Tow-Away at the White Castle Oscar Party

Bernadette Fox’s tow-away at the White Castle Oscar party transforms a bitter driveway dispute into a carefully timed public reprisal: while Prince performed in Nigel Mills-Murray’s backyard, she had twenty cars removed from the shared drive.

The Party and the Driveway Dispute

The White Castle’s completion had already sharpened the conflict. Mills-Murray crowned the house with a million dollars’ worth of California fan palms, each lowered along the shared driveway by helicopter. Bernadette objected that the palms made her entry look like a Ritz-Carlton, but Mills-Murray’s title report specified his easement over her property for ingress and egress, as well as landscaping decisions and maintenance. That language established the narrow property-rights ground on which the later confrontation would turn.

The Tow-Away

The day before the party, Bernadette overheard Mills-Murray’s assistant and the head valet mapping out where to park a hundred cars. She responded by notifying a dozen towing companies that cars would be illegally parked on her driveway. During the party, as the valets slipped into the backyard to watch Prince perform “Let’s Go Crazy,” Bernadette waved in the waiting tow trucks; twenty cars were removed in a flash. When Mills-Murray confronted her in a rage, she calmly produced the property title, invoking its restriction of the easement to “ingress and egress”—not parking.

Consequences and Significance

The tow-away turned Bernadette’s knowledge of the easement into a tactical victory, but it did nothing to make the Twenty Mile House a home the family could move into. At the time, Bernadette and Elgin Branch were living at Beeber Bifocal and expected to raise a family in the new house; as the neighbor feud wore on, Elgin became distressed by its effect on Bernadette and decided he would not move there. Paul Jellinek urged him to wait, hoping matters might change. The episode thus marks a sharp divide between winning an argument over the driveway and preserving the domestic future the house was meant to hold.

From Architecture to Grievance

By the time the White Castle was complete, the property dispute had begun to crowd out Bernadette’s architectural work. After Nigel Mills-Murray called the police over an earlier confrontation, no charges were filed, but the gate was gone the next day; Bernadette suspected he had taken it and lacked proof. With her Getty job winding down, she quit and poured her energy into the Twenty Mile House. Paul Jellinek later recalled that her conversations increasingly returned to the White Castle’s ugliness and waste, a preoccupation he felt had little to do with architecture. The Oscar-party tow-away belongs to that shift: a precise use of property language and timing, but also a sign of how thoroughly the feud had come to occupy her attention.