Basic HTML Version
58
summer
|
fal l
with show business.
“One day,” Milt continues, “I got a call from him and he asked if
I wanted to buy his house on Edgecliff.” Rubin believed the desert air
would be better for him and his wife, so he had planned to move to the
Palm Springs area. This was in 1977.
“I didn’t think I could afford it,” Milt relates, “but then [Rubin]
asked me if I’d checked out how much my property in Balboa was
worth. I told him I hadn’t. He said he’d bet it was worth about as much
as his house in Montecito on the beach.”
Milt’s two little pieces of property had indeed appreciated and
if sold together would put him in a position to buy the Montecito
property. “So, I sold them,” he says, “and offered to buy my step-dad’s
house.” His parents carried a balance, “but I paid for it,” Milt stresses.
Jaffe asked that his stepson keep one of the three one-bedroom,
one-bathroom guest houses on the property for his mother and him,
which Milt did.
Milt’s house is on what was originally the parking lot entrance to the
clubhouse at Edgecliff, which was at one time the home of what is now the
Montecito Country Club.
Wedding Bells
By all outward appearances, Milt certainly seemed a good catch for
some lucky woman, but he remained a bachelor during his twenties,
thirties, forties and halfway through his fifties. He was 55 years old in
1989, when he and Arlene, a sought-after and successful costume designer
who had her own company and who had worked with Milt for many
years, were married. It was the first marriage for both.
Milt had been engaged twice before. “He was engaged to a woman
he’d been seeing for six years or so,” Arlene relates, “but who died in a
plane crash on her way to Mount Fuji in Japan. She was a PR agent for
a sportswear firm in Hollywood. All the executives of the company were
on the plane when it went down. That was the end of them and the
company.”
For a number of years after that, Milt dated a woman with two
children who finally moved to New York City, telling Arlene that she’d
move out if and when Milt “finds the right person.” She later told Arlene
she was leaving, “because
you
are the right person.”
Conversations
When Milt Larsen (left) learned that the City of Los Angeles had foreclosed on its
loan to his non-profit museum – Society for the Preservation of Variety Arts – he hired
Michael Parrish Newman (right) to pose as Howard Hughes in front of the building
with an over-sized check for $1,100,000. Larsen got a little publicity out of it, and
avoided foreclosure
Milt and Arlene Larsen
(née Zamiara) circa 1989