(January 1977 - April 29, 1993) (his death)
In the early 1950s teen-aged Barbara Warner, daughter of Jack, the most forceful of the four original Warner brothers and the head of the Warner Bros. studio, was riding around Los Angeles with a couple of schoolmates when they suddenly decided to pay a call on a friend of a friend. “We turned north on Sunset Boulevard, cut up an incline in tiny Holmby Hills and drove through a wooden gate that truly creaked,” she recalls. “And then we hit a dirt road, with walls of overhanging trees on each side, and up we went through this tunnel of untamed landscape. We had the thrilling sensation of not knowing where we were going.”
They presently arrived at a clearing. Up ahead, gnarled old olive trees silvered the hillside, and the house could be seen all the way at the top. “It was like an enchanted cottage—all that wood, very rustic. The whole place had a real forest quality, which was such a rarity for there, even then,” she says. “That house just stayed with me.”
Barbara Warner had also made a note of the owner, producer-writer-director Cy Howard, who beguiled the girls with the story of how he had recently built the house as a bachelor pad, wanting it to look just like the king of Denmark’s hunting lodge, which he had actually seen. “I always remembered Cy as funny and attractive,” she says. “He served us champagne in the middle of the afternoon.”
Twenty-odd years later, having turned the key in the door of her life in Paris, where she had been married to restaurateur Claude Terrail of the legendary Tour d’Argent, Barbara Warner asked someone back in Los Angeles, “Does Cy Howard still live in that house?” It turned out he did, and, well . . . Reader, she married him. And they lived there happily ever after—or at least for sixteen champagne-filled years, until his death in 1993.