Burl Ives Tunes Out California
Ballad singer BURL IVES and his wife, Dorothy, have sold their Montecito home and moved to Washington state.
They had owned the 50-year-old, Mediterranean-style villa since 1974, when they bought it for $290,000. They sold it to a foreign buyer for $3.9 million.
Ives, who is 80, has said that he wanted to move out of state to get away from the crowds and the climate, which is too dry for him. He also told a real estate source that he could get more for his money in Washington, where he paid a little more than $2 million for a shorefront residence in Anacortes on Puget Sound.
The Montecito property is inland but has 4.42 acres, including a 100-foot-long reflecting pond with a gazebo and a park with benches, encircled by pine trees. The 7,530-square-foot main house, described as “warm and charming,” has beamed ceilings.
The property also has a greenhouse and a 2,010-square-foot guest house, according to Readysystems Research Group in Burbank.
Actor MILTON BERLE, 81, has put the Beverly Hills house he has owned for nearly 20 years on the market at $4.39 million. Berle’s wife, Ruth, died last April.
The 60-year-old home is on a large lot in the flats, with a back yard, a swimming pool and a cabana. The Spanish-style house has 5,198 square feet under roof, with a 60-foot-long living room, a library with a fireplace, an enclosed patio/office, breakfast and dining rooms, four bedrooms, maids’ quarters and a grand foyer with hand-painted wood ceilings.
It’s listed with Yaffa and Michael Lerner at Asher Dann & Associates.
Hockey center BERNIE NICHOLLS of the L.A. Kings and his wife, Heather, have purchased a new home in Whittier at $1,015,000.
The house, in a gate-guarded community known as Friendly Hills Estates, is a three-story, Cape Cod-style place with four bedrooms, five baths, a wine cellar and a 30-foot-high ceiling.
The couple moved from Hacienda Heights, said John White of Friendly Hills Realty, who handled the sale.
A party Tuesday at the landmark Algonquin Hotel in mid-town Manhattan will mark completion of part of a $20-million-plus renovation of the hotel that is being directed by a subsidiary of Tishman Construction, which is building the $108-million Ronald Reagan Office Building in downtown Los Angeles.
The party will celebrate restoration of the lobby and first two levels of the 87-year-old, 13-story hotel, including the Oak Room, where the legendary Round Table luncheons were held in the ‘20s by such well-known humorists and critics as writer Dorothy Parker, New Yorker founder Harold Ross and playwright/producer/director George S. Kaufman.
Joan Rivers, Norman Mailer, Van Johnson, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Leslie Uggams, Claire Trevor and Shelley Winters are some of the celebs who have confirmed that they will be at the party.
Actors DUDLEY MOORE and TONY BILL are a couple of the 72 Market St. celeb owners who last week opened Maple Drive, a Beverly Hills seafood restaurant, at a party that also celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Real Estate Industry Division, which benefits Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Endowment Fund.
With the dinner at $125 a head, the division, composed of leaders in the Los Angeles real estate community, expected to attain its goal of raising $1 million its first year.
JOHN KAY, lead singer with the rock group Steppenwolf, and his wife, Jutta, have sold their Hollywood Hills residence and purchased an 86-acre estate with a private lake and a custom-built home just outside Nashville.
They sold their home, in Nichols Canyon, for $6.25 million and paid a little less for their Tennessee spread.
The Kays had lived in the Nichols Canyon house since 1969, when they bought it with royalties from Steppenwolf’s hit record “Born to Be Wild,” said Joseph Miller at Elite Properties, which handled the Hollywood Hills sale. Kay still tours with Steppenwolf 25 weeks a year, said Miller, but the couple has many friends, including Willie Nelson, in Tennessee.
Singer FRANK SINATRA’S former bachelor pad in the Beverly Hills Post Office Area is for sale again, along with his piano and a few of his other furnishings.
Old Blue Eyes sold the mountaintop refuge, which he built a bit more than 30 years ago, in February, 1987, for about $1 million. The buyer sold it again seven months later to its present owner, developer Sheldon Slaten, who bought it strictly to refurbish and sell.
Slaten is asking $3,495,950 through Darin Lawrence at Mike Glickman’s Woodland Hills office. The furnishings are priced separately.
The house is on about an acre and has a city view, three bedrooms, a den, a wet bar and a guest house that was Sinatra’s screening room.
Music countdown king CASEY KASEM and his wife, actress Jean Kasem, will host their Lawn Circus Festival today, by invitation only, from noon to 4 p.m. to support “The Housing Now! March on Washington” on Saturday. The Kasems are holding the fund-raiser in the Holmby Hills home they purchased in July for $6.8 million.
