‘Hero’ Stays in Neighborhood
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER has purchased the Pacific Palisades home of John and Julie Forsythe, who have moved to their ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley.
Schwarzenegger, who has been working on the action-comedy “True Lies” (directed by his “Terminator 2” director, Jim Cameron), bought the Forsythes’ home for about $3 million, sources say.
The Forsythes, who will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in December, listed their Palisades home of 10 years in May at $3.9 million after they bought their 30-acre ranch just north of Santa Barbara for about $1.6 million.
Forsythe, who played oil magnate Blake Carrington in ABC’s “Dynasty,” hosts the reformatted NBC series “I Witness Video.” His new, multifaceted development deal with NBC includes a Movie of the Week and a script commitment.
Schwarzenegger, 46, stars in “Last Action Hero,” which he also produced. He is married to TV journalist Maria Shriver, 37, who hosts NBC’s “First Person.” They are expecting their third child this fall.
The home where Schwarzenegger and Shriver have been living was purchased by Schwarzenegger shortly before he and Shriver were married in 1986, and it is next door to the house he just bought from the Forsythes.
Schwarzenegger is expected to maintain both houses, using the one he just bought as a gate house or guest house, although the architecture is diverse.
The Forsythes’ former home, with four bedrooms in about 6,000 square feet, looks like an English country manor. Schwarzenegger’s house, with seven bedrooms in nearly 6,500 square feet, is Spanish in style. Both homes were built in the early 1980s.
Schwarzenegger also owns a gym, offices and other commercial buildings, primarily on Main Street in Santa Monica, and he has interests in several restaurants, including his Schatzi on Main.
A Moorish-style house once owned by the BEATLES and leased by ELVIS has been sold for close to its asking price of $1.7 million, sources say. The four-story home, built in 1924 in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, was also owned in the 1960s by actor John Phillip Law.
To help make mortgage payments, Law rented out suites to Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Barry McGuire of the New Christy Minstrels and actor Severn Darden, from Second City and the Committee.
“When Dylan was home, he could be heard typing his lyrics long into the night,” wrote Law’s photojournalist sister-in-law, Lisa, who lived in the house at the same time and chronicled those days in her book “Flashing on the Sixties.”
Tiny Tim, one of many visitors who entertained at the house, sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” from a balcony overlooking the two-story ballroom. The new owner plans to continue the tradition started then by holding musical events there, her realtor said.
The four-bedroom, 5,500-square-foot house, on nearly two acres, was purchased by Cherie Erickson Harris, an insolvency lawyer. Harris is restoring the house with the help of her father, Tony Sikich, a master cabinetmaker who helped build a number of houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Marcia Sherwin of Fred Sands Estates, Pacific Palisades, represented Harris, and Dorothy Carter and Jodi Hodges of Jon Douglas Co.’s Sunset Strip office represented the seller, a woman who had lived in the home for 17 years.
Satirical novelist T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE, whose most recent work, “The Road to Wellville,” is about corn flake inventor John Harvey Kellogg, has purchased a Montecito house designed in 1909 by Frank Lloyd Wright. The house, on a wooded acre with guest cottage, is said to be “the only example of Wright’s Prairie style of architecture west of the Rockies.”
Boyle paid $995,000 for the six-bedroom, 4,700-square-foot home, sources say. The house, also believed to be Wright’s first private-home project in California, was priced at $1.9 million when it went on the market in May, 1992.
Boyle and his wife, who have three children, listed their six-bedroom, Woodland Hills house at $439,000 with Joyce Harczo of James R. Gary Co., Woodland Hills. Boyle, 44, has lived in the house for nine years, and it is where he wrote five books, beginning with “World’s End.”
The author, who is also a professor at USC, was represented in his Montecito purchase by Jane Runyen of Sunset Realtors, and the sellers were represented by Bill Sloniker and Lauren Temkin of Coldwell Banker Premier Properties, Santa Barbara.
Composer HOWARD PFEIFER, a two-time Clio winner who wrote the music for currently running Kelloggs and Mazda TV commercials and recently signed to score “The Peter Revson Story,” and his wife, Ellen, have purchased a $650,000 house in Kapalua, Maui.
The Pfeifers’ main residence, which they bought in 1984, is in the San Fernando Valley. They have three daughters.
