THERE are a number of things that delight Moby, once the ultimate downtown New York musician, about his castle in the Hollywood Hills: the gatehouse turret, from which the original owner’s pet monkey screamed across the canyons when the house was built in 1920s; the lore, both rock ’n’ roll and literary and decadent, that has the Rolling Stones living here for a spell, Aldous Huxley residing across the street and porno films shot around the pool; and the hidden room — a former tiki bar — that at one time had a fake grass ceiling and pictures of Hawaiian dancing girls, which he cannot show you, because this house is so new to him that he can’t find the key.
There is also what he calls the “penultimate” Hollywood view, for which you have to go up the stairs to the master bedroom. Be careful: Moby’s one rule is no shoes on the rug. O.K., now plop down on the rumpled bed. Looking through the window straight ahead, you can see the canyon fall to the Hollywood Reservoir; to your right and up the hill is the famous Hollywood sign. If he were a Hollywood producer and wanted to impress some actress, Moby says, he’d use that view.
Has he had the opportunity to impress anyone here so far?
“I had a date, which ended up making out under the view of the Hollywood sign, but nothing too crazy,” says Moby, who is so slight as to be almost as much of a caricature as the drawing on his gray T-shirt. Make that a caricature in pencil. I don’t fit in here? No problem. Rub me out. I work alone a lot of the time anyway. In appearance, Moby is either Jules Feiffer’s illegitimate son, or he was drawn by him.
But back to the view from the bed and that date. How’s that relationship going?
“At present, it’s ambiguous. Back in my drinking days, I used to be a little more promiscuous, but now in sobriety, I’m like a nun.” A quick correction: “A monk.”
It is a heck of an impressive view, he is told; it should have had some effect.
“She came from a very wealthy background,” Moby says. (Anyway, what fellow wishes his appeal to be property based?) “Hopefully she was impressed by my wit and character.”
Not so long ago, Moby, a musician and composer Billboard once named “The King of Techno,” was the hippest of downtown guys, running a teahouse/vegetarian cafe on his Lower East Side home turf, where he sometimes stopped in to wait tables, headlining at the Bowery Ballroom and going on about soy milk (well, he still talks about soy milk).
But now, while he keeps a small apartment in Little Italy, he has moved to Los Angeles, to a castle on three acres with a stone wall, a Disney-esque gatehouse and a kidney-shaped pool.
Called Wolf’s Lair after its first owner, L. Milton Wolf, a real estate developer, it is a house with old Hollywood flourishes that Norma Desmond would embrace. On the hill overlooking the castle, mounted on a tall pole, is a lamp shaped like a crescent moon, so there will always be the reflection of a moon in the pool, a perfect example of 1920s Hollywood romance. I’ll buy you the moon, baby.
Moby paid just under $4 million for the house last year and estimates he has put another $2 million into its restoration.
For an alternative-music guy, Moby, 45, has been doing very well. He has sold 5 million albums and 2 million digital tracks, according to Nielsen SoundScan (his music has been used extensively in soundtracks and commercials), and he has a new album, “Destroyed,” out next month. Written while he was touring, “Destroyed” is “broken-down electronic music for empty cities at 2 a.m.,” he says, and indeed the music has an echoing, futuristic loneliness.
Moby decided to move to Los Angeles for a number of reasons: New York is so expensive that many of his interesting, creative friends have had to leave; the winters; and that more difficult thing from which to remove oneself, the winter of the soul. The techno musician turns out to have a more debauched past than his persona suggests.
“I stopped drinking a few years ago, and I got to say that the cold and nastiness of New York in February was a lot easier to handle when I was a crazy drunk,” he says. “If you’re hung over when it’s sleeting outside and 40 degrees, it doesn’t seem so bad.”
Are we talking alcoholism here, A.A. kind of stuff?
“A.A. we’re not allowed to talk about, but yeah,” Moby says.
What made him stop?
“Simply the consequence of being hung over 48 hours after being drunk for six hours,” he says. “It didn’t used to be that way when I was in my 20s. I could stay up till 7 being drunk, and the hangover lasted for two hours. In my 40s, the hangovers lasted for days, and they were debilitating and soul-destroying. I simply had to stop.”
IF one were to tell a life story through the houses one has lived in, Moby’s would be particularly rich. A descendant of Herman Melville whose real name is Richard Melville-Hall, he was born in Harlem, when his father was a graduate student at Columbia.
Moby and his mother moved into her prosperous family’s Connecticut home when his father, whom she was divorcing, died driving drunk. His mother, who died of lung cancer 13 years ago, was a sometime secretary and devoted hippie. In 1969, she took him to live in San Francisco.
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