Ed McMahon Buys Selznick Mansion
Johnny Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon and McMahon’s wife, Victoria, have bought the old David O. Selznick estate in Beverly Hills.
That, according to Joyce Flaherty of Schreiber Realty, who represented the McMahons in the purchase. Paris Moskopoulos of Paris Realty was listing broker.
Selznick, who died in 1965, lived there, Flaherty said, with his wife, Irene, during filming of “Gone With the Wind,” which he produced in 1939. (News clips show the couple as being married in 1930, separated in 1945, and divorced in 1948.)
The stately Georgian colonial was built in 1934. Flaherty described it as “a home for decades of European royalty and Hollywood elite.”
Sammy Davis Jr. once lived there, but more recently, real estate tycoon David Murdock owned it before selling the house about four years ago to Ted Field, an heir of Chicago department-store magnate Marshall Field. Field never lived in the 10,000-square-foot mansion, Flaherty said, because he got a divorce shortly after the purchase and has since remarried and bought another house.
The McMahons were attracted to the estate because “they love historical things,” Flaherty explained, “and they just became parents of a beautiful baby girl, so they needed a family home.” Their former home was large enough--almost 6,000 square feet--but the McMahons built it “as a wood-and-glass hideaway, more for a couple, when they didn’t consider having children,” she said.
They’ve listed that house with Schreiber Realty for $1,775,000.
Most people know it as the Max Factor Building, but last Thursday, the 12-story Hollywood landmark was rededicated as the KB Hollywood Center with KB Management, which built the structure at 6922 Hollywood Blvd. across the street from Mann’s Chinese Theater, assuming full ownership.
For many of its 19 years, the building had the famous cosmetics firm as a partner as well as a tenant and name on its exterior. Now Hollywood movie producer Chuck Fries’ Fries Entertainment, which will be the new anchor tenant, will have its name on the outside of the building, along with KB Hollywood Center.
Fries, who has produced more than 80 movies for TV (including such socially relevant films as “The Burning Bed,” starring Farrah Fawcett as a battered wife, and an upcoming one on homeless-rights activist Mitch Snyder, starring Martin Sheen and airing on CBS on May 19), plans to move from his offices on the Sunset Strip at the end of the month.
Not only that, but Fries plans to move his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame so that it can be closer to his new offices. To celebrate that move, he plans a fireworks display from the top of the building on June 3! Well, Fries’ move is good news for Hollywood, after all, which is experiencing a comeback with the help of the Screen Actors Guild’s impending relocation there, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s restoration and other projects.
Max Factor’s offices were moved last year to the East Coast by its new owner, International Playtex Inc., but Max Factor left its mark on more than a few movie stars. The Max Factor Museum, which will have been open two years in July at 1666 N. Highland Ave. just south of Hollywood Boulevard, displays 75 years of Max Factor makeup history, including a 50-year-old parchment scroll bearing the names of famous Max Factor users, wigs Max Factor made for a movie in 1914, and makeup rooms that date from the 1930s and have just been restored.
The building itself is a marvel, an old warehouse that Factor bought in 1928 and had architect Charles Lee redesign in 1935 in Art-Deco style. The museum is “the best buy in town,” its director, Bob Salvatore, says. It’s free! And it even has free parking. Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Monday-Saturday.
Fibber McGee and Molly lived on Wistful Vista, but the actors who played those famous radio personalities of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s--Jim and Marian Jordan--owned part of some ranch property that has just come on the market.
One of the property’s current owners is also a personality: Jerry Buss, owner of the L. A. Lakers, Kings and the Forum. Buss is a principal in the Santa Monica real estate firm of Mariani-Buss, which actually owns the site, in the Sierra Mountains about 50 miles northeast of Bakersfield. (Frank Mariani is the other principal.)
The site has been used by Mariani-Buss as a corporate retreat since it was acquired in 1979 from Jack Kent Cooke, who also sold the Lakers then to Buss. The property consists of 12,475 acres and includes not one ranch but three!
The ranches have mountains, valleys, streams and lakes as well as a swimming pool, spa, lighted tennis courts and several buildings. Among them: ranch-type structures (a couple of barns, a bunkhouse, workshop and tack room) and several dwellings (a 3,200-square-foot ranch house, two 1,700-square-foot guest houses and two 1,000-square-foot cottages.) One little house still has the name “Fibber McGee” inscribed in the fireplace.
Barbara Ross at Jerry Berns & Associates in Sherman Oaks has the listing. The price: $6,103,000, a lot less than the $11.5 million Buss is asking for Pickfair, the landmark Beverly Hills home he bought 5 1/2 years ago from the estate of actress Mary Pickford, who died in May, 1979. Last week, Margie Oswald of Merrill Lynch-Rodeo Realty in Beverly Hills, which has the Pickfair listing, said, “It is a big price, so it will take a special buyer, but Pickfair is mystical and magical to people.” Since she got the listing in February, she added, “we’ve had a lot of curiosity seekers.”
Buss is selling Pickfair because it is too large for his current needs, he said. Mariani-Buss is selling the ranch property because “the firm is busy with other developments: shopping centers and apartment complexes,” Stephanie Bertholdo, marketing director for Jerry Berns & Associates, explained.
Pickfair, if you didn’t know already, was the 1920 honeymoon home of Pickford and actor Douglas Fairbanks, and the estate’s name was a combination of the couple’s names, an idea that prompted California artist David Ligare to joke: “Shouldn’t it now be called Bussfair?”
