7406 Franklin Ave

Los Angeles, CA 90046

In 1966, author Joan Didion moved into this 1920s Greek Revival home. In her classic book of essays, The White Album, she recalled:

In the years I’m talking about I was living in a large house in a part of Hollywood that had once been expensive and was now described by one of my acquaintances as a ‘senseless killing neighborhood.’ This house on Franklin Avenue was a rental and paint peeled inside and out, and pipes broke and window sashes crumbled, and the tennis court had not been rolled since 1933, but the rooms were many and high ceilinged and, during the five years I lived there, even the rather sinistral inertia of the neighborhood tended to suggest that I live in the house indefinitely

In this rambling house, Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, threw wild parties, living through the increasing paranoia of the late 1960s. “At the time,” LA Magazine’s Ethan Varian writes, “Didion began her days with a cold bottle of Coca-Cola and a can of salted almonds. She awoke late each morning and, donning a pair of oversized black glasses, made her way down the L-shaped staircase to the kitchen of the seven-room Hollywood estate she shared with her husband and daughter.”

For Didion, the house began to embody the creepy unease of post-Manson Hollywood. “The Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971, when I left the house on Franklin Avenue and moved to a house on the sea,” she wrote. Today, the estate is home to the Shumei America Hollywood Center, a spiritual organization “dedicated to advancing health, happiness, and harmony for all human kind.”

How to visit: The Shumei America Hollywood Center offers spiritual events and a “commune with nature” most Saturdays. Those interested in attending are encouraged to email hollywood@shumei.us.