Merv Griffin Buys Hollywood Corner

Talk-show host Merv Griffin’s multimillion-dollar conglomerate, responsible for 16 hours of original television programming a week, has purchased a major corner in Hollywood.

It’s not at that most famous intersection--Hollywood and Vine--but it’s not far from it. Merv Griffin Enterprises bought the new shopping and food mart on the northwest corner of Sunset and Vine, where Wallichs Music City was for 37 years. Griffin already owned the adjacent property, where the “Merv Griffin Show” and other Merv Griffin Enterprises productions (“Wheel of Fortune,” “Jeopardy,” “Dance Fever” and “Headline Chasers”) are taped. So now the conglomerate owns the entire four-acre city block.

Why? Griffin isn’t planning to build a studio on the site. “It enters into an expansion of our company,” Murray Schwartz, president and chief executive officer of Griffin Enterprises, said. (Griffin is chairman.) “We’re also working on a deal in principal with a 300-room hotel on Cannery Row in Monterey.” The hotel opened Wednesday. “And we’re looking at other real estate in Palm Beach. I think we’re getting interested in hotels and resorts.”

Interest in Hollywood was a natural for his company, and he’s bullish that Hollywood’s seedy neighborhoods will be redeveloped. What he paid developer Larry Worchell for the shopping center is a sign that things are looking up in Hollywood. “We paid $10.5 million, and we bought our piece (next to it) seven years ago for $1 million.”

Sunset Towers, that wonderful Art-Deco building that became the Sunset Strip’s worst eyesore, closed escrow last week and will soon be restored to its former glory.

That’s the word from Michael Klemens, a vice president of the Abacus Group, which acquired title in 1982 as successful bidder at a foreclosure sale, and Klemens, an Art-Deco aficionado, couldn’t be happier. St. James’s Clubs International, headed by millionaire English yachtsman Peter de Savary, bought the building, designed in 1930 by Leland Bryant, at 8358 Sunset Blvd., and plans to reopen it in early 1987 as its third location. The club--which counts Sir John Mills, Dudley Moore, Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Liza Minnelli and Christopher Plummer among its 5,000 members--opened in London five years ago and is just about to mark its first anniversary in Antigua in the West Indies.

Anthony Walters, who represents the club in Los Angeles, confirmed the Sunset Towers sale but declined to give the selling price. However, he added, “We’re going to spend $25 million to restore the building as a significant landmark in Art-Deco style, and we will operate it as a St. James Club, providing--among other things--some 81 rooms, a restaurant, bar, private dining rooms, a swimming pool, library and other facilities.” The club is private but open to “all people, all creeds, all races and all activities,” as he put it, but the cost to join and monthly dues are “undetermined at the moment.”

Mustering finances to return the 13-story, partially demolished, vacant and deteriorating apartment building to the grandeur that attracted Hollywood legends John Wayne, Errol Flynn and Howard Hughes as tenants years ago will be some undertaking. That might explain why de Savary, who recently purchased one of England’s most extraordinary homes both historically and architecturally, has now decided to sell it through Knight Frank & Rutley in London, an affiliate of Douglas Elliman Knight Frank in New York.

The home, known as Littlecote, contains one of England’s best preserved Roman villas and a manor house that is an outstanding example of Tudor architecture. The home, about an hour’s drive from downtown London, is 7 million (about $10 million) with contents (the largest single group of Cromwellian armour and a fine collection of paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries) or 3 million (about $4.3 million) for the property alone.

De Savary also recently joined forces with The Who’s Pete Townshend to form a British charity to fight drug abuse. De Savary personally contributed 25,000 ($3.6 million) to that cause.

Huge houses--more than 5,000 square feet--aren’t so rare in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, but in Orange? They’re much more noticeable.

Such is the case with the home that Paul and Diane Williamson built for themselves in Orange, which has been described as an archetypical suburban, Southern California neighborhood.

Based on a design by Robert Spannagel, the home was going to be 8,000 square feet, but by the time the Williamsons were done with it, it was more than 9,000 feet and had six fireplaces, several bedroom suites, numerous wet bars, a billiard room, disco, swimming pool, spa, sauna, glassed-in gazebo, hand-painted bath tiles and gold-plated fixtures.

About 3,000 people will see this on Friday when the house is opened as a benefit for the Littlest Angels Guild of Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

Why build such a mansion in Orange? Paul lived in its general vicinity all his life. He was born there. So were two of his three children.

His father was in construction and built 400-square-foot plans in Santa Ana. As owner of Williamson Enterprises, Paul is also involved in real estate as a general building contractor, real estate broker and owner of a company that operates one of the largest open-storage yards for recreational vehicles in Orange County.

The Williamsons’ house is the largest in their neighborhood (which is a new one called Hillcrest in Nohl Ranch), but this may not be true for long. Another is being built nearby that is about 7,000 square feet in size, and half a dozen more are being built in the 4,000- to 5,000-square-foot range.