Elaine Young, real estate broker to the stars, cannot stop crying.
After 36 years of peddling million-dollar estates, a salary that sometimes surpassed $700,000, six husbands and the deaths of two colleagues, Young has closed her agency."It's really hard to hold your head up when you've had one of the biggest real-estate offices in town and you wake up one day and it's gone," Young said, beginning to sob again.
It's especially hard in this town, where image is everything and so is money.
After 17 years on Canon Drive, in the heart of Beverly Hills, Young permanently shut the doors Friday of Alvarez, Hyland & Young, one of the bigger real estate agencies catering to millionaires and moguls.
Young, 58, has sold to Elvis, Sylvester Stallone, Robert Wagner, Barbra Streisand and Raquel Welch. She is the daughter of a studio executive; the ex-wife of a movie star, the late Gig Young; and a self-made woman from a generation that taught its female members to emulate Donna Reed, not Donald Trump.
Still, none of those attributes or clients were enough to save her agency, which fell victim to bad financial planning, a bad real estate market, and an even worse economy.
"We overextended ourselves, as we all do in California," said Young. "Our costs were exorbitant. When the market started to go bad and everyone else began to cut back, we didn't."
Now they are paying the price. But financial problems aside, Young has not had an easy time of late.
Two years ago, her partner, Juan Alvarez, dropped dead from a heart attack. Last July, her best friend, fellow real estate agent Elaine Siegel, was stabbed and strangled in a house she was showing. Siegel had gone to show the house as a favor to Young.
On top of all that, Young underwent 32 corrective plastic surgery operations trying to fix a botched series of cheekbone silicone injections. She admittedly is a child of Hollywood given to flashy cars, fancy clothes and trendy restaurants.
She titled her autobiography "A Million Dollars Down" and created a name for herself 16 years ago by merely giggling when Mike Wallace asked during a "60 Minutes" interview if there was "hanky-panky" in her business.
"I was born here," Young said. "We always think we are what we do, or what we drive, and that's not true. We all have to realize that we're really just human beings."
So on Friday, after telling her agency's 45 brokers and 20 other workers that Alvarez, Hyland & Young was no longer in business, Young readied herself to walk down Canon Drive and work for a smaller brokerage.