Pickfair and Greenacres: The Silent-Film Estates That Made Beverly Hills Famous

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks brought movie glamour to the hills in 1919, and Harold Lloyd outbuilt them a few years later. One estate is listed on the National Register. The other was almost entirely torn down.

The city’s official history says Beverly Hills was “synonymous with glamour” by 1919. That’s the year Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, two of the biggest stars in silent film, who married the following year, bought a hunting lodge on Summit Drive and had it redesigned into a mansion. The press called it Pickfair. Other stars soon followed, including Gloria Swanson, Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino and Harold Lloyd.

Pickfair

Where: 1143 Summit Drive, in San Ysidro Canyon.
What it became: the hunting lodge was remodeled, with Wallace Neff among the architects, into a four-story, 25-room mock-Tudor house with stables, tennis courts and a guest wing. It’s said to have been the first private home in the Los Angeles area with an in-ground swimming pool. Pickford and Fairbanks were famously photographed paddling a canoe in it.
Its role: through the 1920s and 1930s, Pickfair was Hollywood’s social center, and an invitation was a sign that you had been accepted.
What happened to it: Pickford died in 1979. The estate was later sold to Lakers owner Jerry Buss. In 1988, actress Pia Zadora and her husband Meshulam Riklis bought it. In 1990 they revealed it had been largely demolished to make way for a new, larger house. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that all but the guest wing and part of the living room had been razed.

Greenacres

Where: at the mouth of Benedict Canyon. Lloyd bought the land in May 1923 from the Benedict family, who had owned it for more than 60 years.
What he built: a 44-room French–Italian Renaissance house, built from 1927 to 1928, on about 15 acres. The grounds included a nine-hole golf course, a 900-foot canoe stream, a waterfall and gardens by landscape architect A. E. Hanson.
What happened to it: Lloyd lived there until his death in 1971. The lower acreage along Benedict Canyon was later divided into about 15 home lots. The mansion kept roughly five acres and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

Why it matters

These two estates set a pattern that’s still visible on a drive through the hills: famous names, big lots and a tension between private grandeur and public memory. Greystone survived because the city bought it. Pickfair didn’t survive, because nobody did. Both are private property today (Greenacres is a private residence), so please look from the street.