“This thing kept happening, though, that whenever I mentioned that my dad was Flipper, people’s memories would come flooding out,” she said. Her only jewelry consisted of a simple gold cross on a chain and a diamond engagement ring the size of a headlamp. She was dressed in black jeans, a T-shirt and fur Balenciaga slides, her dark hair parted simply down the middle. Ross said, sitting beneath a pergola overlooking a garden and pickleball court at her manorial house, designed by Wallace Neff. “Obviously, I don’t remember anything firsthand,” Ms. While it lasted, it was, depending on who you talk to, either a den of iniquity or a beacon of pleasure during a period of communal expansiveness and inclusivity that would sadly wind down as Los Angeles both grew and devolved into a city of increasingly insular enclaves. She was just an infant when her father, an expatriate Englishman of scant means yet with a surplus of charm and wild-eyed enthusiasms, decided to move his family across an ocean and a continent from London to create a roller skating palace in West Hollywood.įlipper’s opened with great fanfare in 1979 and sputtered to its end a little more than two years later in a welter of code violations, fines and, finally, looting. Ross’s psychic landscape and seemingly also on that of her adopted city. That project is “Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace,” a glossy book-length tribute to a storied roller disco that, during its brief existence, imprinted itself indelibly on Ms. The Portuguese-born stage and film performer of the ’30s and ’40s, celebrated as the Brazilian Bombshell, is unironically crowned at the Holmby Hills roller rink with a signature fruit-bowl headpiece rendered as an eruption of ripe bananas. Ross, a fashion model, once featured and an outsize image of Carmen Miranda. Iovine’s artists, along with a Dior Addict ad in which Ms. A lighting system beamed prismatic rays on the artist Drew Merritt’s wall murals depicting a post-apocalyptic sandstorm landscape populated by a raft of Mr. “California Love” surged from unseen speakers. Ross had constructed her own eccentric plaything, a private roller rink, as a surprise present for her husband, the former record executive and Beats billionaire Jimmy Iovine. Here, in a neighborhood where house prices can top $40 million and where construction extravagances like moats and grottoes (the former Playboy Mansion is across the street) are hardly unknown, Ms. We were standing in an unlikely Aladdin’s Cave set in the middle of Holmby Hills, barely a two minute drive from Sunset Boulevard. LOS ANGELES - “Do you want to skate?” Liberty Ross said, opening a door on a closet full of ankle-height quad skates with boots in all sizes and assorted animal patterns.
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