The most important thing to know about the Jay Sebring house is that he did not die in it. Sebring was murdered in August 1969 at a house in Benedict Canyon that Sharon Tate was renting, several minutes’ drive from his own home. The two properties are constantly conflated, and they are not the same place.
His own house was a 1930 property further down the same canyon, built by the MGM executive Paul Bern and briefly the marital home of Bern and Jean Harlow. Bern died there in 1932. Sebring bought it in 1963 and owned it until his death. It still stands, is privately owned, and has been lived in continuously since 1970.
This guide sets out its history, corrects the confusion, and explains what happened to it afterwards.
The house’s timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1930 | Built by Paul Bern, an MGM executive, in what was then a rural part of Benedict Canyon |
| July 1932 | Bern marries Jean Harlow; the house becomes their marital home |
| September 1932 | Bern is found dead of a gunshot wound at the house, two months into the marriage |
| 1963 | Jay Sebring buys the house |
| August 1969 | Sebring is murdered at a different house in the same canyon |
| 1970 | Sold by Sebring’s parents to a doctor who had long admired it |
| 2014 | The carriage house portion, since separated, sells for $855,000 |
Who was Jay Sebring?
Jay Sebring, born Thomas John Kummer in 1933, was an American hairstylist who effectively invented modern celebrity men’s hairdressing. He built a client list that included Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, and Jim Morrison, and turned it into a business, Sebring International, licensing his methods and products.
He began a relationship with Sharon Tate in 1964. They later separated but remained close, and he was at the house she was renting on the night of 8 to 9 August 1969, when he and four others were murdered by members of the Manson Family. He was 35.
This article does not go further into those events. They are exhaustively documented elsewhere and are not a property matter.
The house Paul Bern built
The house dates to 1930, when Paul Bern, a senior figure at MGM, built it in a part of Benedict Canyon that was then still semi-rural. It is a small, storybook-styled property rather than a mansion, and it has been described for decades as a country cottage.
Bern announced his engagement to Jean Harlow, then one of MGM’s biggest stars, in June 1932, and they married on 2 July. On 5 September, two months later, Bern was found dead at the house with a gunshot wound to the head and a revolver beside him.
The death was ruled a suicide. It has been disputed ever since, including by people who worked with him, with a persistent line of argument that the studio shaped the account to protect Harlow’s career. Nothing has ever been established beyond the original ruling, and this article does not take a position on it. What matters here is that the house acquired a reputation from that night which it has never lost, and which long predates Sebring.
Sebring’s ownership
Sebring bought the house in 1963, three decades after Bern’s death and at the point his own career was taking off. He was aware of its history; the house was already well known in Hollywood for it.
He owned it for six years. It was where he lived through the period in which he became the most sought-after men’s hairstylist in the industry, and through his relationship with Tate.
He was not there on the night he died, and the murders did not take place at his house. This is the single most persistent error in material about the property, and it is worth being blunt about: articles and videos describing the Easton Drive house as the scene of the Manson murders are wrong. That house was elsewhere in the canyon, was rented rather than owned by Tate, and was demolished in 1994.
What happened to the house after 1969
Sebring’s parents handled the sale of the property. In 1970, it was bought by a doctor who had admired the house for years, and it has been lived in as a private home ever since.
The estate has since been divided into two separate properties: the main house and the former carriage house, which had originally served as staff quarters. The carriage house, a two-bedroom property of about 1,110 square feet, sold in May 2014 for $855,000.
Both remain private residences. Neither is a museum, nor is it open to the public, and the current occupants have no connection to any of the events described above. Because of that, this article does not publish the street addresses, which appear freely in other coverage. The house has a long history of attracting attention it did not ask for.
The haunted-house reputation
The property is regularly described as the most haunted house in Hollywood, and a substantial genre of content exists around that claim.
It is worth understanding where the reputation comes from rather than either endorsing or dismissing it. A single house is connected to a death in 1932 that was never fully accepted as explained, and to an owner murdered in 1969 in one of the most notorious crimes in American history. That is an unusual concentration of tragedy attached to one address, and it is enough to generate the folklore without anything supernatural being involved.
Los Angeles has a long history of properties whose value and reputation are shaped by what happened in or near them, a pattern set out in the accounts of Brittany Murphy’s house and of the Encino house Robert Kardashian rented.
What stands there now
Sebring died in 1969, so the question of where he lives does not apply. The house he owned still exists, unlike the house where he died.
It has been in private hands since 1970, was subsequently split into two properties, and the smaller of them changed hands in 2014. It is a modest 1930s house in Benedict Canyon that happens to sit at the intersection of two of the most examined stories in Hollywood history, and its current owners are entitled to be left alone.
Sources
- Wikipedia on Paul Bern, the building of the house, his marriage to Jean Harlow, and his death there in September 1932.
- Wikipedia on Sebring’s career, his purchase of the house in 1963, and his relationship with Sharon Tate.
- The Tate-LaBianca Homicide Research Blog for the detailed ownership history of the property, including the 1970 sale by Sebring’s parents.
- Screen Rant on the separate Benedict Canyon house where the murders took place and its demolition in 1994.
