I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen by Amy Wilentz

Author:Amy Wilentz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Walking through the rooms downstairs with Lynda Resnick is like taking a tour of pre-Revolutionary France. As Lynda wrote in her vanity essay, the house “is topped off on all four sides with rows of balustrades through which a queen might peek out and utter: ‘Let them eat cake.’” These are modern-day Dohenys. It’s no surprise that Lynda and her husband are about to buy a “very significant” portrait of Marie Antoinette. Perhaps the tragic queen can look across the living room at Napoleon in his Elba agony, and smile.

Lynda guides me up the kind of staircase that Scarlett O’Hara descended in so many memorable ways. Scarlett is a heroine of hers, it turns out. (She had the Franklin Mint begin a series of Scarlett items, including a doll, that generated revenues of $35 million.) The stairway Lynda is ascending rises from the echoing front hall up a lovely plantation-style curve to the second-story landing.

Like Greystone, Little Versailles, early on, was owned by oil people, by Dolly Green, whose father, Burton Green, founded Belridge Oil, with pumps in Kern County, near Bakersfield, among other sites. Burton, a Texas wildcatter, came to California in the 1920s for the oil, and bought up a large tract of virgin land—now Beverly Hills—in order to drill. When he discovered that there was very limited oil beneath his land, he sold much of it to developers. What wasn’t Doheny’s in Beverly Hills was Green’s.

And the concentric circles among the wealthy continue to spin out from Beverly Hills. Like other lands previously owned by oil companies, some of Green’s Belridge property in Kern County now belongs to Paramount Farming, which is owned by the Resnicks. As Stewart Resnick describes land transfers in Kern County, two of the largest landholders there in the days of oil exploration were Getty and Superior Oil, which later sold off their fields to Mobil and Texaco. Those two companies became “the biggest farmers there.” Eventually, Resnick says, “Texaco and Mobil wanted to get out, and we bought both of those operations.”

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