Look Inside Joan Fontaine's House in California

This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Architectural Digest.

She made a name for herself playing the timid ingenue, but there was nothing meek about Joan Fontaine's silver-screen success. At the age of 22 the actress snagged an Academy Award nomination for her performance as the callow bride in Rebecca (1940), Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the gothic romance by Daphne du Maurier. The following year Fontaine won the Oscar for her portrayal of another timorous soul in Hitchcock's Suspicion. Just two years after that, she received her third Best Actress nomination, for her work in The Constant Nymph.

Serious laurels for the complicated young performer—the daughter of a frustrated actress and the little sister of Olivia de Havilland, a very successful, and very competitive, actress. (While she beat out de Havilland in the 1941 Oscar race, five years later her sister would square accounts by ignoring Fontaine's congratulations when she accepted her gold statuette for To Each His Own.) De Havilland and Fontaine—who borrowed her surname from her stepfather—were born a little over a year apart to English parents living in Tokyo. The ambitious Lilian de Havilland and her patent attorney husband, Walter, were plainly mismatched, and in 1919 Mrs. de Havilland moved to California with her two daughters. Later, after they moved to Los Angeles, Olivia de Havilland quickly landed a contract at Warner Bros. Joan Fontaine, for her part, acted as her sister's personal cook, housekeeper and chauffeur until she secured her own contract at RKO.

Fontaine was cast in Rebecca shortly after marrying her first husband, the English-born actor Brian Aherne; they were divorced a year after she made The Constant Nymph. In 1946 she began dating the head of RKO, William Dozier, and three months later the two were married. In her memoir, No Bed of Roses, the actress writes that, following some house hunting with Dozier, she moved out of Aherne's Beverly Hills house and into "a delightful, sprawling, many-windowed, shingle-roofed house on Fordyce Road, clinging to a hillside in Brentwood." Although the actress professed a deep ambivalence about what she called the "station-wagon and- dogs life," the house on Fordyce Road would remain, for the next 15 years, one of the few constants in her personal narrative.

There was a projection room and a mirror-lined dressing room, but by movie star standards it was not a grand house. Fruitwood-paneled walls, beam ceilings and wide windows looking out to the ocean in the distance formed the backdrop for a kind of homey splendor. Fontaine filled the house with cozy upholstered sofas and wing chairs, English antiques, oil paintings and books. Over time the Doziers remodeled the house—adding a balcony, enlarging the kitchen and, when their daughter Deborah was born in 1948, installing a nursery.

The couple led a busy social life, at least in the early years of their marriage. They retained a Japanese chef and often hosted large sit-down dinner parties. Fontaine mentions a dinner featuring an all-Russian menu that began with caviar and vodka served in chilled Orrefors shot glasses and proceeded to much glass smashing in the Russian manner. Joseph Kennedy attended a party at Fordyce and before dessert was served managed to propose to Fontaine—in his fashion: He would handle her financial affairs and share her home whenever he came to California, he suggested, just as he had done with Gloria Swanson.

In 1951, on a South American film junket, Fontaine befriended a young Peruvian girl, Martita Pareja, whom she eventually adopted. Her second marriage was unraveling by this time, and the role of Fordyce paterfamilias would soon be assumed by a writer and producer named Collier Young. "I remember the laughter coming from the living room when my mother and stepfather had dinner parties," recalls Deborah Dozier Potter. "All day my foster sister and I played in the pool, picked and planted flowers in the garden or climbed trees." For Fontaine, this suburban idyll was both purposeful and precarious. "I wanted [the children] to have what I hadn't known," she asserts in her book. "At the same time, I could not allow myself to be inextricably painted into a corner, to be buried in domesticity as my talented mother had been."

And she didn't. She shot September Affair in Rome and Ivanhoe in England and Decameron Nights in Spain. She was romanced by Prince Aly Khan in Paris and the Earl of Warwick in London. She signed with Paramount (to pay the bills) and made some good movies (The Bigamist) and some not-so-good ones (Flight to Tangier). She starred in Tea and Sympathy on Broadway and dated Charles Addams and John "Shipwreck" Kelly. She summered with her daughters in the south of France.

By 1961 Fontaine and Young were divorced. The actress rented out the Fordyce house and moved to an apartment overlooking Central Park in New York. From her East Coast base she would do Broadway plays, summer stock and dinner theater, and television. She would date Howard Hughes and Adlai Stevenson. She would marry and divorce a fourth time. Her mother would die, her sister would neglect to invite her to the memorial service, and her daughter Martita would disappear from her life. And, in the fall of 1961, her beloved Brentwood home would perish in the Bel-Air fire. But its hold over the actress would endure. "Other than in memory I would never see that pool with the island again, the children's room, the white-beamed ceiling in my bedroom," she writes. "Even today in my present apartment I search for something in a closet or cupboard only to remember that it lies amid the rubble at Fordyce Road."

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