“They didn't want anything to be too serious,” the designer says. “We played around and found out what we liked,” she continues. After the earthquake, that was a priority,” says Paula Coburn. “We travel so much that we develop a feel for what we like and don't like,” says his wife.īack home they moved into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and began shopping for a house, with side trips to India, Turkey, Morocco, Italy and France. “I love to travel and see new things and new people,” says James Coburn. In Venice they bought Fortuny fabric and the chandelier in the piano lounge. In Paris they browsed in the flea markets.
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The dance was a lambada contest, and as James Coburn remembers, “she was the only one who knew how to do it!”Īfter the 1994 earthquake demolished their house, they took a few months to travel around the world. He had been divorced for a decade and had recently overcome the rheumatoid arthritis that had kept him from working for years.
The Coburns met at a dance in February 1990. Fighteenth-century Burmese monks watch from columns that separate the ballroom from the dining room. An incense burner from a trip to Jaipur sits on the table next to it crouch two Japanese temple foxes. A Fortuny chandelier casts its glow on velvet tiger-pattern-upholstered chairs. “Here we get them dancing.”ĭinner is served in a balcony-like space overlooking the dance floor. “At most parties people stand around and talk and try to impress someone else with how important they are,” James Coburn says. There, draperies of Fortuny fabric, with undercurtains made of gold lamé, frame the sea of lights below, and a velvet banquette borders a parquetry dance floor punctuated by a gilt palm-frond table, a Chinese stenciled table and two carved wood elephants. Prompted by a Tibetan gong, guests proceed up the grand staircase to the piano lounge, a ballroom in the sky.
It might be a small dinner, or an afternoon tea dance where women wearing chiffon dresses drink cosmopolitans, or a Latin late-night gathering featuring the Gipsy Kings and dry martinis. The first act at the Coburns' is always a fabulous party. He's a man at the top of the world, and now he has a house to match. A Jaguar and a Mercedes have replaced the family Model A in his gated driveway, and from the gardens of his Beverly Hills hacienda he looks down on the lights of Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific beyond. Last year, at seventy, Coburn finally found his luck, winning an Oscar for his savage, haunting portrayal of an abusive father in Affliction. The Magnificent Seven (1960) made him a famous cowboy he was an American-style James Bond in Our Man Flint (1965). Over the years he studied with Stella Adler and Jeff Corey, did advertising gigs and played dozens of supporting roles, working with everyone from Audrey Hepburn and Steve McQueen to Sam Peckinpah and Bruce Lee. It was 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression, and the Coburns had just driven all the way from dusty Nebraska looking for luck.Įven as a kid, James Coburn was an actor who projected an engaging air of menace: His first role was as King Herod in the school Christmas pageant. He arrived in California in the backseat of a Model A Ford piled high with his family's belongings. This article originally appeared in the April 2000 issue of Architectural Digest.