End of Week Pick Up: Georges Marciano

SELLER: Georges Marciano
LOCATION: Beverly Hills, CA
PRICE: $24,500,000
SIZE: 19,590 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: This one's for all the children out there who relish in a tetch of schadenfreude with their high-cost real estate scuttlebutt.

All the international property gossips' tongues have been waggingthis week over the Beverly Hills (CA) estate of legally and financially embattled businessman Georges Marciano popping up on the open market as part of a bankruptcy sale with an asking price of $24,500,000.

Mister Marciano made the bulk of fortune as one of the co-founding brothers of the wildly successful Guess clothing company. He's the man most often credited with creating the company's iconic—and still-relevant if not fully fresh—boobs-and-bombshell-meets-noir-film advertising aesthetic that successfully branded the company in the 1980s with glamazon supermodels like Claudia Schiffer and Anna Nicole Smith.

He cashed out his nearly quarter-billion dollar stake in the company in 1993 and invested in various (commercial) real estate enterprises including the Bank of America tower in downtown Beverly Hills, sold in 2005 for about $135,000,000. He lived large and spent big. He shelled out more than sixteen million bucks on a 84-plus carat diamond (now called The Chloe Diamond after his daughter) and amassed a vast collection of contemporary art. The ubiquitous, roofless tour vans that put-put around the Platinum Triangle on every day of the week would frequently pause out front of the gates so gawkers could catch a glimpse through the gates of the fleet of Ferraris maintained by Mister Marciano and frequently lined up in an orderly row in the driveway in the front of his big ol' beast of a house in Beverly Hills he bought in October 1988 for an unknown (but no doubt substantial) amount of moolah.

Alas, the mighty sometimes fall. Sometimes they cut the noses off their own faces and sometimes, depending on one's point of view, they have their proverbial legs chopped off at the knees.

Several years ago, in the aftermath of a bitter 2004 divorce, an increasingly erratic Mister Marciano filed suit against a group of former employees whom he accused of looting money, wines and artwork. The suit back fired big time. Not only did forensic accounting not show any financial misconduct on the part of the former employees, the accused group counter sued for libel and won a staggering $425,000,000 judgement against Mister Marciano who shockingly and inexplicably made a silly run for the California governorship while all this was going down. 

Mister Marciano, legally on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars, went on the lamb for a little bit. In a 2009 article in the L.A. TimesMister Marciano's spokeswoman claimed she herself did not know where he was living. He eventually popped up in Montreal where he opened a LHotel, a boutique hotel in Old Montreal filled to the rafters with the blue chip artwork that used to fill his Beverly Hills mansion.

Even before his ruinously costly legal imbroglio, Mister Marciano wanted to sell his grand, Italian-style pile in Beverly Hills. It was listed for six months in 2005 and again in January 2007 when it appeared on the open market with an asking price of $28,000,000.

In the early days of 2012 Your Mama heard through the Platinum Triangle real estate gossip grapevine the estate was being shopped off-market with a $32,000,000 price tag. With no takers at that sky-high price the property was officially put on the open market last week with a much lower price tag of $24,500,000. Listing information and previous reports on the matter reveal the property is being sold on behalf of Mister Marciano as part of involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings related to the aforementioned, nearly half billion dollar judgement.

Designed and built in 1927 by Robert D. Farquhar, the palatial palazzo has been home to a number of Hollywood hot shots including Showbiz pioneer Harry Cohn, the famously tyrannical co-founder of Columbia Pictures. Mister Cohn reportedly sold the estate to powerful Tinseltown talent agent Johnny Hyde who, while in his mid-70s, took a Svengali-like personal and professional interest in Marilyn Monroe.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, we were recently told by a Britnni Britannica, a gal pal with an encyclopedic knowledge of historical homes in Los Angeles, the grand mansion was owned by 1960s and 70s ears talk show host Mike Douglas who allowed the house to be photographed for Architectural Digest. Miss Britannica and another historically-minded gal pal Helen A. Hightower told also us the house itself—not the finishes and day-core but the architecture and layout—are almost identical to that of Owlwood, the legendary Holmby Hills mansion formerly owned by Tony Curtis and Cher and now owned by the widow of mortgage industry billionaire and diplomat Roland Arnall.

Current listing information shows Mister Marciano's estate spans 2.05 high-profile acres in an especially desirable pocket of Beverly Hills where, should one choose, it's just a short one (long) block walk to Your Mama's favorite (if hideously expensive) luncheon spot in Los Angeles, The Beverly Hills Hotel.

Goldie Hawn Re-Lists Malibu White Elephant

SELLERS: Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell
LOCATION: Malibu, CA
PRICE: $11,200,000
SIZE: 4,195 square feet, 4 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms 

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Poor Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Despite a lot of Buddhist-looking gewgaws and doo-dads they just don't seem to have very good real estate karma when it comes to the Zen-ed out, late-1970s contemporary on Malibu's Broad Beach they've been trying to rent and/or sell for about as long as Your Mama has been slinging dirt about celebs and their real estate activities.

In May 2007 and again in May 2008 the Tinseltown icons put their 4 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom beach house out for lease at $95,000 per month. By the summer of 2010 they'd dropped the asking price to $80,000 and put the (approximately) 4,195 square foot residence up for sale with an asking price of $14,749,000.

This May, the real estate merry-go-round has brought the Russell-Hawn beach house back for lease at $80,000 per month—no pets, please—and they've tossed their real estate albatross back on the market with a significantly lower asking price of $11,200,000.

A lush courtyard connects the detached triple car-garage to a double-height foyer that steps down to an ocean-side living room with vaulted ceiling, fireplace, wet bar area (with unfortunate and upsetting tented ceiling treatment), and more candles than a Catholic church. The adjoining, ocean side dining room opens to a well-equipped center island kitchen outfitted with all the high-end finishes and commercial-style stainless steel appliance to be expected in an 11-plus million dollar beach house.

Upstairs, the voluminous, ocean-facing master bedroom has a vaulted wood ceiling, river rock fireplace, private ocean-side terrace, large closet and bathroom finished with Chinese onyx. The main residence encompasses, as best as we can surmise form listing information, two more guest suites (one up, one down), a Creston powered media room (just off the entry) and what listing information describes as a "fab office" with built-in, U-shaped work space. The detached guest house above the garage has a second kitchen, an exercise room and a meditation space that looks like it's marinated in incense and can, as per listing information, do double-duty as a guest bedroom.

The back wall of the house, a towering wall of smoked glass, looks out and opens to a large ocean side entertainment and dining terrace protected from the prying eyes of paps and beach goers by rolling sand dunes. One side of the terrace is anchored by a built-in grilling station and the other by a carved wood pergola probably antique and probably imported from a shrine of some sort in Bombay or Jakarta. Thickets of tropical foliage frame the postcard perfect view past the picket fence and over the sand dunes towards the melodramatic magnificence of the Pacific Ocean.

A few of the other high-profile peeps who own ocean front homes along Broad Beach—punished in some sections by a serious erosion issue—include Steven Spielberg, Jami Gertz, Ray Romano, PierceBrosnan, Mike Ovitz, Danny Devito and Rhea Pearlman, Dustin Hoffman, Marvel Studios magnate Avi Arad, tool and die tycoon EricSmidt and money manager Mark Attanasio. 

Mister Russell and Miz Hawn's main residence in Los Angeles sits just 22 (or so) miles to the east behind an electronic gate and high hedges in the heart of the low-key but very ritzy Riviera area of Pacific Palisades. The bought the nearly 6,000 square foot spread for $4,124,591 in August 2004, a few months before they sold the much larger mansion across the street to comedian Adam Sandler for $12,000,000. Daughter Kate Hudson and English man-friend/baby daddy Matt Bellamy—the sprite-like lead singer of Muse—live a few blocks away in a star-style compound comprised of two side-by-side mansions.

Mister Russell and Miz Hawn also maintain a penthouse in Midtown Manhattan (bought June 1998 for $3,850,000), a lake-front compound in  Rosseau, Ontario, Canada, and a 70-or-so-acre compound just outside Snowmass, CO with two large residences, several barns, at least three ponds and one tennis court and swimming pool.