History
On February 16, 1929, four months after Ned Doheny, his wife Lucy and their five children moved into Greystone, Ned died in his bedroom in a murder-suicide with his secretary, Hugh Plunket. The official story indicated Plunket murdered Ned either because of a "nervous disorder" or inflamed with anger over not receiving a raise. Others point out that Ned's gun was the murder weapon and that Ned was not buried in Los Angeles' Calvary Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery, with the rest of his family, indicating that he had committed suicide. Both men are buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale within a few hundred yards of each other. Both were involved in the trial of Ned's father in the Teapot Dome scandal.
Ned's widow, Lucy, remarried and lived in the house until 1955, whereupon she sold the mansion and its grounds to Chicago industrialist Henry Crown, who rented the estate to movie studios. In 1963, Crown planned to subdivide the property and demolish the mansion. Beverly Hills stopped the demolition by purchasing the mansion in 1965. The estate became a city park on September 16, 1971, and on April 23, 1976 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The city leased the mansion to the American Film Institute, from 1965 to 1982, for $1 per year, hoping to get repair and upkeep work from the institute.
Since 2002 The City of Beverly Hills has maintained a Web page for the Greystone Mansion park.
Besides the city's restoration efforts itself, many local volunteers have been contributing to the fund raising and restoration to the park, most notably the friends of Greystone that organize various showcase and garden events yearly.
Read more about this topic: Greystone Mansion
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—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
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