Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 23, 1976

The grandiose Greystone Mansion was built out of limestone and slate, steel and brick and concrete. You could just as well say that it was made of oil. This baronial estate was paid for by Edward L. Doheny, the man who first exploited the Los Angeles Oil Field, pioneered oil drilling in Mexico, and later expanded his wildly successful petroleum ventures to South America. There’s a major street in LA and a beach in Dana Point named after him. Libraries and medical research clinics bear the Doheny name too. Upton Sinclair’s Oil! was loosely based on Doheny’s story. As my mom likes to say in Yiddish, Doheny was a “big macher.”

Greystone Mansion and its surrounding 18-acre grounds were built in the late 1920s as a $3.2 million gift (over $50 million today) from Edward Doheny to his only son Ned. The elder Doheny had owned the land since 1914, as part of a much larger ranch that covered 400-plus acres near nascent Beverly Hills. The Greystone estate was supposedly a wedding present for Ned and his wife Lucy, though it was completed 14 years after they tied the knot. 

Chosen for the job was the young architect Gordon Kaufmann, who had impressed the Dohenys with his house for Benjamin Meyer nearby. Kaufmann would later design the Hoover Dam, Santa Anita Park and the Hollywood Palladium; he was clearly a guy comfortable with building on a monumental scale. With Greystone, Kaufmann created a truly palatial home with 55 rooms across 46,000 square feet. He prescribed oak banisters and rafters, carved by hand; checkerboard floors of black and white Italian marble in the grand hall; fine walnut paneling on the walls; chandeliers all over. Kaufmann even commissioned seven different artisans to design and sculpt each of the chimneys. SEVEN CHIMNEYS! From each of the south-facing rooms on the second floor, you can see straight to the ocean. 

The north wing includes a circular staircase that leads up to a movie theater, a billiard room, and the bowling alley where Paul Dano gets his head bashed in during that horrifying scene in There Will Be Blood. 

And that’s just the main house. The remaining 16 acres of the Doheny Estate had a garage and horse stables, workshops, a greenhouse, a gatehouse, even a firehouse, just in case. In between the structures are endless networks of pathways and formal gardens, with fountains and sculptures and impeccably pruned plants that almost look like sculptures, all colluding for a vibe both open and somehow hidden. The landscape architect Paul Thiene had also worked on the Benjamin Meyer estate. Here, his firm had nigh-unlimited resources to beautify the grounds. When Thiene’s principal designer Emile Kuehl asked him what the Dohenys wanted out of the landscaping, he responded “Give them everything.” According to this extensive history, the LA Times reported in 1927 that Greystone’s grounds would “contain the largest sprinkler system in the world.”

All that seems like a lot, even for a family of seven, with 15 live-in servants. But an estate like this is more than a family’s property – it’s a projection of power, another link in a golden chain to a lineage of feudal landowners and kingmakers stretching back to ancient times. It’s a connection made more physical by the medieval English tudor stylings of the house, and the ancient Greek and Italian Renaissance-style sculptures that cover the gardens. 

Kaufmann built Greystone with three-foot-thick limestone walls – it could probably withstand artillery shells – and the plumbing and electrical wiring are rigged so that they sway without breaking if the ground shifts during an earthquake. This estate was designed to outlast everything around it. 

All the sadder, then, that Ned Doheny only got to enjoy Greystone for five months. On the night of February 16, 1929, he was shot in the head in a Greystone guest room, ostensibly by Ned’s longtime friend and secretary Hugh Plunkett, who also died of a bullet to the head that night. This tragedy occurred almost exactly two years after ground was broken for Greystone. 

The official explanation was a murder-suicide perpetrated by an unhinged Plunkett. His marriage was on the rocks, and he had a nervous breakdown on Christmas Eve. Earlier the day of the shootings, Ned and Lucy Doheny had pleaded with him to check into a sanitarium. 

There are so many complexities and unknowns leading up to, during and after what happened. Why didn’t anyone call the police for three hours, even though there was family in the house at the time? Why did it appear that Hugh had been shot from further away, if he supposedly killed himself? Were Doheny and Plunkett secret lovers? And what about the fact that Ned and Hugh were both implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, and were about to testify in an upcoming bribery trial involving Ned’s dad?

I’m no true crime devotee. The part of this story that sticks with me is less the tragedy itself, and more the role that it continued to play in the Dohenys’ lives after Ned’s death. How do you continue to live in a space that you associate with such a horrible phase in your family history, especially one that occurred right at the beginning of your time there? 

Lucy Doheny stayed on at Greystone with her five kids, and got married again in 1932 to an investment dealer named Leigh Battson. In 1955, with the children gone, Lucy and Leigh sold most of their land to the Paul Trousdale Corporation, developers of Trousdale Estates. Greystone itself was later sold for $1.5 million to a Chicago industrialist named Henry Crown, who never actually lived there, but began to lease it out for filming (The Loved One and The Disorderly Orderly were filmed during Crown’s ownership). The City of Beverly Hills bought it from Crown in 1965, and added a gigantic underground reservoir below where the parking lot is today.

Since 1971, Beverly Hills has operated Greystone and the Doheny Estate as a public park, and continued to lease it out for all sorts of things. Twin Peaks legend David Lynch and Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader both honed their filmmaking craft here while attending the American Film Institute, which leased the property in the 1960s and ‘70s. Lynch created his first feature film Eraserhead in the stables, just down the road from the mansion. 

I’ve attended a wedding at Greystone, and when I last visited, caterers were setting up for another one. On any given day, Greystone might be the site of a young couple’s nuptials, a film or photo shoot, a flower show, a theater production, an art opening…you name it. Even if you aren’t lucky enough to score an invite to explore the inside, you can walk around the immaculate grounds for free, maybe pretend you’re a distinguished party guest or visiting royalty. There’s something inspiring about how this building has resisted being defined by the horrible deaths that took place there. Greystone continues to play important roles in the lives of Angelenos, 95 years after it was completed.  

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Greystone Mansion’s NRHP nomination form

+History of Greystone (greystonemansion.org)

+“If These Walls Could Talk…” (Los Angeles Public Library blog, 2013)

+“LA COLLINA”, ESTATE of BENJAMIN R. MEYER, ESQ., BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA (Half Pudding Half Sauce blog, 2015)

+“Mrs. Doheny’s Story” (dohenyfoundation.org)

+Barker, Tess: ”Money, Murder, and Mystery: One Afternoon Inside Beverly Hills’s Beautifully Creepy Greystone Mansion” (Curbed LA, 2015)

+Lockwood, Charles & Peter V. Persic: “Greystone Historical Report” (1984, PDF) 

+Los Angeles Times Staff: “The sensational society killings that rocked L.A. — still a mystery 90 years later.” (Los Angeles Times, 2019)

+Meares, Hadley: “We Shall Never Know: Murder, Money and the Enduring Mystery of Greystone Mansion” (KCET, 2014)

+Oliver, Myrna: “Lucy Doheny Battson, 100; Family Made Fortune in Oil” (Los Angeles Times, 1993)