Robert Culp Spies a New Area to Live
ROBERT CULP, who is working on a pilot for his own show on CBS and with Bill Cosby on a TV movie re-creating their co-starring roles in the 1960s “I Spy” series, has put his home of 14 years on the market.
“He and his wife, Candace, are selling because their daughter goes to (elementary) school farther west and they wanted to shorten the commute time for taking her there in the mornings,” said a spokeswoman for Fred Sands Realtors.
Carolyn Carradine has the $2,495,000 listing in the firm’s Beverly Hills office.
The house is in the Beverly Hills Post Office area in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. It was built in 1926 for British actor REGINALD DENNY, who starred in many film comedies. Later, it was a residence for British romantic actor RONALD COLMAN.
The 4,000-square-foot, Spanish-style home has a secret room designed for use during Prohibition, a spiral staircase, projection room, sun deck and pond stocked with koi.
It also has a studio/workshop where Culp probably practiced his lines for last year’s NBC-TV movie “The Highjacking of the Achille Lauro.”
Director ROUBEN MAMOULIAN, whose last film was the 1957 musical “Silk Stockings” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, died two years ago, but his Beverly Hills home has just been sold for $5 million in an unusual deal involving a life estate.
Life estates are commonly used to give a deceased parent’s offspring a stake in the family residence while allowing the surviving parent, or spouse, to continue living on the property for the rest of his or her life, according to title company and legal sources.
The life estate in the Mamoulian case only allows his octogenarian widow, Azadia, to live in the 36-year-old, 5,000-square-foot house for four more years. Then new owners, identified in public documents as Peter and Stephanie Chung, take possession of the property.
The sale was precipitated by a two-year court battle following the director’s death. Legal proceedings were complicated because his widow wasn’t mentioned in his will or on the deed, real estate sources said. The director bought the 1.6-acre site when he was a bachelor, though he and Azadia were married when the house was built in 1953.
“This life estate works out for everyone,” said Tom Gilleran of Gilleran, Griffin Realtors, who had the $5.5-million listing. “The new owners want to build but not for a couple of years at the earliest; I’d say the property is worth $1 million more than they paid for it, because of the life estate, and Mrs. Mamoulian can continue to live on the property.”
After four years, she would be required to move but would share in proceeds from the sale with a cousin discovered during the court proceedings, said Gary More, who represented the buyers with Patti Siegel, both of Rodeo Realty.
The Mamoulians had no children, but the widow had--at one count--52 cats.
Though the Super Bowl is scheduled today, former offensive lineman BOB KUECHENBERG, who played in the 1972 game in which his Miami Dolphins trounced the Washington Redskins 17-0, is focusing on other games: one is buying houses to fix up and sell.
Kuechenberg, nominated this year for the Football Hall of Fame, played in five Super Bowls, but he and his wife, Marilyn, also bought and sold 20 homes in 13 years.
Now they’ve listed the second house they’ve owned in California--a 6,500-square-foot, Country English-style home in a gated Encino community--at $2,395,000, with Joe Babajian and Judy Cycon at Fred Sands Estates. “This was the first new house we ever lived in, but it was unfinished, so we did the landscaping and interior work,” he explained.
They bought the home 15 to 18 months ago. When they sell it, they may head back to Florida, where their art dealership and corporate travel businesses are headquartered.
SHARON WYATT, who portrays Tiffany Hill on ABC-TV’s “General Hospital” and hosts the TV magazine show “America’s Hit List,” due to start production in April, has purchased a ranch-style house in Calabasas, which makes the Tennessee-born actress feel right at home.
“It’s like Tennessee, because the air is clean, you can see the stars at night, it’s quiet and there’s lots of land,” she said. Her new residence has front, back and side yards big enough for her three dogs. “And I drive by a golf course and through the mountains everyday . . . yet, it was the least expensive house in the area’s most expensive neighborhood.”
She paid $600,000 for the 6-year-old, nearly 3,000-square-foot house, but there have been some sales nearby for as much as $3 million, she said.
Actress MICHELE SCARABELLI is settling into the North Hollywood home she bought, she says, so she could own a dog.
The Spanish/Mediterranean-style house, built in 1930 but restored by a contractor who sold it to Scarabelli for about $500,000, has two fireplaces, beam ceilings, hardwood floors, a courtyard and a large back yard.
Almost as soon as she moved there, the actress acquired a dog that is part Lhasa apso. Scarabelli stars on Fox-TV’s weekly series “Alien Nation” and as the pregnant alien mother of two “will eject her pod in the Feb. 12 episode,” her publicist said.
