Part 1

A young man very much in love leaned forward on the divan in my house one day and dreamed out loud. "Wouldn't it be something," he said, "to have a home all fixed and furnished, just as she'd want it, with everything she loves in it, as a surprise? Wouldn't it be wonderful...?"

"Kinda wonderful," I agreed. "In fact, heavenly."

"That," cried this good looking, newly engaged guy, suddenly jumping to his feet, "is just what I'm going to do!" He turned eagerly to my husband, Dick, and to me. "Would you two help me?" Both of us, (we had hearts like lace Valentines) incurably romantic, took to the idea to our hearts.

"We'd love to," we cried. "We'd be proud." We didn't know what we were getting into. But we'd have gone right ahead even if we had. Gene Raymond, the romantic young man, was really like a member of our family. My first male star client when I opened my Public Relations office in Hollywood, he was, and still is, one of my favorite people. Just a few days before, Gene and the girl who'd promised to marry him, Jeanette MacDonald, had come to the house and told us the wonderful news. And, now, a chance remark of mine had really started it all "....so come next June, Gene, you'll carry your bride across your threshold..."

Gene Raymond's dream sits today high on a wooded Bel Air hill above the twinkling lights of Hollywood. We call it the "MacRaymonds", though Gene and Jeanette call it "Twin Gables". It's more than just a house and always will be. To me it has been a symbol of a man's deep desire to please the woman he loves, a symbol inspired by that woman. To me the house is Gene and Jeanette Raymond. It's a house with a heart. Pictures can indicate its beauty, but can't tell the story the wonderfully insane, fabulous story of how Gene personally planned and furnished it for his bride right down to her favorite perfume on the dressing table and kept it strictly secret from her wildest dreams until he lifted her across its threshold in the most romantic real life plot of Hollywood's history.

It was late August of 1936 when Jeanette and Gene became engaged, and set their wedding for June. During the next ten months I connived with Gene to deceive my best friend his girl. We tricked, tormented, even stole from Jeanette object: surprise the bride. We broke laws, dodged friends, lured accomplices into lives of "crime", smuggled, led double lives, worked and worried ourselves down to skin and bones with a stream of headaches a ton of aspirin couldn't cure. I wouldn't go through it all again for nine million
dollars and the Hope diamond thrown in, not for anybody except, of course, Gene Raymond.

He called me a week later, breathless. "Helen! I've got the house. Come up quick." I dropped everything, raced to the Bel Air address. Gene met me at the gate of a long empty Tudor English house (basically the kind we'd both heard Jeanette say she adored). The gardens were neglected, but lovely. I walked inside stopped in my tracks.

It was just wrong everything was wrong; nothing like Jeanette. But it had what decorators call "possibilities" and Gene saw them. He said, "I'll buy it."

"But Gene," I gasped, "the remodeling, the decorating, the changes, the expense!" My knees wobbled.

"Answer me a question: Could we fix it so Jeanette would love it?" "Yes, but...."

“Then we’ll buy it. Nuts to expense!” We bought it. That is, I bought it. I had to. Let Gene Raymond go into escrow and our secret would be out right then. Mrs. Richard Hargreaves (that’s my married name) was the dummy buyer. Kenneth Albright, our architect, had a Valentine heart, too. We swore him to secrecy and went to work. Plans, blueprints, details whirled in our heads all day and all night. How I ever got any other work done, I'll never know. How Gene made two pictures, I'll never understand but he carried on at RKO and I muddled through, somehow. My husband Dick tried to get some work done. But for ten months we had just one really important thing on our minds; the house, and secret of it. We thought fast more than one to keep it dark.

Across the road the Schuschardts—like other Bel Air neighbors—wondered and speculated. They're close friends of the Raymonds now, but Mr. S. was an architect himself and pretty curious about our Operation Honeymoon. Gene sneaked to meet me at dawn on Sundays, in the dusk on week days. He wore a black coat with the collar turned up, a black hat, brim down, and held a handkerchief to his nose. Soon the rumor got around that Chicago gangsters had bought the place; someone even whispered "Al Capone!" And the Schuschardts couldn't understand why the mystery man in black always had a cold in the head!