David Weddle: Among The Mansions Of Eden: Tales Of Love, Lust, And Land In Beverly Hills

David Weddle's Among The Mansions Of Eden surveys the social and psychological landscape of California's nouveau aristocracy, mostly by touring its real estate. Weddle begins with a history of land development in the Los Angeles area, explaining how oilman Burton Green planned and broke ground on the community of Beverly Hills in 1906, when Sunset Boulevard was still a dirt road. Then the author starts mixing in amusing anecdotes. He arranges each chapter around a general theme–the influx of Persian immigrants to the area after the Shah of Iran was deposed in the late '70s, the rise of the home-security industry in response to the celebrity-stalker scares of the '80s and '90s, the drug-addled students of Beverly Hills High, and so on–and then tells stories dominated by long shadows and steep decline, profiling rich folks and the underclass workers who serve and resent them. Weddle relates the sagas of Hugh Hefner wannabe Norm Zadeh, founder of the magazine Perfect 10, and Mark Hughes, who converted his mastery of pyramid-scheme middle-management into the ridiculously successful vitamin distributor Herbalife. Mansions looks at the rise and fall of the Friars Club and its biggest supporter, Milton Berle, and he ponders the dozens of silent-movie stars who built the first great estates of southern California before their careers skidded out. In the midst of the stars and former stars, Mansions also covers the retailers of Beverly Hills, like Giorgio's Fred Hayman, and the managers of the Beverly Hills Hotel & Polo Lounge, none of whom prepared for the slump in business that inevitably arose from their clientele's fickleness. Weddle takes on a broad range of topics, from the covert attempts to maintain racial purity in Beverly Hills to the endless cycle of new money moving to the area and mimicking the glory and opulence of past generations and cultures (a trait that goes back to Green's days). Weddle's connections are sometimes too tenuous and his observations too scattered, and he occasionally tries too hard to pump Tom Wolfe-style rhythm and color into his prose. But he regains his focus by coming back to the houses, and to the men and women who broker their purchases. The detailed descriptions of pools, cabanas, and multimedia rooms make good daydream material, the heroes of which aren't the wealthy who have it all and lose it, but the people who lock up after them once they leave. In Beverly Hills, celebrity fades. Only the realtors get to go where they please.