Max Brainard
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When I talked to Dixie Evans earlier this year I asked her if she had ever heard of the SP. She said that she had and that it was part of the Max Brainard estate and that he had to sell it because of the taxes. Well, we now know that Carl M. Brainard did in fact own the SP for a short time.
After some poking around I've found that he was a well-known LA area coin collector and a Hollywood prop master and set decorator. Guess what film he worked on? Wasp Woman; and where have we heard that title before!
Brainard (b. Aug 20, 1911; d. Mar 10, 1981) was also known as Carl Brainard and Karl R. Brainard. Re: [spiderpool] Hacienda help? (Hacienda-SP connection)
Bear in mind that Brainard owned the pool in the 1950s. He was not the first owner who oversaw or permitted use of the pool for nudie shoots; it had probably been around for two decades.
It behooves us to learn what we can about the men that have been ID'd as owning it during it's photographic heyday, but there is no reason to think that any of them were involved with the design or building of the Pool.
The mystery continues... bwahaha... bbwahaHAHAHA!
Rowan Actually, the name was KARL Brainard. He was born in 1911 and died in 1981. To bad. Check out this link. Re: [spiderpool] Re: Help needed finding Spiderpool survivor
I think we all jumped the gun on IMDB Karl in the excitement of the Chain of Title discovery. It seemed to fit so well that a "Hollywood prop master" would be involved with the Spiderpool, but as the next installment of SotSP will reveal, the SP's Carl M. Brainard was born around 1922.
IMDB Karl is *not* the man we want unless they have the dates horribly wrong. I wish that would turn out to be the case, but the odds aren't in our favor. Re: [spiderpool] Re: Help needed finding Spiderpool survivor Regarding Mr. Brainard, all I can say is: the official docs and public reports we have on the man connected with the Spiderpool in the early 1950s all say "Carl" or "Carl M. Brainard".
Rowan
Forgive me if this is obvious to you all (or incorrect), I'm just trying to do the math out loud.
Somehow, I can not find anywhere the transcript of what Sage learned last year from DelMonte, but I seem to remember two things she said.
- 1) There was 'a guy' up in the hills that would let people use his pool for photoshoots.
2) It was a long walk from the house to the pool.
Based on these two things I conjecture: If you walk from the house to the pool, that must have been because you 'checked in' at the house. 'The guy' therefore, must have been Brainard.
DW _
- Re
- [spiderpool] Secrets of the Spiderpool, Part 4: 1947-52
Jay: My turn to think out loud... Dolores posed at the SP while EJ McDermott owned it, but Carl Brainard seems to have been the one actually living there. Who "the guy that allowed" the modeling was depends on whatf you think is more likely, that the photographer checked with the official owner, or with the on-site man. Until we learn more about who these people were, what they did, and who they knew, that part is educated guesswork. Idle speculation 1: Brainard's wife testified that he wasted his money on cameras --> "inventor" Brainard liked gadgets and photography --> he was involved with the then-popular "camera clubs" --> club needs models and locations --> Brainard offers "his" pool to the club and the guys "pool" their money and hire models for the day. --> Pool gets a reputation, rest is history. Idel speculation 2: Wealthy camera buff Harold Lloyd, always looking for good settings to shoot 3D nudes, remembers the late Jack McD's pool --> Lloyd drives to the site and makes the acquaintance of Brainard --> Brainard, not a fool, says "okay". --> Pool gets a reputation, rest is history. Both are perfectly reasonable scenarios, but almost all of the steps are presently speculative. Please keep thinking out loud. I know the story got pretty convoluted.
Rowan
- RE
- [spiderpool] A standing e-ovation to some great investigators!
DW:
It's interesting that there's now a copycat Spanish Kitchen. There's also a copycat Hollywood Canteen. That means that as I get involved, we can expect a copycat Spiderpool. I'll make sure to show up at the "unveiling."
J
I'm still hoping to find out how if anyone in this group has made contact with any of the models. I wasn't sure if the comments by Dolores Del Rio were off of the Playboy website or direct quotes from her.
It makes me want to go to the show in November where she'll be signing autographs.
What are the feelings in the group about tracking down the former (maybe current?) models?
By the way, I tracked Carl Brainard to the Palmdale/Lancaster area as of a
few years ago. But neither he nor his wife, Janell, show up in the records
I checked. He didn't show up on the death index. Maybe he's in a home
somewhere.
This is getting fun.
Don Ray
Don Ray, Journalist/Author/International Trainer, www.donray.com
One of the most exciting experiences I have had while researching Jack McDermott and the Spiderpool occurred this afternoon when I was able to speak to Carl M. Brainard.
After a search that took longer than that for the Pool itself, OB and I were able to locate Carl and interview him by phone. He’s 83, has just returned from vacationing in Mexico with his wife, and was extremely generous with his time as I picked his brain. (Everything in quotes is from Carl, in as close to his own words as my chicken-scratch shorthand allows.)
I was out when he returned my call, but he left a message saying he was calling “regarding the old McDermott castle". I hadn’t described it as a castle, so I was sure I had found the right man! I called him back as soon as I had gotten my thoughts the least bit organized.
When I reached him and mentioned Jack’s house he immediately said, “That was some kind of place." When I told him that the Spider and part of the wall was still there, he wasn’t at all surprised. He sold the estate over 50 years but said he had been there just a few years ago and knew that the “waterfall is still there." He chuckled as he added: “the spider and the fly."
Carl bought the estate from Jack’s nephew, Eddie, “for $7,500". Eddie never lived in the house, according to Carl. Also: “He was a pilot, and he was ferrying a plane, and it crashed. He was killed." Eddie was working for a civilian airline, not the military, Carl added.
“It was really quite a place. It wasn’t bad even when *I* owned it. All that was left was the servants’ quarters, down below. The living room had burned," but was livable. The inside of the door was charred, and Carl left it that way. “And there was a bedroom under the living room. It was like a one-bedroom apartment." He said he never heard how the fire started.
Jack must have had someplace to park his car down the hill from the house. “The paths from the parking lot were lined with bottles. Bottles, upside down and buried in the ground. Booze bottles."
“When I moved in there was all kinds of memorabilia. Pictures of Marie Wilson…"
I’ve never heard of Marie Wilson. Here’s a bio from barnesandnoble.com:
- Marie Wilson (December 30th, 1916 - November 23rd, 1972)
- a.k.a Katherine Elizabeth Wilson
- The quintessential dumb, buxom blonde, Marie Wilson was born in Anaheim, CA, then moved with her family to Hollywood after the death of her father.
- She received her first screen role as Mary Quite Contrary in the Laurel and Hardy version of Babes in Toyland (1934), through the auspices of her then-husband, writer/director Nick Grinde. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract, Wilson cemented her scatterbrained reputation in such films as Satan Met a Lady (1936) and Boy Meets Girl (1938). In 1944, she was hired by Ken Murrayto perform a comedy striptease in Murray's Hollywood stage revue Blackouts; the engagement lasted five years and 2,332 performances… she died of cancer at the age of 56.
Is it significant that of all the memorabilia that was there,
Carl remembers Marie Wilson? Another trail to follow! (I have e-mailed a
fellow who is researching Marie... we'll see if he knows anything about
Jack.)
“The place was covered with tiles. Mosaic tiles. They say that Jack wrote to tile companies all over Europe, like in Italy and Spain. He’d tell them that he was in the tile business and that he’d like to be their American distributor. Of course, he’d need samples, and so they sent him thousands of tiles. And after he got them, well, he went out of business."
“The neighbors told me that the studio higher-ups would have big three-day parties there. They’d get all the young starlets. The higher-ups would dress up like sultans, and the girls would dress like slave girls. They told me that afterward they’d find nude girls passed out in the bushes."
But all the parties weren’t over. “We had some good parties in there," Carl told me. Maybe it was the talk of parties that did it: Carl was the first to bring up the subject of nude modeling.
“Sometimes the modeling agencies would send nude models over, and they would pose around the pool. They liked it because you couldn’t see anything that was going on unless you had a helicopter. Harold Lloyd did that. Have you ever heard of Harold Lloyd? Well, he was one of them that did that.
“I was off at work most of the time, but I’d come home occasionally, and there’d be all these beautiful young girls lying all around the pool.
“It didn’t affect you unless you got one of them alone in the house..."
I asked if someone had contacted him, thinking the pool would be good for taking pictures, or if it was his idea. He didn’t recall.
Right after talking about the models, I asked about the spider: Did he have any idea why the spider motif was chosen. He chuckled as he had earlier. Not exactly a chuckle. I’ve heard my 85-year old father “chuckle" that way. It’s a tone of voice that I think means, “I was a young man once… understand?"
Carl said, “Come into my web, said the spider to the fly…" Understand?
There seems to be no doubt in Carl’s mind that Jack intended the same thing. Never mind that’s it’s a wasp and not a fly, that’s what Carl believes and I’m not going to be the one to debate him with entomological evidence.
And as we have figured out, the Spider was indeed a waterfall. “The water was pumped from the pool up to the top of the spider. The first time I fired that thing up I got the most beautiful aroma of gardenias. Something must have been backed up in those pipes."
But Carl insists there was no tunnel through the hill to the Pool. He seemed surprised at the idea. “It was easy enough to get to it. Just climb up the steps and you were there."
He is certain there was no underwater viewport in the Pool when he bought the place.
Carl does recall there being tunnels under the house, however, and from the house down to the “parking area". Jack used the tunnels for many things. “They said he could disappear when he wanted to. If the party bored him, he’d just drop out of sight."
And there were other oddities about the house that haven’t shown up in my
research. We know about the well in the living room that led by a tunnel
out to the Wishing Well, and we know about “secret rooms" and “hidden
passages", but what we never heard was about the “transparent mirrors" as
Carl called them, “in the bathrooms". Oh, that Jack!
I began to ask questions about specific Pool mysteries. For some reason, I
thought of the “mystery box" at the end of the benches and asked about
that. Carl just remembered the benches being tile, but while I was down at
that end of the Pool I asked about the telescope.
“No, there was no telescope. He might have had one, but it wasn’t there when I owned it." (Odd when you think about the supposed dates of the telescope pictures we have.) While I was trying to sort out my thoughts about the telescope, Carl went on: “Now there was a room at the end of the pool, but it wasn’t an observatory. It was about 10 feet in diameter, but it didn’t have a telescope in it."
Well, obviously this got my attention. “It was a dressing room or something. Like the Arabian Nights. It was pretty well caved in when I bought it, and I just ripped it out."
So the Old Circle wasn’t a hot tub or an observatory. We’ve speculated about the need for dressing rooms for the Pool, and someone way back when might have tried to tie it to the Old Circle. If so, they win this prize. Now we know.
I decided to jump to the other end of the Pool and ask about the Ruins.
“There was an old foundation of some kind. It predated what I had. I never
knew about that."
As for the fate of the Pool: “The people I sold it to disappear. Then the people who lived down below were afraid it [the house] would fall on them and tore it down and buried it in the tunnels." Regarding the pool: “I hear they tore up two or three bulldozers trying to get it up. It had walls two feet thick."
Carl couldn’t recall whom he’d sold the house to. The name of Ira Low didn’t really ring a bell. “At one time," he ventured, “I took out a second mortgage on the place, and he might have been the one I did that with."
Carl was at work while we were speaking, and I could tell he was getting a little busy. I asked if I might be able to call him again and he agreed without hesitating. All in all I would guess he didn’t think I was too intrusive. He volunteered a lot or needed just a hint to get going. He never asked why I was asking or what I planned to do with the information. He seemed to agree with me that the old McDermott place was worth talking about.
To me he pretty much answered the biggest question of them all: Why would anyone have thought that a giant spider was just the thing to build staring out over a beautiful pool in the Hollywood Hills? And he pretty much took care of the enduring mystery of the Old Circle to boot. And now we know what happened to poor Eddie McDermott. Jack, E.J., and Eddie all died young and tragically. Did Eddie leave a family?
I look forward to talking to him again and hope to solve more mysteries in the process. There is so much more to talk about, but I don’t want to wear out my welcome with this very busy, very generous, 83-year old eyewitness to Spiderpool history.
Anyone with specific questions about the Pool, this is the time to add them to the list. If we don't know the answer already... we can now take the question pretty close to the source. (We once wondered where the machinery was for the Pool. Now I know just the man I can ask!)
Also, special thanks to retrowavelength for his continued -- and timely -- financial support. There are more documents worth trying for, and this was just the motivation I needed.
I hope you enjoyed this installment. Keep your fingers crossed for more.
Rowan
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