She’s ready to be a graduate of ranching life
Linda Gray, who played J.R. Ewing’s long-suffering wife on the hit CBS series “Dallas” and last year starred on stage as Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” on Broadway and in London, has listed her Santa Clarita ranch at $2.9 million.
Gray has lived on the 3-acre ranch, behind gates in the Sand Canyon area of the high desert northeast of Los Angeles, for 30 years. “My children were raised here,” she said, “but I’ve come to a time of my life when I want to fold my tent, or downsize, and travel.”
She plans to go to Nicaragua and other countries as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, and she is working on a film that will be shot in Tuscany. She is looking, however, to buy a smaller home in Santa Monica, where she was born, or in Pacific Palisades. She wants to keep a place in the L.A. area to remain close to her two children and two grandchildren, one of whom was born about six weeks ago.
Gray and her ex-husband, Ed Thrasher, whom she described as an art director and a cowboy, built the Sand Canyon home in 1973, 10 years before they were divorced and five years before she started playing Sue Ellen for 11 seasons on “Dallas,” which is still in syndication around the world.
“He thought the ranch was perfect because it was near the studios but he could have a horse here,” she said of Thrasher. “I was kicking and screaming, saying I was a city girl. Now it’s my oasis.”
The main house has three bedrooms and two bathrooms in slightly more than 4,200 square feet. The house has a kitchen with a pizza oven; a master suite with an exercise room; a step-down living room with a large fireplace; and an outdoor living room, which she calls her “summer living room.”
“We always eat out there in the summer, and it’s just like an indoor living room except that the oak trees provide the roof.”
The ranch also has a two-story guest house/studio with a fireplace and a game room; stables where she has kept horses, and a number of giant oak trees, which Gray said are 700 years old.
Although she said that her home is “like a resort’s spa” with such amenities as a tennis court and a pool, she is quick to add that unlike homes in “Dallas,” her house is “not over the top.” Realtors describe it as “a rustic country estate.”
She recently remodeled and had a feng shui expert help in the design, which she said she also tried to make “environmentally correct” with such features as organic materials and skylights, to cut down on use of electricity.
“I’ve had the decorating bug,” she said, “and I’m eager to start brand new.”
Gray started out as a model and was the body double for the advertising poster of the 1967 movie version of “The Graduate.” She followed Kathleen Turner in London and on Broadway in the stage role. During the ‘90s, Gray guest starred as Heather Locklear’s mother on “Melrose Place” and starred in the spinoff series “Models Inc.” She also has appeared in many TV movies.
Claire and Toni Heebner of Coldwell Banker, Sherman Oaks, and Sonja Lindvall and Lil Kirk of Coldwell Banker Vista in Valencia share the listing.
Palisades home sold post-divorce
Nicole Kidman’s Pacific Palisades home, which she shared with Tom Cruise until they were divorced in 2001, closed escrow just before Christmas at $10.5 million.
The buyers are a dot-com businessman, who is on several boards of directors, and his wife. They already owned a couple of homes in the neighborhood when they bought Kidman’s.
The 1940s house, on nearly an acre behind gates at the end of a long driveway, has five bedrooms in about 7,600 square feet. Cruise purchased the home for about $4.7 million just before the actor and Kidman were married in 1990. The actress got the home and one in Sydney through the divorce.
Opting out of the game in Bel-Air
Georgia Frontiere, co-owner of the St. Louis Rams, has put her nearly 2-acre estate in Bel-Air on the market at $10.9 million.
Frontiere, one of only two female owners of a National Football League team and the only active woman owner, is selling because she is spending most of her time at her homes in St. Louis and Sedona, Ariz.
The Bel-Air home hasn’t been for sale in 30 years. The 10-bedroom, 10,000-square-foot-plus house, built in 1931, sits on park-like grounds with a tennis court and a pool. The house was designed by Paul Williams.
Frontiere made some alterations over the years, including the addition of a mini-kitchen in the master suite.
Frontiere, in her early 70s, inherited 70% of the Rams from her sixth husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, who died in 1979. She moved the Rams from L.A. to Anaheim in 1980, the same year she married Hollywood producer Dominic Frontiere, whom she divorced in 1988. She moved the Rams to her native St. Louis in 1995.
Loren Judd of Westside Estate Agency, Beverly Hills, and Joyce Rey of Coldwell Banker, Beverly Hills, share the listing.
Beanie Babies’ Ty adds to collection
Beanie Babies billionaire Ty Warner has had his $22-million backup offer accepted in the purchase of an oceanfront home in Montecito.
In addition to the $22 million, Warner is expected to pay $5.4 million to a prospective buyer who had the seven-bedroom, 14,000-square-foot home in escrow at $20 million.
The extra fee will include a commission for the original buyer’s agent, Rebecca Riskin of Village Properties.
The deal was struck earlier this month in a bankruptcy courtroom in Santa Barbara. Escrow is due to close in February on the home, which was originally listed at $21 million.
Warner owns another home in the area, which he bought for $8 million in 1999, and the Four Seasons Biltmore Resort in Montecito, which he purchased for $150 million in 2000. He owns the nearby San Ysidro Ranch, where John and Jacqueline Kennedy honeymooned, and the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. In November, he was in escrow to buy the $26-million, 18-hole oceanfront Sandpiper Golf Course near Goleta.
Warner, 57, is worth $7 billion to $8 billion, according to Forbes magazine. The marketing genius, who created the small bean-bag stuffed animals that sometimes sell for several thousands of dollars each, has been described as a reclusive tycoon but has been known to talk to Beanie Baby fans at trade shows and to appear publicly on behalf of his Santa Barbara properties.
He is considered a part-time Montecito resident. His Ty Inc. is based in Oak Brook, Ill., where he has had a modest home for years.
Ranch price cut to $29.5 million
Dr. Bernard Salick, who founded a chain of 24-hour cancer-care clinics that he sold in the mid-1990s for $480 million, has put his 92-acre horse ranch in Hidden Valley, near Thousand Oaks, on the market again, this time at $29.5 million.
It was listed in September 2001 with another realty firm at $50 million. Salick bought a 113-acre horse property in New York just before he listed his Hidden Valley ranch the first time.
The California property has three main houses, including a former residence of the late actor William Powell, who co-starred with Myrna Loy in the “Thin Man” movies of the 1930s and ‘40s. The ranch also has three guest houses, eight staff quarters and three ranch offices.
Among the horse breeding, training and competition facilities are an outdoor show-jumping grass field, a jumping arena, two regulation dressage fields and multiple barns.
Salick bought the California ranch as a place for his daughters to train for riding competitions. One of his daughters had bone cancer, which prompted Salick to develop the clinics that he sold. He is developing a national network of outpatient clinics specializing in cancer and cardiovascular treatment.
Myra Nourmand and Melody Rogers of Nourmand & Associates, Beverly Hills, have the listing. Rogers, who was co-host of a popular TV show called “Two on the Town” with Steve Edwards during the 1980s, teaches disabled children how to ride horses.
New owner for gum king’s home
Lawrence Hahn, an international distributor of women’s fragrances, has purchased a Beverly Hills home for about $11 million.
The house was built in 1989 by Bahador Mahboubi, the chewing-gum king from Iran who made a fortune buying Rodeo Drive real estate and building --with other members of his family -- the posh retail complex known as the Rodeo Collection.
It took Mahboubi, who introduced chewing gum to the Middle East in the 1940s, four years to build the eight-bedroom, 20,000-square-foot house on an acre with a pool and a tennis court, but he never occupied the estate.
It wasn’t occupied until a Santa Barbara businesswoman bought it in the summer of 2000 for $8 million.
Hahn, who developed his business in Atlanta during the 1970s, also sold his former five-bedroom home on the Westside. Its asking price was $6.5 million.
Stephen Resnick of Westside Estate Agency, Beverly Hills, represented Hahn in his transactions, and Joyce Flaherty of Coldwell Banker, Beverly Hills, represented the seller of the former Mahboubi home, sources said.
On ‘Wings’ to Palm Springs
David Lee, Emmy-winning creator and executive producer of “Frasier” and director and former producer of “Wings” and “Cheers,” has purchased a Palm Springs home owned at one time by composer Jerry Herman (“Hello, Dolly!,” “Mame”) and at another time by the late singer Dinah Shore.
The compound, on just more than an acre, sold for close to its asking price of $3.4 million.
The 7,000-square-foot compound was designed by modernist Donald Wexler and built for Shore in the early 1960s in the Old Las Palmas area of Palm Springs.
The property includes a main house with a master suite and a guest wing with three bedrooms and walls of glass. The compound also has a guest house, a 44-foot-long pool with a spa, a tennis court and pavilion.
Richard Cassese of the Beverly Hills office of DBL Realtors and Karen Joy of the firm’s Palm Springs office represented Lee in buying; Paul Moore and Gary Carlson of DBL Palm Springs had the listing.
