For Sale: Palace of a Playboy

High on a Bel-Air peak, with city-to-sea views so commanding the hilltop once held Nike surface-to-air missiles, the center of gravity of the late Wilt Chamberlain’s storied bachelor pad is indisputably the bedroom.

A mirrored ceiling above the jumbo bed retracts to reveal open sky. A pillow-side command-and-control panel let Chamberlain dim the mood lights or fill the sunken Cleopatra-inspired bathtub that shimmers with 18-karat gold tile at the foot of the bed.

You can swim into the living room from the moat swimming pool. Downstairs, in the plush pink velvet “playroom,” Chamberlain had a wall-to-wall water bed floor. In his playboy heyday, one bedroom even had a traffic light rigged to signal “Love” in green and “Don’t Love” in red.

As the Hall of Famer himself described the decor: “A little kinky, with kinky details.”

The 7-foot Laker great died of heart failure in 1999. But his ‘70s palace lives on. It is as much a monument to the legacy of the basketball sultan and his 20,000 legendary nights--or at least, supposed female conquests--as the architecturally eclectic San Simeon castle is to newspaper czar William Randolph Hearst.

Since the days of Imperial Rome, homes have been built as long-standing monuments to the wealth, power and ego of their owners. Today, the Chamberlain estate is undergoing the ultimate test of time: the Los Angeles real estate market.

Wilt’s place is for sale.

“That house was the personification of Wilt,” said attorney Sy Goldberg, an old friend of Chamberlain’s and executor of his estate. “That house was the man, and the man was bigger than life. He sat up there like the king of the mountain. It’s more than just a house. That house was him.”

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The estate went on the market a year ago at $7.4 million, dropped to $5.2 million, and is stalled at $4.3 million.

In Los Angeles, where one man’s castle is another man’s tear-down, Goldberg just rejected the most recent low-ball offer, from a writer-producer who apparently considers the place the ultimate white elephant. The buyer said he would demolish the pyramidal palace, with its five-story living room, five freight cars of old-growth redwood and 200 tons of Bouquet Canyon stone.

Like other custom homes of the rich and famous, Chamberlain’s intensely personal vision--like his $1-million, one-of-a-kind gold “Chamberlain” sports car in the garage--requires what real estate agents politely term “a unique buyer.”

But this is a city where ‘50s pads styled like flying saucers are in deep vogue and architect Frank Gehry’s sheet-metal-clad home is a design landmark. Is it so unreasonable to hope for someone eager to live under a soaring tripod of triangular beams that looks like a 1970s “human potential” conference center?

The mere thought of Chamberlain’s masterpiece as a demolition site is deeply upsetting to Goldberg. A courtly man with an avuncular air, he frets about it in his Marina del Rey law office. Behind his desk is a Leroy Neiman lithograph depicting a Valhalla of basketball greats jostling beneath a towering Chamberlain going for the slam dunk.

A House Visited by Many Women

“Here’s a guy who weighed 300 pounds who was as graceful as a gazelle,” Goldberg said. “He’d go up in the air and almost fly.”

This, after all, was the man who some call the greatest basketball player of all time. His house, Goldberg said, “has the cachet of being a house where a famous man who had a lot of women lived.

“If that makes some people uncomfortable, they’re not the right people to buy the house,” he said.

Goldberg stayed at the place for six months during the house’s lavish belle epoque.

“Basically, [Chamberlain] lived in the bedroom,” Goldberg said. “If everything but the bedroom and the kitchen floated away in a flood, it would take a few days for him to notice.”

Goldberg was one of the few men to witness the effect of the powerful Chamberlain mystique on women at close range.

“I never got used to it,” he said. “They’d come out of the woodwork. They’d run across the room.”

Now Goldberg feels compelled to play down Chamberlain’s virile image, just as he removed the playroom’s water bed floor four months ago because “some of the women were incensed by it.”

Memories of the playroom still make him grin.

“It was a pretty sexy place,” Goldberg said.

But, “I’m hoping [the house] doesn’t have the aura of a hideaway sex place,” he said, “because it turns women off.”

And as any seasoned real estate agent knows, there is a strong psychological dimension to the value of a home.

Hollywood newcomer David Geffen bought the high-cachet mansion of Old Hollywood baron Jack Warner for $47.5 million--then the most ever paid for an American single-family home.

On the other hand, a house with a grim past--known as “stigmatized real estate” in the trade--can be a tough sell. The Menendez family home sold for a reported $1.2-million loss. Nicole Simpson’s crime-scene condo finally sold at a deep discount after 2 1/2 years on the market--and a change of address and facade. O.J. Simpson’s house was razed by the buyer, and real estate agents recommended an address change there, too.

Celebrity ownership does not always boost prices, agents say, and such a small pool of buyers can afford luxury homes that finding the right buyer--or even the right tear-down--can take time.

“Let’s say it’s Mel Gibson’s house; now that’s mystique,” said Lisa Hutchins, a a luxury property agent at Coldwell Banker in Hancock Park. “Wilt was a famous basketball player who, uh, had a lot of girlfriends. Maybe the house got a little worn out, or let’s say, used in a way that may not appeal to everybody. It’s not everyone’s fantasy mystique.”

Many buyers are turned off by an increasing penchant for custom details.

Charlie Sheen’s Malibu Lake bachelor crib, just on the market, has a fire pole in the closet of the master bedroom that descends to the front door.

“It screams: a boy with his toys,” Hutchins said.

Television producer Aaron Spelling equipped his family’s 45-room, 56,500-square-foot Holmby Hills mansion with a bowling alley, doll museum, sports bar, video game room and two gift-wrapping rooms.

The 48,500-square-foot Connecticut mansion of former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson has languished on the market for more than four years, though its $5-million price tag is a steep markdown from the $22 million Tyson asked in 1997, and the office handling it refuses to say if it’s still for sale. Built by convicted real estate swindler Ben Sisti, it has a 3,500-square-foot nightclub with a 19-foot bar and smoke machine.

Such architectural self-expression makes the Mod Squad rococo of Chamberlain’s estate--with its magenta carpets and padded walls covered with mock batik and faux zebra--seem modest.

Not the Home for Everyone

“I couldn’t live there,” conceded Goldberg, “and a lot of people couldn’t live there. Not because of the size. It’s his personality, and it’s his personality that made him unique.”

On a recent afternoon, as hummingbirds whirred in the setting sun, Richard Klug, a Sotheby’s International agent, opened the vault-like front door of Chamberlain’s house. It is a 5-foot-thick, 14-foot-high, 2,000-pound triangle.

“It’s shag-errific,” he said as he walked into the 20-foot foyer. “It’s absolutely ‘70s architecture.”

He paused at the foot of a chrome-and-glass central staircase with rope railings. It looks like a set from “The Love Boat,” though it was actually modeled on something from a battleship.

Klug shrugged off a suggestion that a down market might make this sale harder.

“There’s a lot of money in this town,” he said. “Don’t ask me where it comes from. But there’s a bunch of it. And once you get a bunch of it, once you get that pile of money, it’s all about what you want.”

You don’t have to guess what Chamberlain wanted.

“When I dreamed about my house, I had to think about it relative to, No. 1, my unique size,” Chamberlain wrote in his 1972 book, “The Possible Dream.” “I definitely wanted a house where I was going to feel comfortable, and that presented the biggest of all problems.”

He already had a name for the place: Ursa Major. It is the constellation known, like Chamberlain, as the Big Dipper.

Chamberlain envisioned “a free type of place. Not really rooted down, yet strong and stable. I wanted my house to be salty and earthy. Sometimes the cleanest thing in the world is dirt.”

The athlete had an existential outlook that must have come in handy during the house’s innumerable delays and cost overruns.

“I believe a house is never completed,” Chamberlain said. “I believe it is a living thing. Like man.”

Chamberlain’s architect, David Rich, flew by helicopter over the Santa Monica Mountains until he spotted the lot, which overlooks Stone Canyon Reservoir and, on a clear day, its sellers say, offers vistas of Catalina Island and the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Rich brought Chamberlain to the mountaintop, drew several large geometric shapes on the ground and asked the athlete to step inside. Chamberlain rejected the square: “No excitement.” The circle? “Too soft, too feminine.” But the triangle “sparked Chamberlain instantly.”

The Olympian edifice that arose out of this combined vision is built on an equilateral triangular grid. It is free of the Greco-Roman embellishments that lend a Caesars Palace air to some Bel-Air homes. Yet its abundance of mirrored walls evokes the narco-tecture of a “Miami Vice” coke dealer den.

Three-Level Triangular Bedroom

But let’s cut to the chase.

Chamberlain’s bedroom is a three-level triangle with glass on two sides and the bed--with its James Bond control panel--is at the summit. The headboard and bedspread were once covered with the fur of what was termed “Arctic wolves’ noses.”

“I wanted the Roman tub right in the bedroom, like back in the old Roman days, as I remember seeing in pictures of Cleopatra,” he wrote.

The tub required its own jumbo water-heating system.

“We thought if it takes two hours for it to fill up, the spirit of the moment would be gone. Everybody would go home,” Rich said.

Steps away, a red skylight bathes the mirrored triangular shower in a scarlet glow, and separate doors open into his-and-hers bathrooms.

Since the days of ancient Greece, great houses have borrowed from public buildings. Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad’s Brentwood home looks like a gallery. Hearst Castle emulates a Spanish cathedral. Chamberlain saw his house as a sort of cathedral to nature. But his more pagan touches seem inspired by fact-finding missions to the Playboy Mansion.

One guest bathroom is papered floor to ceiling with a high-relief photo series of an attractive nude woman turning around. The light switch is placed at an indelicate spot.

Across the hall is a small cave-like room with mirrored walls, a circular pink velvet wraparound sofa and pink lame pillows. Missing is the water bed floor and its cover of French black rabbit fur.

Chamberlain also liked to unwind in the living room pit, a place with “great vibrations” and a floor covered with yet more fur from Arctic wolves’ noses.

OK. So what’s the deal with all the wolf noses?

“The tree-huggers will get excited about that,” Rich said as he tried to recall how they were acquired.

“The trappers in the Arctic of Alaska peel off the noses and the fur,” he said. “I think it was a whole season of wolf noses.”

Today, he said, environmentalists would be “coming up the street with pitchforks. But it was a really nice touch.”

Chamberlain’s old friend Goldberg clarifies. Somehow, Chamberlain acquired 10,000 wolf-face masks from a dealer who represented the state of Alaska.

“In those days, Alaska was overrun by wolves,” he said. “It was open season. You got the bounty by turning in the mask of the wolf.”

“They were all over the place,” Goldberg said of the wolf rugs and throws.

Chamberlain’s Legacy Not Just Real Estate

They’re all gone now.

“They just deteriorated,” he said. “They dried up. They weren’t properly tanned.”

Goldberg is uncomfortable. He hates feeling that Chamberlain’s legacy has been reduced to voyeuristic details about his house, or his boast of bedding 20,000 women. What about his unflinching stance against racism? His attack on the role of big money in sports?

And what about the estate? A million dollars were willed to relatives. The rest--up to $14 million, depending on the house sale--will fund charities for minority children. But the house has to sell first.

And so far, that’s no slam dunk.

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Times researcher Vicky Gallay contributed to this story.