She’s Just Not an L.A. Townie

MOLLY RINGWALD, “The Breakfast Club” star who will play one of the lead roles in the pilot for the upcoming ABC sitcom “Townies,” has put her Hollywood Hills residence on the market.

“She made the break from her house while she was in Paris for four or five years and now she’s living in New York,” said her business manager, Ken Miles. “Even if it [the series] shoots here, she wouldn’t want to live in L.A. on a permanent basis.”

Ringwald, 28, was raised in Sacramento. By the time she was 18, she had appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and she had starred in the John Hughes films “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink.”

She starred in Alan Alda’s “Betsy’s Wedding” (1990) and then moved to Paris, making some French films there and occasionally returning to L.A. to visit friends and family, including her father, jazz musician Bob Ringwald.

The actress, who moved to New York from Paris last year, also returned earlier to the U.S. to star in the TV movie “Something to Live For: The Allison Gertz Story” (1993), Stephen King’s miniseries “The Stand” (1994) and the movie “Malicious” (1995). She will appear with Jeanne Tripplehorn in the thriller “Office Killer” and will co-star in the Carsey-Werner Co. sitcom pilot “Townies,” about three small-town girls from Massachusetts.

Ringwald has owned her L.A. house, off Mulholland Drive, since 1988, sources say. Built about 1950, the house was about 2,000 square feet before Ringwald added a family room, laundry room, garage and pool. The house has one bedroom and a guest room.

Described as “a bachelor haven,” the contemporary country-style home is walled with city views. The asking price is $869,000.

Connie Nelson and Jeannie Thompson, both of the Prudential-Douglas Co. in Studio City, share the listing.

Jockey CHRIS McCARRON, who already won the Kentucky Derby twice and the Santa Anita Derby twice before this weekend’s race at Churchill Downs, has sold the house he had built at Mulholland Estates in the Beverly Hills area and bought a home in the San Gabriel Valley to be closer to Santa Anita, sources say.

McCarron, 40, and his wife, Judy, are said to have sold their 8,000-square-foot, country-style home to a local businessman for close to its $2.3-million asking price. The house was about 5 years old. The McCarrons paid $1 million for the lot in 1989, the year he was elected to the Racing Hall of Fame.

In March, McCarron became racing’s all-time leading rider in money won, with accumulated winnings of slightly more than $190,300,000. He wasn’t always well off. As one of nine kids in a Boston family, he had trouble as a young man scraping up $45 toward his first car.

After winning several big purses, McCarron remembered his youth and the financial woes of some jockeys he had known by creating, with his wife and actor Tim Conway, the Don MacBeth Memorial Jockey Fund, for injured riders.

Margie Oswald-Sherman, Christian Stevens and Carol Whelan, all of the Prudential-Rodeo-Douglas Co., shared the listing.

Director BARRY LEVINSON, who won an Oscar for “Rain Man” in 1988 and will next direct Michael Crichton’s sci-fi thriller “Sphere,” has sold his Mandeville Canyon home to Martin Shafer, president of Castle Rock Entertainment, and producer Carol Fuchs, sources say.

Shafer was also a partner of Rob Reiner and others in forming Castle Rock, now owned by Turner Entertainment.

Levinson, who is in his early 50s and just finished work on the upcoming “Sleepers” (with Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman), sold his house for about $5 million, sources say. Levinson and his wife, Diana, bought the home in 1990 from actor Mark Harmon and Harmon’s wife, actress Pam Dawber, for close to $7.9 million. The Harmons bought the house for $4 million in 1988. While they owned the house, the Harmons expanded it from three to five bedrooms and from 5,400 to 8,000 square feet. They redesigned it to look much like a hunting lodge, with a lot of stonework. They even hung an artificial moose head on one wall, a source said.

The home also has a pool, pool guest house, gym and sauna, all on 3.5 acres, terraced with rolling lawns, rose gardens and mountain and canyon views.

Dreyfus fund founder and philanthropist JACK DREYFUS JR. has listed his 140-acre estate at Lake Tahoe, just south of Incline Village, at $60 million.

In February, Dreyfus signed an agreement with the American Land Conservancy that would turn his property, the largest private estate at Lake Tahoe, into a public park.

However, the deal hinges on the federal Bureau of Land Management’s agreement to trade to the conservancy public land in the Las Vegas area that could then be sold to developers. Sale proceeds would be used to pay Dreyfus, and his estate would then belong to the U.S. Forest Service.

The process is expected to take a few more months. In the meantime, the estate is being marketed for backup offers in case the deal falls through. Dreyfus wants to sell the estate to fund his medical research foundation.

He has owned the property since the 1970s, but most of the 16,000-square-foot compound dates back to the 1930s, when it was built by George B. Whittell Jr., a San Francisco multimillionaire and heir to a Gold Rush fortune. Whittell, a quirky recluse who liked to gamble, kept lions, tigers and an elephant as pets and when he died in 1969 at the age of 87, he left much of his fortune to animal-welfare groups.

The estate, known as “Thunderbird Lodge,” has more than a mile of shoreline with white, sandy beaches, four stone cottages and a three-story main lodge resembling a medieval French chateau.

Dreyfus modernized the heating and electrical systems and built what he calls “the lighthouse,” with an entertainment center and a master and guest suites.

There is also a boathouse, blasted out of solid rock and connected to the main house by a 500-foot-long rock tunnel. An electrically operated cradle in the boathouse once held Whittell’s mahogany boat, the Thunderbird.

Dreyfus doesn’t own the 56-foot, $100,000-plus vessel with twin 500-horsepower diesel engines, but it can be seen sometimes, still cruising on the lake, sources say.

Shari Chase of Chase International, Lake Tahoe, has the listing.