Sinatras List Area Home
Frank Sinatra and his wife, Barbara, are selling their Beverly Hills-area home to live full time in their Rancho Mirage abode.
Is Old Blue Eyes retiring? “Oh, no, no, no,” Sinatra’s publicist Susan Reynolds of Solters, Roskin, Friedman emphasized. “He just enjoys his home in the desert. He’s had it there for many years.”
His city home is on a mountaintop just outside of Beverly Hills. “It has a great view, and it’s super private,” Mike Silverman, whose Beverly Hills firm has the listing, said.
Ed Kelly, who is handling the sale, said Sinatra built the home about 30 years ago on an acre behind electric gates at the end of a long, private driveway.
The main house has two bedrooms and teak floors. There is also a guest apartment with a bedroom and living room or two bedrooms. The grounds have a swimming pool, a room with a sauna and two projection machines, which will remain with the house, a three-car garage and parking for 20 other autos.
“The home has been beautifully kept. He’s so crazy about cleanliness--everything has to be spick-and-span,” Kelly, who has known Sinatra for many years, said. (Kelly was formerly in the music business and was once singer Peggy Lee’s manager.) Asking price: $3 million.
Best-selling novelist Harold Robbins (“The Carpetbaggers,” “The Betsy”) has sold his eight-acre estate in what is called the “Beverly Hills post-office” area to movie producer Dino De Laurentiis (“The Bounty”). A little history: De Laurentiis sold that fabulous Beverly Hills home known as the Knoll a few years ago to singer Kenny Rogers, who then sold it to Denver oilman Marvin Davis.
The producer’s new home, which is on a private knoll with a long driveway, was built for the famous author about five years ago, said Asher Dann, whose Beverly Hills real estate firm represented Robbins. The house is a copy of a chateau in France--which is where Robbins may soon be. “He’s temporarily living in Palm Springs, where he went to write before going to Europe,” Dann said.
Joan Collins’ publicist Jeffrey Lane is getting settled in his new home, the former Anne Baxter house.
“I bought it directly from her estate,” he said. “I was a close family friend. The house never went on the market.” The famous actress and, most recently, star of the weekly TV show “Hotel,” died in New York last Dec. 12.
“I was in the house about three years ago at a party and loved it,” Lane reminisced, “but who would have guessed that I’d wind up owning it? It was fate, I guess.”
The two-bedroom, two-bath house in Beverly Hills has what he describes as “a real English garden with loads of flowers,” which suits Lane just fine, because he’s from Great Britain.
Baxter had her main homes in Connecticut and New York but used the Beverly Hills residence when filming in Hollywood.
Collins ordered a major renovation of the “Dynasty”-size, Beverly Hills mansion she purchased in May and for the moment, she and her husband, Peter Holm, are still living in the nearby house where they were married last November.
“She’s hoping to move into her new home by Christmas,” publicist Lane said of the 12,000-square-foot mansion, which was built in the early ‘60s by the late British actor Laurence Harvey.
In the meantime, the “Dynasty” TV-show star’s other, smaller (5,000-square-foot) house is still for sale at about $1 million through Stephen Shapiro of Stan Herman Associates in Beverly Hills.
