Star Maps Maven: Her Family Has Tracked Celebrity Homes for 80 Years

Linda Welton remembers the time her mother came home from work and said Marilyn Monroe had bought a map. It was a big day for a woman who’d sold Star Maps on a sidewalk near Sunset Boulevard for decades.

“She said she was wearing white and was very nice,” recalled Welton, the Star Maps heir who now sits in a folding chair across from Michael Jackson’s former Los Angeles home and sells maps like her mother did, showing where the area’s biggest celebrities live.

Welton was on good terms with The Gloved One, who she said signed a map two days before he died. “We would alert [Jackson’s] guards when paparazzi were trying to leap the fence or get on the roof, and we’d tell them to get out of there.”

Dr. Phil once dropped by on a visit to Jackson’s home and joked about not being on the map, while Jay Leno bumped into Welton in Whole Foods and was happy to hear that he is. “The people who are on the map are top notch,” Welton said.

Some celebrities approach her to see if they’re on the map, without realizing that she knows who they are, said her friend Keith Holman, a celebrity designer who worked with Jackson and others. “One of the beauties of Linda is that she remembers the legendary people as well as the new people.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor is an example, as are Diahann Carroll and Buddy Hackett. A 1940s Oscar winner, Celeste Holm, once approached Welton to ask if she could be included, and Welton said “yes.”

Welton’s grandfather, a retired vaudevillian, started the Star Maps business in 1936, well before the Internet and sifting through property records came into vogue. He would send Welton’s mother and her cousin to chat with gardeners and innocently ask who lived in the home — a tradition that continued with Welton.

“My mother sent me to the house of Jack Haley [the Tin Man in ‘The Wizard of Oz’] in my private school uniform,” she recalled. “I knocked on the door and said I’d like Jack Haley’s autograph. He answered the door, and I didn’t know what he looked like, but he said, ‘I’m Jack Haley,’ and that confirmed he lived there.”

It’s not all star sightings and sleuthing, though. Star Maps also means the gritty, flesh-pressing business of selling the glossy, full-color maps that start at $15.

Then there was the lawsuit.

Welton’s mother spent five years fighting a lawsuit that characterized her as a public nuisance. It went all the way to the state supreme court, and in 1978 she won in a verdict that Welton carries with her, just in case.

After all, she doesn’t want a hiccup in her legacy.

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