Kevin Spacey Selling His Penthouse Spacey

SELLER: Kevin Spacey
LOCATION: Harrison Street, New York, NY
PRICE: $4,675,000 (taxes/maintenance=$2,489 per month)
SIZE: 2,363 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: Occupying the top 2 floors in this 5 apartment condo; A sprawling 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath duplex penthouse with every convenience you could ever want. A complete Crestron system controls the window shades, lighting, entertainment system and internet. The wrap around terrace has open views, built-in grill, planters at every turn, custom lighting, sound system, timed irrigation system and retractable awnings. A perfect oasis for outdoor dining and lounging.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: According to the always too well informed real estate gossip Braden Keil who pens the Gimme Shelter column for the New York Post, two-time academy award winning film actor and noted thespian Kevin Spacey has karate chopped the asking price of his TriBeCa digs from nearly $4,995,000 to $4,675,000. Now kids, we're not embarrassed to tell you this was entirely new news to Your Mama. Not only were we totally ignorant to the fact that Mister Spacey owns property in New York City, we also didn't know this duplex condominium–which we have actually viewed online several times because we're sorta fond of the layout and 900 square foot terrace–actually belongs to someone as rich, famous and sexually ambiguous as Mister Spacey.

Property records for the 2,363 square foot building topper that rides astride a small boo-teek building on Harrison Street are a bit murky...at least Your Mama found them to be a wee difficult to parse during the early morning pre-caffeine hours. Most records indicate that Mister Spacey purchased the 3 bedroom and 2.5 bathroom condo in August of 2000 for an undisclosed sum of money. However, we also find records that indicate he coughed up $3,135,000 for the place in October of 2004. So who knows? We're sure that Mister Big Time can sort that out with his exceedingly powerful Lexis Nexis thing and we'll just update the information then.

A quick glance at the photos and it's obvious Mister Spacey hired himself a nice gay decorator to fill his penthouse with sleek, expensive and mostly beige and brown furniture and cabinetry. While ordinarily Your Mama poo-poos an all beige color scheme, we can live with this one because we know deep down in the points of our art loving toes that this place would benefit greatly from some vividly colored paintings and over-saturated photographs.

The layout on the other hand we like quite a bit. The bottom of the stairs cascading directly into the elevator entrance concerns us because according to the feng shui that could encourage the owner's money to run right out the front door. Otherwise Your Mama is rather fond of the modest and comfortable scale of the rooms, the smart separation of public spaces from private ones, and most especially the location of the master bedroom on it's own private floor which means that guests and hosts, while literally on top of each other, are unlikely to feel that way...at least if proper soundproofing was put into the floors. Given that the apartment is kitted and fitted with a high powered and high cost Crestron system that listing information indicates controls everything but the kitchen sink, we can't imagine that Mister Spacey didn't properly insulate and soundproof.

Like dinner guests who have an unexpected onset of diarrhea, Your Mama is breathing a sincere sigh of relief that all the bathrooms have windows. While the closet space is somewhat limited for a full time resident, as a pied a terre there seems plenty of space to stash the cashmere coats and winter boots. We're not surprised the the natty dressing Mister Spacey chose to decrease the size of the bedroom area of the master in order to increase the closet space and create a small dressing area. Your Mama is of the mind set more square footage in master bedrooms ought to be devoted to closets and bathrooms than the actual bedroom area as all most people do in their bedrooms is sleep and fornicate.

The well planted and appointed wrap around terrace has both Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter swooning with envy. We love the small private terrace off the master bedroom and the built in barbecue that is noted in the listing is perfect for warm summers of grillin' and chillin' with all our tan and good looking lezbeeun ladee pals. The only feature that we think might make this roof top oasis even more enviable is an outdoor shower private enough that you're neighbors could not see you washing your naughty bits. Don't scoff children, there are more outdoor showers installed on roof top terraces in Manhattan than you might think.

Although Your Mama isn't a big fan of living in TriBeCa, it's become very popular among 30 something Wall Streeters with giant wads of cash as well as celebrities with similar sized bank accounts. None the less, Your Mama is just not certain if there is a nearby park where Mister Spacey can "walk his dog" at four in the morning.

Property records also show that Mister Spacey also owns a large home on Live Oak Drive in Los Feliz's The Oaks neighborhood that features an oval swimming pool and a long, tree lined celebrity style driveway. Given that he's also the Artistic Director of the legendary Old Vic Theatre Company in London, Your Mama imagines but can not confirm that he has a crib across the pond too.

David Geffen: Beach Hog

BUYER: David Geffen
SELLER: Peter Morton
LOCATION: Pacific Coast Highway
PRICE: $9,800,000
SIZE: 1,473 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama is a little late to the rodeo on this one, but since it involves a couple of big name property mavens in Malee-boo with biggest of bucks to trade properties as freely and easily as a couple of cock-eyed queens trading shade in a busted up bar in Birmingham, we figured we'd weigh in with some sass and salt.

The players are billionaire media mogul David Geffen and Hard Rock Café co-founder Peter Morton. Both gentleman currently own and occupy large Carbon Beach compounds comprised of multiple lots–two lots for Morton and four big ones for Geffen. Both also own several other properties in and around Malee-boo not to mention they live just a few hundred feet from each other as the crow flies...big bad Geffen in Bev Hills and Mister Morton in the Holmby Hills.

Anyhoo, back in March 1996 Mister Geffen bought an itty bitty 1,473 square foot oceanfront house with 45 feet fronting Carbon Beach for $1,230,000. He sold the two bedroom house in July of 1998 for an undisclosed price to a man named Richard Lovett, who happens to be the president of the ubiquitous and powerful artist management company Creative Artists Agency.

Time warp to February of 2007 when Mister Morton purchased the above mentioned property for a $10,500,000. Presumably Mister Morton leased the place out or maybe his son Harry, famous for founding the LA based Pink Taco restaurant chain and dating a pre-rehabbed Lindsay Lohan, shacked up there over the summer of 2007. Who knows? Who cares.

What is important here is that in early 2008 Mister Geffen agreed to purchase the teeny tiny two bedroom house for $9,800,000, which our bejeweled abacus tells us is $700,000 less than Mister Morton paid for the property just one year ago.

Your Mama is hard pressed to believe the house has lost $700,000 in value in the last year particularly given that the Malee-boo market hasn't exactly gone cold or stale in the midst of the mortgage meltdown sweeping other less desirable locales. So, our little pea brain says there might be more than meets our myopic eyeballs. It couldn't be that Mister Morton was just feeling charitable and decided to give the billionaire a big break, could it? Maybe Mister Morton is looking to show a large loss on his taxes? Could this parcel be part of some larger transaction between Mister Geffen and Mister Morton? Will Mister Geffen go on a buying spree in order to give Oracle founder and may-jor Malee-boo land owner Larry Ellison a run for his real estate money?

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

The house is reportedly leased and Your Mama checked with a few of our better connected sources along the Pacific Coast Highway and from what we hear, the tenant is not, unfortunately for the celeb obsessed children, famous.

UPDATE: Veronica Hearst

This morning we're going to engage in a little rumor and gossip. Did you hear that children? Ru-mor and gos-sip, so there isn't much here you should read as fact.

Over the last few days Your Mama has heard from no less than three New York City sources who all whispered the same thing: The real estate drama for the allegedly (April issue, page 38) financially strapped socialite Veronica Hearst has yet to come to an end. The children will recall that the Widow Hearst recently endured a nasty, prolonged and public foreclosure on Villa Venezia, the pa-lay-shul 52-room Palm Beach spread she and her late huzband, newspaper heir Randolph A. Hearst, purchased for nearly $30,000,000 just a few months before Mister Hearst was called by life's Editor in Chief. (The property has since been reportedly purchased by filthy rich financier Franklin Haney.)

First, Your Mama heard the rumor from The Fifth Avenue Flap Jaw that the co-op board of Miz Hearst's dignified and limestone clad building at 4 East 66th Street was quietly encouraging Miz Hearst to even more quietly sell her large apartment before another foreclosure fracas presented itself that might shine the kleig lights of publicity on the other discreet and ridiculously rich residents of the dee-luxe building, or even worse, allow an unwanted buyer to swoop in and purchase the posh co-op at auction thereby skirting the usual, byzantine and sometimes humiliating hoops of co-op board approval. Property records show other residents in the swanky building include Pharmaceutical honcho Howard Soloman, hedge hog Daniel Nir and Deutsche Bank director Kevin Parker and his wife Ulla. Our high society snitch, The Social Butterfly, told us ages ago that Texas based billionaires Sid and Mercedes Bass also maintain a residence in the building.

Next we heard from someone we'll call Yelena Yaksitup who whispered to Your Mama that she heard an unsubstantiated rumor that the Widow Hearst's apartment had already been sold...for $31,000,000. Property records do not reveal a sale and we are somewhat skeptical if only because we're hard pressed to believe we'd get scuttlebutt this scandalous before the much more established real estate gossips in New York City. None the less, the $31,000,000 number does sound about what Your Mama would expect the (approx.) 8,000 square foot full floor co-op overlooking Central Park would fetch if it were to be sold.

After hearing what Yelena and Flap Jaw had to say, Your Mama got on the horn with The Social Butterfly who made a few discreet inquiries with some of her more hoity toity acquaintances and reported back that the ladees in Balmain suits who lunch at Swifty's and Michael's haven't heard a thing about this particular real estate rumor and doubt very seriously that Miz Hearst would give up her apartment unless she was dead or being dragged out kicking and screaming in all 7 of the languages she speaks.

Let's be real children. Despite that uglee foreclosure bizness in Florida, neither Your Mama nor anyone else besides Miz Hearst and her team of accountants and attorneys has any inkling about Miz Hearst's financial (in)stability or exposure. Just because it has been reported that she put up the Fifth Avneu apartment as collateral for the massive loans she took from New Stream Capital, the reality could easily be that Miz Hearst still has more money than Your Mama and most of the children...combined. Although it does take big buckets of bucks to live a life of private planes, couture lunching suits and multiple residences with outrageous tax and maintenance bills, just because she couldn't afford to keep Villa Venezia, does not automatically infer that she can't well afford to keep her Fifth Avenue digs and/or her 45 acre estate in New Castle, NY.

However, if the scuttlebutt is true and the Widow Hearst's bank accounts are gasping for air, Your Mama advises that the ladee either marry well, again, or sell her big ticket properties and pay cash for something small and chic at the Sherry Netherland and perhaps treat herself to a petite pied a terre in Paris. Who needs the nonsense of constant debt restructuring and refinancing not to mention public and private chatter among her couture clad crew just to be able to maintain the image of massive wealth? It just ain't worth it.

For those of the children that do not already know, Miz Hearst's decadent digs on Fifth Avenue were exquisitely done up and did over by (now deceased) Italian trompe l'oeil genius and master of interior decorating fakery Renzo Mongiardino, a man who could (and did) make cardboard look like butter soft and aged calf skin and then meticulously installed it in some of the finest homes in the world.

The photos above show Miz Hearst's Fifth Avenue crib and were shot sometime in 2007 for the large format fashion glossy V Magazine. In the article, Miz Hearst's gal about town in a good pair of shoos daughter Fabiola Beracasa is interviewed and featured in additional and fun photos inside mommy's lavish apartment slouching on spectacular and exceptionally upholstered red velvet brocade chairs as well as straddling an ancient stone horse while standing on a gilded commode. Good stuff, children, have a look-see for a glimpse of how the young and entitled in New York City get by.

And remember kids, for now this is just rumor and gossip...rumor and gossip.