‘60s Heartthrob Gets New Beat
Veteran pop singer BOBBY VINTON has put his 113-acre Malibu ranch on the market at $20 million, and he is moving his permanent residence to Branson, Mo., where he expects to open his 2,000-seat theater in September.
The Ozarks boom town, which has been described as an embryonic Las Vegas, has only about 3,700 residents, but its 30-plus theaters featuring country and pop music stars attracted 5 million visitors last year.
Vinton, who has sold more than 75 million records since he became a pop star in the 1960s, had planned to open his $7-million Blue Velvet Theater on his 52nd birthday last Wednesday, but a windstorm delayed construction on the 6.5-acre site.
“Blue Velvet” (1965) was not only one of his early No. 1 hit records, but it was also a No. 1 song in England a couple of years ago, when it was re-released.
“Bobby was thinking of retiring,” Vinton’s wife, Dolly, said by phone from Missouri, “but when he went to work here (Branson) last fall, he called me and said, ‘I won’t have to travel if we move here. The audiences will come to me.’ He was tired of being on the road for 25 to 30 years. . . . Branson changed our minds about everything.”
The Vintons, who have been married for 30 years and have five children and three grandchildren, bought their Malibu ranch about 10 years ago. Since then, they built four guest houses, a 12,200-square-foot main residence with a 3,300-square-foot master suite; an indoor pool with a retractable ceiling; horse facilities, and a tennis court on the property.
“I love to garden,” Dolly Vinton said. “My husband laid fencing underground so the gophers and groundhogs can’t come up.” Besides the vegetable garden, the ranch has five rose gardens, an orchard, creek, waterfalls, lake and three wells.
The Vintons also own a seven-bedroom home in Sarasota, Fla., which they have put on the market at just under $3 million. The home is on 2.5 acres waterfront and has two guest houses.
“We’ll keep a place in California and in Florida, but not of the magnitude that we have now,” Dolly Vinton said. The ranch is co-listed with Kay Cole and Sarah Campbell of Prudential Rodeo Realty, Woodland Hills; the Florida home is listed with Lynn Robbins of Prudential Realty in Sarasota.
WHOOPI GOLDBERG, who co-stars with Ted Danson in the movie “Made in America,” has purchased the Pacific Palisades house she has been leasing since she sold her Malibu home in January.
Goldberg paid nearly $2.5 million for the five-bedroom, 7,000-square-foot house, sources say. The house, which was built in the 1930s, was recently on the market at $3.4 million.
The comedienne/actress sold her Malibu home of six years for about $2.2 million.
DENNY DILLON--who co-stars as the “secretary from Hell,” the acid-tongued New Yorker Toby Pedalbee, on the hit HBO series “Dream On”--has become a first-time home buyer with her purchase of a pied-a-terre in New York City.
She rents a Pacific Palisades house to be near the studios to film “Dream On,” but she bought in New York as she often travels there and plans an extended run in New York of her one-woman comedy show “Saints & Survival” later this summer.
Dillon bought a 550-square-foot studio apartment for $135,000, and the unit is being renovated before she takes occupancy.
“It’s a dream come true for me to have a little piece of Manhattan,” she said. “The apartment is sunny and bright with a Hudson River view. It’s within walking distance of Central Park, and the museums and the theater district.”
That reminded her of an old joke. “I can get to Carnegie Hall,” she said, “and I don’t even have to practice.”
CATHERINE OXENBERG, who is about to leave for Mexico to film the new syndicated TV series “Acapulco Heat,” has decided to lease out her Beverly Hills home while she’s gone.
The refurbished three-bedroom home, which looks like a villa in the south of France, is available to lease at $7,000 a month through Barry Peele in Fred Sands’ Directors Office in Beverly Hills.
Oxenberg played Princess Diana in the 1992 TV movie “Charles & Diana: Unhappily Ever After,” and she was a regular for a couple of years on “Dynasty,” playing Joan Collins’ daughter Amanda.
A 60-acre estate in Atlanta, Ga., is believed to be the highest-priced private home currently on the market in the United States.
Listed at $40 million, the estate includes a 32,000-square-foot main residence with eight bedrooms and 13 fireplaces; a 10,000-square-foot carriage house with two apartments, an office and a garage for 12 cars; a conservatory, amphitheater, greenskeeper home, estate manager’s cottage, wedding chapel, lake, fountains and 18-hole golf course.
Known as Dean Gardens, the home was built last year for Larry Dean, founder and chairman of Stockholder Systems Inc., a computer software firm in Norcross, Ga. Jason Dean, one of Dean’s sons, has the listing at Coldwell Banker/Previews in the Sandy Springs area of Atlanta.
