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"Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Other Old Hollywood Stars' Homes\nAD revisits the residences of stars from Tinseltown's golden age, including Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Jayne Mansfield\nBeneath an artificial dogwood tree, Joan Crawford and her fourth and final husband, Pepsi-Cola CEO Alfred N. Steele, relax on the plastic-covered sofas of their 18-room New York City duplex penthouse in the 1950s. As one of the neat-freak actress's decorators, Carleton Varney, once observed, \"There was more clear plastic on that furniture than was on the meat in an A&amp;amp;P supermarket.\" William Haines, Crawford's longtime friend, who had been a leading man during the silent era, originally decorated the apartment.\nActor Yul Brynner and Frank Sinatra chat poolside at the singer's luxurious compound at the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. \"The desert was Dad's lifelong passion, the place where he felt healthiest and most peaceful,\" Sinatra's daughter Tina, once wrote. Purchased in the 1950s and adjacent to the country club's seventeenth fairway, the two-and-a-half-acre property remained a family getaway until 1995.\nSophia Loren poses for photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, in 1964, in the master bedroom of Villa Sara, her 16th-century house near Rome. Purchased in 1952 by her future husband, producer Carlo Ponti, it was restored with architect and garden designer Imerio Maffeis and decorated by costume-and-set designer Ezio Altieri. The bedroom features frescoes of the four seasons, which were moved there from another room in the house; the Louis XVI painted bed was made in Tuscany.\nWhen Elvis Presley had his Memphis, Tennessee, mansion, Graceland, decorated in 1957, the living room's 15-foot-long sofa was upholstered in electric-blue fabric and the walls were painted Dresden-blue. By the early 1960s, however, the room had been repainted and the sofa recovered in a woven white material brightened by orange velvet cushions.\nAsian art picked up on worldwide travels is tacked to a wall of actor John Wayne's living room in the San Fernando Valley. The sprawling, ranch-style house sat on five and a half acres, and its high brick walls \"kept us safe and apart from the world outside,\" the actor's daughter Aissa Wayne wrote in AD in 2008. As for the house's decor, she added, \"My father loved Asian art and furniture, which he would mix in with other styles. Whether a room was decorated in early American or modern, there would always be a piece, here or there, inspired by the Orient.\"\nFuture U. S. president Ronald Reagan settles back in a rolled-arm chair at his 1957 ranch-style home in Pacific Palisades, California. Designed by architect William Stephenson, the residence was a state-of-the-art creation, thanks to Reagan's job as host of the television show General Electric Theater. As his wife Nancy recalled, \"The house consumed so much energy, and involved so much intricate wiring, that a special switch box had to be installed on the outside.\" The couple sold the house in 1981, after Reagan was elected president.\nPurchased by the screen siren in 1957, Jayne Mansfield's Pink Palace earned its name for obvious reasons: Inside and out, the Mediterranean Revival mansion in Los Angeles where she lived with her second husband, Mr. Universe 1955 Mickey Hargitay, was a paradise of rose-color excess, thanks to set designer Glenn Holse. Pink shag carpeting covered the ceiling, walls, and floor of the actress's bath, and the heart-shaped tub glittered with gold mosaic tiles. Later owned by singer Engelbert Humperdinck, the Pink Palace was demolished in 2002.\nIn the mid 1950s, actress Ava Gardner decorated her newly built brick house at La Moraleja, a suburb of Madrid, with antiques she purchased at local shops. The dining room featured Louis XVI chairs and persimmon-color walls. She is holding Rags, a Pembroke Welsh corgi; the dog had been a gift from her former husband Frank Sinatra.\nShortly after their 1956 wedding, Marilyn Monroe and her second husband, playwright Arthur Miller, stand in the unkempt garage of their Roxbury, Connecticut, estate. The house itself had been built in 1783, and Monroe and Miller added sliding glass doors to its rear fa\u00E7ade and created a one-room studio where the playwright could work.\nPacific Palisades was the California town where actor Gregory Peck chose to settle down in the late 1940s. He and his first wife, Eine \"Greta\" Kukkonen, a Finnish former makeup artist, purchased a 1930s house designed by legendary architect Cliff May, famed for his ranch-style aesthetic and sophisticated appreciation of indoor-outdoor living. The picture shows the Pecks behind the green leather\u2013clad bar of the den, which was accented by illuminated glass pilasters. As AD observed, the den was \"a place for casual entertaining and where family evenings, kids [the Pecks had three sons], and dogs [the couple had several Alsatians] were welcome.\"\nActor Kirk Douglas stretches out on a skylit sofa in his Beverly Hills home in the early 1960s. Above him hang two Pablo Picasso paintings that he and his wife Anne purchased in 1960. The one at left, formerly owned by Pittsburgh steel tycoon G. David Thompson, was described by Douglas as \"a seated child with a squashed-in face and two eyes on the same side of her head. It was typical of Picasso's work during the thirties. I thought it was awful.\" On the cocktail table stands a sculpture by Italian artist Marino Marini. All three works were eventually sold by the Douglases to fund children's playgrounds.\nHumphrey Bogart and his third wife, actress Mayo Methot, called their 1920s Los Angeles house Sluggy Hollow\u2014the name alluded to their famously contentious relationship. As Dorothy Parker once said of the so-called Battling Bogarts, shown here perched on a bougainvillea-draped terrace above the front door, \"Their neighbors were lulled to sleep by the sounds of breaking china and crashing glass.\" Bogart purchased the house in 1936, two years before he married Methot. It was later demolished to make way for a condominium project.\nDespite being just steps from a glamorous stretch of Central Park, James Dean's studio apartment on West 68th Street in New York City was decidedly collegiate. The actor lived in the rented space, off and on, from 1953 until his death in a car crash two years later. (The photograph here was published in Life magazine, six months before Dean was killed.) On the top floor of a five-story, 19th-century redbrick townhouse, Dean's New York City home was furnished with bohemian casualness. Outfitted with indifferent, seemingly secondhand furniture and knotty-pine shelves, the small, round-windowed interior had abstract art tacked to the walls and a matador's cape hanging above the bed\u2014the latter possession echoed in one of the books above the built-in desk: Volume 5 of Los Toros, a 1943 encyclopedia of bullfighting by Jos\u00E9 Mar\u00EDa Coss\u00EDo. The bath, shared with other tenants, was located down the hall.\nOscar-winner William Holden relaxes in his home in Toluca Lake, a suburban neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley; the modest Georgian-style house was designed by African-American architect Paul R. Williams and was later owned by Denzel Washington. Papered with a map of the world, the room featured a three-part portrait of Holden's first wife, Ardis, a Philippines-born actress who used the screen name Brenda Marshall. Beside the actor is his Academy Award for Best Actor, presented for his performance in the 1953 film Stalag 17.\nCrooner and actor Bing Crosby's adobe house in Rancho Santa Fe, California, was the centerpiece of the entertainer's 65-acre horse-breeding operation\u2014conveniently located near the Del Mar racetrack. The house, which Crosby and his first wife, Dixie Lee, bought shortly after their marriage in 1930, had been constructed in the 1840s by the first mayor of San Diego, Juan Osuna, and enlarged in 1910. With the help of architect Lilian J. Rice, the Crosbys expanded the house as well, adding a wing to accommodate their growing family.\nIn 1938, actress Joan Bennett commissioned architect Wallace Neff to design her 14-room house in the west Los Angeles neighborhood of Holmby Hills in her favorite French Provincial style. Then a divorced mother of two, Bennett, known for films such as Little Women, Scarlet Street, and The Woman in the Window, got a white-painted-brick mansion so elegant that actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. said it resembled \"the beautiful Joan expressed in bricks and mortar.\" Though the exterior remained white-painted brick with blue shutters and dark-gray shingles throughout Bennett's nearly 15-year residency, decor went through two color phases, said the actress, who was a talented amateur decorator. (She, did, however, have some help from a designer friend, Hazel Wray Davey.) \"I'd furnished the house when I was a blonde,\" Bennett explained, \"and when I became a brunette [she began dyeing her fair hair around 1940], naturally the colors were no good with my dark hair. So I gave the house a brunette personality.\"\nAdmired for her daffy but distinguished performances in The Wizard of Oz and Dinner at Eight, actress Billie Burke lived in an English-style house in Beverly Hills in the 1930s, with her husband, showman Florenz Ziegfeld. Here Burke is photographed in the beamed study, which she furnished with countrified furniture, masses of memorabilia, and charming art, including a portrait, at left, of her daughter, Patricia Ziegfeld. The sombrero hanging in the corner was a gift from Will Rogers, and the rug appears to be a Beni Ourain from Morocco. Elsewhere in the house were, Burke recalled in her memoirs, \"eight highly articulate canaries.\"\nCalled \"an amusing little clown\" in one film review, actress Jean Arthur (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The More the Merrier) takes tea on the Colonial-style canopy bed of the Hollywood home she shared with her second husband, Frank Ross, a screenwriter and producer. Dramatic ruffled curtains screen the picture window, while the chairs sport a Victorian silhouette.\nShowman nonpareil Fred Astaire built his Beverly Hills residence in 1959, five years after the death of his first wife, socialite Phyllis Potter. The bachelor pad's living room featured comfortable modern upholstered furniture clad in lively patterned fabrics, and walls hung with contemporary art; the glass ashtray in the foreground is by Steuben."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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