SELLER: Candice BergenLOCATION: Beverly Hills (Post Office), CA
PRICE: $10,250,000
SIZE: 5,000 square feet (approx.), 3 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Yesterday, while sitting on our back deck, picking our toenails and minding our own damn beeswax, Your Mama received a covert communique from a gentleman we'll call Leonard Leaksthenews who directed us towards an off-market listing for a sprawling compound in the Beverly Hills Post Office owned by actress/comedian/all around classy ladee Candice Bergen. Information Your Mama squeezed out of the interweb shows that the pretty property was quietly shopped around for $10,250,000. Although property records do not yet reveal a transaction or sale price, Your Mama hears from a second well connected informant we'll call Whispering Winnie, that Miz Bergen's Bev Hills Post Office compound is already done been sold.
Miz Bergen, the daughter of famed ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and actress Frances Bergen, was born of privilege and raised with a silver spoon in her mouth in the rarefied clime of Beverly Hills, CA where she was from the get-go swept up into the world of the famous and rich. As a wee, well groomed lassie of 9, and despite her famous father having a word with Walt Disney himself, little Candy Bergen was turned down for a spot on The Mickey Mouse Club. However, her showbiz career has only been uphill since that initial rejection from the mouse man. Her early films included two with lesbian story lines (The Group and The Adventurers) as well as a role in Mike Nichols' sexed up film Carnal Knowledge. In 1975 Miz Bergen became the first female to host Saturday Night Live and in 1979 she was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in Starting Over.
The sophisticated and obviously intelligent Miz Bergen is perhaps–for better or worse–best known for her 10 year long run from 1988 to 1998 as the sassy journalist Murphy Brown on the Murphy Brown sitcom, a role that earned her 5 Emmy awards and the ire of that ridiculous Dan Quayle who criticized Miz Bergen's character for having a baby out of wedlock. After a long, cool streak with small roles in films and tee-vee programs Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, Sex and the City, and The Women, Miz Bergen eventually landed on the now canceled comedy-drama hybrid Boston Legal on which she played tough talking attorney Shirley Schmidt to weird and wacky William Shatner's buffoonish Denny Crane.
From 1980 until his death in 1995, Miz Bergen was married to the iconic and enormously respected 3-time Oscar nominated film director Louis Malle (Vanya on 42nd Street, Au revoir les enfants, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre, Murmur of the Heart). Miz Bergen and Mister Malle made one baby together, a girl by the name of Chloë Malle who happens to be the New York Observer's current (celebrity) real estate gossip queen who also pens the occasional smart art review for The Daily Beast.
Property records and previous reports show that Miz Bergen bought her Beverly Hills Post Office property in May of 1996 for $3,100,000. Listing information for the perfectly private compound, located in a private community with a guard who sits in his cruiser and relies mostly on the stink eye to keep non-residents out of the 'hood, shows the gated (approximately) 3-acre estate has a hacienda style main casa that contains approximately 5,000 square feet with 3 bedrooms and 4.5 poopers plus a fully detached guest casa that encompasses an additional 2,000 square feet with another 3 bedrooms and 2 poopers.
The tile-roofed and vine laden residence includes various rooms with hardwood, tile and brick floors, vaulted ceilings with hand-painted beams, lots of books and landscape paintings, and a boat load of upholstered furniture with rolled arms with cushioned backs and a bevy of decorative needlepoint cushions. Altogether is has the distinct aura of being the country house of a sophisticated and cultured individual largely uninterested in hollow shine of glamour or current trends in interior day-core, which is–rightly or wrongly–exactly how Your Mama thinks of the urbane and accomplished Miz Bergen.
The expansive, park-like grounds contain a black-bottom, free form swimming pool and spa, brick dining terraces, vine shrouded patios, rolling lawns, lush gardens, mature shade trees, a gazebo, and a north/south situated tennis court.
Miz Bergen's soon to be former compound is located in the same celebrity packed private community as music mogul Guy Oseary, frozen faced ack-tress Nicole Kidman and her country crooning huzband Keith Urban, bling queen Kimora Lee Simmons Hansou and her real estate mistake, down on her professional luck singer Jessica Simpson, reggae scion Ziggy Marley, actor turned pro poker player Gabe Kaplan (Welcome Back, Kotter), lezbionic actress Sara Gilbert (Roseanne) and her ladee-mate writer/producer Allison Adler (Still Standing, Family Guy), and Craig Ellwood's Case Study House #17 now owned by by a Beverly Hills surgeon.
Above and beyond her Bev Hills Post Office compound, Miz Bergen has an interesting real estate history and a rather porcine real estate portfolio full of pricey properties. In the late 1960s Miz Bergen, then Miss Bergen, lived in sin with legendary record producer Terry Melcher. Together they lived at 10500 Cielo Drive. After deciding to decamp to the then bohemian beach enclave of Malee-boo, the Ceilo Drive property was leased to film director Roman Polanski and his wife, up and coming actress Sharon Tate (The Beverly Hillbillies, Rosemary's Baby, Valley of the Dolls). The rest, thanks to Charlie Manson, Tex Watson, and their band of batty babes, is the famous and tragic story of a demented cult personality run totally amuck.
Property records and previous reports reveal that Miz Bergen and her second huzband, wildly rich real estate developer/arts supporter Marshall Rose, also own a 4 bedroom and 3 pooper property in Montecito, CA as well as a hideaway on a particularly posh lane in East Hampton, NY. When in New York City, the cosmopolitan couple make their home at the ludicrously la-di-da cooperative apartment house at 1040 Fifth Avenue.
The children will recall that 1040 Fifth is the very same building to where former first ladee Jackie Kennady Onassis moved shortly after her husband the President was gunned down in Dallas. The children may also remember or be interested in knowing that 1040 Fifth is where zinc king William "Bill" Flaherty and his sassy, soon to be ex-wife Clementina "Tina" have their palatial penthouse on the market with an asking price of $32,000,000–reduced from $43,000,000–and where Edgar Bronfman, Jr. spent $19,500,000 on a 10th floor spread in January of 2008 and without ever moving a stick of furniture into it, flipped it in September of 2008 for $21,000,000 to financier Thomas Lehrman.
Ten-forty Fifth is also the same building where very young hedge hog Scott Bommer sold his 14th floor crib in late 2007 to real estate executive Jeff Blau so that he and his wife Donya could move into the titanic doo-plex penthouse digs they'd bought a few doors up, at the equally insanely expensive 1060 Fifth Avenue in January of 2008 for a skin melting $46,000,000. But alas, before the ink on the deed even had a chance to dry, those crazy Bommers caught a classic case of The Real Estate Fickle and flipped the behawtcha in July 2008 for $48,836,000.
As usual we digress and we have exhausted ourselves so, as Belma Buttons and Tovah McQueen so eloquently say, "We. Are. Through."
No comments:
Post a Comment