When Portland Mason, their daughter, put the house on the market, it was widely assumed that, like many others in Beverly Hills, it would be torn down and replaced by a new mega-mansion. After all, the villa is small by Hollywood standards: Next to the 20,000-40,000-sq.ft. mansions that are twinkling in Tinseltown, it looks like Nick Carraway's Long Island cottage in "The Great Gatsby." And the house itself is not particularly important architecturally. Verge is a little-known architect, and its mix of styles -- 1920s Hollywood glamour, Mission, Spanish, Italian, and Moorish -- began to lose its appeal about the time that Keaton was forced to move out.

But because of its association with Keaton, the house is significant from a historical standpoint. Some three decades after Keaton left, James Mason, while puttering around in the potting shed, discovered a cache of negatives and working prints of Keaton's films locked in a safe. The only other copies had been destroyed in a studio fire years before, and the discovery reintroduced the world to Keaton's films and re-ignited his career. "This is a very important piece of Hollywood history," says Patty Tobias, co-founder of The International Buster Keaton Society. "I've heard that Keaton cut ‘The General’ with scissors in that cutting room where Mason made his discovery."

David Weddle, a member of the society who is writing a book about Beverly Hills, says that it is important to preserve Keaton's mansion because "it is a cultural artifact. It is one of the few silent movie star houses in Beverly Hills still intact, and movies are a premier American art form. We preserve the houses of our great writers, so why not our great filmmakers?"

Portland Mason, who had lived in the house virtually her entire life, also wanted to make sure the house was saved, and after turning down some higher offers from other developers, sold it for $4.7 million in May 1999 to Christopher Bedrosian and John Bercsi, co-owners of Beverly Hills Properties, who are restoring it to the way it looked when Keaton owned it.

By the time Bercsi and Bedrosian bought it, the only inhabitants (apart from a staff of servants), were some three dozen cats. The house was structurally sound, but part of the ceiling in the master bedroom had collapsed; the basement leaked; dry rot was rampant; and the windows, plumbing and electrical, and heating and cooling systems had to be replaced. There were also many cosmetic issues to be addressed, and Bercsi says, this was a case where benign neglect proved a great aid to restoration. "It's a very British idea of the old country estate that when things need fixing, you just shut the door and live in the rest of the house," he says. "That is the philosophy the Masons followed, so we had to do everything from cellar to dome. I knew about this house for years. There is no gate, and I used to drive down the driveway late at night to look at it. There was a 1956 Rolls up on blocks by the front door, and the top was all rotted and cats were living in it. James had bought it from media baron Lord Beaverbrook."

Next Page