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  • Built in 1924 on Lot 8 in Tract 5640
  • Original commissioner: corporation lawyer Rupert Lewis Alderman
  • Architect: Arthur Rolland Kelly
  • On September 25, 1924, the Department of Buildings issued R. L. Alderman a permit for a 10-room residence at 400 Rimpau Boulevard. On October 30 Alderman was issued a permit for a one-story, 29-by-18-foot garage on the property. (A permit for another of Arthur Kelly's residential projects, the lost 12 Berkeley Square, was also issued on October 30)
  • San José–born Rupert Alderman and his wife née Elizabeth Wilson had been married in San Francisco on January 8, 1908; their only child Josephine was born in Los Angeles on April 28, 1910. The Aldermans led a typical Hancock Park existence of an attorney and his wife until Rupert died on December 23, 1933, age 53, after a long illness. After her father's death, Joine, as Josephine was somewhat awkwardly called, would begin her career as a socialite, mentioned dozens of times in the columns of newspaper social diarists over the next few decades. Her socializing was more high-minded than the average Marlborough-educated Hancock Park girl; she began a Tuesday salon "to increase friendship, tolerance and broadmindedness," which is curious in light of the interest she developed in Nazi Germany during the '30s. Her obituary in The Malibu Times in 1968 would refer to her salon in capital letters as the "Joine Alderman Celebrity Salon," the goal of which was to "preserve the Continuity of the Individual Free Man." According to Steven J. Ross's Hitler in Los Angeles, "Alderman...helped steer salon conversations on current events and politics along lines most favorable to Germany." She was closely linked to Hans Wolfman, editor of the local Staats-Zeitung during this time—"a constant combination" is how one gossip scribe put it. Wolfman had served on the German-American Olympic Committee that raised funds for German participation in the 1932 games held in Los Angeles; the organization's honorary president was Rupert von KleinSmid, the longtime president of U.S.C. who believed that "the application of the principles of Eugenics to organized society is one of the most important duties of the social scientist of the present generation," sympathies that would have dovetailed nicely with the rise of Nazi Germany. (It wasn't until 2020 that U.S.C. removed Von KleinSmid’s name from its Von KleinSmid Center for International and Public Affairs.) According to Steven J. Ross, Hans Wolfman was a close friend of Georg Gyssling, the German consul in Los Angeles, at whose home Alderman and Wolfman were frequent guests. It seems that Joine Alderman was being used; it is unclear as to whether she married Hans, though the Federal census enumerated in April 1950—at which time she was living in Malibu—indicates that she had been divorced. (The census also gives her age as 33; she was actually turning 40 that month.) She seems to have been unscathed by her dubious prior associations, her name still turning up in Times gossip columns as late as 1960. She married 21-year-old John Pfalzgraff, described as a concert pianist, in 1951 at the age of 41; as she had the census-taker, she appears to have told the marriage bureau, if not her husband, that she was 33. Joine Alderman died on May 17, 1968; her Malibu Times obituary appearing a week later perpetuated her sense of an exalted patrimony, noting that "Her father was Rupert Lewis Alderman, prominent Los Angeles attorney, but her heritage dates back to early Colonial immigrants of English nobility."


Aryan dreams: Joine Alderman, apparently having worn her leis all the
way from Honolulu, arrived home on the Lurline on August 22,
1935. After her career as a salon-keeper, she married a
man 20 years her junior in 1951; a 1968 obituary
noted that she later became manager of
the Palm Springs Tennis Club.


  • Joine Alderman's salons took place at 400 Rimpau Boulevard for only a few years; she and her mother moved to an apartment at the Streamline building at 3530 West Seventh Street before relocating to separate apartments elsewhere. According to the 1940 census, Joine was then living at 1609 North Normandie Avenue and writing for radio
  • Elizabeth Alderman sold 400 Rimpau Boulevard to retired St. Louis malt-company executive Carl Joseph Schiller, who was in residence by 1936 with his wife and three daughters. Carl Schiller died on March 21, 1944. Elizabeth and her daughters remained at 400 for two years before moving to Lido Isle in Newport Beach
  • On August 10, 1936, Carl Schiller was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety for the addition of a 16-by-16-foot sleeping room off a rear northside upstairs bedroom. On May 2, 1939, Schiller was issued permits for a lath house and a 14-by-20-foot greenhouse on the property 
  • Carl Schiller sold 400 Rimpau Boulevard to insurance executive Willard Woodward Keith in early 1946. In her "Confidentially" column in the Times on May 9, social diarist Lucille Leimert wrote that "Willard Keith has cut down his struggle with traffic, each morning and night, by 30 minutes. He has deserted Beverly Hills and moved to Hancock Park"; he and his wife Adeline sold their house at 606 North Alta Drive to move to 400 Rimpau. Keith's name had appeared and would appear many dozens of times in the press over the years in filler social columns as well as in business news and in connection with his considerable work on behalf of civic causes. Born in Fresno on August 25, 1899, Keith was profiled in a lengthy feature in the Times on March 11, 1958, as an indefatigable businessman who had achieved great success despite having only had a grammar-school education. The article included a photograph of an attractive six-foot-three 58-year-old with his hands on a desk, unselfconsciously revealing his half-missing left pinky. He married the former Adeline Donnelly, who was apparently four years older, in 1919, with Willard Jr. arriving on June 13 of the next year; Donald was born in 1929. Willard Jr., recently married, was killed at Guadalcanal early in the war; his father was at the time director of the Office of Civilian Defense in Southern California. Donald Keith married at 22 in June 1951, leaving his parent empty nesters. It seems that the primary attraction of Hancock Park for the Keiths, as it was for many such burghers before the completion of the Santa Monica Freeway, was its proximity to downtown offices, but even as freeways were being built and the system expanded, downtown Los Angeles began to lose its appeal to businesses, some of which, such as Cosgrove & Company, moved west with their employees. In early 1955, Cosgrove moved into a new building at Sixth Street and Ardmore Avenue, one designed by Claud Beelman, who had been the architect of another era's Eastern Columbia Building downtown. The Keith's preference for the Westside resurfaced; as soon as his commute was rendered no longer from Club View Drive to his new office than it was from Rimpau Boulevard to downtown, Willard and Adeline began to make plans to move back west to a house looking east over the fairway of the Los Angeles Country Club. They sold 400 Rimpau in the spring of 1956


As seen in the Los Angeles Times on March 11, 1958


  • On March 19, 1946, Willard Keith was issued a permit by the Department of Building and Safety for various interior alterations at 400 Rimpau Boulevard. On August 13, 1947, Keith was issued a permit for a new one-story, 29-by-33-foot garage at the northeast corner of the lot to be entered from Fourth Street. While somewhat unclear, other permits issued that year and the next called for the remodeling of the original garage into a playroom/guesthouse and for the partial enclosure of the porte cochère on the south side of the house 
  • Investment banker Robert Daniel Cavanaugh succeeded the Keiths at 400 Rimpau Boulevard. On March 21, 1956, the Times ran an item noting that "The Cavanaughs will desert their Cheviot [Hills] neighbors this summer to move to Hancock Park." Cavanaugh's first wife Louise died the day before her namesake daughter's 11th birthday in June 1946, her obituary curiously omitting Robert Cavanaugh from the list of her survivors; he was married again in January 1950 to Katherine Reynolds Fassoth, who had been widowed in 1944. (Interestingly, Cavanaugh had been best man at her 1929 wedding to insurance man Paul Fassoth.) Louise Cavanaugh Jr. was married to Stephen Everett Griffith in the garden of 400 Rimpau on August 17, 1957; his parents, the Benjamin Perry Griffiths, lived at 121 Fremont Place, which synchronously had been built by Katherine Cavanaugh's parents, the Walter J. Reynoldses, in 1921. Robert Cavanaugh died at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, apparently of cancer, on August 20, 1962
  • Katherine Cavanaugh remained at 400 Rimpau Boulevard until her death at the age of 79 on October 19, 1982. Though their jibs were certainly cut the same way socially, it is unclear as to how close she was to her neighbors next door at 414 Rimpau, the Roland T. Kinneys; but, waiting the prescribed year after (the second) Mrs. Kinney died in September 1971, Katherine and Mr. Kinney were, per the 1973 Southwest Blue Book, married on October 12, 1972
  • A retired industrialist, Roland Kinney wasted no time in making over his residential acquisition if not his third wife. Engaging Lundeberg & Strawn, the firm that had carried out remodelings of his former house at 414 Rimpau 20 years before, two additions were made to the library at the northeast corner of the house, one 9 by 15 feet and another 3 by 14 feet. A permit for this work was issued by the Department of Building and Safety on March 29, 1973; on that same day Kinney was issued a permit to add a new chimney (or to replace an old one) in the guest house, previously referred to as a playhouse, which was a remodeling of the original 1924 garage. The next day Kinney was issued a permit for an irregularly shaped swimming pool on the property. On May 22, 1980, Kinney was issued a permit to install solar heating for the pool. (William A. Lundeberg was primarily a developer, although he had worked during the 1930s as a draftsman in the offices of architect Paul Revere Williams from 1925 to 1939, as had J. Cecil Strawn. Lundeberg & Strawn carried out renovations across the city and sometimes built new residences on previously unoccupied sites—as in the case of 526 Rimpau Boulevard—and sometimes on sites on which larger houses had stood. Lundeberg's other nearby projects include 602 and 606 South Lucerne Boulevard, 420 South Plymouth Boulevard, 355 South Irving Boulevard, 4665 West Fourth Street, and 4518 West Sixth Street)
  • Apparently still in possession of 400 Rimpau Boulevard, Roland T. Kinney died on July 19, 1989. The house was on the market by the following March with an asking price of $1,895,000, reduced the next month by $200,000. It is unclear if any sale took place in this period, but 400 was again offered for sale in the fall of 1991 for $1,795,000, perhaps again languishing on the market. By the spring of 1993 it was marked down to $1,299,000. A building permit issued on April 21 for chimney repairs after the Northridge earthquake three months earlier notes the Household Finance Corporation of Pomona as owner
  • 400 Rimpau Boulevard was sold the next year to owners who added foundation bolts to the house. A subsequent owner expanded the kitchen internally and carried out other remodelings; in 2017 the 1947 garage was remodeled



Illustrations: Private Collection; UCLADC; LAT