Home to Man on Cutting Edge of Shaving

It is an estate as remarkable as the architect who built it and the razor-blade king who commissioned it, and as unusual as the tenants who would inhabit it thereafter, from a cult priestess to an Oscar-nominated film director and, now, Soka University.

Tucked into the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu Creek State Park, at the center of a tranquil 580-acre Calabasas oasis, is a Mediterranean mansion built by King Camp Gillette, the mustachioed man who created a razor blade and an empire.

In the summer of 1895, an eccentric 40-year-old traveling bottle-cap salesman and tinkerer from Fond du Lac, Wis., was on the lookout for a sure-fire product that would make him a fortune. Standing in front of the hotel-room mirror with a lathered face and a dull razor that constantly needed sharpening, he had a revelation: a razor that used disposable blades.

“I have got it; our fortune is made,” he wrote his wife. He was right.

It was an era when beards and mustaches were a sign of manhood, in part because beard removal was a hazardous undertaking. As one Russian proverb--obviously coined by a man--put it: “It is easier to bear a child once a year than to shave every day.”

By 1901, Gillette had perfected his blade and opened a razor business in Boston with $5,000. But war against whiskers was off to a slow start. In 1903, the company reported sales of 51 razors and 168 blades. The following year, sales jumped to 91,000 razors and 12.4 million blades, with Gillette’s picture on every wrapper. A revolution was underway in the shaving industry.

World War I was a boon for Gillette; he supplied 3.5 million razors and 36 million blades to recruits. The Gillette razor became a standard issue, along with a uniform and gun.

Even before he began changing the shaving habits of the nation with a blade that did away with the ritual of honing and stropping a straight razor, Gillette thought competitiveness was evil.

“If people really need to buy goods, it is quite unnecessary to lure them.... Advertising is part of the game of beating your neighbor,” he wrote.

His politics were not unusual at the time; Gaylord Wilshire, for whom Wilshire Boulevard was named, was among California’s silk-hat socialists.

Gillette dreamed of a utopian society, to be run by Theodore Roosevelt with a yearly salary of $250,000, in which 60 million people would live in mammoth, glass-domed apartment complexes with great central kitchens powered by Niagara Falls.

His political views and visions--summed up in his books, including “The Human Drift,” “World Corporation,” “Gillette’s Social Redemption” and “People’s Corporation,” edited by muckraker Upton Sinclair--would never equal the success of his invention.

Like a double-edged sword, his idealistic views were in constant conflict with his business success. He had competitors who adapted his blade long before Gillette’s patent ran out. He spent much of his time in court battling them. Ultimately, instead of a better world, he had to settle for a better shave as the money poured in.

Buying $6 Million Worth of Land in 1920s Dollars

After Gillette retired at 58, in 1913, still remaining president of the company, he and his wife, Atlanta Ella “Lantie” Gaines, and their son, King Gaines Gillette, moved to Beverly Hills and began buying up California real estate, a total of $6 million worth in 1920s dollars.

In California, Gillette continued to write and split political hairs over economics and social policies with social reformers such as Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis. Upton Sinclair and Gillette once met with auto magnate Henry Ford, unsuccessfully trying to bring him around to their ideas.

The Gillettes moved from Beverly Hills to Pacific Palisades and, in 1926, bought a working ranch in Calabasas, near a canyon still known as Stokes Canyon, for its former owner.

The Gillettes traveled and collected art--jet-setters before the days of jets--and, in 1928, set off for Europe. They left behind a commission for Wallace Neff, known as the “architect to the stars,” to design a ranch house and left the particulars up to him.

On a knoll overlooking a lake he created by damming Stokes Creek, Neff built a 25-room, two-story Mediterranean-style hacienda of adoblar brick, obtained from the soil he excavated for the lake.

One year later, the globe-trotting Gillettes returned to a finished, furnished and fully staffed mansion. Neff even arranged to have dinner waiting for the weary travelers. The $500,000 house and stables had arched entrances, fountains, hand-painted tiles, a patio mural and even a black-tiled bathroom for Gillette’s light-sensitive eyes. When Gillette saw his new home, Neff later recalled, he broke down and wept.

To ornament this palace, Gillette planted hundreds of varieties of trees, flowers and shrubs he brought back from his travels. It was there that he died in 1932, at 77, having lost most of his fortune in the stock market crash.

His widow did not sell the estate, but depended on the charity of friends. At last, her lawyer demanded that the still-prosperous Gillette Co. come to the aid of its founder’s widow.

The company said no, then reconsidered and gave her a $200 monthly pension until her death in 1951. Her son died four years later at his Newport Beach home.

Over the years, piece by piece, mother and son had auctioned off their valuable art collection, jewels and property. In 1935, their Tudor-style Pacific Palisades home overlooking the Riviera Country Club went for $68,000. Their beloved Calabasas estate was sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer director Clarence Brown for less than $150,000.

Brown had been an automobile engineer and World War I aviator before he became a prolific film director. He enhanced the careers of such stars as Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Norma Shearer and Elizabeth Taylor in such film vehicles as “The Eagle,” “Flesh and the Devil” and “The Human Comedy.”

Among the ranch’s rolling hills and peaceful lake, Brown tore down the Stokes adobe, raised horses and crops, hosted MGM company picnics and built a private airstrip for himself and his “fly-in parties.”

The site later became the backdrop for such films as “Ah, Wilderness!” (1935), “Campus Confessions” (1938), “White Cliffs of Dover” (1944) and, most famously, “National Velvet” (1944).

A Catholic order, the Claretian Fathers, with a faith as firm as the surrounding oaks, bought the property in 1953, built a seminary and called it Claretville.

On Sept. 25, 1970, Father Pat McPolin watched a Malibu wildfire whip giant fireballs onto the hills surrounding the Claretians’ cattle and ranch, which remained unscathed.

“Here we were untouched; God must have put his protecting hand over us,” he said recently.

Ten people died in the fire that blackened more than 435,000 acres and destroyed more than 400 buildings.

Soon the Claretians moved to the 17-acre Dominguez Ranch Adobe, and the property was briefly leased to Thomas Aquinas College, a Catholic school.

In 1978, the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect known for its members’ daily spiritually therapeutic enemas and controversial leader, Elizabeth Clare “Guru Ma” Prophet, bought the property for $5.8 million. She called the place Camelot.

It wasn’t paradise to one follower, who left the fold and sued her in 1986 for allegedly destroying his personal life and health. She took the witness stand and claimed that the late Pope John XXIII had become an “ascended master” in her cult, had transferred the power of the church to her and named her Vicar of Christ, one of the pope’s titles. She lost the suit.

A New Life as Soka University

That same year, she and more than 100 followers retreated from Camelot to settle in Montana to build their “New Jerusalem,” leaving behind the Wallace Neff tower, where she said God passed along messages.

Even before the Prophet followers left, Soka University had bought the property and moved in. The campus is one of four in the Japan-based university system and is home to 200 students.

The Wallace Neff house still stands, and is used for guests.

In the decade since, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, politicians, homeowners and environmentalists have waged a costly battle with Soka over expanding the university’s buildings.

Last fall, the state Supreme Court denied the university’s request for review of a lower court ruling that stopped expansion of the campus.

Although the man Gillette is all but forgotten, the name Gillette is still associated with a clean, close shave.

His exotic plants survive him, and Soka and its Botanical Research Center and Nursery host nature walks in this kingdom fit for a King.