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  • Built in 1940 on Lot 32 in Tract 5640
  • Original builder: The Oxford Investment Corporation as a speculative project
  • Architect: Glenn Charles McAlister
  • On March 6, 1940, the Department of Building and Safety issued the Oxford Investment Corporation permits for an 11-room residence and a one-story, 21-by-28-foot garage on Lot 32 in Tract 5640, which was originally designated as 553 Rimpau Boulevard
  • The Oxford Investment Corporation was among the entities of prolific residential builder James Frank Dickason, who had been turning out houses in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills since 1923. G. C. McAlister had been practicing architecture in Montana and Wyoming before moving to California; one of his designs was the 1929 Holmby Hills house owned by Rudy Vallee in the 1930s and later known famously if not notoriously as Jayne Mansfield's Pink Palace. (In a sad postscript to Dickason's life, he died a suicide in 1949 leaving a note reading, "I did it—lost $400,000 gambling. Gambling is a malignant disease.")
  • After running frequent classifieds in the Times advertising open houses at 553 Rimpau Boulevard during the summer and fall of 1940, as well as small display ads, Dickason succeeded in selling the house by the next fall to Antoinette Tuller, widow of politically powerful attorney Walter Tuller; known at the time of his death in September 1939 as O'Melveny, Tuller & Myers, his firm evolved into O'Melveny & Myers and is today called simply "O'Melveny." Mrs. Tuller had James Dickason make some changes to his design before she moved in and appears to be the one who decided that the house should be addressed "555" rather than 553
  • On November 17, 1941, Antoinette Tuller was issued a permit to add a chimney on the north side of the house to match the existing one on the south side and to add a screen porch to the southwest corner of the building. A permit issued to Mrs. Tuller on December 8, 1942, called for changing the "existing false beam and cap, on front porch," an apparent design change that is unclear
  • Milwaukee-born Antoinette Ruth Sabel had worked as a music teacher at Pasadena High School before marrying Walter Tuller in 1930 and was otherwise no mere public-school faculty member. With the backing of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, she had gone on to develop orchestras, brass bands, and singing groups composed of city workers (though she forbade jazz, which she considered sordid). It is unclear as to when Nettie, as she was known, and Walter might have first met. Tuller was married with five children when he divorced his wife of 20 years in August 1928; for whatever reasons, it was decided then that the three elder children (Lula May, 18, Carol, 17, and Walter Jr., 6) would be placed in the custody of their mother, living in Long Beach, while the two youngest (Mary Louise, 6, and Robert, 4) would live with Mr. Tuller in a house he bought at 300 South June Street in Hancock Park. In 1931 the ex–Mrs. Tuller was forced by the apparently unrepentant, egotistical, and altogether unpleasant-sounding Major Tuller—he was the pug-faced type of man who clung to a wartime rank well after the Armistice—to plead in court for her alimony and for support of the invalid Lula May after he had cut her off at the age of 21; more wrangling over money would occur at the time of his death later in the decade. In the meantime, as announced in the Pasadena Post on June 13, 1930, Tuller married Miss Sabel at the Los Angeles home of friends the day before. A large, rather indiscreet photograph of the couple appeared in the Times on July 10, 1933, as they were embarking on a delayed round-the-world honeymoon. The ambitious new Mrs. Tuller seems to have been anxious to establish herself socially now that she had the important spouse and more than the salary of a schoolteacher or municipal employee. Her husband had been born in flyspeck Iuku, Kansas, in 1886 as Walter Kimple Tuller (Kimple being his mother's maiden name); it seems that Antoinette preferred the grander-sounding middle name of Kilbourne for him, and it was duly adopted. When Antoinette decided she needed a beach getaway, she had Walter buy a lot in the Malibu Beach Colony, as reported in the Times in May 1939. The year before, the Tullers had moved to the grand house built in 1912 by Dr. Peter Janss 455 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square (later Norman and Buff Chandler's "Los Tiempos"). It was there that Walter Tuller died on September 27, 1939


Perhaps too self-involved to consider declining an offer to pose for a Times photographer,
Walter Tuller, still clinging to the rank of major 15 years after the Armistice, and his
second wife appeared in the paper on July 10, 1933. In addition to world travel,
the former schoolteacher was beginning to assemble upper-middle-class
decorousness in the form of some serious residential statements.


  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was considerable ill will, so to speak, concerning the last will and testament of Walter Tuller. Within weeks of his death, a series of suits was filed by Edna May Tuller and daughters Lula May and Carol regarding Tuller's dissolution of a trust he'd set up for the young women's benefit, one that apparently included community property of their parents and of which perhaps Antoinette did not approve. Tuller had left his namesake and his daughter Carol $250 each and Lula May just $100 while the two younger children were left sizable trusts along with Antoinette. Lula May contended in her suit that her father had been controlled by the "keen mind, fascinating personality and compelling attraction" of her stepmother. On October 31, 1939, an item in the Times reported that 18-year-old Mary Louise Tuller had married theater doorman George Topper in Oakland 13 days after the death of her father. Meanwhile, perhaps having to adjust somewhat to the outcomes of her stepchildren's and her predecessor's lawsuits, Antoinette Tuller decided to unload 455 Lorraine and strike a deal with James Dickason for 555 Rimpau Boulevard
  • With her two stepchildren gone from her household—Mary Louise married and Robert off to college and war service, after which he lived with his sister in Van Nuys—Antoinette Tuller appears to have been buying the 11-room 555 Rimpau more for a statement than a need for space. She kept it through the war years, selling it to Elizabeth Dwyer Reid in 1945. Mrs. Tuller bought the considerably smaller Hancock Park house at 132 North Las Palmas Avenue, hiring Paul R. Williams, the house's original architect, to carry out some remodeling; she flipped 132 within a few years and, ever upward, would be moving on to Bel-Air. Apparently, however, she missed the old 'hood. In 1960 she bought the Lemuel Goldwater house at 627 South Hudson Avenue, retaining it until her death in 1974
  • Elizabeth Reid had been married to Horace Boos of the Boos Brothers cafeteria fortune; after he died in 1926 she married grain executive William P. Reid. The Reids were divorced by 1940, she remaining in their house at 104 South Hudson Avenue in Hancock Park and he moving to the Los Angeles Country Club. Her son Horace Boos Jr. brought notoriety to the family with his messy marital life, much covered by the press in the late '30s. Mrs. Reid was left to help raise Horace's daughter Elizabeth Dwyer Boos, which might account for her purchase of 555 Rimpau; the child seems to have shuttled between her grandmother and father, who, after having been married to young Elizabeth's mother twice when she was a child, had since married an actress and had two more children. Mrs. Reid moved on to Beverly Hills in 1948 
  • An item in the Times on October 10, 1948, reported that "The two-story, 10-room Colonial residence at 555 S. Rimpau Blvd. was sold by Mrs. Elizabeth Reid to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Levin for $65,000"
  • Bernard Levin, a real estate operator, moved into 555 Rimpau with his wife Mollie and their young children Ellen, Harold, and Nancy. The Levins remained until moving to Beverly Hills in 1954
  • Classified ads appearing in the Times in the late winter of 1954 offered 555 Rimpau Boulevard for sale at an asking price of $57,500; it was still on the market, at an unspecified price, in October
  • Edward Levin, a Beverly Hills physician, bought 555 Rimpau Boulevard in 1955 and moved in with his wife, née Helen Keller; it is unclear as to whether he was related to his predecessor. Dr. Levin, born in Los Angeles on January 19, 1909, received his M.D. from U.S.C. and practiced internal medicine at Cedars Sinai for 50 years. His family appears to have still owned 555 at the time of his death on June 4, 1996
  • The Edward Levins were burglarized at 555 Rimpau soon after they moved in; in January 1956, a porchclimber made off with a mink stole, a tape recorder, and liquor, among other loot
  • On May 29, 1961, the Department of Building and Safety issued Dr. Edward Levin a permit for an 18-by-38-foot swimming pool on the south side of the house; on June 12 of that year, he was issued a permit for kitchen alterations
  • The owners of 555 Rimpau Boulevard in recent decades have demolished and replaced the original garage (2006) and carried out some interior remodeling



Illustrations: Private Collection; LAT