Raised by Polish immigrant parents in the late eighteen-hundreds, in Baltimore, Maryland, London, Ontario, and Youngstown, Ohio, the Warner brothers—Harry, Sam, Albert, and Jack—founded their first official studio in Hollywood in 1918, and in 1923 they created Warner Bros. Pictures, with Harry as president, Jack and Sam as vice-presidents in charge of production, and Albert as treasurer. By the early nineteen-forties, Warner Bros., which had become known for introducing sound to film (with “The Jazz Singer”) and for producing movies with a greater social awareness than those of its main competitor, M-G-M, owned seventeen thousand movie houses in seventy-five hundred towns. The studio’s roster of actors soon included James Cagney, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and James Dean, and its list of films such classics as “Casablanca,” “The Big Sleep,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “A Street car Named Desire.” During this time, Jack and his second wife, Ann Warner, also became legendary members of the Hollywood social aristocracy. Although Jack and Harry Warner managed to make their studio one of the most successful in Hollywood, they had serious disagreements about its management and became increasingly estranged. In 1956, two years before Harry’s death, Jack negotiated a buyout in which he maneuvered Harry out of the studio and replaced him as president. In 1966, Jack sold his interest in Warner Bros. to Seven Arts Production, for thirty-two million dollars. The following interviews about the Warner family have been excerpted and edited from a work in progress.

THE WAX MUSEUM OF DREAMLAND

David Geffen (interviewed 1991): One time, a friend and I were driving past Jack Warner’s house on Angelo Drive. We noticed that the gates were open and we actually drove in, but guards showed up and stopped us from looking at the house. When I read Ann Warner’s obituary in the Hollywood Reporter, in March, 1990, I thought, I’ll say I want to buy the house just to get a look at it. This time, I was ushered in. It was so grand and so Hollywood. It was a bigger statement than Louis B. Mayer. It was a bigger statement than David 0. Selznick. It was the biggest statement that any of the figures of that era had made. It was an homage to an idea about the way people lived in Hollywood. I got caught up in the whole gestalt and I bought it.

Barbara Warner Howard (interviewed 1986-98): Our house was originally built in a Spanish style, but my mother hated it. My father had lived there with his first wife, and Mother was always after him, saying, “Let me just change a few things,” but he kept saying no. Then one day Father came home and found that she had arranged through someone at the studio to have a bulldozer tear down the façade of the house. Anything that looked Spanish was gone. So he finally let her redesign the whole front. She was very taken with Monticello and went to study it before they built. With some help from the Hollywood decorator Billy Haines, the house became the Southern antebellum mansion of her dreams.

There were big wrought-iron gates at the street entrance and there was always a guard from the studio posted by them. You’d come up the driveway, under a canopy of sycamore trees that were illuminated at night by soft hidden lights, then around a graceful fountain in the brick courtyard. Then you’d pass through a pair of mahogany doors into an entrance hall that had a curved staircase, a large crystal chandelier, and a Versailles parquet floor which Mother had found in France. Downstairs, there was a theatre with a massive screen that rose out of the floor and, in the next room, a bar with a pale oak counter and leather wall panels. The dining room on the ground floor had Regency chairs and an English dining table that could seat twenty-four. And there was a ladies’ room, where the women would go while the men smoked their cigars after dinner, which had a pink-veined marble floor and Venetian blackamoors. In the pantry, there was an old-fashioned telephone switchboard that only the butler could work. Upstairs were my parents’ quarters, complete with steam room, and my little bedroom and sitting room, which were done in deep pink—to this day I’ve hated pink—and lots of chintz. I’d never been particularly attached to the house—I’d always wanted to get out. To this day, I don’t completely understand my feelings about it.

Only about ten days after my mother died, an executor for the estate said, “I have someone who might be interested in the house.” It was David Geffen. He came over a few days later, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and a nice jacket: he looked like someone you would meet at a beach party. He could have been a friend of mine. I thought it would be nice to sell it to someone in the entertainment business, and my mother might have liked him, though my father would have disapproved. But David said, “I could never live here. What would I do in a place like this?”