Roots Pulling Rocker Home
BRET MICHAELS, lead singer and songwriter for the popular rock band Poison, has listed his Calabasas estate at just under $1.6 million.
“I want to go back to the East Coast, where my whole family is from, and buy a big ranch, maybe 100 acres, where I can ride my motorcycles every day,” said Michaels, who is a national spokesman for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and has been a diabetic for 25 years.
“I want an area where I can take five old cars and have Figure 8 Derbys. I grew up in Pennsylvania, where we did that, and I miss it.”
That doesn’t mean that Michaels, 31-year-old frontman of the band that has been considered a pop alternative to the darker Guns N’ Roses, is deserting Los Angeles, where Poison is recording its sixth release, to follow its million-selling “Native Tongue” album.
“I love L.A.,” he said. “You can’t beat the weather. I would like to have a condo here.” But first he plans to sell his Calabasas home and former residence in Sherman Oaks, which he bought soon after he moved to California in 1983.
He purchased the 3.25-acre Calabasas estate in 1991. “One of his hobbies is dirt biking, and he used to ride in Calabasas, where he watched his house being built,” said listing agent Lynne Weiss of Coldwell Banker in Sherman Oaks.
A Beverly Hills couple built the home in 1989, then decided that it was too remote. So Michaels bought it and leased out his Sherman Oaks residence, which is for sale now at $550,000, with five bedrooms and a Valley view. His Calabasas home has five bedrooms and a corral.
Michaels has two Arabian stallions and four large dogs on the estate, which suffered the loss of one outbuilding in the firestorms of last fall. “The fire came up to the edge of his house, then blew away,” said Weiss, who had helped Michaels then by loading his gold and platinum records into her mini-van for safe keeping.
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TINA LOUISE, who lives in New York and appears regularly on the TV soap “All My Children,” has put her Beverly Hills-area home on the market at $1.2 million.
The actress, best known for her role as Ginger on the syndicated sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” originally listed the 3,000-square-foot home in the fall of 1992 at $1.6 million. The one-story, three-bedroom residence, described as “an Asian-style ranch home,” has a koi pond, 40-foot-long swimming pool and guest house. Mike Silverman and Jackie Bright, both of Mike Silverman Estates, a Jon Douglas Co., have the listing.
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Actress ELISABETH SHUE, sister of Andrew Shue (who plays hunky writer Billy Campbell on TV’s “Melrose Place”), and her fiance, film director David Guggenheim, are getting ready to move into a Spanish-style home they bought just outside of Beverly Hills.
The three-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home, which is being renovated, was purchased for slightly more than $400,000. “It was a foreclosure sale, which went for far less than it is worth,” a source said. “It’s in a neighborhood of million-dollar homes.”
Elisabeth Shue played Tom Cruise’s love interest in “Cocktail” (1988) and Marty McFly’s girlfriend, Jennifer, in the second and third installments of “Back to the Future.” She also played the aspiring actress/niece of a soap-opera star in “Soapdish” (1991).
Rob Novinger of ReMax, Beverly Hills, represented the buyers, and Lois Crane of Prudential California Realty, Santa Monica, represented the sellers. Financing was arranged by W. Alex Glasscock of Brodon Mortgage, Santa Monica.
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ROBBY BENSON, voice of the beast in the Disney animated film “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), has purchased a newly built, $620,000 house in Park City, Utah, sources say.
Benson, who hosted the March TV special “American Express Presents Backstage Pass . . . Disney’s Beauty and the Beast Goes to Broadway,” bought a four-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot house with a golf-course view.
A San Fernando Valley resident, Benson plans to take occupancy of the Park City home, built by Zamir Unique Homes, in June, sources say. The actor also teaches at the University of Utah.
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ROBERTA WEINTRAUB, who was on the Los Angeles Board of Education for 14 years, has leased a home in Bel-Air. Her Sherman Oaks home was damaged in the Northridge earthquake.
Weintraub, now on the L.A. library board and L.A. County Commission on Local Government Services, leased a home owned by Barry Barnholtz, senior vice president of Trimark Pictures, and his wife, Kate. The Barnholtzes moved to Malibu some time ago.
Weintraub is leasing at $6,250 a month for a year, sources say. The house had been listed by Victoria Lockwood of Fred Sands Estates, Beverly Hills. Joe Babajian, of the same office, and Jody Fine, of the firm’s Pacific Palisades office, represented Weintraub.
