Tom Selleck Buys Into Pasadena Tower
Tom Selleck, whose $4.8-million salary makes him television’s best-paid actor--according to a celebrity salary survey released last week--has put some of his earnings into a new office building in Pasadena.
It’s the Pasadena Financial Center at 35 N. Lake Ave., estimated to be worth about $30 million, but Selleck didn’t buy it all himself.
He and several other investors, including actor Richard Pryor, bought a 50% interest, said Don Arnett, who sold the interest with his partner, Tom Hollingsworth. Hollingsworth-Arnett Inc. of Cerritos developed the nine-story, 157,000-square-foot building, designed by Herbert Nadel AIA & Partners with about 10 corner offices on each floor. Arnett and Hollingsworth are remaining as managing general partners of the tower, which was completed last year.
“Our side is simple. It’s just the two of us,” Arnett said. On Selleck’s side, there are a number of investors. Among them: general partners Joel Katz, who is executive in charge of production for the 10-hour NBC miniseries “Peter the Great” (currently in production in the Soviet Union); Zane Lubin (Selleck’s business manager), and PPTY Partners, whose general partner is accountant James R. Parks. Besides Selleck and Pryor, limited partners include manufacturer R. W. Spears, movie producer Thomas Lee Miller, and the CPR Lake Avenue Group.
This isn’t the first time Selleck has invested in commercial real estate--he also owns part of a mall in Escondido. He probably got the idea from his dad, Bob, who is a senior vice president with Coldwell Banker. Incidentally, Coldwell Banker is handling leasing for the Pasadena building, which Arnett estimated is 70% occupied “if all the leases out are signed.”
Lionel Richie bought an office building on Beverly Hills’ most glittering street--Rodeo Drive--last fall, but the news just came to light after the popular singer/songwriter won two Grammys.
Richie was so thrilled when he received one that he said, “Oh, man! I’ve been working on my new home and the room has already been built, so I got plenty of room for this.”
That was a slip, said his agent, “because he is a very, very private person.”
Some famous people are secretive about things that are usually in the public record anyway. It’s so much nicer to get it from the horse’s--er, celebrity’s--mouth.
There are other ways, however, to find out who’s buying and fixing what, and these revealed that Richie not only bought a four-bedroom, 1920-era house about a year ago in Bel-Air and has been remodeling and expanding it, but he also purchased the office building next to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel at 145 S. Rodeo Drive.
When contacted, Jeff Hyland of the Beverly Hills real estate firm of Alvarez, Hyland & Young, conceded that he sold the house to Richie and added, “He and his wife came to look at a house that I had in Beverly Hills, and I told them about another I had in Bel-Air and gave them a brochure on it. The next day, they wanted to see it, and bought it on the spot. Escrow closed in nine days.” The Richies liked the location, which has a sense of privacy with what the broker described as “fabulous grounds.” Hyland wouldn’t divulge the exact price but indicated that it “sold in seven figures.”
Last September, Richie paid $1.4 million for the 3,024-square-foot office building, constructed in 1948. At the time, it was one of the highest amounts paid per square foot for any office building in the Los Angeles area.
It might be awhile, if ever, before the Redlands mansions, mentioned in this column on March 3, are turned into bed-and-breakfast inns.
The city approved an ordinance last week allowing the inns almost everywhere except in residential areas, and that’s where the largest of the mansions--the 21-bedroom, 17-acre Burrage estate--is located.
Maribeth Lotito, who owns the mansion with her husband, Jim, was still reeling from the decision when telephoned last Wednesday. “We and hundreds of other people were shocked,” she said, “since we started this fight two years ago, and it was going along fine until a couple of weeks ago when they threw in this extreme measure.”
Now she’s just waiting to see if the city will approve her application to form a nonprofit organization to restore and maintain the mansion for weddings, tours and fund-raisers.
The Mulholland Drive home of the late film producer Gerard Alcan, who co-produced a movie in 1973 about a conspiracy to kill Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, will be auctioned on Wednesday at 10 a.m.
The three-story, 4,469-square-foot house with four bedrooms and four baths, in addition to maid’s quarters and a sound room, is only about 2 years old, according to Milton Gamson, whose Gamson & Flans firm will conduct the auction at the site at 7566 Mulholland Drive. “I don’t think he (Alcan) ever lived there--just the caretaker,” he said. “It should go in the $500,000s.”
