TIME stands still at Oakridge.
The stone house on the Northridge hilltop is locked. Through its darkened windows can be glimpsed empty rooms that for nearly a half-century echoed with the laughter of comic actor Jack Oakie and a nonstop flow of Hollywood buddies.
Its curving driveway, circling an ancient oak, is cracked. The back lawn, where Oakie and his celebrity friends lazed away summer days by the pool, is overgrown and brown.
Oakridge is a monument to a long-vanished lifestyle in the San Fernando Valley, perhaps the last of the multi-acre ranches that stars from Hollywood's golden era bought in what then was the outskirts of town.
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had one down the street from Oakridge. Zeppo Marx, the brother of Groucho, Harpo and Chico, owned one in Northridge. So did actor William Holden and actress Janet Gaynor. Studio mogul Harry Warner had a working ranch in Woodland Hills that is now Warner Center.
As development spread across the Valley floor, the Hollywood ranchos disappeared one by one.
Oakie and his family were determined that Oakridge would not meet the same fate.
Until he died in 1978 at the age of 74, the radio and movie comedian battled to preserve low-density agricultural zoning around the home.
His wife, Victoria, continued his fight, persuading Los Angeles officials to designate Oakridge a historic-cultural monument in 1990. Two years before her death in 2003 at the age of 91, she bequeathed the estate to the USC School of Cinematic Arts. "I feel it is too beautiful to be torn down when I'm gone," she told city officials.
But time is ticking at Oakridge.
USC has decided to sell the house and land, and use the money for its film school.
A developer is weeks away from buying the nine-acre estate near Devonshire Street and Reseda Boulevard for a 28-home subdivision. City officials, meantime, are scrambling to preserve Oakie's English manor-style house. They would like to buy it and turn it into a cultural center that would salute pioneering Hollywood figures who had their own ranchettes in the Valley.
"The Oakie house is one of the last vestiges of the San Fernando Valley's personal connection to the movie industry," said City Councilman Greig Smith, who represents the Chatsworth and Northridge areas. "James Cagney's ranch is gone. Lucy and Desi's is gone. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans' is gone."
