FILM STAR FARMERS

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 24 April 1935, Page 11

FILM STAR FARMERS

SAN FERNANDO VALLEY “TARZANA” RANCH ON SCREEN.

King Vidor is not the only Hollywood celebrity who’s gone “hayseed.” Tiie well-known producer-director, who recently took over Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ranch, “Tarzana,” in the rolling San Fernando Valley, just outside Los Angeles, and turned it into the largest truck garden in the West as a setting for his production, “Our Daily Bread,” found that 100 or more film stars, writers, directors and other studio attaches have acquired extensive land holdings in the valley, and, besides using them as country homes, arc farming many of the 'acres an-d adding sub-

stantially to their income. A survey showed that a score of the agrarian-minded movie-folk control something like 1000 acres of productive land. Around their lovely homes ten-

nis courts and swimming pools, crops of citrus fruits, walnuts, avocadoes and vegetables are being grown. Others go in for breeding their favourite strains of dogs. Aviaries and apiaries are also maintained for pleasure as well as profit.

Among the better-known picture people who are cultivating from one to 100 acres are Gary Cooper, who also has extensive land holdings in Montana, Lewis Stone. Leslie Fenton, Edward Everett Horton, Raoul Walsh, Anna Nichols. Donald Crisp, Anna Q. Nilsson, Bradley King, Roy Del Ruth, Charlie Ruggles, Paul Muni, Gregory La Cava and Donald Meek.

Smaller country places are maintained in the valley, practically within n stone’s throw of the Burroughs’ ranch, by Bing Crosby, Ruby Keeler, Carl Laemmlo. Richard Arlen, Mary Astor, Boris Karloff, W. C. Fields. Dick Powell, “Slim” Summerville. Virginia Bruce, Frank McHugh, Roy Disney, Ann Dvorak, '‘Buck” Johns, At St. John, Mnrv Brian, Melvyn Douglas and others.