Season Finale in Brentwood
ROSEANNE, whose weekly sitcom will end May 20 after nine seasons on ABC, has sold her Brentwood home for just under $2.3 million, according to public records.
The home was part of a two-house compound created by the Emmy-winning actress in May 1994. She sold the other house a year ago for about $3.5 million.
Roseanne, 44, and her husband, Ben Thomas, 30, decided to sell the houses after the birth of their son in August 1995. That summer, Roseanne was quoted as saying that she didn’t want to raise her child in Los Angeles and that she missed “having horses and growing things.” She once had a farm in Iowa and now has a home at Lake Arrowhead.
The house she just sold is traditional in style and has five bedrooms in 3,000 square feet. The white-brick house was built in 1938. Roseanne bought it in 1994, the same year she divorced actor Tom Arnold, for about $3 million.
Since the “Roseanne” ratings began to slip in 1994, there had been talk of discontinuing the series. A proposal to bring it back next season fell apart last month. Since then, there have been discussions about Roseanne hosting a talk show or starring in a new series.
She is in New York now, preparing to play the Wicked Witch of the West May 7 to June 3 in “The Wizard of Oz” at Madison Square Garden.
Roseanne, a producer and director as well as a comedy writer, has four grown children besides her young son.
Barbara Robinson of John Aaroe & Associates, Beverly Hills, had the listing.
Falcon Lair, the Beverly Hills-area estate built for screen legend RUDOLPH VALENTINO and recently owned by the late tobacco heiress DORIS DUKE, has been listed at $3.9 million.
Valentino had the Spanish-style home built in 1924. He died at 31 in 1926. Duke died at 80 in 1993. She had owned the estate for more than 30 years.
The 13-room, 4,700-square-foot house has painted stucco walls, wood-beamed ceilings, a library/music room, master bedroom with arched windows, staff quarters and a guest apartment with a living room and two bedrooms.
Situated on a four-plus-acre promontory in lower Benedict Canyon, the estate has city views, a secluded garden, meandering pathways and a courtyard with a fountain.
Jeff Hyland and Rick Hilton of Hilton & Hyland, Beverly Hills, are the listing brokers with Peter F. Kempf of Christie’s Great Estates.
BARRY BOSTWICK, who plays the fictional New York City Mayor Randall Winston--Michael J. Fox’s boss--in the hit ABC sitcom “Spin City,” has put his Beverly Hills home on the market at about $1.6 million.
Bostwick, 52, moved to New York last year for the series, and he and his wife, actress Sherri Ellen Jensen, in her mid-30s, recently moved again, with their two children, from a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment to a four-bedroom farmhouse 36 miles north of New York City.
Bostwick, born and raised in California, starred as Danny Zuko in the original (1972) Broadway production of “Grease,” and he played the nerdy innocent Brad Majors in the cult classic “The Rocky Horror Show” (1975). The Tony- and Golden Globe-winning actor also appeared in the miniseries “War and Remembrance” (1989).
He helped to design and build his Beverly Hills home in 1989. The gated, 5,600-square-foot house has five bedrooms, a guest apartment with a private entrance, a pool, waterfall and more than 80 fruit trees.
Barbara Tenenbaum of Fred Sands Estates, directors office in Beverly Hills, has the listing.
Attorney BROWNE GREENE and his wife, LEANA, are about to undertake a major refurbishing of a Santa Monica Gold Coast estate built for early-Hollywood actress NORMA SHEARER and her husband, legendary producer IRVING THALBERG.
Shearer won an Oscar for “The Divorcee” (1930) and was billed by MGM as “The First Lady of the Screen,” but after Thalberg died in 1936, she turned down a starring role in “Gone With the Wind,” had two film flops and retired as an actress in 1942. She died in her 80s in 1983.
Thalberg became the head of production at MGM in 1924 at the age of 25. During his 12-year reign, MGM became Hollywood’s most glamorous film company. He died at 37 in his beachfront home of pneumonia stemming from a rheumatic heart condition.
A year later, the Motion Picture Academy instituted the Irving G. Thalberg Award, still given “for the most consistent high level of production achievement by an individual producer.”
The house was one of 25 or 30 residences built in the late 1920s and early ‘30s along the stretch of Santa Monica beach by such early Hollywood luminaries as Louis B. Mayer, Darryl Zanuck and Harold Lloyd.
The Thalberg-Shearer house was built, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once described it, “for the great emotional moments.” The dramatic-looking, 11,000-square-foot house has a soaring Tudor roof-line.
Greene, a well-known trial lawyer, bought the estate last summer from a member of the Thalberg family for $3 million, industry sources say.
He and his wife, a singer-actress from Sweden who heads a Beverly Hills-based court reporting business, selected architect Richard Landry and designer Ron Wilson to orchestrate the refurbishing, which is expected to take about 18 months.
LILA CAZES, producer of “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995) and “Touch” (1997), and her husband, JEAN, executive producer of “Somebody to Love” (1996), have purchased a Hancock Park home for $2.8 million, sources have said.
Jean Cazes also owns Lumiere International with the French company UGC. Lila Cazes runs the Los Angeles operation.
The Cazes bought a nine-bedroom, 16,000-square-foot house built in 1926 by Gordon Kaufman. The Mediterranean-style house also has a ballroom, pool, two laundry rooms, a wine vault, green house and motorcourt. The seller was interior designer John Cottrell.
John Nelson of Fred Sands’ Beverly Hills office had the listing, other sources said. The asking price had been $3.2 million.
SHELDON GORDON, who developed such projects as the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and the Beverly Center in L.A., has put four 40-acre lots on the market, next to his estate in Malibu.
The lots range from $2.5 million to $5 million each, with approved permits and plans, one with a tennis court and a riding ring. “It was going to be my Virginia-style horse farm,” he said.
His plans changed after Gordon, in his 60s, married his wife, Christine, and they adopted two children. Now he rarely goes to Malibu. Their primary residence is in Las Vegas. They also have a home in Aspen. And they keep their world-class jumping horses and host fox hunts at their 200-acre country estate 100 miles from London.
John Lee and Randy Brant of Gordon Group Holdings in Las Vegas are handling the sale of the Malibu property.
