More Week End Catch Up: 03.01.13

Michael Jordan may have hung up his eponymous size thirteens almost a decade ago but the six-foot-six basketball superstar is still hauling in enough bank to maintain and grow a fat property portfolio. Indeed, recent reports by the dozen reveal Mister Jordan—who was just hit with a paternity suit from a woman who is not his fiancée and who claims her 16 year old son is his sire—dropped $2.8 million to acquire a 10,000-or-so square foot mansion out of foreclosure on Lake Norman in Cornelius, NC

The gated, two parcel spread occupies a private peninsula within the posh Peninsula Club golf community and totals just over an acre of boardwalk ringed lake frontage on three sides. The property had previously been owned by drag racer Doug Herbert who, apparently, could not or chose not to make his mortgage payments.

The three story mansion has six bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms, an impress the guests-style foyer, a double height great room and, on the lower  lake level, a recreation room with dance floor, a home gym and a spa room with sauna. Terraces cascade down the past the swimming pool to the lake's edge where there's a private dock for parking water craft.

Mister Jordan also owns a large house in Park City, UT and an even larger if not quite finished custom constructed mansion in a fancy gated golf enclave in Jupiter, FL as well as a pair of penthouse condos in Charlotte, NC, where's he's an majority owner of the local professional basketball team. He recently slashed the asking price of his custom built 56,000 square foot mega-compound in Highland Park, IL from $29 million to $21 million.

listing photos: Lake Norman Realty

Back in Beverly Hills, attorney and financier Leonard Ross has made his monstrous Mediterranean Revival-style residence available for lease at a rate of—Your Mama suggests you get a nerve pill down in you for this—$600,000. Per month. That's right, puppies, that's $7.2 million just to rent this house for one year.

Just to put that in a wee bit of financial perspective: A few quick tabulations with the beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals that a person who earns $10 an hour would need to work 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year for almost 29 years to earn single month's rent. That same worker would have to work at the same rate for 346 years to come up the the $7.2 for a full year's rent. You just watch, some free-spending gajillionaire from Kazahkstan, Abuja or Shanghai will probably not even bat an eye to drop that kind of dough to rent it for six months while his mistress shops, sunbathes and undergoes a battery of cosmetic treatments and enhancement by a scalpel and syringe wielding squadron made up of some of Beverly Hills' most successful and expensive doctors.

Anyhoo, the humongous house was designed by architect Gordon Kaufmann—he's the guy who designed Greystone, dontcha know—for banker Milton Getz in the mid 1920s. In 1946 silent movie superstar Marion Davies bought the house for $120,000 for her portly and very married man-friend, the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. He died in the house five years later. John and Jackie Kennedy spent part of their honeymoon at Beverly House and scenes from numerous movies including Fletch, The Bodyguard and The Godfather were filmed on the property.

We're not sure exactly how many bedrooms and bathrooms are in the massive and decadently decorated main mansion—the L.A. County Tax Man says it's 9 and 15—but we do know from online marketing materials that there is a 50 foot entrance hall, a living room with a 22-foot ceiling, a billiard room and a family room that spills out to a prairie-sized terrace capable of accommodating 400 for a sit-down dinner prepared in a commercial grade kitchen. There are also two projection rooms, an Art Deco night club, a gym and spa facilities.

In addition to the massive main mansion the historic 3.7 acre compound offers generous staff accommodations, a guest house above an 8-car garage, a separate security cottage, a separate two bedroom apartment and a two story gate house with four bedrooms and a kitchenette.

Mister Ross unsuccessfully tried to sell the estate in 2007 when he hoisted on the market with a vivaciously optimistic $165,000,000 asking price. Although it does not appear in the MLS as an active sale listing at least one listing accessible on the computer shows it's currently freighted with a much lower but still elephantine $115,000,000 price tag.

Hello? Did anyone call Tamara Ecclestone?

listing photos: Hilton & Hyland

Your Mama could not name even one movie in which she's appeared, hum the tune to a single song she's sung or otherwise name a any of her (no doubt copious) professional achievements. None the less, Haylie Duff—the older sister of Hilary—ranks high enough on the celebrity real estate meter that at least one property gossip reported this week that she sold her upscale but ho-hum house in L.A.'s star-studded Toluca Lake area in mid-February (2013) for $30,000 less than the $1,750,000 she paid for the five bedroom and six bathroom house in June 2008.

listing photos: John Aaroe Group

Although Your Mama first heard it from a real estate tattle tale we sometimes refer to as Ima B. Anupstatemary it was already reported in New York Magazine that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes—currently the publisher, editor in chief and majority owner of lefty-lib rag The New Republic—and his politically ambitious activist/investor husband Sean Eldridge scooped a very contemporary getaway in the tiny Upstate New York town of Shokan in the insanely scenic Catskills Mountains.

Your Mama has a couple of (very) tenuous tie ins to this property. Not only do we have a tattoo of an anchor—as does one of the sellers, the sometimes mustachioed advertising industry creative director Fritz Westenberger who custom built and co-owned the house with his former man-friend Patrick O'Neill—as it turns, out the house is just a short hop as the crow flies from the rustic farmhouse on 400 glorious acres above the Shokan Reservoir that Your Mama and a group of friends leased for a few years back in the mid 1990s. But, really, that's entirely irrelevant, isn't it?

Anyhoo, information provided by Mister Anupstatemary shows Mister Hughes and Eldridge paid $1,922,500—in cash—for the glassy two bedroom and two bathroom residence that Mister Westenberger told the New York Times in 2011 was inspired by the designs of modernist master Richard Neutra. The sleek and airy interior spaces are complemented on the outside with a negative edge swimming pool and panoramic views over the Shokan Reservoir to the distant Shawangunk Mountains.

The couple also own a loft in SoHo bought in 2010 for $5 million and an 80-acre estate in Garrison (NY), the same semi-rural, arty-farty and upscale community where Patty Hearst, Julie Taymor, Roger Ailes and (former New York) governor George Pataki all maintain residences.

listing photos: Eric Bean Real Estate / Coldwell Banker

And, finally, because we can not resist the melodramatic real estate plight of a rich lady, there's all the hullabaloo and legal brouhaha brewing between Showbiz widow Candy Spelling and the fit to be tied  landlord of her $28,000 per month rental at the swanky Carlyle building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Miz Spelling has been holed up in her rental at the Carlyle—the apartment house not the perfectly elegant New York City hotel—since she vacated The Manor, the 56,000 square foot neoclassical-ish pile she sold to Formula One racing heiress Petra Ecclestone last year for $85 million. She awaits the completion and decoration of the 16,000 square foot duplex penthouse at the newly erected Century building in the heart of Century City for which she paid an astonishing $47,000,000 back in 2008.

The landlord is spitting mad and claims in court documents that Miz Spelling remains illegally in residence beyond the terms of her lease that officially ended January 31 (2013). Miz Spelling asserts she arranged to extend her lease by six months and had, in fact, already made her February rent payment.

Will Candy vacate on her own volition? Will the landlord pursue legal remedy? Would a judge turn a multi-milionairess out on her keister and force her to take a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Where would she go? Could she move in with Tori and Dean and their 87 children? What real estate fate, children, does Miz Spelling face before she can, at long last, move into her $47 million dollar penthouse? Stay tuned...

exterior image: Carlyle on Wilshire