The house at 546 Ocean Front clearly meant a lot to the Zanucks. Darryl’s son, Richard—who used to be handed over to me to babysit, and who grew up to be a great producer in his own right—eventually bought the house from his mother and lived there for years with his own family.

Dick Zanuck was a remarkable man in so many ways—the obstacles he had to overcome in order to carve out his niche! He once told me the story of how he took over Fox. It was after The Longest Day, and the studio was in the doldrums. Dick went to Paris to be with his father, who was thinking of coming back and taking over the studio . . . again.

“You know all these young people,” Darryl told him. “Do you know anybody who could run production? Here’s what I want you to do. At dinner tonight, bring me a list of people who could run the studio.”

That night, Dick handed his father a note. On it was just one word: “Me.” And that was the beginning of Dick’s reign as a studio head.

Dick sold 546 Ocean Front some years before he died, in 2012, but I’ll always remember it as the Zanuck house. And I’ll always remember Darryl and Dick Zanuck. They’ll always be in my heart.

As my own career began to flourish and I began circulating among my fellow movie stars in areas full of money, I encountered a number of surprises. For instance, James Cagney’s house on Coldwater Canyon.

The house itself looked like an unpretentious Connecticut farmhouse. It had two stories—the exterior of the first story was finished in fieldstone, the second floor in shingles.

It was not large, with only six or seven markedly small rooms, and a warm, rustic interior. Jim’s study was very masculine, with roughly finished boards, lots of books, a card table, and a piano. The house had been completed just before World War II, and that’s where Jim lived when he was making a movie in town. Otherwise, he was in the East, at either of his farms in Dutchess County, New York, or on Martha’s Vineyard.

The Beverly Hills house wasn’t exactly a cottage, but it seemed incomprehensible as a residence for a great star like Cagney. But then, Jim wasn’t your typical great star. He always felt that Jack Warner was taking advantage of him, but he was never really successful away from the studio. He broke away a couple of times—once, briefly, in the 30s, and later, during the war and after, when he set up Cagney Productions with his brother Bill.

But the pictures Jim made for himself showcased him not as his fans wanted to see him—snarling, taking on the cops and the world with a gun in his hand—but as he wanted to see himself: in literary material such as Johnny Come Lately or The Time of Your Life, in which he played a quiet, reflective man in transition. Those pictures would disappoint, and he would troop back to Warner, grumbling the entire time.

There were very few personal touches in Jim’s Hollywood house. One of them was a track that he had constructed right on Coldwater Canyon—his property encompassed six acres—where I would jog his trotters when I was a teenager. I got the job through the Dornans, a prominent political family, who were good friends of his. There weren’t a lot of grooms around Hollywood at that point, so I lucked into the job.

I was just a kid at that point, so he didn’t have to be nice to me, but he always was. That’s the kind of man Jim Cagney was. He liked people, he was very open, and he was very compassionate about animals. If you cared about animals, Jim was your friend. Since I was young and loved horses, I was one of his people. Ten years later, I died in his arms in What Price Glory—one of the great thrills of my life.