Elon Musk Sells Gene Wilder’s Former Home Back To The Late Actor’s Family
Mr. Musk sold it to the new owner, the famed actor’s nephew, with the stipulation that the property be preserved.
5 min
Jordan Walker-Pearlman was heartbroken when he was told, erroneously, that the house where he grew up with his uncle, the late actor Gene Wilder, had been demolished.
He still had vivid memories—sometimes even dreams—of Mr. Wilder’s morning swims in the kidney-shaped pool, the Sunday after-tennis hangouts with the likes of Mel Brooks and Sidney Poitier, raucous dinner parties, and listening to Mr. Wilder read scripts and play piano while he nursed a Lillet cassis cocktail.
The low-slung, white-shingled house, in the Bel-Air neighbourhood of Los Angeles, was also where actress, comedian and “Saturday Night Live” cast member Gilda Radner died from ovarian cancer in 1989. Mr. Walker-Pearlman considered her a second mother after she married Mr. Wilder in 1984.
“I mourned the house,” says Mr. Walker-Pearlman, a 53-year-old film director and writer, who directed the 2000 film “The Visit” and whose wild hair and prominent, expressive eyes are similar to those of his late uncle, known for his work in “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and “Blazing Saddles.” From an early age, Mr. Walker-Pearlman split his time between living with Mr. Wilder, and living with his grandmother in Harlem. His biological parents, he says, were “a little crazy and not enthusiastic about the responsibilities of child rearing.”
Then one day, when he was in the neighbourhood, Mr. Walker-Pearlman drove by to show his wife, screenwriter Elizabeth Hunter, where the house had been. He was shocked to find it still standing. Owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, there was a large party under way, but the security guard opened the gate so they could peek in.
About a year later, a friend sent him a screenshot of Mr. Musk’s now-famous May 1, 2020, texts:
“I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house” and “Just one stipulation on sale: I own Gene Wilder’s old house: It cannot be torn down or lose any of its soul.”
A US$9.5 million listing appeared on forsalebyowner.com, advertised as the “former home of Gene Wilder/Willy Wonka,” “upgraded with modern amenities, but preserved original charming and quirky vibe.” The listing stipulated that the home was being sold with the condition that it must be preserved.
Mr. Walker-Pearlman said he reached out to Mr. Musk’s team immediately. He knew he couldn’t afford that price, but the tweet gave him optimism they might reach a deal. “The only person who could possibly want it not to be torn down as much as him was me,” he says. Mr. Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
After four months of negotiations, Mr. Walker-Pearlman says Mr. Musk agreed to sell the house to him and Ms. Hunter for US$7 million along with what’s called a “long form deed of trust and assignment of rents,” in which Mr. Musk agreed to lend the couple $6.7 million, according to public documents.
“He could have sold it for so much more,” says Mr. Walker-Pearlman. “His sensitivity to me can’t be overstated.”
The sale closed in October 2020. The timing for Mr. Walker-Pearlman was exquisite, because it allowed him to use the house as the set for his upcoming film “The Requiem Boogie,” produced by his production company, Harlem, Hollywood. The somewhat autobiographical plot follows a middle-aged former child actor, played by Mr. Walker-Pearlman, who is mourning the loss of his movie-star father. It is a spiritual, quasi-comedy about dealing with Mr. Wilder’s death and the nature of show business, says Mr. Walker-Pearlman.
Living in the house again has been both wonderful and spooky, says Mr. Walker-Pearlman. He feels the ghosts of the people who made it come alive. When he walks into a certain room, a memory will pop up and he will get teleported back, he says. At times he even feels like messages from beyond are being sent, such as when the crew was filming in what was Ms. Radner’s dressing room and suddenly the water in the shower and sink came on.
When he and Ms. Hunter were signing the papers for the loan from Mr. Musk, a buck they had never seen before appeared from the hedges and stood in the window, staring at them, hanging around for nine hours that day; they haven’t seen it since. The couple’s 3-year-old nephew, Hunter, has told him there are ghosts in the house, he says.
The house came with many of Mr. Musk’s furnishings, including a purple sofa, a drawing of a clown, a large chess set and a swing encased in a giant metal birdcage in the backyard, which Mr. Walker-Pearlman says was a party gift to Mr. Musk.
Mr. Walker-Pearlman says he believes Mr. Musk originally bought the property to protect the distant views of Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean from his primary house across the street, which Mr. Musk sold for $29.72 million to Chinese billionaire William Ding in June 2020, according to public records. He says he believes Mr. Musk used the garage as a school for his children at one point and the main house to hold parties. Mr. Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Some things have changed since Mr. Wilder owned it: There used to be white shag carpet in the living room (a recommendation to his uncle from the late actor Burt Reynolds, says Mr. Walker-Pearlman); the main bathroom had a bath. Mr. Wilder’s much-used piano and a dart board are gone. The ceiling is now painted with black and white stripes and trees no longer block the view of the Bel-Air Country Club’s golf course below.
But much is the same. Mr. Walker-Pearlman still uses the indoor grill in the dining room where he says Mr. Wilder loved to cook chicken three times a week. He sits at the small kitchen desk, where he says Mr. Wilder would eat his morning bran muffins and drink Earl Grey tea. And he swims in the same pool where Mr. Wilder would do morning laps and where he taught Mr. Walker-Pearlman how to swim. Almost every wall and shelf contains memorabilia, including photographs of Mr. Wilder playing tennis, dressed as Willy Wonka.
Mr. Wilder, who was born Jerome Silberman, bought the 2,800-square-foot, five-bedroom, five-bathroom house in Bel-Air for around $300,000 in 1976, buoyed by the success of the 1974 film “Young Frankenstein,” in which he starred.
Mr. Walker-Pearlman had been living part time in Harlem with his grandmother, and part time with Mr. Wilder, who was his mother’s brother. He soon started spending all summer and time during a few other months in Los Angeles.
In L.A., Mr. Wilder gave him an education rich in the history of film, moviemaking and acting. He says he learned to process the world in terms of film, being hyper-aware of lighting and constantly wanting to change people’s dialogue. He started acting as a child and made and starred in his own film for Nickelodeon as a teenager. He also learned a lot about French red wines and the importance of romance, he says. “I didn’t leave his side.”
Ms. Radner urged Mr. Walker-Pearlman to try college, so he attended George Washington University and Howard University for stints. But she was also upset when he said he didn’t want to pursue an acting career. He says she told him “this house is for crazy people. You have to become one of us.”
The result was a mixed relationship with film. He says he learned to hate what he sees as the commodification and narcissism of the film industry, but he loved being in the editing suites and on set, especially during the filming of “Hanky Panky” in 1981, directed by Mr. Poitier, when Mr. Wilder and Ms. Radner met as co-stars.
In 1991, two years after Ms. Radner died, Mr. Wilder married his fourth wife, the former Karen Boyer. They eventually moved permanently to Ms. Radner’s former farmhouse in Stamford, Conn., where Mr. Wilder had been living much of the time after Ms. Radner’s death. He sold the Bel-Air house in 2007 for $2.7 million to Bristol Capital LLC. Mr. Musk bought it in 2013 for $6.75 million, according to PropertyShark.
Mr. Walker-Pearlman says he’s still mourning his uncle, who died in 2016 at age 83, and Ms. Radner. Living and filming in the house has triggered a range of emotions. “It’s the closest you can get to going back to the past,” he says. He worries that his wife pays a toll for that.
But Ms. Hunter says she’s thrilled to get the chance to live in such a beautiful house in a neighbourhood she never thought she would be able to afford. “It’s magic,” she says.
For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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