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  • Built in 1927 on Lot 26 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: building contractor Chester Wurster as his own home
  • Architect: Newton & Murray (Henry Carlton Newton and Robert Dennis Murray)
  • On October 29, 1927, the Department of Building and Safety issued Chester Wurster a permit for a two-story, 12-room house with an attached garage, still an unusual arrangement in local domestic architecture, fire a leftover concern from the days of hay being stored in barns and similar early concerns about gasoline. The permit carried the notation that "all points of contact between garage and living quarters will be fireproofed...."
  • Chester Wurster's father, Frederick Henry Wurster, started as a contractor and builder in Buffalo and was specializing in reinforced-concrete structures by 1900. By 1912, after a stop in Wichita, he and his family arrived in California, where offices of the Wurster Construction Company were opened in Los Angeles and San Diego; there the firm was the contractor for architect Bertram Goodhue's California State Building and California Tower built in Balboa Park for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. After Frederick Wurster died in July 1924, Chester assumed the presidency of the company, which also is notable for having been the contractor for a number of churches, including St. Vincent's at Adams and Figueroa and the Wilshire Boulevard Christian Church at Normandie; schools, including buildings for the Claremont Colleges; and theaters. Chester's wife, née Mary Davies, became secretary-treasurer of Wurster Construction
  • The Wursters remained at 655 Rimpau Boulevard until 1938. A classified ad in the Times on May 22, 1938, reads "English type de luxe. This home offered $10,000 under market value." On May 25, 1941, a display advertisement appeared in the Times for an auction of "exquisite furnishings from the original Hancock Park home of Mrs. Chester Wurster," which had been moved to the galleries of Lewis S. Hart on Wilshire Boulevard. The Wursters were by then living at 349 South Norton Avenue
  • Succeeding the Wursters at 655 Muirfield Road were Robert and Enid Parsons; he was executive vice-president of the Pacific Company of California, investment brokers. The Parsonses owned the house but occupied it only briefly, moving to 101 North Irving Boulevard by mid 1942. (Apparently serial renovators, the couple soon had that house on the market and were off to 105 North Van Ness Avenue)
  • Attorney Leonard Meyberg was occupying 655 Rimpau Boulevard by 1948; born in St. Louis on January 2, 1895, he was by the early '20s well-known in Hollywood legal circles and was producing films. Meyberg's wife Lorraine was the daughter of wool mogul Leon E. Kauffman, whose fortune had him moving his Alvarado Street house to the southeast corner of Wilshire and Wilton Place, where it became 3986 Wilshire Boulevard, before relocating all the way to the Pacific—although not taking the house with him this time. In 1928 Kauffman moved to the Villa Leon, the result of his making good on a promise to his wife Clemence to build her a palace by the sea. Leonard and Lorraine Meyberg had had a tangled path to matrimony; in 1922 he'd married 28-year-old divorcée Lucile Hellman Frank, daughter of Maurice S. Hellman of the well-known old-line banking clan. While there was some scandal implied in press coverage of Lucile's first divorce, it was nothing compared to what came out in coverage of her second: On November 20, 1931, the Los Angeles Record carried a page one, above the fold article detailing Leonard Meyberg's $1,000,000 suit against his former in-laws claiming that the Hellmans had caused the breakup. Meyberg claimed that Lucile's parents did not feel that he had kept their clearly spoiled daughter in the life of luxury to which they thought she was entitled, he apparently being told by the Hellmans, "If you cannot give her luxury, we will," and, unwittingly explaining their daughter's biggest problem, "We separated her from her first husband, and we'll separate her from you." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lucile's next marriage in 1936 ended within a few years—that husband had her living in Glendale, which cannot have pleased her parents—and she would go on to marry yet again


Lorraine Kauffman Rettenberg Harris Meyberg in 1934


  • Meanwhile, Leonard Meyberg had become interested in marrying again himself. Lorraine Kauffman was another young divorcée, having married Leonard O. Rettenberg of New York in the spring of 1931 and then, over her father's objections, eloping with Boston bandleader Stanley Gershon Harris in the summer of 1934. Having apparently just obtained a second divorce in Nevada, she and Meyberg were married in Carson City in November 1936. Apparently taking a cue from Meyberg himself, Harris filed a $100,000 alienation of affections suit against the attorney, claiming that he had lured Lorraine away with lavish presents and also suggesting bigamy, alleging that the Nevada divorce was illegal due to a technicality. He sought alimony from Lorraine, sometimes called the "Woolen Princess" in the press. Once Harris was gotten off their backs, the Meybergs moved to an apartment on Highland Avenue in Hollywood; with the birth of their son Leonard James Meyberg Jr. on June 10, 1940, the Meybergs moved to a house at 6666 Whitley Terrace. After Leon Kauffman Meyberg was born on December 19, 1943, the family needed more room indoors and out and found 655 Rimpau Boulevard. The Meybergs' daughter Clem Kauffman Meyberg—named for her maternal grandmother Clemence Marx Kauffman—was born on March 6, 1951
  • On December 28, 1950, the Department of Building and Safety issued the nominal owner of the house, the Penn Company Limited—a business entity incorporated by Leonard Meyberg in 1931—a permit to build a two-story, 10-by-20-foot addition at the northwest corner of the house
  • The Meyberg family would retain 655 Rimpau Boulevard for decades. Leonard Meyberg died at the age of 81 on July 8, 1976; while his widow was still listed at 655 in city directories as late as 1987, she had put the house on the market as early as April 1984, when classifieds in the Times cited an asking price of $895,000. Hancock Park houses did not fly off the shelves in the '80s—a year later the price had been reduced to $730,000 and there were still no takers. By that August, it was down to $697,000 and by December down another $98,000. Ads were still citing a price of $599,000 in the spring of 1986. It is unclear as to when the house finally sold, though by 1987 Lorraine Meyberg had moved to an apartment. She was 86 when she died on January 21, 1997
  • Succeeding the Meyberg family at 655 Rimpau Boulevard, if not immediately, were the owners current as of 2021


Illustrations: Private Collection; San Francisco Examiner