L.A.’s a Wrap for Reynolds

DEBBIE REYNOLDS, who opened her hotel/casino in Las Vegas about a year ago and is planning to open her Hollywood museum there in January, has put a Beverly Hills lot that she has owned for a few years on the market at $1.2 million.

“I was going to build a home there, but I bought the hotel, and it takes my full time. So I have to give up the house plans,” she said by phone from Las Vegas.

Her lot, which she once had listed at $1.75 million, is sloped with pine trees across the front. “It’s half a block up the hill from the Jack Warner estate (now owned by David Geffen) and is right off of Benedict Canyon, near the Beverly Hills Hotel,” she said.

Reynolds, 62, will play a character’s mother in the NBC “Wings” segment titled “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother,” airing Nov. 22, and she appears with a number of other stars in the film tribute to MGM musicals, “That’s Entertainment! III,” released in May.

Other than such occasional parts, Reynolds only comes to Los Angeles once a month, she says, to see her daughter, writer/actress Carrie Fisher, and her granddaughter, Fisher’s daughter. Reynolds’ son, Todd, has been helping to renovate and expand the hotel/casino.

“I’ve had a condo here (in Las Vegas) for 20 years, and though I have a small place in North Hollywood, I just fly in (to L.A.) to visit. I don’t stay,” Reynolds said.

She has been too busy running the 200-room hotel/casino, which she bought at auction as the former Paddlewheel Hotel in 1992. “I had to build a showroom, where we do a show every night and two shows on the weekends, and a cafe, where we do a lounge show,” she said.

Reynolds, who is going through her third divorce, is also getting ready to display part of her Hollywood memorabilia collection, which she estimates is worth $20 million, in an 8,000-square-foot museum on her 8.5-acre hotel/casino site.

“The walls are being covered, and the carpet is being laid,” she said. “Money (from the lot sale) will likely go for more purchases (of memorabilia).”

Robert Clarke of Fred Sands Estates, Beverly Hills, has the listing.

MARILYN MONROE’S Brentwood home, where she died in 1962, has been sold, and although there were some rumors last week that the house will be razed, there are “absolutely no plans right now to tear it down,” a source said.

The house sold for $995,000 to director Michael Ritchie and his architect wife, Jimmie, according to public records. The home had been listed at $1,025,000.

Ritchie, who started as a documentary filmmaker on TV’s “Omnibus” before directing “The Candidate” and “The Bad News Bears,” directed this year’s films “The Scout” and “Cops and Robbersons.” His book “Please Stand By: A Prehistory of Television” was published earlier this month.

The Brentwood home, said to be the only house that Monroe ever owned, is on half an acre with a pool, spa and city-lights view. Built in 1929, the hacienda-style residence has three bedrooms and a guest house in slightly more than 2,000 square feet.

It was being leased when it was sold by Alexander and Candice Bull, described as being in the country music business and living in Nashville.

The buyers were represented by Marsha Rebney of Prudential Rodeo Realty, Brentwood.

RICK ROSENFIELD, one of the owners of the California Pizza Kitchen restaurants, and his wife, Esther, just purchased an 11,000-square-foot home on five acres in Bel-Air for a bit more than $7 million, including some furnishings, sources say.

The most recent asking price of the home was $8.9 million, but it is said to have been on the market at one time at $12 million.

The seller, a perfume manufacturer who bought the home in 1991, had nearly $11 million invested in the residence, sources say. The assessed value is slightly more than $8 million.

The Rosenfields recently sold their former Beverly Hills home for just under $2 million, other sources said.

It’s not officially on the market but . . . a number of real estate brokers say that the Bel-Air home that actor RICHARD GERE and his wife, super-model CINDY CRAWFORD, bought in May, 1993, for about $5 million is being shown at just under $7 million.

Last spring, the famous couple took out a full-page ad in the Times of London, proclaiming “reports of a divorce are totally false,” but since then, rumors of a split have continued to hound the pair.