Marvin Davis Expected to Buy the Beverly Hills Hotel

Marvin Davis, the Denver oilman and former chairman of 20th Century Fox, will be the next owner of the Beverly Hills Hotel, informed sources said Saturday.

The deal for the landmark hotel, expected to be announced this week, is in the $130-million to $140-million range, the sources said.

Davis’ public relations spokesmen, Lee Solters and James Fingeroth, reached separately in Los Angeles and New York, said Davis told them Saturday that he had “no comment” on the reported sale.

Current owners of the Beverly Hills Hotel are Seema Boesky of New York, the wife of Ivan F. Boesky, the wealthy Wall Street stock speculator who is at the center of a burgeoning insider trading scandal, and her sister’s family, who reside in Beverly Hills.

Seema Boesky owns 52% of the Beverly Hills Corp.; her sister, Muriel Slatkin, her estranged husband, Burton, and their two sons own the other 48%.

Among the potential buyers who had been competing most keenly with Davis for the hotel, which will be 75 years old next year, was New York real estate developer Donald Trump, sources said.

Davis, 61, a multimillionaire who has residences in Los Angeles and Denver, lived in the resort-like hotel’s bungalow No. 1 in the early 1980s before buying singer Kenny Rogers’ Beverly Hills home in 1984 for $22.5 million.

At the time, the sale to Davis of Rogers’ house, called “The Knoll,” was believed to be the highest price ever paid for a piece of U.S. residential real estate.

Opening of bids for the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard took place on Nov. 25 and 26 behind closed doors in New York. The bidding was conducted by a real estate subsidiary of Morgan Stanley & Co., the investment banking firm.

But no announcement was forthcoming.

It was understood that Seema Boesky was apprehensive that cash from the sale could become entangled in litigation generated by the government’s investigation of her husband’s insider trading activities.

The Beverly Hills Hotel Corp. owns a majority stock interest in San Diego-based Northview Corp., which runs the Vagabond Hotel chain. The sale does not include Northview’s properties, sources said.

It is believed that Davis executed his high bid through Miller-Klutznick-Davis-Gray Co., a real estate partnership in which Davis has the majority interest and which has developed a number of hotel properties throughout the country.

Davis, born in Newark, N.J., and raised in Manhattan, sold off in April, 1985, what was believed to be nearly all of his producing oil and gas wells and his most promising oil land for $180 million. He then dramatically cut back the Denver headquarters operations of Davis Oil.

Then, in September, 1985, he received $325 million in cash from newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch for Davis’ 50% stake in 20th Century Fox.

Since then, said a source close to the hotel deal, the financier has been waiting for a deal such as the Beverly Hills Hotel to come along.