Sex, Drugs and Roller Skates
The New York Times
A new book pays tribute to the vanished magic of Flipper’s, a storied if short-lived 1970s skate palace.
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.
We were standing in an unlikely Aladdin’s Cave set in the middle of Holmby Hills, barely two minutes drive from Sunset Boulevard. 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. 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.
“California Love” surged from unseen speakers. 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. Iovine’s artists, along with a Dior Addict ad in which Ms. Ross, a fashion model, once featured and an outsize image of Carmen Miranda. 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.
