Actress Finds Life’s a Beach
Actress PAMELA ANDERSON, a former Playboy centerfold who stars in the syndicated series “Baywatch,” has purchased the Malibu townhouse she had been renting for a couple of years.
Anderson, 27, was detective Mike Hammer’s secretary Velda in the CBS movie “Come Die With Me,” a Mickey Spillane mystery that aired Tuesday night.
A native of British Columbia, Anderson became a spokesmodel for a beer company after her image was projected on a scoreboard screen at a Canadian football game in 1989.
She went on to pose for five Playboy covers, including the one in November, and to play Lisa the Tool Girl, TV handyman Tim Allen’s assistant on ABC’s “Home Improvement,” which she left after the ’93 season to focus on “Baywatch,” playing flower child C.J. Parker.
Anderson bought the Malibu townhouse for $270,000. She had been renting it at $1,725 a month. The unit, in a security-gated complex with a pool, has two bedrooms in about 1,700 square feet. Anderson spent more than $100,000 in remodeling before buying it, sources say.
The townhouse has been described as being “scented with incense and furnished in pine.” Anderson, a dedicated meditator, learned about meditation from her Finnish grandfather.
Anderson’s purchase was handled by Ira Greenspon and Bob Rubenstein, both of Malibu Realty.
Oscar-winning actress/singer SHIRLEY JONES and her husband, actor/comedian MARTY INGELS, have leased out the Brentwood townhouse they bought a year ago from singer Janet Jackson.
The 3,000-square-foot townhouse at Mountaingate was Ingels’ idea to buy as a scaled-down, in-town alternative to the 5,200-square-foot Beverly Hills house Jones has owned since 1967, when she bought it with her then-husband, late actor Jack Cassidy.
No sooner was Ingels’ offer accepted, however, than Jones started making it clear that she didn’t want to move into the townhouse or sell her Beverly Hills home. “I call it the ongoing saga of the three houses of Ingels,” the actor/comedian said.
The couple also has a Big Bear home, which he expanded at a cost of $400,000 as a surprise to Jones when she was on tour in Europe. Luckily, Jones liked the rehab, but Ingels still wasn’t sold on the mountains, which he calls “too high and too quiet.”
In the meantime, the townhouse, which he calls his “dream retreat,” seemed to be “slipping through my fingers,” as he puts it, with its homeowners’ fees, mortgage payments, fix-up costs, impending remodeling. “And Shirley said sell.”
The solution, at least for a year, was to lease the condo to West Coast garment magnate John Macaluso and his family. Sherwin Mitchell of Fred Sands’ Beverly Hills office had the listing on the estimated $5,000-a-month lease. “The lease meant time to think out our needs,” Ingels said.
They have discussed retiring, but it won’t happen soon. In January, they go on tour in “Love Letters,” then they resume running TV roles. She is in “Burke’s Law” and “Murder, She Wrote;” he is in “The Young and the Restless.” She also did a pilot for Aaron Spelling for her own TV show.
The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “La Miniatura,” on about an acre in a ravine in Pasadena, has come on the market at $3.45 million.
Wright designed the textile-block house in 1923 for Alice Millard, the widow of a rare-book dealer. She died in the 1930s, and sculptor Donald Potter Daniels, a neighbor of Millard’s, bought the home from her estate.
Daniels’ granddaughter, Nicole, inherited it several years ago. She grew up in the house and just completed revamping it.
“She has a young son who likes to surf, so she wants to move to Laguna to be near the beach,” said listing agent Barry Sloane of Dalton, Brown & Long in West Hollywood.
The three-bedroom house, on the December cover of Architectural Digest, was the first of Wright’s four textile-block houses in the Los Angeles area, and it signaled a turn in Wright’s work toward designing buildings in cast-concrete blocks. Lloyd Wright, Wright’s son, designed a studio with a loft that was also built on the property.
