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# Sun, sea and stars: Santa Monica is home to Hollywood’s elite
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/sun-sea-and-stars-santa-monica-is-home-to-hollywoods-elite/
- Published: 2004-12-22T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T01:31:35.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Pier, #archive-import

For as long as they’ve been making films in Hollywood, those with power and money have been living in Santa Monica. Back in the 1920s, the beach north of the Santa Monica Pier was known as the “Gold Coast.” Beach Road, a.k.a. Palisades Beach Road, was called the Gold Coast because the people who built houses there were not merely rich, but they were celebrated too. In the early days, Beach Road was home to four of the five men who created Hollywood: Irving Thalberg and his wife, actress Norma Shearer; oil man J. Paul Getty; comedian Harold Lloyd, and leading man Douglas Fairbanks and his wife Mary Pickford. Locals called the area “Rolls Royce Row.”

In 1928, the Gold Coast was so desirable that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, commissioned Julia Morgan, who was the architect of the Hearst Castle, to fashion an estate on the beach for his mistress, actress Marion Davies. Morgan created a three-story, 118-room, 34-bedroom, 55-bath Georgian mansion on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica. It was accompanied by three guesthouses, two swimming pools, tennis courts and dog kennels. Called “Ocean House” or “The Beach House,” it was built at the astronomical 1928 cost of $7 million. It was the grand-est property in the neighborhood.

The road under the bluffs has always been one of the most desirable streets in town. Hollywood legend Harold Lloyd was at 443 Beach Road; Mae West at 514 Beach Road; Darryl Zanuck at 546 Beach Road; Samuel Goldwyn at 602 Beach Road; Harry Warner at 605/607 Beach Road; Louis B. Mayer and Peter Lawford at 625 Beach Road; Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford at 705 Beach Road, and Norma Shearer at 707 Beach Road.

When America’s royal family migrated west from their compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, they settled at 625 Beach Road, the former home of movie mogul Louis B Mayer. Pat Kennedy, sister to President John F. Kennedy, and her bonvivant husband Peter Lawford, lived there. When President Kennedy visited LA, he officially stayed at the Beverly Hilton, but he spent a lot of time relaxing by Santa Monica Beach. Lawford, who was engaged in the swinging ’60s Hollywood lifestyle, would entertain the president with starlets, models and escorts. His parties for the president were attended by beautiful people like the Rat Pack and Marilyn Monroe. It’s rumored that when in LA, JFK rendezvoused with Marilyn Monroe at 625 Beach Road. The president spent so much time here that in the ’60s, the Gold Coast became known as the “western branch” of the White House.

Palisades Beach Road was inaccessible to the public. You could only enter the street through the exclusive private beach club, The Sand & Sea Club, which closed in 1991\. The state of California took it over, opened Palisades Beach Road, and leased out the property for filming. Many episodes of the popular TV series “Beverly Hills 90210” featured scenes from the Sand and Sea estate.

That’s the story of one street. Celebrities live all over Santa Monica, not just on the Gold Coast. Well-known residents have included actors Sean Penn, June Lockhart, Tobey Maguire, Robert Redford, Jeff Bridges, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ted Danson, Judge Reinhold, Harry Shearer and Tom Selleck. We could give you their addresses, but we won’t. We will tell you that the honorable Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger lived on 21st Street before he married Maria Shriver. He currently owns 3110 Main St., the commercial complex with the restaurant Schatzi, and a mural of the Terminator by the elevator.

In 1978, the city’s best-known political activists were actress Jane Fonda, whose vocal opposition to the Vietnamese war still irks conservatives, and her husband, Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society in the early ’60s and one of the Chicago Seven who were tried on and acquitted for disrupting the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Fonda, Hayden and their children lived in a turn-of-the-century beach house at 153 Wadsworth in Ocean Park. Together they founded the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which was dedicated to “an effort to transform the radicalism of the ’60s into the common sense of the ’70s.”

This grassroots group organized residents, backed candidates for local offices, and was instrumental in our rent control laws. In 1982, Hayden was elected to the California State Legislature, and the celebrity couple moved out of Santa Monica.

And now the Kennedys are in vogue on the Santa Monica political landscape.

City Councilman Bobby Shriver is the nephew of JFK, and the son of 1972 vice presidential nominee R. Sergeant Shriver and Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver. He is the brother of California first lady Maria Shriver.

Thank you to all the high-profile people who make Santa Monica such an entertaining place to live.

Next week: TV and movie locations around town. (For your real estate needs, , or call (310) 309-4219).

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 22, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/122204.pdf?ref=smdp.com)