Smaller Home Is No. 1 Pryor-ity
RICHARD PRYOR--who is developing ideas for his film company, Indigo Productions, and planning to get back into recording stand-up comedy--has sold his Bel-Air home for $3.5 million, sources say.
The 51-year-old comedian, who was reported to have multiple sclerosis in a 1986 diagnosis and underwent quadruple-bypass surgery last June, is “doing well, thinking positive and looking forward to doing some recording,” his agent said last week.
Actor Eddie Murphy orchestrated the TV Special “A Party for Richard Pryor” on CBS in December to pay tribute to Pryor for inspiring a generation of comics.
Pryor has appeared in more than 40 films including “Harlem Nights,” “The Toy,” “Brewster’s Millions,” “Lady Sings the Blues,” for which he earned an Oscar nomination, and “Silver Streak,” the first of several movies in which Pryor co-starred with Gene Wilder.
Pryor also co-wrote and appeared in “Blazing Saddles” in 1974 and directed, co-wrote and starred in the 1986 film “Jo Jo Dancer.” The autobiographical movie depicted a 1980 fire in which Pryor suffered third-degree burns over 50% of his body after freebasing cocaine.
He bought his Bel-Air home in the late 1980s for about $3.25 million. He listed it several months ago at $4.25 million.
Built in 1985, it is a two-story, Santa Fe contemporary with a five-bedroom main house and one-bedroom guest house, all in 7,600 square feet on 1.75 acres behind gates. The home also has gardens and a swimming pool.
“It is a very large home, and he wanted something smaller,” a real estate source said.
Pryor has been married and divorced seven times and has seven children.
The Malibu home of jazz genius MILES DAVIS, who died last September, has been put on the market at $2.65 million, with an adjacent vacant lot priced at $695,000.
The late trumpeter had owned the five-bedroom, four-bath contemporary since November, 1985.
The house, which is about 5,000 square feet, was built in 1983 and is on a bluff with a couple of dozen stairs down to the beach, a favorite surfing area known as County Line. The vacant lot includes plans, drawn by architect John Lautner, for a lagoon pool.
“Miles loved his West Coast beach home,” said Bob Rubenstein of Malibu Realty, who has the listing and represented both parties when Davis bought it. Davis also had a home in New York.
“His Malibu home is where he was able to relax and unwind from the road, and it is where he would go to paint. He really enjoyed doing that,” Rubenstein said. “Miles also dug driving his Ferraris up Pacific Coast Highway to his home.”
VILLA LAURISTON--a Portola Valley home with 20 rooms, 10 baths and 10 fireplaces in 13,000 square feet--has come on the market at one of the highest prices being asked for a private home in Northern California: $15 million.
Named for a Scottish castle, the home, on about 20 acres surrounded by 1,000 acres of open space, was built in the 1920s by patent medicine tycoon Herbert Edward Law, who rebuilt the Fairmont Hotel after buying it 12 days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
John Francis Neyland, personal attorney and confidant of newspaper czar William Randolph Hearst, bought the home in 1937 and lived there until the 1950s. Later owners included a Japanese industrialist and a former mayor of Manila.
Current owners are David and Nancy Beare, who bought and restored the home 11 years ago.
Barbara Tyler of Grubb & Ellis, Menlo Park, shares the listing with Scott Dancer in the firm’s Woodside office.
JOHN GETZ, who stars in A. R. Gurney’s “The Old Boy” at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, and his wife, writer Grace McKeaney, have purchased a home in the Gillette Regent Square neighborhood of Santa Monica.
Getz, who will play a long-suffering husband in the upcoming ABC movie “Overruled,” portrayed an obnoxious corporate lawyer boyfriend in the movie “Curly Sue” and a jealous suitor in the films “The Fly” and “The Fly II.”
McKeaney, who is working on a sitcom pilot for Fox Television and completed a screenplay for 20th Century Fox, wrote the play “How It Hangs,” which made its West Coast premiere at the Figtree Theatre in 1988, and the one-hour work “Chicks,” performed at the Groundlings in 1989.
The couple bought a home with a four-bedroom main house and a two-bedroom guest house for about $800,000.
Chrys Stamatis of Douglas Properties, Brentwood, represented the couple, and Charles Pence, Lorraine Silver and John Hathorn, all of the Douglas office on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, had the listing.
