Plan to Use Greystone as Museum Dies

Negotiations to lease the ill-starred Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills for use as a Westside branch of the County Museum of Natural History have collapsed, representatives of both sides said Wednesday.

The announcement came after months of talks that had appeared to be nearing a successful conclusion, according to city officials.

“We were dumbfounded,” City Councilwoman Vicki Reynolds said.

The museum would have featured exhibitions, educational programs and research at the city-owned mansion, originally built for the oil-rich Doheny family. The county would have paid about $2.5 million to renovate the decayed structure, and one of the country’s most extensive ornithology collections would have been housed on the grounds.

Control Over Use

But in the course of the negotiations it became clear that the city wanted to retain too much control over the county’s use of the building, said James Gilson, an attorney for the Natural History Museum Foundation.

“The city understandably wanted to have a lot of flexibility over the site, but you can’t have both flexibility and long-term commitment,” Gilson said.

In a letter dated Dec. 6, Craig C. Black, director of the museum, informed the City Council of the museum’s decision to abandon the idea.

“The city imposed lease conditions that unfortunately made it impossible” for the museum to proceed, the letter said.

But city officials gave up only after making several more efforts to resume negotiations, Reynolds said Wednesday.

“We felt very positively about the direction of the negotiations, so when we received the letter we were extremely surprised, because it seemed out of sync with the way things had been moving,” she said.

Ultimately, however, it became clear that the museum wanted to be able to build on the property and expand its activities, while the city was looking for a more limited program that would have little impact on nearby expensive residential neighborhoods, Reynolds said.

“I think that what happened is that the enthusiasm of the negotiators carried the negotiations further perhaps than the board (of the museum) wanted to go,” Reynolds said.

Previous Proposals

The collapse of the talks was not the first time that plans for putting Greystone to use have failed.

Collector Frederick R. Weisman planned in 1986 to house his multimillion-dollar collection of modern art at the 18.6-acre estate, but he backed out, saying that he did not want to become embroiled in a political fight with the neighbors.

An earlier proposal to house the art collection of uranium magnate Joseph Hirshhorn at Greystone also failed after neighbors said they were concerned about traffic and parking. Hirshhorn eventually gave his collection to the National Gallery in Washington.

Completed in 1928 at the then-staggering cost of just over $3 million, Greystone was built of 3-foot-thick concrete walls, covered in stone and roofed with imported Welsh slate.

The grounds included a swimming pool, two tennis courts, a sweeping lawn, a series of gardens inspired by the Italian Renaissance, a waterfall and a small lake.

Built for Edward Laurence (Ned) Doheny, son of the first man to strike it rich in Los Angeles oil, the baronial home became the scene of tragedy in 1929 when gunshots killed both young Doheny and Hugh Plunkett, his secretary. It is uncertain which of the men fired the shots or why. Doheny’s widow, Lucy, remarried and stayed on until 1955, when she sold the house to Henry Crown, a Chicago industrialist who never moved in.

The city bought it for $1.1 million in 1965, renting it to the American Film Institute until 1982, when it regained possession amid charges that the building had been badly treated.

The city makes about $300,000 a year by allowing movie companies to use the grounds for filming.