‘The Boss’ Buys on the Westside
Rock star BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN has paid nearly $14 million for a secluded estate in what is one of the largest private-home transactions ever completed on the Westside.
“The Boss,” who is expecting a baby with his former backup singer Patti Scialfa, closed escrow a few days ago on the property, which a real estate source not involved in the deal described as being “like Montecito but only three minutes to downtown Beverly Hills.”
“So the working-class hero is now living in the Beverly Hills area,” he quipped.
Springsteen’s gated, 4 1/2-acre estate doesn’t have a swimming pool or a tennis court, but it has a number of mature redwood trees and some 200-foot tall eucalyptus trees as well as two houses: a 10,000-square-foot Mediterranean and a 7,500-square-foot English-style house with a two-story living room.
The larger house was built in the ‘20s and has four bedrooms, two maid’s rooms and a chauffeur’s quarters. The smaller house, which also has four bedrooms, was built after the property was subdivided in the ‘70s and was sold first to a Beverly Hills doctor and then to actor ROBERT VAUGHN, sources said.
The parcels were reassembled into one estate by the current seller, an art collector and developer of apartments and shopping centers who is relocating to the East Coast.
Springsteen also owns an estate in New Jersey, which once belonged to the late screen star GLORIA SWANSON, and a small house in the Hollywood Hills. He plans to maintain both of those homes and to do some redecorating at his new residence, although it is in move-in condition, sources said.
None of the realtors who worked on the deal would comment, but they are Don Caverhill and Linda May, who shared the $15.9-million listing, and Joe Coons and Scott Sandler of Prudential/Rodeo Realty, who represented Springsteen. Title is held in the name of a trust.
Rain Pryor, actor/comedian RICHARD PRYOR’S daughter who co-stars in the ABC-TV sitcom “Head of the Class,” is buying her first house in an area known as “Toluca Lake adjacent.”
The 21-year-old actress has been living in an apartment in Studio City.
She expects to close escrow in another week on a two-bedroom home with a large yard, for her Rottweiler, at $385,000 through Betty Griffin in one of Mike Glickman Realty’s Sherman Oaks offices.
Essam Khashoggi, brother of Saudi arms dealer ADNAN KHASHOGGI, has put 178 acres that he owns in Kauai on the market at $11 million.
Essam Khashoggi had planned to build a 20,000-square-foot house in the Kauai valley but apparently changed his mind.
“He just finished building a house about 25,000 square feet on the lake at Tahoe, and he plans to build a house the same size on 30 acres he will still own here at (a development known as) Seacliff Plantation,” said Pat Harrington, who has the $11-million listing at Harrington’s Paradise Properties in Hanalei, Kauai. Essam Khashoggi also has an oceanfront home at Hope Ranch in Santa Barbara County.
“He just thought he had more land (in Kauai) than he needed,” Harrington added.
The 178 acres, which have ocean frontage as well as a stream and waterfalls, will be sold as one parcel or as two sites: one for $600,000, the other for $10.5 million.
Khashoggi bought the 178 acres in 1987, shortly after he sold his 20,000-square-foot Kahala home, on Oahu, for $18 million.
JOHN BADHAM, who directed the action comedy “Bird on a Wire” starring MEL GIBSON and GOLDIE HAWN that is expected to open in May, has purchased a gated farmhouse off Coldwater Canyon for about $2 million.
Badham, who directed “Saturday Night Fever and “War Games,” was represented by Doug Taylor of Prudential California Realty, Beverly Hills, and Rebecca Riskin of Pitts & Bachmann Realty, Montecito.
Dr. Joel Weisman, chairman of the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR)--which gained prominence in 1988 when ELIZABETH TAYLOR was national chairwoman, is building two oceanfront homes at Hollywood Beach in the Channel Islands marina area of Oxnard.
Weisman, a physician and researcher, is founding director of the AIDS unit at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital besides heading AmFAR, one of the largest private organizations in the country funding AIDS research projects.
One of the houses that Weisman is building is for his use on weekends away from his main residence in the Beverly Hills Post Office area. The other house is on the market with Hadley Hendrick at Ennis & Ennis Realtors at Hollywood Beach. Each of the homes under construction is valued at $1.5 million.
Hollywood entrepreneur A. JERROLD (JERRY) PERENCHIO, who co-produced “Driving Miss Daisy” with Lili and Richard Zanuck, is rehabbing his Bel-Air home, next to former President Reagan’s, at an estimated cost of more than $9 million.
Perenchio’s home, known for years as the Kirkeby Estate, was used regularly at the opening of the 1960s CBS sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
He bought the residence for $13.6 million in 1986, and later bought three adjacent properties for a total of slightly more than $9 million, making his 11.5-acre estate the largest in Bel-Air, real estate sources said. Perenchio also owns several homes at Malibu Colony.
At least 26 building permits have been issued for Perenchio’s Bel-Air property since 1988, including half a dozen so far this year, and passers-by remarked last week on the enormity of the work going on there, though it is obscured by a large, greenish, translucent sheet of plastic.
Building permits don’t indicate that Perenchio plans to add much square footage to his Bel-Air mansion, but they show planned interior modifications to the 10-bedroom, two-bath house, including a remodeled kitchen, and the demolition of several free-standing structures--among them a garage, tennis court and guard station.
Perenchio already has razed at least one of the adjacent houses he purchased, and is living in a neighboring one designed by Wallace Neff, sources said.
Permits also indicate that he plans to build a guard house, pool, pool house, tennis court, electrical vault, mechanical room and an underground motor court with a wine cellar with gardens on top.
