Milton Getz and the network of Jewish Beverly Hills
Although he was not himself a studio mogul, Milton Getz, executive director of Union Bank & Trust Company, had significant social and financial ties to the Hollywood Jewish community. Getz emigrated from Prussia with his family after the Gold Rush and, along with his father Louis and his brothers, started a general store to sell supplies to miners in the northern California foothills near Clear Lake. The store grew, and soon the Getz family began exporting their "Getzbest” brand products to Asia.  Milton and his brothers travelled extensively to open new offices of their company. 

Through his business travels, Getz met Kaspare Cohn, another successful merchant who had capitalized on connections formed through his dry goods businesses to establish a bank, the Kaspare Cohn Commercial Savings Bank. Milton fell in love with Cohn’s daughter, Estelle, and after their marriage, Kaspare Cohn invited Getz to be a partner in his bank. Cohn passed away in 1916 and Getz and his brother-in-law, Ben R. Meyer, took control of the bank, renaming it the Union Bank & Trust, as they expanded its holdings. 

As the city grew, Union Bank became one of the largest and most successful banks in the region, providing loans to many of the city’s new entrepreneurs. Like the moguls of Hollywood, Getz chose to build a massive new home to reflect his increasing wealth and prowess in the local economy. In 1926, he purchased a large lot in Beverly Hills near studio moguls, such as Carl Laemmle, and the Hillcrest Country Club, where many of the city’s most prominent Jews were members. To design the house, Getz hired Gordon B. Kauffman, a partner in Johnson, Kaufmann and Coate, whose offices were located in the Union Bank building downtown.

A signature Mediterranean style 
Born in England and trained in Europe, Kaufmann shared Ballin’s admiration for the classical techniques of the European masters and drew his inspiration for the Getz house from the villas of the French and Italian Riviera. Although Mission-style adobes had been a part of Southern California architecture since the 19th century, Kaufmann and his partners elevated and expanded on regional trends by employing classical Spanish and Italian forms and forged a new “Mediterranean” style in residential architecture. Kaufman’s “signature details” included interior patios enclosed by gardens, loggias, archways, cantilevered balconies, ramadas for dining, and stucco exteriors, many of which he featured in the Getz house. With seventeen bedrooms and twenty-nine bathrooms on a 3.5 acre lot, the gigantic estate was featured in Architectural Digest in 1928 and became one of the best-known homes in Beverly Hills.⁸ Kaufmann also worked with landscape designer Paul Thiene to create the Getz House’s palatial grounds. 

As historian Merry Ovnick has shown, the Mediterranean style of Kaufmann and other architects in 1920s Los Angeles was also heavily influenced by the cinematographic techniques of the silent film era. Not only did the homes built then mimic the decorative motifs of the grand castles, romantic haciendas and cottages of Hollywood films, but their designers also employed the visual strategies used by art directors such as Ballin to add texture and depth to their sets. Rather than build from a single block, Kaufmann designed a structure with multiple facades around a central fountain and motor court. A large balcony extended from a two-bay arcade with Spanish-style archways, facing elaborate terraced gardens and pools outside, and balconies off of individual rooms that further fragmented the plane. On the interior of the home, he included carved ceilings, paneled walls, arched doorways, open-air arcades and other decorative features that added further depth and richness. The building’s distinctive pink stucco exterior, tiled floors, and roof enhanced the building’s romantic, Spanish-revival style. Ovnick argued that, consciously or unconsciously, architects mimicked the fragmented planes, multiple volumes, and contrasts of dark and light that Ballin and other set designers employed in elaborate mansions such as the Getz house and in more modest single-family homes built in the 1920s.⁹

Cinematic design at home
Ballin also employed cinematographic techniques in the murals he painted for the dining room of the Getz house. He used each wall to illustrate a theme – the religions, the arts, the seasons, and the senses – and included both depictions of “real” historical events and characters as well as symbolic, allegorical figures to represent myths and embody ideas as he had in his murals at the Wisconsin State Capitol. But, while the murals in Wisconsin featured figures grouped together in a single frame on an even plane, Ballin’s murals for the Getz house depicted multiple figures positioned at a variety of depths, combining multiple planes into single compositions on each wall. As he had with his film sets, Ballin used these techniques to create “broken planes, with receding and advancing surfaces, each receiving a different amount of light” adding dimension and depth to each mural panel.¹⁰ According to one reviewer, these new visual strategies greatly enhanced Ballin’s storytelling abilities in the murals, allowing him to:

“… [give] expression to a complete and highly civilized individuality, adding wit and a thorough understanding of reality to his great ability as a painter and his highly developed sense of beauty. Here he gives us, above something to enjoy with the eyes, a work of art that stimulates the mind and imagination.”¹¹

A Hollywood epilogue

Milton Getz sold his house to in 1941 to art collector Otto Thum. In 1946, Thum sold the house to actress Marion Davies, who bought it for newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, with whom she was romantically involved at the time. Hearst and Davies hosted lavish parties at the estate with famous Hollywood guests and invited Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, to honeymoon there in 1953. In the 1960s, a new owner subdivided and sold the original lot and covered over the Ballin murals, but maintained the house and its lavish gardens. Perhaps because its architecture had been so heavily influenced by set design, the house became a popular filming location in the 1970s, serving as the set for many films including The Godfather, The Jerk, Fletch, Into the Night, and The Bodyguard as well as several television shows.