Ah, well, same thing happened to David Geffen when he bought the old Warner mansion with all contents and excitedly brought in someone to appraise the priceless furniture and wall coverings and found out it had all been built by Warner’s prop department. True story. https://twitter.com/amandakhurley/status/1302601835715452931

He kept all the stuff, he thought it was funny. One constant in the world is you never know what David Geffen will find funny, and what he will lose his absolute shit over and it’s rarely what you think.

But IMAGINE Geffen excitedly telling his person “this entire room was flown in from Paris and dates from 1803!” and her saying “this sticker says Burbank.”

I again strongly urge you to read the BANANAS good biography of David Geffen that started out authorized and then he tried to throw on the brakes partway through and told all his friends to stop talking to the writer but none of them did. It’s “The Operator” and it’s by Tom King.

But what Geffen realized, and I love, is that he desperately wanted to own a piece of Classic Hollywood and there’s nothing more Classic Hollywood than Jack Warner saying “just build me a fake Versailles.”

I liked Geffen MORE after reading the book, he should have chilled out about it. This was before his drone shot of his yacht with “we’re all in this together” but I would absolutely be on that yacht without my family if I had a plausible connection to David Geffen.

Also when I was originally reading the book I tweeted about it and the copy-editor slid into my DMs and now we’re friends.

But that’s my second favorite Geffen story, my first favorite is when he agreed to be in the documentary about the Eagles just so he could say, flatly yet contemptuously: “Don Henley is a malcontent.”

I just bought the book again bc I left my copy at my mom’s so she could give it to houseguests, you can open it to literally any page, read for twenty minutes, be exceptionally entertained.

He sold the Warner Mansion to Jeff Hairball Bezos in February for $165 million (decent profit since he bought it for $47.5 million in 1990) and I HAVE to know if Bezos kept the furnishings.

If you want to see the fake decor, this Architectural Digest story is great. They don’t want to piss anyone off so they say things like “24 gorgeous Regency-STYLE chairs.” https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/jack-l-warner-beverly-hills-house

“These tapestries COULD be out of a period film.” They sure could.