United Artists Buys Beverly Hills Site
United Artists has purchased the northeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills, and although there has been talk that the firm will build a three-story world headquarters there, company spokesman Phil Cuppett said, “We have been contemplating designs, but we have no firm plans at this time.”
The theatrical, TV and film production company reportedly paid $8.6 million for the property, which once housed a Ralph’s supermarket and was recently proposed as a hotel site until an overlay zone, allowing new hotels in the area, was voted down in a drive led by hotelier Hernando Courtright.
A question is: Since Courtright died Feb. 24, will the city’s attitude toward new hotels change? The elegant Four Seasons Hotel that was planned across the street from Courtright’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel (and down the street, to the west, from the United Artists property) is now being built in the city of Los Angeles as a result of the election, but on the Beverly Hills border, at Doheny Drive and Burton Way. So Beverly Hills will get some of the traffic that opponents of the overlay zone warned against, but it will get none of the revenues.
Real estate deals can turn into nightmares, but few become “haunted houses” that benefit the homeowners.
Such was the case with the house in “House,” the horror movie now making the neighborhood-theater rounds.
It started about eight years ago when Arcadia firemen John Wade, Bruce Marshall and Greg Laurent bought the classic Victorian, built in 1887 by real estate developer William N. Monroe, the first settler in the area (later named for him), for his son’s wedding present. It was one of the top houses in Monrovia when it was built at a cost of $10,000, Marshall said, but it had deteriorated.
Then film producer Sean Cunningham (“Friday the 13th”) and his staff spied the place as a location for “House.” A deal was struck for the film makers to return the house to its former glory, the movie was released nationally by New World Pictures in late February, and the firemen wound up with a spruced-up Victorian that they may soon put on the market “in the neighborhood of $525,000.”
While they’re thinking about selling it, the firemen are also cashing in on another location deal: Their house is being featured, on a weekly basis, in Lorimar Telepictures’ “Morningstar/Eveningstar,” which was created by Earl Hamner (who also created “The Waltons.”) The CBS series debuts Tuesday at 8 p.m.
Actor Robert Loggia, nominated for his first time for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Columbia Pictures’ “The Jagged Edge” (Don’t forget: The Awards ceremony is this Monday night), has purchased a home with his wife, Audrey, in the Windsor Square section of L. A.’s Hancock Park.
Audrey grew up in Hancock Park and is glad to be back in the middle of city life, she says, after she and her husband lived in a gated community on the Westside for a few years.
With all of the filming that goes on in the Hancock Park area, they’ve already had many friends drop by who are filming there on location.
Alice Buckley of Coldwell Banker represented the Loggias in the sale of the red-brick house, which was listed with Lucy McBain, also of Coldwell Banker, at $525,000.
“It’s a new house for our area,” Buckley, who is a neighbor, said with a chuckle. The house is 21 years old.
Actor Dean Martin slept here: It was his long-time residence a few years ago--a 10,000-square-foot mansion on Mountain Drive in Beverly Hills, now on the market for $6.9 million.
The English country-style, gated house, on 1.69 acres, has gardens (What respectable English-style house doesn’t have gardens?), a sunken tennis court, swimming pool, spa, cabanas, library and--oh, yes--a step-down bar (probably a “must” in a Dean Martin home) in the middle of the family room that doubles as a kitchen. Jeff Hyland of Alvarez, Hyland & Young shares the listing with Ron Desalvo of Merrill Lynch Realty.
Remember the item in this column last week about actor Marlon Brando buying a house off Laurel Canyon that was the site of a bunker during World War II?
That item prompted Richard Somers to telephone about his house, which is in the same area and was also used by the U. S. military. He described it as “an early-warning radar station built at the end of the war, which the government also used as a film vault, with its 13-inch thick walls, storing movies made of atomic-bomb testing.”
Somers found the structure, which was painted to look like a house with fake windows and doors, in 1955 when he was a radio ham in high school. By then, the military had abandoned the hilltop site, he said, and he vowed that someday he would turn it into a real home and live there. The son of the original landowner beat him to it, but Somers finally bought the 4,000-square-foot building in 1967, and started his Autotell Communications Network, now a nationwide radio-communications relay business, there.
He also added a swimming pool. “It was my bachelor pad for 15 years,” he said, “but now I’m a married man with a family, and we need to move to the flats so the kids can ride their bikes to school.” The home, complete with the government’s mustard-gas filtration system, is listed at $1.1 million with Nancy Stern of Schreiber Realty in Beverly Hills.
