stubborn faith turned an obscure Mexican weed into North America's Christmas flower.

This is the story of a boy star in the first days of vaudeville in Los Angeles, when the silent studios were humming with promise. A child singer of exceptional talent, Howard Enstedt was one of the city's youngest prodigies. His was a voice like no other: innocent, yet penetratingly strong, startlingly mature. It was a voice that made people listen. For a while, at least, the boy's future looked as bright as the lights of Broadway. He would conquer both the stage and the screen. But it was Hollywood, and his was another story, destined to end all too soon.

In the bustling world of early Hollywood, where aspiring actors arrived by the trainload and studio lights burned late into the night, few performers embodied their name as sincerely as Sunshine Hart. Born July 6, 1886, in the small river town of Vevay, Indiana, she grew up far from the glittering dream factories of Los Angeles. Yet, through determination, comic talent, and an unmistakable warmth, Hart carved a place for herself on stage, in vaudeville, and ultimately in silent films—leaving behind a brief but memorable legacy.

In the constellation of rising Hollywood talent, few shone with the otherworldly magnetism of Harry Hains, the Australian-born actor, model, and artist whose brief life left an unmistakable mark on the worlds of film, fashion, and queer representation. Born December 4, 1992, in Melbourne, Hains grew up in a creative family and soon gravitated toward the arts, driven by a restless imagination and a desire to explore identity beyond traditional boundaries. 

Long before animation became a billion-dollar empire—and decades before the world knew the name Mickey Mouse—there was Margaret J. Winkler, a determined young woman with a keen eye for talent and a business instinct sharper than any of her male contemporaries cared to admit.

Ida Estelle Taylor was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on May 20, 1894. Her father and mother divorced early in her childhood, and she was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents. Little else of her childhood seems to have survived the heat of studio klieg lights and the glare of Old Hollywood desert sun. What did endure was the propriety and strict discipline that she learned as a youth from the guardians who instilled in her middle-class values. Taylor became a professional pianist and was well schooled in the codes of respectability. But from childhood she had an intensity of expression and physical magnetism which found their finest outlet in silent film.

Eugene Rafael Plummer was born January 8, 1852, in San Francisco. The adventurous spirit of restless mid-nineteenth century California was evident even in his parents. His father was Captain John Cornelius Plummer, an Anglo sea captain who had come west during the Gold Rush years. Eugene's mother was Maria Cecilia McGuire Pacheco; a Latina woman of Irish ancestry whose spirit and independence were to greatly influence Eugene Plummer. From birth his life was connected to the unique transformation of California from Spanish-Mexican rancho culture to an American one of law, land litigation, and squatters.

Hugh Trevor was an attractive but short-lived American film actor of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He began his career late in the silent era and came into his own as an actor during the first years of the talkies.