Talking His Way Out of Beach House
Howie Mandel, now into his eighth month as host of a syndicated talk-variety show, and his wife, Terry, have listed their Malibu retreat of five years at just under $4 million.
“They’re selling because he works 14 hours a day, and he has been to the beach eight nights in two years,” said listing agent Jay Rubenstein of Coldwell Banker’s Malibu West office.
When Mandel, 43, isn’t doing his show, he is often on the road as a comic. He has starred in his own comedy specials on HBO and does the voice of the title character on the Saturday-morning cartoon show “Bobby’s World.” He is also executive producer and a writer of the animated show. In the 1980s, he played Dr. Wayne Fiscus on “St. Elsewhere” for six seasons.
The Mandels’ three children were all younger than 10 when the Malibu getaway was purchased. “Now they are old enough to have their own interests, and the family just doesn’t use the house,” Rubenstein said. The Mandels have another home closer to L.A.
The Malibu house is Cape Cod in style and has four bedrooms in the main quarters plus a guest house. The house was built in 1957 and was remodeled by the Mandels.
“They ripped down the two-car garage and built the two-story guest house with a wet bar, fireplace and loft, which has an office, bedroom and workout area,” Rubenstein said. The ocean-view house is in Malibu Colony.
*
A Pacific Palisades home owned by the estate of actor Gene Raymond, who was married for 28 years to singing star Jeanette MacDonald, has been sold for $950,000.
Raymond, who died in May at age 89, was a leading man in movies of the 1930s and 1940s. He was married to MacDonald until she died in 1965.
He appeared in such 1930s hits as “Red Dust” with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, “Ex-Lady” with Bette Davis, “Zoo in Budapest” with Loretta Young and “Sadie McKee” with Joan Crawford. He also played the romantic lead opposite Delores Del Rio in “Flying Down to Rio,” which first paired Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Later, Raymond worked in television.
He had lived in the house since 1974, when he remarried. His second wife, who died two years before he did, had the house built. It was designed by architect Richard Neutra.
Built in 1950 on a bluff with ocean views, the three-bedroom 3,085-square-foot house is long and narrow and has lots of windows, said Michael C. Thom, who represented both sides of the deal along with Steven M. Foonberg. Both are with the Group in Beverly Hills.
*
Former Japanese wrestler Kanji Antonio Inoki and his wife, Naomi, have purchased a home in the Santa Monica area for close to $1.85 million.
Inoki and his family moved to Los Angeles a year ago and leased a home until they bought the six-bedroom 4,400-square-foot house, built in 1991. They also purchased the furnishings at extra cost.
Inoki and Muhammad Ali fought each other to a 15-round draw in a World Heavyweight Martial Arts Championship bout in 1976, but they are now business associates. Ali is honorary chairman of Inoki’s company, UFO (Universal Fighting-arts Organization), which just held a fight in Osaka, Japan.
Inoki also was a senator in Japan for about four years, and he was in the movie “The Bad News Bears Go to Japan” (1978).
Tiya Choi of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate in Glendale represented the Inokis in their home purchase.
*
Laura Mako, who designed the interiors of homes for Bob and Dolores Hope, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Henry and Ginny Mancini, and Gerald Ford, has put her home in Beverly Hills on the market at just under $2.3 million.
“I bought it from Ria Gable [Clark Gable’s second wife] in 1959, but I’m selling because I have a beautiful house in Maryland, and I want to go back to my roots, although I will keep an apartment here,” she said.
She remodeled the house in 1974. “It was one of the first houses I did,” she said. Built in 1924, the house has a family room with a sunken bar and fireplace, a kitchen with a breakfast room and cook’s library, a den with a fireplace, a master suite with a fireplace, a cabana with a loft, a guest house, gardens and a pool.
Joe Babajian at Fred Sands Estates, Beverly Hills, has the listing.
*
The 1998 luxury-home market on L.A.’s Westside was the best it has been in more than a decade, thanks largely to the entertainment industry, according to a year-end study by Cecelia Waeschle, a broker with Coldwell Banker-Jon Douglas Co., Beverly Hills.
Waeschle has tracked the sales of Westside homes going for more than $2.5 million since 1987. She doesn’t focus on deals in the $1-million-to-$2.5-million range, because there are so many of them. She concentrates on Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Holmby Hills, Santa Monica, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Malibu.
During 1998, there were 241 sales in the area for more than $2.5 million, and of those, 42 sales were for more than $5 million and six were for more than $10 million, she said, adding that about 65% of the 241 sales involved the entertainment community.
During 1997, there were 170 home sales for more than $2.5 million; of those, 37 were for more than $5 million and two were for more than $10 million.
“The last year we had this many sales at over $10 million was in 1990,” Waeschle said. That was the year David Geffen bought Jack Warner’s Beverly Hills estate for $47.5 million. To date, no subsequent sale has approached that amount.
One of the closest was the $18-million sale in 1998 of the Bel-Air home of the late presidential advisor Henry Salvatori. Among other top sales of 1998 were the $12.5-million purchase of a Malibu home by saxophonist Kenny G and the nearly $13-million purchase of a Malibu home by Chicago financier Sam Zell.
