Life magazine once wrote that Pickfair was a 'gathering place only slightly less important than the White House — and much more fun.' The estate's name was a portmanteau: Pick from Pickford, fair from Fairbanks. It was the home of the two most famous actors in the world, and for a brief, extraordinary time, it was the center of everything.
Douglas Fairbanks purchased the property in 1919, initially as a hunting lodge on eighteen acres of Beverly Hills hillside. When he married Mary Pickford in 1920 — a union that scandalized conservative America, since both had divorced previous spouses — Pickfair became their shared home and, almost immediately, a kind of institution.
The guest list over the following two decades reads like a catalog of the century's most remarkable people. Charlie Chaplin was a regular. So were Albert Einstein and Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison and Babe Ruth. President Roosevelt visited. The Duke and Duchess of Alba came from Spain. Will Rogers — himself a national figure of enormous affection — declared in 1928 that his most important duty as honorary mayor of Beverly Hills was 'directing people to Mary Pickford's house.'
The house itself was remodeled by architect Wallace Neff into a mock-Tudor style — 18 rooms, a swimming pool, formal gardens, a private screening room. The scale was modest by the standards of later Hollywood excess, which may have been part of its appeal: Pickfair felt like a home, not a stage set.
The marriage that gave the house its name ended in January 1936. Fairbanks and Pickford divorced after sixteen years, and the dream of Pickfair as Hollywood royalty dissolved with it. Fairbanks moved out and eventually married again. Pickford remained in the house, increasingly withdrawn, living in the rooms where the golden age had happened.
She died in 1979. The house passed through several owners. Jerry Buss, who owned the Los Angeles Lakers, acquired it. Then, in 1988, singer and actress Pia Zadora and her husband Meshulam Riklis purchased the estate for $6.5 million.
In 1990, they demolished the original house. Zadora would later say the estate was haunted — that she had heard a laughing ghost. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the son of one of the estate's founders, was more direct: 'I regret it very much.' The demolition erased not just a building but a specific moment in the history of American culture — a moment when two people at the height of their fame had tried to build something real, and had briefly succeeded.
A new mansion now stands on the site, purchased in 2005 for $15 million by UNICOM Global. The name Pickfair is occasionally attached to the address, a courtesy gesture toward history that the original building's destruction makes somewhat hollow.
The estate's cultural legacy, however, is harder to erase. The very naming convention that produced 'Pickfair' — blending two surnames into a portmanteau — inspired Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz when they named their production company Desilu. The house was the model for a certain kind of Hollywood celebrity: accomplished, hospitable, genuinely engaged with the wider world rather than simply performing glamour.
What visitors to Beverly Hills today find is a neighborhood that still carries the memory of what it once was — a place where the most famous people on earth lived, entertained, and for a time believed that their world would last.