Then people long to go on pilgrimages, And palmers to take ship for foreign shores, And distant shrines, famous in different lands…
—Chaucer, The Canterbury Tale, translation from The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition (ed. Larry D. Benson.)
In 1930, an adventurous great aunt headed to California from New York City to see the sights. She saw the Rose Parade while she was here, the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the redwoods and the Big Sur coast, but the souvenir she sent home to her sisters was a booklet of postcards entitled “ Houses of the Stars.”
There was a time when sidewalk vendors hawked “maps to the stars’ homes” on almost every street corner in Hollywood. Tourists like Great Aunt Theresa still come to Los Angeles hoping to see sites connected to a favorite celebrity, the same way pilgrims worldwide have traveled vast distances to pay their respects at the shrines of saints and deities. One could make the argument that the tourist industry evolved expressly to cater to the needs of pilgrims.
A 2024 study authored by John Jenkins, co-director of the Centre for Pilgrimage Studies in the UK, reveals that the sale of pilgrimage souvenirs and paraphernalia, from the cockle shells that were the symbol of Saint James, the patron of pilgrims, to the metal badges they bought as souvenirs to bring home, was highly profitable and that the trade was far more organized and efficient than previously thought, driving a thriving tourism economy in towns with cathedrals and important Christian shrines.
In Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, the newly emerging middle class had money and leisure to travel not out of religious obligation but for pleasure. It became fashionable to visit the houses of the very rich. Provided one was a respectable person of means, one might be invited in to tour some of the grander rooms.
Samuel Johnson visited Kedleston, the home of Lord Scarsdale, in 1777. He wrote, “I was struck with the magnificence of the building, and the extensive park, covered with deer, cattle and sheep delighted me. The number of oaks filled me with respect and admiration.”
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy Bennet laments that, “she must own that she was tired of seeing great houses; after going over so many, she really had no pleasure in fine carpets or satin curtains.”
Some property owners took advantage of their new-found popularity and sold souvenirs and guide books. Others found the constant stream of visitors trying. After George Washington became president of the newly created United States of America, his Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon, was besieged with visitors who expected not only to tour the house but to experience the famous Mount Vernon hospitality. Washington is said to have complained about the lack of privacy repeatedly, but he regarded it as an obligation. Washington biographer Joseph Ellis describes it as the price of fame. For Washington, it was a high price.
Photography helped drive the evolution of celebrity culture in the Victorian period. Fans collected photographs of stars like actress Lily Langtry and wild west performer Buffalo Bill Cody, even if they never actually saw them perform. The popularity of Queen Victoria drove its own celebrity tourism phenomenon. People flocked to Scotland and to the Isle of Wight to vacation in the places the Queen vacationed in. Shopkeepers cashed in, selling commemorative trinkets with the Queen—and her houses—on them: spoons, commemorative plates, mugs, horse brasses, confections, and in the case of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, little jars of colored sand. It was unlikely one would see the queen, but one could buy a teaspoon or paperweight with a picture of her on it to bring back to the folks at home—proof that one had been there.
By the 1920s, motion picture stars provided a new tourist destination. Society columnists and real estate developers promoted the image of film stars as the new aristocracy, living lavish lifestyles in magnificent houses in the hills of Hollywood. Everyone wanted a glimpse of that lifestyle.
George Copeland Thomas, one of the Thomas Brothers of map book fame, got his start selling maps to the movie stars’ homes in Hollywood in 1915, but some of the earliest “star maps” weren’t a ploy for tourists, they were real estate marketing promotions. Real estate developer George E. Read published one in 1924. His goal was to attract prospective buyers with the enticement of famous neighbors. In 1925, Hollywood Realtor Henry Guertin, compiled his own “Starland” map and distributed it for free to participants in an automobile tour of Los Angeles organized by the Shriners. Bus tours remained popular but hunting for the homes of the Hollywood elite became a popular activity for motorists. Those who could not afford an automobile or pay for a tour could buy a map for use on the Red Line trolley cars. Maps of the stars , and bus tours to those locations, were well on their way to becoming a Los Angeles cottage industry.
A 1928 newspaper article by noted society columnist Mayme Ober Peak, writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, describes how the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was capitalizing on the fad by releasing a “descriptive booklet of the stars’ homes, with a detailed map of the streets leading to them.”
Some of the studios also seized the opportunity to promote the locations of their stars’ homes. “Naturally the visitors considered the movie mansions public property,” the feature in The Eagle article states, describing how tour buses would drive by, the tour guides blaring the names of any hapless celebrity they spotted.
“The insistence of the public to know all about the film stars’ personal lives drives them mad,” The Eagle article concludes.
Actress Gloria Swanson experienced much the same kind of aggravation George Washington must have felt. She ended up selling her prominent Beverly Hills home because it was impossible to keep the public out of her private life. Action star Douglas Fairbanks was caught out skinny-dipping in his own backyard pool by a troop of nosey fans who climbed over a fence and through the shrubbery for a chance to gawk at him. His wife, filmmaker Mary Pickford, was dismayed to find a hotdog cart on her front lawn, catering to the tourists who flocked to the house.
When lots on a remote spit of land on the Malibu Rancho was offered for ten year leases, Swanson, Fairbanks and Pickford were among the first to snap up lots. They paid exorbitant sums for small lots that were leased, not available for purchase, because the luxury of privacy was worth any price.
There is no guarantee of privacy even on the most remote beach, in the deepest canyon, or behind the biggest gates. And even time doesn’t diminish the appeal. Celebrities, like ghosts, tend to linger. Their fans turn up in even the most remote neighborhoods looking for the garage where silent film comedian Thelma Todd died, or the house where Robin Williams lived. It doesn’t matter if it was the 1980s or the 1930s. It doesn’t even matter if the house is still there, or if it was torn down twenty years ago and replaced with apartments, the cachet remains.
Map sales seem to have peaked in the 1970s, when the increased presence of sidewalk vendors raised concerns. Some manufacturers of star maps began enlisting children to sell the maps. The presence of children as young as ten standing on street corners selling maps raised more concerns. An ordinance banning the vendors was passed in Hollywood, but the vendors simply moved to the street corners outside city limits. The ordinance eventually triggered a legal challenge by a longtime map seller who argued that the ban violated her first amendment rights. The vendors ultimately prevailed, but the trade in maps of the stars declined with the advent of the internet and GPS. There are still some hearty entrepreneurs plying the trade, but paper maps are now largely obsolete, and postcards are also on the decline.
“Houses of the stars” bus tours remain popular. Before the Palisades Fire, they were a frequent sight not only in Hollywood and Beverly Hills but in Pacific Palisades and Malibu. The business took a turn for the macabre following the Palisades Fire, when ghoulish tour operators began ferrying busloads of tourists to the disaster zone to see not the houses of the stars in Pacific Palisades, but the burned out remnants of the houses some of them lived in up until the disaster. The Los Angeles City Council moved quickly to stop the practice. Celebrity voyeurism was one thing; commercialized disaster tourism, entirely another.
Angelenos tend to look on Hollywood tourism with amused tolerance—or contempt—but for the tourists who travel long distances to pay homage to a favorite performer this is a pilgrimage not unlike the one undertaken by Chaucer’s travelers. These modern pilgrims seek notoriety not absolution, but they come all the same, looking for something intangible, leaving with a souvenir or two: a postcard, a t-shirt, a map of the stars, to show the people back home that the pilgrimage was a success, proof of something wonderful.
