Actress Hears Desert’s Call

SHIRLEY MacLAINE, who no sooner finished shooting the movie “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway” with Richard Harris and Robert Duvall than she started filming “Guarding Tess” with Nicolas Cage, has put what she calls her “sanctuaries”--her Malibu and Seattle-area homes--on the market.

“I’ve always had my eye on New Mexico,” she said, in a telephone interview, of her plans to make her main residence on a 7,500-acre ranch that she recently bought there, “but I also want a not-so-big of a place in L.A.”

The prolific actress, who just received a lifetime achievement award at this year’s American Comedy Awards, plays a boarding-house landlady who has a romance in “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway.” In “Guarding Tess,” she portrays an ex-U.S. president’s widow who drives her Secret Service agent crazy.

MacLaine is set to play the feisty widow Aurora Greenway in “The Evening Star,” the sequel to “Terms of Endearment” (1984), for which she won an Oscar. She co-stars with two other Academy Award best-actress winners, Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates, in “Used People,” now showing nationwide.

A dancer and singer who toured last year with Frank Sinatra, MacLaine, 58, is also a writer of seven best sellers, including “Out on a Limb,” a book on spiritualism and reincarnation that became a 1986 TV miniseries in which she starred.

“The home in Malibu has meant so much to me,” she said by phone from the “Tess” set in Baltimore. “It’s where I wrote the first three books. . . . I’m going to write a new book when I settle into my new place in New Mexico.”

Her home in New Mexico will be in Abiquiu, where the late Georgia O’Keeffe did much of her painting. Abiquiu is about 45 minutes from Santa Fe “in a Land Rover with a four-wheel drive,” MacLaine said. Her renovation of a ranch house there should be completed in a month.

MacLaine has maintained her primary home in Malibu since she and the late Cliff May designed and built an apartment building there for her in 1963. “There were eight units, but I took almost all of the top floor with six bedrooms, four baths, a deck and spa,” she said.

There are four rental units in the building, which has 100 feet of beach front and was recently refurbished, with a new deck to complement her Oriental garden. It is listed at $4 million with Kathy Villa of Asher Dann & Associates, Beverly Hills.

MacLaine’s home in Graham, an hour south of Seattle, has 4,000 feet of frontage along the Puyallup River. Situated on 105 acres, with 98 acres as a private wildlife reserve, the five-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot house is surrounded by a deck and has a pool, hot tub and view of Mt. Rainer. Peg Stanfield of Re/Max Cascade Realty in Tacoma has the $1.2-million listing.

“It makes me sad to think about the eagles, the elk, the wonderful salmon . . . and Malibu was my dream house,” MacLaine said, “but you can have too many places (to live), so I’ll relocate where I write to have my base.”

She had been drawn to Malibu by the ocean. She had been lured to the Northwest by the tall trees. Now, she said, “I feel the high desert calling me.”

JULIA SWEENEY, the comic actress who has been a regular on “Saturday Night Live” for three years and is probably best known for her androgynous character named “Pat,” and her screenwriter husband, Stephen Hibbert, have purchased their first home.

Described as “a Mission Revival Spanish-style” house, it was built in 1921 and is in the Larchmont Village area of Hancock Park. The two-bedroom home, with a separate building that the couple plan to use as a writer’s studio, sold for close to its reduced asking price of $359,000.

Sweeney, 31, and Hibbert, 34, still work sometimes at the Groundlings Theatre in West Hollywood, where they got their starts and she created the wallflower character known as “Mea Culpa.” She had joined the Groundlings, taking improv classes there, at 25, after she left her job of four years as an accountant at Columbia Pictures.

For awhile, she wondered if she had made the right career switch. A year ago, Sweeney was quoted in The Times as saying, “I remember sobbing because I couldn’t even go into the Gap and buy a blouse, and all my friends were buying houses.”

Since then, she appeared as a nosy neighbor in “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid” (1992) and as a lab receptionist in “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” (1990).

Ken Molina and Brian Mazurkiewicz represented the couple in the purchase. Mazurkiewicz is now with the Jon Douglas Co., as are listing agents Gary Wallace and Geoffrey Grisham.

POSTSCRIPT: The title of Stuart Whitman’s two-hour pilot for a Fox TV series is “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.”