Whitley Heights 101

6662 Odin Street

6662 Odin Street was built in 1916 by banker turned real estate broker Earl Dietz who built a 6 room bungalow on the northwest corner of Odin Street which intersected Fairfield Avenue at the time. Above, Fairfield Avenue (originally called Oakwood Avenue) started at Cahuenga Blvd., intersected through Odin Street, near Highland Avenue, curved after this house and then went back into Whitley Heights ending just below Whitley Terrace and Wedgewood Place. When Dietz and his family were not living at 6662 Odin Street, they were renting out the bungalow before they sold the house in 1924. In 1920, Dietz added another room to the house, now totaling three bedrooms and two bathrooms. In 1929, the new owner added a two-car detached garage to the property. Below is the corner of Odin Street and Fairfield Avenue seen from Broadview Terrace in Hollywood Heights.

Screenwriter Charles Kenyon (1880-1961) rented out the home in 1917 shortly after he married his first wife, Elsa Cook. Kenyon who started writing theatrical plays, had 118 film credits between 1915 and 1946. In 1935, he wrote the screenplay for William Shakespeare’s “A Midsomer Night’s Dream” and Bette Davis’ “A Girl from 10th Avenue”. Cook died in 1934 and he married former Ziegfeld Follies actress Jane Winton in 1927 (both pictured below). He was 47 years old; she was only 22 years old.

Known as the “Green-eyed Goddess of Hollywood”, Winton (pictured below) completed 43 film roles between 1924 to 1937. She started as an extra in “Three Women” in 1924 and was able to get more substantial roles soon after. In 1926, she co-starred in “The Love Toy”, with John Roche in “Don Juan”, and with Monte Blue in “Across the Pacific”. In 1930, Winton received top billing for “In the Next Room” with Crauford Kent but did not do well when talking pictures came about and her parts fell back to minor roles such as a baroness in Howard Hughes “Hell’s Angels” that same year. Her marriage to Kenyon lasted less than three years. A few years later, Kenyon would remarry for the third time, to a woman who was 24 years younger than he.

Actress Ethel Clayton (1882-1966) rented 6662 Odin Street in 1919 following her husband, actor and director Joseph Kaufman’s death in New York in 1918. The two met (both pictured below) when they starred in “A Woman Went Forth” in 1915 and immediately married. Less then three years later, Kaufman died of pneumonia during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918; he was only 37 years old. Clayton moved in this bungalow with her mother and brother, Donald Clayton, who was also an actor. 

Ethel Clayton and her family rented the Whitley Heights home that year (she with her dog in front of 6662 Odin Street circa 1918 pictured below) before purchasing a two a two-story home on Hawthorn Drive. The silent screen actress was credited for 199 roles between 1909 to 1946. Clayton had trouble converting to sound pictures and appeared in mostly minor roles starting the the late 1920s.

Clayton moved to Hollywood in 1918 after getting a contract with Famous Player’s Lasky Corporation and then Hal Roach Studios in the early 1920s. Clayton would purchase another home in Whitley Heights in 1922, located at 2119 Fairfield Avenue, which she lived in for five years. After losing her first husband, Clayton would always live with her mother and brother, except when she was briefly married to actor Ian Keith. Her last role was as an extra in a Betty Hutton film in 1947; Clayton then retired and moved to Thousand Oaks with her brother in the 1950s.

Between 1937 and 1938, Eric and Karen DeWolf rented the home with their two small children, Guy and Grete. Karen DeWolf (1909-1989) was a screenwriter who started at Universal Studios in the early 1930s under the stage name “Gypsy Wells”. She was actually born Muriel Valentine Quick who lived in Alameda with her parents in the early 1920s. Karen was somewhat of a rebel child as she made national headlines in 1920, at the age of 17, when she posed in her bathing suit for the famed National Police Gazette magazine and got suspended from school. Aspiring to become an actress, Karen told her high school principal that she never intended for those photos to become published as she was seen holding a cigarette.

In 1922, Karen briefly gave up her acting career for love, marrying a 27 year old real estate developer named John Warfield Wells when she was 19 years old. At this time, she assumed the stage name Gypsy Wells and performed in the San Francisco Bay Area as a dancer. The marriage would soon end in divorce. Gypsy Wells then moved to Hollywood to get her acting career started but soon realized her love for writing and got hired in the editing department at Universal Studios. That is where she met her next husband, a cinematographer named Abe Fried whom she married in 1927. After they married, Fried changed his name to Conrad Wells. By 1929, the pair had separated and Gypsy Wells moved to a guest house behind actor Vessey O’Davoren and his wife, portrait painter Ivy de Verley at 2051 N. Las Palmas Avenue (see below).

In 1930, Conrad was working for Fox Film Corp. and was working on the film, “Such Men are Dangerous”, starring Warner Baxter. On January 2nd, while filming several scenes from the air off the coast of Santa Monica, the plane he was flying in, collided with another plane that was also filming for the movie. Both planes burst into flames before crashing into the ocean, killing Conrad Wells and eight others including, director Kenneth Hawkes, three other cameramen, an assistant director, two property men, and the two pilots. Conrad had not changed his will and $10,000 was left for Gypsy Wells. She then met an artist/etcher named Eric DeWolf and married him by 1930. He was 36 years old; she was 23. Gypsy stopped her career to have two children: Guy and Grete (pictured below center and right). Guy DeWolf would later rent the guest house at 2051 N. Las Palmas Boulevard in 1952, the very place his mother had rented years before.

By 1933, Gypsy took the name of Karen DeWolf and was again working at Universal Studios writing scripts. DeWolf co-wrote the script for “The Countess of Monte Cristo” starring Fray Wray in 1934 and “The Love Captive” starring Gloria Stuart and Nils Aster in 1935 before becoming the sole writer for many films. By the end of the 1930s, her big break came when she became the writer for the “Blondie” films which starred Penny Singleton. In the mid 1950s, DeWolf switched to television before she retired in 1958, writing 31 episodes of the Ford Television Theater from 1951 to 1957. Karen divorced and married for the forth time, which also ended in divorce.

In 1939, South African born Cecil Kellaway rented 6662 Odin Street for a year. Kellaway had just moved from Australia where he worked in live theater, to try his hand in acting on films. Finding he could get only gangster bit parts, he got discouraged and returned to Australia. Then William Wyler called and offered him a part in Wuthering Heights (1939). From then on Kellaway was always in demand when the part called for a twinkling, silver-haired leprechaun. Cecil Kellaway was nominated for two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor for The Luck of the Irish (1948) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Cecil was originally offered the role of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), but he turned it down, telling his son, “Americans don’t go for whimsy.” His works also include some television. He played Santa Claus on an episode of Bewitched (1964) and also appeared in The Twilight Zone (1959). Below is Kellaway with actress Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” in 1946. 

His son was Peter Kellaway, the pioneer in the clinical use of the electroencephalogram (EEG) test to evaluate patients with possible neurological difficulties. When Jack Ruby stood trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Kellaway testified about the results of Ruby’s EEG tests.

In 1956, the residence and garage was relocated to 8216 Geyser Avenue in Reseda where it remains today. The 2,136 square foot house has not changed structurally, but had since been remodeled.