Ever wondered how movie moguls spend their money? Donald Clarke finds some answers in a new book devoted to Hollywood interiors
While leafing through Hollywood Houses, a new book featuring chillingly tasteful interiors from that southern Californian locale, we come across a sunlit living room belonging to - the text is as infuriatingly coy as it is grammatically catastrophic - "a noted actress". Despite the room's rigid geometry, which seems, in the manner of a sitcom set, to open out onto a fourth wall, there are certain nods towards informality. "Jeez, we are just so damn whacky we couldn't find time to buy a coffee table," we imagine the unseen notable remarking. "So we just dragged this old trunk down from the attic and dumped it in the middle of a room. Oh, look, there's my old globe. And my desiccated starfish. I was wondering where they had got to."
It's nonsense, of course. Every last neutrino in the room has been positioned by Kerry Joyce, an interior designer, to suggest precisely the right degree of neurotic cheerfulness.
Just as Angelinos' faces are chopped up and re-ordered to cancel out the random effects of ageing, so too their bedrooms and bathrooms are ritually stripped of any messy humanity by the sort of people who know where to go when you desperately need 65 small paintings of birds.
To call these spaces lifeless would be to invest them with more vivacity than they could ever comfortably contain. Littered with bloated cushions ("José, our plumper, comes every other weekday") and regularly irregular stacks of unread coffee-table books ("Shall we put Hollywood Houses between Magritte and the tasteful photos of Italian urchins?"), the book's icy chambers set one's mind musing on the eternal oblivion to come. The fire in the Santa Monica home of Michael Collins, an art collector, burns brightly, but the room still seems more suitable for an autopsy than for a cocktail party.
To be fair, the photographer Tim Street-Porter - who, having once been married to Janet Street-Porter, deserves our sympathy if not our respect - does deliver some lovely images of Hollywood homes built in the golden years. Frank Lloyd Wright's La Miniatura, in Pasadena, is as elegantly proportioned as one might expect from that architect, and, for those able to ignore the horrible modern furniture, the interior of the Talmadge Villa conjures up memories of Norma Desmond's house in Sunset Blvd. Mind you, considering that Billy Wilder's film was narrated by a corpse and that it began with a monkey's funeral, I am not suggesting that such an association lifts the mood to any significant degree.
Hollywood Houses is published by Thames & Hudson, £29.95 in UK