“Paragraphs of jaw-dropping details about a type of extravagance that might have been scorned even by the very wealthy on the Titanic. But [Unreal Estate] also leaves the reader with a sense of history….[It's] what would happen if Us Weekly and Architectural Digest had a love child that was much smarter than either. The book provides a panorama of what was going on inside some of the most frivolous, gated houses on a hill that have ever existed.”The Los Angeles Times
"Great Hollywood houses, great Hollywood tragedies, great book." The Chicago Tribune
"Sprawling, delicious….compelling and overflowing with gossip....It’s fun! And quite astonishing to read….Unreal Estate is compulsively readable."Liz Smith
“Gross seems to be picking up where the late, great Dominick Dunne left off in his fascination with the ways that high life and low life come together. Gross gives us the lowdown on an incredible cast of characters…[He] is such a good storyteller.”Joe Meyer, Connecticut Post
“Why didn’t today’s owners of the great LA estates get together and offer Gross a house of his own not to write the book?...Great dish."Jesse Kornbluth, Headbutler.com
"This book's for you."David Patrick Columbia
"Murderers, lawyers, actors, pornographers, tycoons, and addicts....Fantasy and ambition, cheating and careless waste...Gross's research is meticulous. Hard to read. Harder to put down."Los Angeles Magazine
"Rich in incident and full of thwarted ambition, visionary zeal, conspicuous consumption [and] salacious gossip...A juicy, breezily told social history of La La Land, deal by deal.Kirkus Reviews
“Unreal Estate has it all: movie stars, murders, strippers, pimps, playboys and Mafiosi alongside the founding members of Los Angeles society…The book is a great read. New York Social Diary
“A gripping picture of what made Los Angeles what it is today...In Unreal Estate, [Michael Gross] takes on the Western Frontier like a modern day cowboy — seeking, searching and taking no prisoners.” Lucy Blodgett, The Huffington Post
“Remarkable houses …famed owners…stories of trysts, broken marriages, dissolution and predatory capitalism.” The Hollywood Reporter
"Sexy and sordid stories fill this survey of L.A.’s wealthiest, most private districts." Los Angeles Magazine "The Reading List"
"Tales of adultery, prostitution, embezzlement, Mafia schemes, and the dauntless efforts of millionaires to keep the riffraff out of the exclusive enclaves of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Park.” Details
"Mister Gross leaves no high society stone un-turned...untold and sometimes sordid stories."The Real Estalker
"Stripping bare the glamorous West Coast,from Beverly Hills to Bel-Air, Holmby Hills, Beverly Park, etc… Michael’s never been a lap dog of his subjects. And he never holds back the dish "George Christy, Beverly Hills Courier
"A name-dropper's paradise."Library Journal
"Gross write with an aficionado's zeal."Publishers Weekly
Michael Gross uncovers the very secret history of Los Angeles through the mind-boggling estates of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills and Beverly Park, and the fascinating, fabulous folks who created and populate them. Using the century-long evolution from adobe huts to $100 million mansions as the baseline of the story, he reveals how a few powerful and often ruthless oil and railroad magnates imposed their idyllic vision of the good life on the Los Angeles landscape to create the legendary communities known as the Platinum Triangle. Gross gives vivid, riveting accounts of the most lavish of the many lavish houses that started springing up almost immediately. But the stories of those homes are just a window onto the lives of their owners and occupants over the course of the 20th century, and onto the bigger story of a people and a storied region that have become, in Gross’s words, “the Mecca of self-invention.” Taken altogether, they read like a cross between Gross’s own 740 Park, Valley of the Dolls, and Hollywood Babylon. With a little of the film Chinatown thrown in too. Los Angeles provides Michael Gross with his broadest canvas yet; UNREAL ESTATE will surprise, fascinate, and most of all entertain you with a story you don’t know about a place you think you do.
Attention Angelenos: Click through for the details on my February 12th appearance at the Beverly Hills Women’s Club and the next day’s Aaroe Architecural Forum lecture at the Pacific Design Center’s Silver Screen Theater. (That’s Lynda and Stewart Resnick‘s Sunset House under construction, at right)
Unreal Estate is now (unreally!) in its eleventh week on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. My new Crain’s New York Business column is about the persistence of beach books. And in case it’s not obvious, Gripepad is off the beach (at right) and back in business.
David Patrick Columbia has written briefly about Unreal Estate before. Today, he offers a lengthy review, and it’s as provocative as I tried to make the book. “Houses are fascinating because houses are people,” he writes. “And when there’s the more, there’s the merrier, not to mention hucksters and hustlers, money managers and lawyers, and the misled, the misplaced, as well as the maudlin, and even murderous. It’s life on the other side of the real fence, and it’s not like yours or mine. That’s what you get in this book; the hot skinny and with caviar and creme fraiche. And Michael serves it up with an appetite for it as big as any reader’s. He does not disappoint….Michael’s style is strong and doesn’t skip a beat. If he’s going to take on a story, he’s going to get it. Dogged, that appetite for uncovering, disrobing the characters – although never unkindly, yet with a curiosity that would once have been called vulgar, but these days is right on the money….The intrepid journalist always looking for the scoop. Break the story, tell the truth, show the consequences, unmask the villains. Them, and the village idiots. There are quite a few of those garnishing the real estate fables in Unreal Estate.” There’s lots more on the book, last week’s book party, and even a certain book reviewer who doesn’t agree with David at New York Social Diary.
For the ninth week, Unreal Estate is holding the fort on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. This week, it’s at #7. Thanks again, California. I look forward to saying that again in person on February 12 at the Beverly Hills Women’s Club and the 13th at the Aaroe Architectural Forum at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.
Star Corcoran broker Wendy Sarasohn hosted a book party for Unreal Estate on Wednesday night, where I spoke to a crowd of New York real estate heavyweights including Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman (at left in the photo with Wendy and me) and New York’s highest-earning realtor (and go-to guy for 740 Park apartments), John Burger of Brown Harris Stevens. The New York Observer’s Elise Knutsen was there and reports on the festivities here. And Guelda Voien of The Real Deal has a report and photos, too. (Photo above by Richard Lewin)
That’s Unreal Estate front and center in Burbank. Meanwhile, on the right coast, Elise Knutsen offers up a squib on my next book, House of Outrageous Fortune, for my new publisher, The Free Press at Simon & Schuster, on observer.com. And as if all that isn’t enough attention for one Wednesday, The Fame Game has named me the week’s #1 literary Mover and Shaker, edging out James Frey and Candace Bushnell. The great Gay Talese and the egregious Ann Coulter round out the top five. (Photo by the The Real Estalker aka Your Mama)
In a post-Christmas surge, Unreal Estate has vaulted back up to the #6 position on the Los Angeles Times non-fiction bestseller list.
Former #1 Steve Jobs has dropped from the top ten, but Unreal Estate is showing staying power at #2 on the nonfiction bestseller list at Book Soup this week. The people of L.A. approve and one author rejoices.
Unreal Estate leads Liz Smith‘s column today for the Chicago Tribune and wowowow. It’s “a sprawling, delicious chronicle of how L.A. evolved real estate-wise, how the land became valuable, how the great neighborhoods were designed,” Smith writes, “….compelling and overflowing with gossip. Gross doesn’t just give us sites and architecture. He tells of the innumerable scandals that each house spawned: the epic divorces, murders, suicides, bankruptcies, sexual excess, family plotting, betrayals and crooked land and water deals. It’s fun! And quite astonishing to read….Unreal Estate is compulsively readable.”
Unreal Estate is now in its seventh week on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. I love L.A.!
