Whitley Heights 101

6821-6825 Iris Circle

6825 Iris Circle was built in 1923 by businessman George Kling. He owned his own business and his two sons and daughter helped to run it. According to a 1930 census when they lived here, his son, Robert, listed himself as an actor for motion pictures, but no record of him acting could be found. The Klings lived at this residence until 1932 when they put the home up for sale. The next buyer turned the property into a duplex with one apartment on the bottom floor (6821 Iris Circle) and one on the top (6825 Iris Circle).

Animator Ken Harris and his first wife, Alta, lived at 6821 Iris Circle between 1938-39. Born, Karyl Ross Harris, he first changed the spelling of his name to Karol, while he lived here and then eventually changed his name to Ken because others had a difficult time remembering the spelling. Ken first worked at a car dealership because he loved racing cars and was said to have owned a total of 120 cars in his lifetime. He married, Alta, both pictured below, in 1927 and she died in 1963. Ken never attended any formal art school and his talent for drawing came naturally. Early on, he applied at Disney, but was turned down due to his lack of education. In 1927, his animation career actually began at the Los Angeles Examiner and the Evening Express newspapers drawing cartoons for the sports page.

From there, he went into animation with Leon Schlesinger, and subsequently Warner Brothers, where he worked on “Bugs Bunny”, “Daffy Duck”, “Wile E. Coyote”,and “The Road Runner” under the direction of Chuck Jones for 28 years. After Warner Brothers closed he went to Hanna Barbara to draw “Tom and Jerry” at MGM under his old director Chuck Jones. His last main feature before retirement from MGM was “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” under Chuck’s direction. He also became lead animator for the Richard Williams studio in London, notably creating the title sequence of The Return of the Pink Panther (1975). A year before his death in 1982, he was made a recipient of animation’s highest accolade, the Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award.

Below is photographs of the lower floor apartment, 6821 Iris Circle, where Ken and Alta lived for two years. The apartment consists of a living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom and bathroom.

From 1942-1945, J Gordon Anderson and Josephine Villalobos Anderson rented the same apartment while Gordon was on furlough. Josephine was born in Mexico and her younger sister was actress, Lupe Velez known as “The Mexican Spitfire” and “The Mexican Hurricane”. Lupe Velez was born on July 18, 1908, in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, as Maria Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez. As a young girl, she would accompany her father to battles during the Mexican Revolution and witnessed death, which is what made her a fearless adult. She was sent to Texas at the age of 13 to live in a convent because she was dating a 21 year old man. She later admitted that she wasn’t much of a student because she was so unruly. She then returned to Mexico with her family, who were struggling financially and her father went missing during the revolution and it was suggested that her mother and she prostituted to get money. By 1924, Lupe started her acting career on the Mexican stage and was discovered by an American actor named Richard Bennett who invited her to Hollywood.

By 1927 she had emigrated to Hollywood, where she was discovered by Hal Roach, who cast her in a comedy with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Douglas Fairbanks then cast her in his feature film The Gaucho (1927) with himself and wife Mary Pickford. While testing for the role of the “wild mountain girl,” Fairbanks asked her to take off her shoes, since her character would be barefoot. Vélez refused. “Then you don’t get the part!” Fairbanks said. “I don’t take off my shoes for you or no one…I go back to Mexico!” Vélez yelled. Not only did she get the part, Vélez and a smitten Fairbanks, who was married to Mary Pickford, would go on to have a brief affair.

Lupe was known to have a quick temper and had gotten into several altercations. She got in a fistfight with the actress Lilyan Tashman in the powder room of the Montmartre Café. She once pulled a knife on Norma Shearer at a party given by Carole Lombard because she didn’t like Shearer wearing a red dress at the all-white ball. And she once socked Libby Holman, her co-star of the Broadway show You Never Know, in the face and gave her a black eye at a curtain call after a long-running feud with her. Lupe also was known to have multiple romantic relationships with popular actors including; Gary Cooper, Tom Mix, Errol Flynn, Red Skelton, John Gilbert, Charlie Chaplin, Victor Fleming, and Clark Gable. Lupe started dating Gary Cooper while co-starring with him in 1929’s Wolf Song. They lived together at 730 N. Rodeo Drive until he left her in the early 1930s and they also lived in the “Happy Days” house located at 565 N. Cahuenga Blvd. She had stabbed him with a kitchen knife and got into a tabloid fight with his mother who did not want her for a daughter-in-law. The rocky relationship had taken its toll on Cooper, who had lost 45 pounds and was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Paramount Pictures ordered him to take a vacation to recuperate and while he was boarding the train, Lupe showed up at the station and fired a pistol at him.

In 1933, Lupe married Tarzan actor, Johnny Weissmuller, in Las Vegas and they moved next door to 732 N. Rodeo Drive. Their five year marriage was full of public fights in restaurants, at football games, prize fights, and premieres. Weissmuller would go to the movie set covered in bite marks and scratches that makeup artists had to cover up. Once Lupe taunted him by saying she killed his dog. He retaliated by wringing the neck of her parrot, then walked out on her. He would mention later that he often had to bring her home from Cooper’s house. Lupe filed for divorce twice from Weissmuller and they reconciled each time. The third time was final in 1938 “when she told the judge that he was ‘very insulting,’ threw dishes at her and threatened to kill her chihuahua”.

Then, in September 1944, 36 year old Lupe Vélez found out that she was pregnant. As the official story goes, Lupe discovered she was pregnant while seeing the Austrian actor Harald Ramond Maresch (pictured below). In November, she announced their engagement. But their relationship went sour in early December 1944, with the Los Angeles Times reporting on December 10 that they broke up. On the evening of December 13, 1944, Lupe dined with her two friends, the silent-film star Estelle Taylor and Venita Oakie. In the early morning hours of December 14, Lupe went to her bedroom, where she consumed 75 Seconal pills and a glass of brandy. Her secretary, Beulah Kinder, said that she found the actress’s body on her bed later that morning. A suicide note addressed to Harald Ramond was found nearby. It read: To Harald, May God forgive you and forgive me too, but I prefer to take my life away and our baby’s before I bring him with shame or killing him. – Lupe. On the back, it said, How could you, Harald, fake such a great love for me and our baby when all the time, you didn’t want us? I see no other way out for me, so goodbye, and good luck to you, Love Lupe. Lupe was a devout Catholic who would have never had a baby out of wedlock.

There were also other rumors circulating about Lupe. Journalist Robert Slatzer claimed that he interviewed her several weeks before her death in her home and she confided that the baby was Gary Cooper’s who refused to acknowledge the baby indicating he thought it was Maresch’s. Slatzer further indicated that he spoke to Cooper after Lupe’s death who confirmed that it was possible he could have been the father. He also spoke with actress Clara Bow, a former girlfriend of Gary Cooper, who stated that Cooper called her screaming that he was going to kill Maresch for getting Lupe pregnant. The story goes on that Lupe, trying to protect Cooper’s reputation, was trying to get Maresch to marry her and that she killed herself because of Cooper’s rejection per Michelle Vogel in her book, Lupe Velez: The Life and Career of Hollywood’s Mexican Spitfire”.

In the 2002 book Tarzan, My Father, Johnny Weissmüller, Jr. recounted the events surrounding Lupe’s death as a mystery caused by an attempt to “put a lid” on what happened. When Kinder discovered her body, she called Bo Roos, Lupe’s business manager, who called his friend and Beverly Hills Police Chief Anderson to the scene. The book states on the night of her death, Lupe arranged to meet Maresch and decorated her room with candles and dressed in a lingerie. She took the Seconal to either to calm her nerves to meet him or to scare him. The book also suggested the baby was fathered possibly by Cooper, not Maresch.

In his book, “Hollywood Babylon”, Kenneth Anger suggested that Kinder found Lupe with her head in the toilet in her bathroom. Anger indicated that Lupe had a spicy Mexican dinner that night and when she took the pills, they did not mix well with the food and she needed to vomit. In his account, while racing to the toilet, she slipped on the tile and plunged head first into the commode. If Lupe had been alive when Anger wrote the book in 1959, she may have gone “spitfire” on him because he did not have any concrete evidence that Kinder found Lupe in the bathroom. In fact, Kinder stated “I thought she was asleep, she looked so peaceful,” Kinder remembered. “Lupe looked so small in her oversized bed,” the first policeman on the scene recalled, that at first sight he “thought she was a doll.” However, according to the blog, Beverly Hills Confidential, Lupe was found on the floor and recovered a death photo:

Lupe’s death occurred while her sister, Josephina was residing at 6821 Iris Circle. Josephina, who was a double for some of her sister’s movies, held a press conference in this apartment shortly after Lupe’s death. Josephina claims that on November 6, Lupe asked her sister to raise the baby as her own until she married Maresch. Lupe wanted Josephina to go with her to either Santa Barbara or Mexico until the baby was born and then Josephina return to Hollywood with the baby. Josephina was contesting Lupe’s estate, valued at $125,000, consisting of her Rodeo Drive home, two cars, jewelry, and personal effects, was left to her secretary, Beulah Kinder, with the remainder held in trust for her mother, Mrs. Josephine Velez. Josephina claims that Lupe was going to give her $25,000 to care for the baby. Josephine also disclosed that Lupe tried committing suicide twice before, once by attempting to jump out of a window and the second pills. Her death certificate listed “Seconal poisoning” due to “ingestion of Seconal” as the cause of death, not drowning. Further, there was also no evidence to suggest Vélez had vomited.