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Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles
Michael Gross is the preeminent chronicler of America’s rich and powerful, most recently in 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery. Now, he goes west to uncover the very secret history of Los Angeles, specifically those wealthiest and most private of enclaves— Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Park—through their most mind-boggling estates, and the fascinating, fabulous folks who created and populate them.
Gross begins his epic tale with the sordid mob-driven history of the newest mega-mansion district in L.A., Beverly Park, (home to among others Magic Johnson, Barry Bonds, Rod Stewart, Mark Wahlberg, Reba McIntyre, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, Samuel L. Jackson, Sly Stallone, Richard Zanuck, and relatives of an Indonesian dictator and Saudi Arabia’s king). He then flashes back to the creation of this fabled district, built on dusty lima bean fields and carved out of the rugged impassible mountains between the city and the sea. Using the century-long evolution from adobe huts to $100 million mansions as the baseline of the story, he reveals how a few powerful and often ruthless oil and railroad magnates imposed their idyllic vision of the good life on the Los Angeles landscape to create the legendary communities known as the Platinum Triangle.
Gross goes on to give vivid, riveting accounts of the most lavish of the many lavish houses that started springing up almost immediately (with only a brief slowdown during the Depression). But the stories of these homes are just a window onto the lives of their owners and occupants over the course of the twentieth century, and onto the bigger story of a people and a storied region that have become, in Gross’s words, “the Mecca of self-invention.”
As one might imagine, there is a truly glittering cast of characters. Apart from the many Hollywood stars who have passed through these houses—Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Harold Lloyd, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, George Hamilton, Tony Curtis, Cher, to name just a few—you will meet decadent Spanish land-grant families, desperado oilmen and railroad titans, the country’s first all-powerful corporate legends, con men and pyramid schemers, porn magnates, and Arab potentates, not to mention contemporary tabloid luminaries from the worlds of business and entertainment. Taken altogether, their stories read like a cross between Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood Babylon, and Gross’s own 740 Park— with a little of the film Chinatown thrown in too.
Los Angeles provides Michael Gross with his broadest canvas yet; Unreal Estate will surprise, fascinate, and most of all entertain you with a story you don’t know about a place you think you do.
Gross begins his epic tale with the sordid mob-driven history of the newest mega-mansion district in L.A., Beverly Park, (home to among others Magic Johnson, Barry Bonds, Rod Stewart, Mark Wahlberg, Reba McIntyre, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, Samuel L. Jackson, Sly Stallone, Richard Zanuck, and relatives of an Indonesian dictator and Saudi Arabia’s king). He then flashes back to the creation of this fabled district, built on dusty lima bean fields and carved out of the rugged impassible mountains between the city and the sea. Using the century-long evolution from adobe huts to $100 million mansions as the baseline of the story, he reveals how a few powerful and often ruthless oil and railroad magnates imposed their idyllic vision of the good life on the Los Angeles landscape to create the legendary communities known as the Platinum Triangle.
Gross goes on to give vivid, riveting accounts of the most lavish of the many lavish houses that started springing up almost immediately (with only a brief slowdown during the Depression). But the stories of these homes are just a window onto the lives of their owners and occupants over the course of the twentieth century, and onto the bigger story of a people and a storied region that have become, in Gross’s words, “the Mecca of self-invention.”
As one might imagine, there is a truly glittering cast of characters. Apart from the many Hollywood stars who have passed through these houses—Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Harold Lloyd, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, George Hamilton, Tony Curtis, Cher, to name just a few—you will meet decadent Spanish land-grant families, desperado oilmen and railroad titans, the country’s first all-powerful corporate legends, con men and pyramid schemers, porn magnates, and Arab potentates, not to mention contemporary tabloid luminaries from the worlds of business and entertainment. Taken altogether, their stories read like a cross between Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood Babylon, and Gross’s own 740 Park— with a little of the film Chinatown thrown in too.
Los Angeles provides Michael Gross with his broadest canvas yet; Unreal Estate will surprise, fascinate, and most of all entertain you with a story you don’t know about a place you think you do.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
560 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
33 people are currently reading
370 people want to read
About the author
Michael Gross
11 books82 followersThis book list is a work in progress. Michael Gross is recognized as one of America’s most provocative writers of non-fiction–its “foremost chronicler of the upper-crust,” says curbed.com. His latest book Unreal Estate, to be published November 1, 2011, is a west coast version of his bestseller, 740 Park, this time exposing the most exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles–Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel Air and Beverly Park–and their residents. 740 Park, published in 2005, is the inside story of New York’s richest, most prestigious cooperative apartment building. Built by James T. Lee, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ grandfather, and long the residence of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 740 Park is today the home of some of New York’s wealthiest and most prominent families. Fortune has described 740 Park as “jaw-dropping apartment porn.” It offers an unprecedented peek into the world of such latterday financial heroes and villains as Stephen Schwarzman, Ezra Merkin and John Thain.
In between these real estate epics, Gross published the wildly controversial expose of New York’s cultural elite Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum in 2009, setting off an extraordinary campaign by some of New York’s most influential citizens to suppress the book. It failed. The New York Times Book Review called it “a blockbuster exhibition of human achievement and flaws” and Vanity Fair said it is simply “explosive.” Why? “Gross demonstrates he knows his stuff. It’s a terrific tale…gossipy, color-rich, fact-packed …What Gross reveals is stuff that more people should know,” according to USA Today. A paperback edition was released in May 2010.
Before 740 Park, Gross wrote Genuine Authentic, a biography of fashion designer Ralph Lauren. It was acclaimed by The New York Times as a work of “impressive reporting” that “hack(s) through the hype and half-truths” of the Polo purveyor’s legend. Publishers Weekly praised his “meticulous research and artful prose…The crackerjack journalist simultaneously tells a compelling story and gives it meat enough to be satisfying.”
A Contributing Editor of Travel & Leisure, Gross has also worked as a columnist for The New York Times, GQ, Tatler, Town & Country, and The Daily News; a Contributing Editor of New York (where he wrote 26 cover stories, including the magazine’s all-time best-selling reported cover story on John F. Kennedy, Jr.), and of Talk; a Senior Writer at Esquire, and a Senior Editor at George.
In 2000, Gross published My Generation, a generational biography of the Baby Boom. It was called “wonderful” by the Washington Times, “trenchant, well-dramatized, thought-provoking and unusual” by Kirkus Reviews and “hugely entertaining…a brilliantly reported story,” by the Orlando Sentinel.
Gross’s 1995 book, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, was an investigative tour-de-force, and a blistering expose of the fashion-modeling business. It was a New York Times bestseller, and a selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club. Model, which remains in print and in demand more than a dozen years after its first publication, was also published in France, the U. K., Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, Brazil, and China. Most recently, an updated edition was published in Russia. Click here to read reviews of Model.
Over the years Gross has profiled such subjects as John F. Kennedy Jr., Greta Garbo, Stephanie of Monaco, Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin, Madonna, and Ivana Trump; fashion figures Tina Chow, Calvin Klein, Diane von Furstenberg, Isaac Mizrahi, Ralph Lauren, and Steven Meisel, and he’s written on topics as diverse as philanthropy, the theft of the internet domain sex.com, plastic surgery, divorce, the A-List, Sex in the 90s and Greenwich Village-the last in an article that introduced the phrase “quality of life” into New York City’s 1993 mayoral campaig
In between these real estate epics, Gross published the wildly controversial expose of New York’s cultural elite Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum in 2009, setting off an extraordinary campaign by some of New York’s most influential citizens to suppress the book. It failed. The New York Times Book Review called it “a blockbuster exhibition of human achievement and flaws” and Vanity Fair said it is simply “explosive.” Why? “Gross demonstrates he knows his stuff. It’s a terrific tale…gossipy, color-rich, fact-packed …What Gross reveals is stuff that more people should know,” according to USA Today. A paperback edition was released in May 2010.
Before 740 Park, Gross wrote Genuine Authentic, a biography of fashion designer Ralph Lauren. It was acclaimed by The New York Times as a work of “impressive reporting” that “hack(s) through the hype and half-truths” of the Polo purveyor’s legend. Publishers Weekly praised his “meticulous research and artful prose…The crackerjack journalist simultaneously tells a compelling story and gives it meat enough to be satisfying.”
A Contributing Editor of Travel & Leisure, Gross has also worked as a columnist for The New York Times, GQ, Tatler, Town & Country, and The Daily News; a Contributing Editor of New York (where he wrote 26 cover stories, including the magazine’s all-time best-selling reported cover story on John F. Kennedy, Jr.), and of Talk; a Senior Writer at Esquire, and a Senior Editor at George.
In 2000, Gross published My Generation, a generational biography of the Baby Boom. It was called “wonderful” by the Washington Times, “trenchant, well-dramatized, thought-provoking and unusual” by Kirkus Reviews and “hugely entertaining…a brilliantly reported story,” by the Orlando Sentinel.
Gross’s 1995 book, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, was an investigative tour-de-force, and a blistering expose of the fashion-modeling business. It was a New York Times bestseller, and a selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club. Model, which remains in print and in demand more than a dozen years after its first publication, was also published in France, the U. K., Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, Brazil, and China. Most recently, an updated edition was published in Russia. Click here to read reviews of Model.
Over the years Gross has profiled such subjects as John F. Kennedy Jr., Greta Garbo, Stephanie of Monaco, Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin, Madonna, and Ivana Trump; fashion figures Tina Chow, Calvin Klein, Diane von Furstenberg, Isaac Mizrahi, Ralph Lauren, and Steven Meisel, and he’s written on topics as diverse as philanthropy, the theft of the internet domain sex.com, plastic surgery, divorce, the A-List, Sex in the 90s and Greenwich Village-the last in an article that introduced the phrase “quality of life” into New York City’s 1993 mayoral campaig
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 2, 2012
An impressive amount of research went into this book, and admittedly, I kept reading it. Of course lifestyles of the rich and famous always fascinate--I'm only human--, and as a native Angeleno, the local history and color and names were of particular interest. That being said, I sort of came away with less respect for myself after realizing that I could sit there for hours reading what was basically a bunch of smut about a bunch of smutty people. And that being said, I found myself wishing there were more pictures of those people and of the houses and a few maps. Not a bad read, but you're not going to learn anything of much importance to yourself or the universe.( I may follow up though and find the picture books recommended in the author's extensive bibliography--that's how conflicted and hypocritical I am about all this). It would have been helpful also if the author had presented a table showing the successive ownerships of each of the houses he chose to focus on. It got very confusing and difficult to sort out.
March 21, 2012
If you love gossip, real estate and the lives of the rich and famous this book has some great tales! Oh and throw a little history in there. Lesson learned (from Cher) - the best place to keep your money is under your feet!
January 31, 2012
This book is delicious. As is always the case with the author you get journalistic reporting mixed with Valley of The Dolls and the result is always pure enjoyment.
Michael Gross knows that "fact is stranger than fiction".
I look forward to whatever is next.
Michael Gross knows that "fact is stranger than fiction".
I look forward to whatever is next.
March 16, 2012
I really, really wanted to like this. And I never did. The structure was confusing - I had trouble keeping track of the characters, houses, and timeline. More pictures would have been nice. And fundamentally, I just think Gross really misunderstands LA and the west. Huge disappointment.
October 18, 2019
Stopped about half-way. It is just not what I expected. Basically, it's higher genre version of tabloid gossip, not a true description of the spirit of Los Angeles or parts of it.
March 15, 2013
As a transplanted Los Angeleno and a lover of 19th and 20th century American history who is not beyond a guilty pleasure of celebrity gossip and "lifestyles of the rich and famous" gawking, I enjoyed this book very much. The first 2/3rds of it, about the founding of the communities and the initial property deals that made them what they were and are, made for fascinating reading (especially as I sat in my Century City office with a birds eye view of Sunset Blvd). The latter part of the book got a little tawdry for even me at times and could have been edited down.
July 26, 2012
I don't think I would have enjoyed this book without knowledge of LA geography. A slow read because of trying to keep all of the people involved straight. Second half was my favorite - devoting each chapter to a single couple or person. This book proves, once again, that having money is certainly no single key to a happy life!
September 5, 2012
Typical for Michael Gross. He relies heavily on secondary sources and published accounts. There is very little insider or first-hand information here. A good story and Gross synthesizes a lot of information. He really wants to expose the rich, but will always be an
outsider.
July 25, 2012
Interesting book about assorted trophy properties in Los Angeles, Malibu, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.
March 11, 2013
Had some interesting parts especially since I know or know of several of the people involved but I thought parts of it dragged and went on for too long.
January 21, 2016
I found it very interesting but would have loved to see more photos.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews