Whitley Heights 101

6616 Iris Drive

6616 Iris Drive was built in 1930 by Edwin G. Bowen Company, a well-known contracting company who had built the St. Andrews Bungalow Court in 1920 and then worked with screenwriter Zane Grey when he started his own production company in 1932. Bowen traveled to Australia in 1936 with Grey to produce and direct the film “White Death”, a film in which Grey starred in as a fisherman in search of a great white shark.

This Spanish Style two-story single family residence was built with 6 rooms with a total of 1,716 square feet with three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. The exterior of the house is stucco with composition single roofing. There is an attached two car garage on the left side of the residence. The house last sold in 2004 for $450,000 and is currently assessed over $1.1 million dollars. In 1940, an outside porch was converted into a sunroom on the second floor in the rear of the home.

The original owner, Julia St. Clair, resided in the home with her son, Charles, a commercial artist, until 1934, when screenwriter, Wyndam Gittens, a descendant from the West Indies, rented the house for a year. At the time, Gittens was the supervising editor for Mascot Pictures Corporation who recently worked with author Alexander Dumas in the production of “The Three Musketeers” which aired in 1933 and starred John Wayne, Jack Mulhall, Francis X. Bushman, Jr., and Lon Chaney, Jr. Below a partial list of the 66 films he was listed as a contributing writer on.

Below, 6616 Iris Drive was photographed in 1937 by Herman Schultheis, who was born in Germany and worked in film industry from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, most notably on the animated features Fantasia and Pinocchio. He was also an avid photographer who traveled the world with his camera and took hundreds of photographs of the Los Angeles area during the 1930s, including dozens of Whitley Heights. It was on one of these photographic exhibitions in 1955 that he disappeared in the jungles of Guatemala and his remains were discovered 18 months later.

Below is a recent photograph of what the area on Iris Drive/Circle appears today.

In 1940 James and June Van Every purchased 6616 Iris Drive; their daughter, 29 year old Virginia Van Every, an aspiring actress, moved in with them. Virginia, known as Billie, started her acting career in the local theater and was used as a movie extra in 1928 in Cecil DeMille’s “The Godless Girl” when she was 16 years old. In 1932, Van Every made local headlines when she was one of 55 actors who were arrested in a local theater performance of the Greek play “Lysistrata” as it was dubbed an “indecent” play. Below, Van Every is pictured on the right, was booked into the Lincoln Heights police station and then arraigned on the charge of “presenting indecent show” in January of 1932.

Fortunate for Van Every, the arrest did not hinder her acting career; the following year Warner Brothers awarded the actress with the “retrousse nose and big brown eyes” a contract in which she appeared in minor roles including “Sadie McGee” which starred Joan Crawford, “Most Precious Thing in Life” starring Jean Arthur and Donald Cook, “Blind Date” starring Ann Sothern, and “Broadway Bill’ starring Warner Baxter and Myrna Loy. In 1939, Van Every was briefly engaged to Eugene O’Neill’s brother, George, who was also a screenwriter.

Van Every had a promising career but only appeared in 22 films before she eloped with a salesman named Walter Erwin in April of 1941 in Las Vegas. Erwin’s former fraternity brother married the two. After residing with her parents in the Iris Drive house, they moved to the valley where Erwin became a meteorologist and Van Every retired to raise children.

6616 Iris Drive was home to another celebrity in 1946. Singer and actor Johnny Johnston and his first wife, Dorothy, purchased the Whitley Heights home and moved in with their two small children. Johnston started out singing and playing guitar in clubs across the United States and then began performing with Art Kassel and his band, “Kassels in the Air”. He and Dorothy married ten years earlier when they were both 21. The marriage worked as the two never saw each other with Johnny performing at night and Dorothy working during the day. The two would spend time together by meeting for for breakfast in the morning before Dorothy went to work.

During Johnny’s second trip to Hollywood, he began appearing on radio and by 1942, he reached a record deal with Capitol Records and a movie contract with Paramount. Johnston appeared on “Star Spangled Rhythm” which had a star-studded cast of: Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland, Paulette Goddard, Dorothy Lamour, Dick Powell, Betty Hutton, Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd, and Susan Hayward. Johnston sang “The Old Black Magic” in the film and the song was a hit.

As Johnston became more famous, the started staying out all night and Dorothy was getting fed up with his behaviors. Some saw him as a manipulator and a opportunist in the entertainment industry. In 1946, he appeared in “Til the Clouds Roll By” where he met actress Kathryn Greyson and the two had a steamy affair. Dorothy was tired her husband’s absence and filed for divorce. Not only did she win a big settlement, she got the kids and the house!

Johnny didn’t care; he was a rising star, acting entitled to whomever crossed his path. While he was on the set of “Till the Clouds Roll By”, he disrespected and embarrassed the big boss, Louis B. Mayer. Mayer cut Johnston out of the film and fired him from Paramount. Johnny married a pregnant Greyson in 1947 and she gave birth to a girl six months later. Johnston began working at MGM in “This Time For Keeps” starring opposite Esther Williams. Williams described Johnston as a “con-man” who was often gambling on the set and then not paying his outstanding debts. She once observed Johnston with his female groupies reading intimate letters from Greyson.

Johnston’s second marriage lasted until 1952 when Greyson filed for divorce claiming cruelty. Indirectly, Johnston’s run-in with Meyer would end his career as his work on screen began to dwindle. His last minor role was in “Rock Around the Clock” in 1956 which starred Bill Haley and the Comets. Johnston eventually settled in Cape Coral, Florida where he died in 1996 after being married a total of six times. Meanwhile, Dorothy kept the house and married a dentist, Joseph Poole, who adopted her two children from Johnston and had another son in 1949. The moved from Whitley Heights to a family neighborhood in 1955. Below is 6616 Iris Drive in 1940 prior to Whitley Heights being cut in half for the Hollywood Freeway. The house on the lower left, 2053 Lloyd Lane would be moved across the street at 6601 Iris Circle to avoid demolition in 1950.