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`Looks a little like a hotel up there these days," Charles (Buddy) Rogers said the other afternoon, gazing from a sunny sitting room uphill toward the looming beige bulk of Pickfair, the legendary estate that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. began to build at the start of their marriage in 1920, and that was Buddy's home for the 42 years of his marriage to Mary.
"When Mary was about to leave on her journey to heaven," Rogers recalls, "she said, `Will you live on here?'
"I said, `Lord, no; it's too big, too much for me to rattle around in without you.' She said, `What you should do is take a piece of land down the hill from the house and build yourself a place of your own.' And that's what I did."
Pickfair more than any other home symbolized Hollywood in its unchallenged heyday in the 1920s, Hollywood at its most opulent, glamorous, enviable and fascinating, its stars as rich and famous and potent as royalty, with Doug and Mary themselves as their king and queen. But Hollywood has changed, and so has Pickfair under its subsequent owners. After Mary died in 1979, Rogers sold Pickfair to Jerry Buss, and it is now owned by financier Meshulam Riklis.
"He's alone since his wife (entertainer Pia Zadora) took their two kids and left," Rogers says, "and I believe he's trying to sell it."
The house that Rogers built after Pickford died is a few dozen yards down Pickfair Lane from the mansion. It is gated and elegant but not intimidating. Within, it is light-filled and livable, and crowded and aglitter with treasures from Pickfair itself-gifts received and objets d'art purchased (a set of Napoleon's china, watercolor sketches by Rodin), an entire Western bar, stools and all, with Remington paintings.
A kind of honors room off the entrance hall is filled with eight decades' worth of memorabilia accumulated both by an actress who was, at her peak, very likely the most famous woman in the world, and by her husband, a star personality in his own right.
There are Pickford's two Oscars (a best actress award for "Coquette" and a lifetime achievement award given in 1976) and the aviator's leather hat and goggles Rogers...