Vamp Buying Gangster’s Pad
MADONNA, pop music’s wealthiest material girl with estimated 1991 earnings of $48 million, has purchased a $5-million mansion in the Hollywood Hills.
The singer/actress co-stars in the upcoming MGM movie “Body of Evidence” as a woman on trial for the murder of her lover, an elderly man who dies while the two are having sex.
Since April, when she signed a multimedia pact with Time Warner worth about $60 million, the 34-year-old pop siren has been testing the limits of overexposure in a series of music, book and film projects that has included her “Sex” book and “Erotica” album and video.
Among her earlier film projects was a co-starring role in “A League of Their Own,” released last summer; her concert documentary “Truth or Dare” (1991), and a key supporting part in “Dick Tracy” (1990).
Her new home, a nine-story mansion built in the 1920s overlooking Hollywood, was used by a well-known gangster as a gambling den during the 1930s. It has nine bedrooms and six baths in nearly 8,000 square feet.
Madonna also owns another Hollywood Hills home that has two bedrooms in about 4,500 square feet, and a 1920s-era, six-bedroom home in Miami, which she purchased in June for about $4 million.
She nearly bought a Bel-Air house about a year ago for $8 million but changed her mind, and the house was sold to an international financier.
Madonna had been house hunting in Hollywood, mostly with Jeff Kohl of Fred Sands’ Hollywood Hills office, who represented her in the sale with Madison Offenhauser of Sands’ Estates office, other sources said.
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Actress BRITT EKLAND and her musician husband, JAMES McDONNELL, (also known as Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats) have sold their 5-bedroom, Doheny Estates home for $650,000, sources say.
The couple has separated, and the actress now lives in her native Sweden, where she hosts a TV talk show dealing with women’s issues.
McDonnell recently completed a world tour with the Stray Cats and has moved into a West Hollywood condo. Steven Kay of Fred Sands’ Hollywood Hills office represented the musician in the condo lease/option and had the listing on the Hollywood Hills home.
“I also sold them the house about eight years ago,” he said. The house was originally listed a couple of years ago at about $1 million.
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Grayhall, a Beverly Hills mansion built in 1909, has been sold in a trade valued at $20-million-plus to MARK HUGHES, founder and president of Herbalife International, and his wife, actress SUZAN HUGHES.
The 22,000-square-foot home, known in its early days as the Spaulding House (for its owner, sporting goods magnate/Beverly Hills Mayor Silsby Spaulding), was also a former home of Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and George Hamilton.
Fairbanks rented the house while he had architect Wallace Neff turn a nearby hunting lodge, which the actor had purchased in 1919, into a residence, later called “Pickfair.” Hamilton owned Grayhall in more recent years.
The seller spearheaded a $10-million renovation of the home, designed in the style of an English country manor, over the past three years.
“They kept a lot of the Old World charm, with its original, magnificently carved ceilings and carved stone fireplaces,” said Jerry Jolton of Rodeo Realty, who represented the buyers. Steve Lewis and Valerie Fitzgerald of Prudential Rodeo represented the seller.
Herbalife, founded in 1980, distributes and markets weight-loss and weight-management products, health and nutritional supplements, and skin and hair products.
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Bella Vista, a Mediterranean villa built by film director King Vidor in 1926 and sold shortly after completion to actor John Barrymore, has been sold again. The selling price is believed to be close to the asking price of $6 million.
The gated Beverly Hills-area home, which was the scene of many lavish parties during Barrymore’s time, was refurbished about five years ago but still has many mementos of the actor. Among them is a Bavarian porcelain chandelier, which he had installed, and a telephone room-turned-linen closet that has penciled sketches drawn by Barrymore and the private phone numbers of early Hollywood stars Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge and Wallace Beery.
The nearly 7,000-square-foot home, which has city and ocean views, also has two guest houses that Barrymore had built along with a pool and stone cabana, and a baronial room, which could be used as a media room and has its own entrance. The buyer is a film producer.
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Actor MICHAEL J. FOX’S Bel-Air home sold for $2 million less than its original $3,995,000 asking price, and sportscaster Keith Olbermann’s Beverly Hills condo went for $379,000, about $100,000 less than its original asking price, at “Operation Must Sell,” a Jon Douglas Co. sale of 85 homes slashed in price by as much as 50%. The sale, kicked off last Sunday, extends to Dec. 22.
