He’s Back in the Saddle Again

Veteran actor STUART WHITMAN, who played a New Mexico sheriff in last week’s episode of Prime Time’s “Time Trax” and appears with Lynda Carter in the upcoming film “Lightning in a Bottle,” has just completed building a Santa Fe-style home on his Montecito ranch.

Whitman, who also plays a mob boss in the upcoming movie “Private Wars” and will start shooting a “Movie of the Week” in March for the Fox Network and Warner Bros., won an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in the 1961 film “The Mark.”

Among his many movies were “The Longest Day” (1962) and “The Sound and the Fury” (1959), and on TV, he was a semi-regular in the 1950s TV series “Highway Patrol,” and he starred in the 1968 CBS series “Cimarron Strip.”

Now in his 60s and the father of five as well as the grandfather of five, Whitman, who has been semi-retired for some years, said by phone from his ranch:

“I lost a whole bunch of weight. I quit drinking and smoking. Now I have the energy to go back to work. And now that I’m done building my ranch, I’ll sell my home in Benedict Canyon and get an apartment in town.”

He has owned the Montecito ranch since 1977. “It was a dairy that stopped operations in the ‘30s,” he said. Whitman planted an avocado orchard on part of the ranch and sold off all but 16 of its 30 acres.

He just completed, on three of its acres, a 7,000-square-foot, one-story house, with a large master suite and three other bedrooms in a separate wing. He built a 20-by-50-foot pool overlooking the ocean and plans to put in some equestrian trails and a tennis court.

He figures that he spent $3 million on construction. His five-acre Benedict Canyon home, which he has owned since 1954, is worth about $2 million, he said.

FRED DRYER, who signed a multi-year deal with Paramount last year to produce and act in three TV movies and a number of feature films, has put the Beverly Hills-area home he was building for himself on the market at $3.8 million.

Dryer, a former L.A. Rams and New York Giants defensive end, is also known for his starring role in the long-running NBC police drama “Hunter.”

“I switched dreams about nine months ago,” he said of the house that he just completed. “I found a vacant piece (of land) down the street and decided to build again, probably in about a year, but I want to get this off the market first.”

The 10,000-square-foot house, in the gated community of Mulholland Estates, is based on a plan that was designed by Wallace Neff in 1927 but was not built until now, said Dryer, who no sooner completed the house than he was off to shoot a film in Thailand.

Dryer, who lives in a condo in Santa Monica, listed the house with Judy Cycon and Joe Babajian of Fred Sands Estates.

The former Bel-Air home of Baltimore Orioles owner ELI JACOBS has been sold for about $2.8 million, according to public records.

Jacobs paid $5.6 million for the red-brick, New England-style home when he bought it about four years ago. He reportedly put close to $1 million into refurbishing it but never moved in, though security guards kept watch 24 hours a day.

“He was going to move there but never did because he bought the Orioles and spent so much time in the East,” a source said. The house, which had been on the market for a few months, was first priced at $4.2 million but was reduced by the seller, a bank that took title shortly before the sale, to $3.2 million.

Jacobs, who once had stock and real estate holdings worth an estimated $500 million, has been said to be under mounting financial pressure to sell his 87% stake in the Orioles to raise money to repay creditors.

A Maryland home that he bought in 1990 for $2.25 million is expected to be auctioned Friday by a bank that began foreclosure proceedings earlier this month. Jacobs lives in New York.

The Bel-Air home, which had been listed by Bruce Nelson of John Bruce Nelson & Associates, was sold after a two-week escrow.

SINEAD O’CONNOR’S Los Feliz home was not on the auction block last week in London, as her New York publicist had said earlier, but will instead be sold conventionally with proceeds going to the Red Cross and its Somalia relief fund, said a business manager representing O’Connor’s L.A. interests.

“We . . . decided that we were better off to sell it through the conventional market,” said Jeff Cohen of Boulevard Management. “It’s everyone’s desire to sell it as quickly as possible, but it’s also a matter of maximizing the number of dollars that go to Somalia.”

The Colonial-style house, with five bedrooms and four baths in about 3,200 square feet, is listed at $695,000 with Shirley Wells and Paulette Wood, both of Douglas Properties.

STEVEN HAFT--co-producer with David Kirschner of the upcoming Disney movie “Hocus Pocus,” starring Bette Midler--renewed his six-month lease of a Beverly Hills home for a few weeks while filming was being completed.

The Spanish-style, 4,000-square-foot home, with 2,000-square-foot guest house, leases at about $8,000 a month through Don Robinson at Jon Douglas Co.’s Beverly Hills office. Bobbi Ward of Asher Dann & Associates represented Haft, whose main residence is in New York.