Casa Montalban

Their house is milk chocolate brown with a white trim. Flowering magnolia trees and camellias nestle up against it, and a white rail fence surrounds it. On the second floor, under the bedroom windows, there’s a romantic looking balcony. And out in back, beyond the patio, is a high garden wall.

On warm evenings when the doors of the living room end den are thrown open you can hear rhumba music, South American style, drifting over the wall. And if you could climb the wall, you’d probably see Ricardo dancing with his wife. Four or five other couples might be dancing, too, or watching, or serving themselves at the buffet tables.

“This is the kind of parties we like.” Mrs. Montalban says. “We eat on the patio and then we roll back the living room carpet, pick up the scatter rugs in the foyer and have a ballroom larger than Mocambo’s. Ricardo loves to dance, but he prefers to do it at home.”

It’s easy to see why. Their home was planned for good living and fun. It’s large and comfortable, filled with hand-picked furniture.

The person greatly responsible for providing the background to this homelife which is one of the happiest in Hollywood is Ricardo’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Gladys Belzer. Mrs. Belzer is also the mother of Loretta Young, Sally Blane, Polly Ann Young and a son, Jack. After rearing a family of five and seeing them safely through careers and marriages, she turned her boundless energy to a career of her own. She became a professional interior decorator. It was only natural that when Georgie married Ric, she would be sought out by the newlyweds and asked for a little sound housing advice.

“Only we didn’t call on Mama Belzer right away,” Ricardo says. “For the first six months of our marriage, Georgiana and I lived in a dream world. We were too much in love to think of anything so practical as buying a home.”

It wasn’t until Ricardo’s contract with MGM was definitely set and baby number one was enroute, that Ric and Georgie started looking for a house. They went to every place that Mrs. Belzer recommended. They visited all the model homes in town. They met quite a few real estate agents. In the end, they decided to buy a ten-room Mediterranean-style house in Westwood Village which Georgiana’s mother had owned and rented out for six years.

At the time the Montalbans chose this generous-sized house in a well-established neighborhood, some of their young friends accused them of “going Hollywood.”

“What do you need with four bedrooms and two maids’ rooms? Think of the taxes. Who’s going to do all that housework?” they were asked.

Georgie and Ric smiled and said nothing. They had their reasons. They were also following some of Mama Belzer’s advice.

Mrs. Belzer believes that when young people plan to have a family, they should buy the largest and most comfortable house they can afford and then grow into it. In the end they save the expense of changing homes every four or five years, and they never have to live in cramped or make-shift quarters. All their care and money is lavished on this first good house.

“Ricando saw the place only once,” his wife recalls. “Then he left for Mexico. Three weeks later, I met him at the airport and drove him home. I had the house full of flowers, there was champagne on ice, and all the rooms were ablaze with light. When he walked in the front door, the expression on his face was like a little boy’s. He was wide-eyed and speechless.”

He is still wide-eyed, and so happy in his house that he almost never goes away for a vacation. They like to pack picnic lunches and take Laura and Mark, the two oldest children, to the beach. They play tennis every morning and have parties whenever they please.

“Whenever I think of the money we save by not going out, I treat myself to a new dress,” says Georgiana. “And the wonderful part of it is that Ric never complains about my occasional extravagances, but he loves to tease me when the bills come due. Only last week he picked up a statement from Saks Fifth Avenue. ‘What’s this?—A mink bath towel?’ he said, pretending to read from the bill. For a minute I almost fainted at the thought of being charged for some little mink item. His laughter gave the joke away, but for a second he really had me worried.”

The Montalbans’ house was built by Alan Siple, one of the best architects in Southern California. He designed it for privacy and an economical use of every foot of floor space. Then for the fun of it, he added some romantic touches like the balcony and a real playing fountain in the dining room.

The living room is an island of privacy. It is two steps lower than the remainder of the house, and a pair of cypress panelled doors may be closed to shut this room off from the rest of the household traffic. Upstairs there are three large bedrooms, each with a private bath, while the master suite has two complete baths.

Right now, the Montalbans and their three children need every available bedroom and bath in the house. When baby Anita was born, almost two years ago, Georgiana decided to furnish a linen room next to the nursery as sleeping quarters for Mark. Thus each child and the nurse has a separate room.

When it comes to furnishings, Georgiana likes to quote her mother once more. “Mama believes in buying one or two really good wooden pieces. She supplements these with less expensive upholstered furniture that can be replaced later on. She says that good cabinet-work is like good breeding—it shines through in the long run.”

Among the really fine items in the Montalban living room are a Mother Superior desk that’s a masterpiece of secret drawers and hidden compartments, two Italian antique commodes, a pair of French mirrors and the opera figures on the mantel.

The room is also full of typical Belzer decorating touches. The walls, for example, are covered with Chinese grass cloth instead of wall paper. This particular wall covering has remained untouched for 12 years, and it now looks more mellow and more beautiful than it did when new. Instead of using draperies at the windows, Georgiana’s mother favors shutters. Long before these small-style louvres became as popular as they are today, she bought them at auctions of old estates and used them in all her decorating jobs. She likes to work a window seat into her homes, too, even if it means pushing out a wall or two.

“They serve as extra seating space without taking up precious floor room and are a godsend at parties,” says Mrs. Belzer. “You can also store bulky objects in them. And to please Ricardo, I had record storage cabinets built into the window recess. He has a large collection of Pan American music.”

The home furnishing hint from his mother-in-law that Ricardo Montalban appreciates most, however, is the trick of taking antiques which are works of art and putting them to practical use. He and Georgiana collect old pewter objects, but they don’t store them in a treasure chest. They use them for ash trays, lamp bases and vases. Even the chandelier in the dining room is an antique pewter urn. Last month the Montalbans found an elaborately-carved door in a second-hand store. They snapped it up at a bargain, and then took it to a cabinet-maker. Right now he’s building a large cabinet to house the Philco radio-television set and the sound wire-recorder that Georgiana gave Ric for Christmas. Thus, this beautiful old door will camouflage the mechanics of their home entertainment.

The room most lived in at the Montalbans’ is the long narrow den. At one end is the alcove where the family eats breakfast on a glass-topped, wrought-iron table. The rest of the intimate little room is perfect for Ric when he wants to practice diction by talking into his wire recorder. Georgie likes to bring her mending in here, because the four glass doors opening onto the patio let in so much light, and she can also keep an eye on the children playing outdoors. The three young Montalbans like it because no matter how grimy their hands, or how much they romp on the yellow koroseal couch, none of the adults ever object. This wonderful leathery stuff is tough and washable.

Upstairs in the pink and white nursery, the furnishings look deceptively delicate, too. But all the chests and tables are painted with a high-gloss enamel that can and does get washed as regularly as the dishes. The rose-colored velvet chair in which Ric sits every night to read a bedtime story to Laura and Mark is not as impractical as it might seem at first glance. With the emphasis Mrs. Belzer places on quality, its covered in the heaviest upholstery velvet she could find. The three active children see to it that the nursery takes quite a beating, and yet it shows relatively little wear and tear.

At the other end of the house, away from the nursery, the Montalbans have a spacious master bedroom. Its color scheme is predominantly white and green with an occasional touch of cyclamen. Mrs. Belzer had the draperies and bedspreads made of washable white linen. On the wall she made effective use of a green-white trellis wallpaper, and around the fireplace and over Georgiana’s built-in vanity table, she had one of her talented craftsmen paint a green and white marbleized surface. The overall effect is as cool and fresh as a bed of mint.

In Georgiana’s dressing-room bath next to the bedroom, another clever artist painted humorous and identifying murals on the wardrobe doors. But the smartest features of the dressing room are cotton shag carpeting to insure barefoot comfort, and the series of ordinary door hooks for storing Georgiana’s costume jewelry in an orderly fashion.

Whenever Georgiana and Ricardo decide to make a few changes or add a new piece of furniture to their home, they first ask themselves, “Does it have a lasting quality and is it beautiful?” Then to make sure, they check with Mama Belzer—because in their opinion, Mama really does know best.

THE END

BY MARWA PETERSON

(You can see Ricardo Montalban in MGM’s Across The Wide Missouri—Ed.)

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE MAY 1951