Villa Fontana: Joan Fontaine's Haven
More than any other actress, I get the feeling that Joan Fontaine
was more impressed by having a rich inner life, by improving her home, by being
fulfilled by projects outside of the Hollywood backlots.
She was a Cordon Bleu-trained chef, an interior designer and a
licensed pilot. She could hit a hole-in-one at golf. She rescued dogs from the
SPCA. She was a gardener with a prized rose garden. A consummate hostess, cultured,
educated, and ever proper, Joan threw herself into everything she did.
Today, on the 10th anniversary of her death, I want to explore Joan's final years in Carmel-by-the-Sea,
California.
The seaside city has always boasted famous residents amongst its population. Including Joan, there was Doris Day, and Clint Eastwood, who served as mayor for a spell, among others.
Joan moved to Carmel in the mid ‘80s after mostly retiring
from her acting career. In a 1985 interview with The New York Times, Fontaine
spoke of her life in New York: “When you live in New York, as I did for 25
years, you don't have time. I was out every night at premieres or operas, or if
I was at home, I was entertaining. TV is for married couples and their children
who have nothing left to say to each other. Conversation has become a lost
art.''
She was inspired to make the move to Carmel after visiting the
town and walking into a house that had an identical library to the one back in
her New York apartment.
''I loved my New York apartment. I had a whole
floor with a wonderful library. The only problem with the apartment was that it
looked out on a wall of concrete on 72d Street instead of onto the ocean. A
year ago when I was in Carmel I walked into a house with an identical library
to the one I had, except that it overlooked the Pacific. So I sold my apartment
for 20 times what I had paid for it, and I moved to California.''
That house became Villa Fontana, Joan’s retreat for the final decades of her life. She lived there with five dogs and a beautiful rose garden, and considered the coastline among the most beautiful sites anywhere in the world.
The house had four bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms on
three acres of land. It was built in 1965 and featured add-ons like a guest house,
gardens, a library, and fireplaces.
In a 2013 interview with Rebecca
L. Knight for Carmel Magazine, Joan said that she bought the house
after it languished on the market for a while. The original owners were a husband
and wife newlywed couple who never took possession of the house before the
husband died in a car accident. It went back up for sale but sat there, Joan felt,
because the ocean view was obstructed by the Cypress trees.
Joan saw the property, fell in love with it, and trimmed the
trees to get that ocean view.
Knight describes Villa Fontana as featuring a downstairs that
was very similar to the ‘tony’ apartment she’d owned in New York. Her Oscar,
won for Suspicion in 1941, sat on a corner shelf. She barely acknowledged
it to Knight, simply saying, “Oh yes, well there’s that,” when Knight
pointed it out. She also had a pillow made for her by Salvador Dali in ‘one of’
her dining rooms.
Outside, Joan had a prized rose garden with over 160 rosebushes.
Knight writes: “More than 160 rose bushes flourish in an amphitheater shaped
garden that occupies a portion of the twoplus acres she owns in the Carmel
Highlands. Ascending tiers of Floribunda, Hybrid Tea, Damask, Grandiflora, and
English roses command her attention now, and she generously offers that a
bouquet be taken home. As if on cue, a gardener begins cutting as impossible
choices are made. (Later that afternoon, the bouquet of roses will reappear,
arranged in a vase, and placed inside a box with a cut out for transporting
flowers by car. Again, the consummate hostess.)”
In the Carmel
Pine Cone, the local newspaper for the Carmel area, Joan was remembered
by her neighbours shortly after her death. Jimmy Durham and Clay Couri had been
her neighbours for 15 years by the time she died in 2013 and recalled her as a
good friend who was always up for hijinks.
“We went to the movies often, usually downtown to
the Golden State or Osio. Once after a movie she wanted to go to Rosine’s and
get a chocolate soda. We were told that we couldn’t get a chocolate soda there.
Joan says, ‘you have milk, right? And ice-cream and chocolate syrup, right? And
a glass to put them in, right?’ She was hilarious and she got her chocolate
soda,” said Couri.
Another neighbour, Cliff Bagwell, recalled Joan’s gardens. “Joan
was so kind and generous, and oh my, she was so courteous. And what a gardener!
Her roses were the most beautiful in the area. She talked to her roses and knew
all of them by name. She shared them, too. Joan took bunches of roses to her
neighbors. Always to the shut-ins first. You know, she was very intelligent
with an extremely high IQ. I would ask her why she was hanging out with a poor
old country boy like me. She would say ‘Cliff, you’re just loaded with common
sense.’”
Dean Powell, who worked for the Welsh Treorchy Male Choir, met
Joan in 1994 when the Choir performed in Carmel and she came to the performance.
They became fast friends.
He
recalled of her legendary dinner parties, “She always had terrific
parties at her house and she had a surreal group of friends. I would find
myself sat between an Iranian prince and the inventor of the zip. Joan would
say his career ‘was very up and down’ – that’s the sort of humour she had.”
Joan cherished her home life. In March 2008, she answered the
Proust Questionnaire for Vanity Fair and devoted three answers to her
home, Villa Fontana, a sprawling home on three acres in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
In answer to “What is your greatest fear?” Joan replied: “As
I lost my Brentwood, California, house and its contents in a firestorm in 1964,
I fear the same might happen to Villa Fontana.”
Her most treasured possession, she said, was Villa Fontana.
Her idea of perfect happiness was working in the impressive gardens there, “while
my five A.S.P.C.A. dogs smell the roses … or water them.”
Joan fully retired from acting in 1994 after a much-lauded
career on screen and stage. Joan died in her bed—as she’d always hoped to do—on
December 15, 2013 at the age of 96.
After her death, Joan directed her estate to sell her house
and possessions at auction to benefit the SPCA. Villa Fontana was sold for $2.5
million, and her estate sold for over $1 million.
They even tried to auction off her Oscar, but due to a longstanding rule from the Academy which bars any winner’s descendants from selling an Oscar without first offering it back to the Academy for $1, it was taken off the auction block.
Separately and together, Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland
have always fascinated me. And inspired me, it must be said. Here were two
successful sisters, two totally different women who lived two complex lives and
left behind two important legacies.
It’s fascinating to me how Joan became so renowned for her life at Villa Fontana and Olivia became so renowned for her life in Paris. Feuding or not, these might have been the two most fascinating women Old Hollywood ever produced.
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