Word: mansions
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...tastes. It was not just that the incoming First Lady had toured the White House with the man who is evidently to be the First Decorator, Los Angeles Interior Designer Ted Graber. At a Georgetown party, she told a Carter aide that when she and her husband leave the mansion, as her "legacy" they will move before Inauguration Day, to give their successors an early start on revamping the family quarters. Not surprisingly, and despite denials by Reagan spokesmen, Carter partisans took that as a startling hint for Jimmy and Rosalynn to consider clearing out well before...
...high marks for simplifying the regulations on issuing and trading stocks; at the same time, he developed a reputation for being a blunt-talking, decisive manager. Friends recall that when Casey arrived in Washington with his wife Sophia and daughter Bernadette, he offered to buy a Massachusetts Avenue mansion from the widow of Chicago Tribune Publisher Robert McCormick. Upon learning that the Japanese embassy had offered more money, he quickly made a yet higher bid and sealed the deal. When the flustered Mrs. McCormick asked what she should tell the Japanese, Casey tersely replied: "Tell them to remember Pearl Harbor...
These days it is a hardship even for the wealthy to build a mansion from the ground up, but they may always acquire one readymade. Jerry Buss, owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings, has recently bought the legendary Pickfair (Will he rename it Bussfare?). It has 22 rooms, which sounds a lot for a bachelor, but big spenders always enjoy an abundance of rooms, even when those rooms have no particular functions...
After houses come gardens. A big house is one way to establish Paradise, but a garden, historically, is a more appropriate place to start. The childish "What if that envisions a mansion is not nearly so ambitious as one that seeks to transplant cypresses from one soil to another (as Hearst did in San Simeon) or to display the rarest species. (After seeing Lionel Rothschild's Japanese garden in London, the Japanese Ambassador was said to remark: "We have nothing like this in Japan.") Versailles, the model of gardening for so many big spenders, must have had Eden...
...they suffer on our behalf. Most of us merely dream nonsense, but the rich have to live it; and while we rarely endure the consequences of our fantasies, they do so relentlessly. Allan Carr, the co-producer of Grease, reflecting on his Malibu dream house and his Beverly Hills mansion with its cop per-walled disco chamber, exulted, "This is my fantasy . . . I'm dreaming all this." Then he added that he would kill anyone who awakened him. Who would think of doing that? Thanks to the Allan Carrs, all our harebrained desires are realized by proxy, like hiring...