Guests who tour the William S. Hart Museum in Newhall are especially charmed, as I am, by a child’s 1920s bathing costume in the silent movie cowboy’s bedroom.
Photos of William Hart’s chubby-cheeked son, Bill Jr., sit on a wooden trunk next to a stuffed bear and a toy holster. Also on display in the Spanish colonial revival mansion is a photograph of the steely Hart and young Bill’s mother, Winifred Westover. The D.W. Griffith actress was snub-nosed, doe-eyed, and 23 years old when, in 1921, she married the 57-year-old Shakespearean actor turned pioneer Western filmmaker, perhaps most known for his roles (both as actor and director) in Hell’s Hinges (1916) and Tumbleweeds (1925).
But the bedroom tableau doesn’t hint at the years of bitter litigation that followed the wedding. Within months, the union was over. A pregnant Westover claimed that Hart had tossed her out of their Hollywood home following an argument she had had with his sister Mary Ellen Hart, whom Westover charged was one reason for their separation. William denied that such an argument took place.
Santa Clarita historian Leon Worden is not surprised that the split occurred. “You’ve got a Victorian man who wants a Victorian wife who stays home and makes babies,” he says. “That’s not what she wanted.”
In a separation agreement, Westover received a $103,000 trust (worth around $2 million today), with $100,000 for her future child: Baby Bill would be born exactly nine months after the wedding. She also agreed to stop acting and hold no right to any of Hart’s properties, present or future.
To the delight of the national press, the separation and divorce dragged on.
In 1925, the New York Times reported that little Bill “for the most part slumbered blissfully” in a Los Angeles courtroom as Westover sought to renegotiate her settlement and resume her career. To dispel rumors, she testified, “It is not true that my husband ever pulled me around by the hair.” For his part, Hart declared that Westover threatened to reveal a (false) Fatty Arbuckle–type sex scandal if he didn’t come to a new agreement. Eventually, the California State Supreme Court would allow Westover to act again. But the clause barring her from an interest in Hart’s properties remained.
A year later, Hart wrote to the architect Arthur R. Kelly—who designed what became known as the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills—about building a house on his Horseshoe Ranch in Newhall, where Hart shot some of his films. Kelly accepted Hart’s offer and made notes, writing, “The plan has to be made to fit the contours of the mountain.” Hart named his hilltop estate La Loma de los Vientos (the hill of the winds).
The home, completed in 1927, is a magical, 10,000-square-foot tile-roofed mansion, with a curved floating staircase, a bedroom for Hart’s Harlequin Great Danes, and lofty dining room windows through which Hart’s horses are said to have poked their noses during dinner parties. Over the years, visitors included the O.K. Corral lawman Wyatt Earp, aviator Amelia Earhart (Hart once sent her a buffalo coat to “hold her tight and keep her warm”), the painter James Montgomery Flagg (famed for his “I Want You” World War I recruiting poster), and the humorist Will Rogers, who gifted an Alaskan bearskin rug that lies, fangs bared, in the beamed living room (Hart also used the beast as a lawn blanket).
He lived there with his sister, who died in 1943, leaving Hart an estate valued at more than $200,000. After Hart’s death three years later, his will revealed that he had left his mansion and the property to Los Angeles County for use by his fans. “While I was making pictures, the people gave me their nickels, dimes, and quarters. When I am gone, I want them to have my home,” Hart had said.
Upon his death, Westover, then 47, and Bill Jr., then 23, began a battle to overturn the will.
In one of Bill Jr.’s increasingly desperate legal attempts, he asserted that his father was a victim of “monomania,” or fixation, and had disinherited his son because of “an insane delusion” and “unexplained hatred” of Westover. He sued the executor of Hart’s will, suggesting that a crucial handwritten page from an early version of his aunt Mary Ellen’s will was missing and had been suppressed. He accused his father of incest with Mary Ellen, for which a judge declared “there was no basis in fact.” He even persuaded a judge to order his father’s brain removed before cremation to examine it for abnormalities. “It came back as not abnormal,” says Worden, with a chuckle, adding that Hart wrote his will two years before he died. The pathologist concluded that any degradation to his brain would have occurred in the last few months of his life.
Westover and her son did not succeed. At last, in 1958, William S. Hart Park opened under the supervision of the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation; the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County took charge of the mansion. Westover, whose acting comeback fizzled after she starred in the unfortunately titled 1930 talkie Lummox, died in 1978; Bill Jr., a real estate appraiser and teacher, died in 2004.
Now, fans of architecture, silent movies, and Western art and history line up at the mansion, which was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic but reopened this April following an ownership transfer from Los Angeles to the City of Santa Clarita. During the free, 45-minute docent-led tours, visitors can view the Native American rugs, textiles, and basketry; book collections, including copies of Hoofbeats, one of the dozen or more novels Hart authored; and bronze sculptures by C.M. Russell, whose massive buffalo-hunt painting dominates a living room wall. In a downstairs powder room, cans and jars of Max Factor face powder, greasepaint, and cold cream sit near other memorabilia from Hart’s stage career, which included roles in Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, and Ben-Hur.
Following a tour in May, I return to tackle one of the rugged hiking trails that dot the 160-acre park’s bucolic landscape, this one named for Fritz, Hart’s adored pinto pony, whose large stone-and-bronze monument still stands. Below the hilltop, bison laze, descendants of the original herd gifted by Walt Disney in 1962. At the park’s entrance, per Hart’s will, a plaque reads: “This park has been dedicated by William S. Hart for the benefit of the American public of every race and creed.”
Had Westover and her appraiser son prevailed, says Hollywood historian E.J. Stephens, “it could have been Hart condominiums.”•
Louise Farr is based in Los Angeles, where she contributes to the Writers Guild of America West's Written by. She is the author of The Sunset Murders.
