$150M buys you late TV producer's L.A. mansion

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g3xq9KyCRMkxjtqUBjchzzXcY9_QD9767T3O2

$150M buys you late TV producer's L.A. mansion
By ALEX VEIGA
1-27-9

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The widow of producer Aaron Spelling is placing "The Manor" in the exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood on the market for a jaw-dropping $150 million, making it by far the most expensive home for sale in the U.S.

The French chateau-style mansion has 56,500 square feet of space on more than 4.6 acres and is the largest home in Los Angeles County. Among the neighbors are the Los Angeles Country Club and, not too far away, the Playboy Mansion.

Candy Spelling's late husband produced hit shows such as "Charlie's Angels," "Dynasty" and "Beverly Hills 90210." He died in 2006.

"Everything there is glamorous, and is luxurious and it's really great scale," said Sally Forster Jones, an agent with Coldwell Banker Previews International in Los Angeles, which is co-listing the property. "There really is nothing to compare it to."

Candy Spelling told The Associated Press that she let her dog Madison, a soft-coated Wheaten Terrier, help pick out the best real estate agent for the task. She had her security bring the dog into the room every time she met one of the candidate agents and watched how the dog reacted. If Madison didn't like them, Spelling crossed them off the list.

Prospective buyers won't have to worry about passing such scrutiny, Spelling jokes.

"Not at all," she says.

The three-story mansion, built in 1991, is gated and features a winding driveway that leads up to the three-story house, which includes ceilings that reach up to 30 feet high, Jones said.

While some published reports put the tally of rooms in the mansion at well past 100, Jones couldn't provide an exact count.

Spelling says she doesn't know either.

"You're really asking the wrong person," Spelling jokes. "There's a lot. (The house) has evolved and I actually haven't gone around and counted."

The Spellings found no shortage of uses for the many rooms in the mansion, however.

There's a bowling alley, wine cellar, wine tasting room, gift-wrapping room, a humidity-controlled silver storage room, China room, library, gym and media room, among many others.

The screening room is one of Spelling's favorites.

"I had some really wonderful times entertaining in that room," she said. "We showed movies and I still do."

The room features a movie projection system that automatically comes up from the floor at the same time that shades extend over the windows. It's an idea that came to Candy Spelling in dream as she sought to avoid having a projection screen open all the time.

"I wanted Aaron to have the best projection room anyone had ever seen, and the biggest, so I came with this solution, not realizing that we had to excavate a lot of dirt to get down that low, to have a special room that housed the screen that was totally dust free," said Spelling, 63.

The Spellings also finished the 17,000 square-foot attic that includes a barber shop and beauty salon.

The home also includes a wing for service staff, including a kitchen and seven bedrooms, and five fireplaces and four wet bars.

Lavish features also can be found outside the house, including a tennis court, fountains, a waterfall, a pool and spa, a reflection pool and a pool house with a kitchen, and 16 car ports.

The estate also boasts an 18th Century-style garden, a rooftop rose garden and a citrus orchard.

Prospective buyers won't have to worry much about parking when they host big parties. The property includes a winding motor court with space for more than 100 cars.

Spelling plans to trade her mansion lifestyle for a luxurious, two-story condo atop a residential tower in Los Angeles that she bought last year for $47 million.

"I have a lot of wonderful, wonderful, wonderful feelings about this house and special things that I went through in building it, with a love that you can't even imagine," she gushed. "Yet I feel like I'm moving on to a new chapter in my life."

1950s pinup model Bettie Page dies in LA at 85

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jJ82vzTJfZkwzNZMVZhni6WG9D5wD950V02G0

1950s pinup model Bettie Page dies in LA at 85
By BOB THOMAS
12-11-8

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bettie Page, the 1950s secretary-turned-model whose controversial photographs in skimpy attire or none at all helped set the stage for the 1960s sexual revolution, died Thursday. She was 85.

Page was placed on life support last week after suffering a heart attack in Los Angeles and never regained consciousness, said her agent, Mark Roesler. He said he and Page's family agreed to remove life support. Before the heart attack, Page had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia.

"She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," Roesler said. "She is the embodiment of beauty."

Page, who was also known as Betty, attracted national attention with magazine photographs of her sensuous figure in bikinis and see-through lingerie that were quickly tacked up on walls in military barracks, garages and elsewhere, where they remained for years.

Her photos included a centerfold in the January 1955 issue of then-fledgling Playboy magazine, as well as controversial sadomasochistic poses.

"I think that she was a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact on our society," Playboy founder Hugh Hefner told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She was a very dear person."

Page mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for decades, during which time she battled mental illness and became a born-again Christian.

After resurfacing in the 1990s, she occasionally granted interviews but refused to allow her picture to be taken.

"I don't want to be photographed in my old age," she told an interviewer in 1998. "I feel the same way with old movie stars. ... It makes me sad. We want to remember them when they were young."

The 21st century indeed had people remembering her just as she was. She became the subject of songs, biographies, Web sites, comic books, movies and documentaries. A new generation of fans bought thousands of copies of her photos, and some feminists hailed her as a pioneer of women's liberation.

Gretchen Mol portrayed her in 2005's "The Notorious Bettie Page" and Paige Richards had the role in 2004's "Bettie Page: Dark Angel." Page herself took part in the 1998 documentary "Betty Page: Pinup Queen."

Hefner said he last saw Page when he held a screening of "The Notorious Bettie Page" at the Playboy Mansion. He said she objected to the fact that the film referred to her as "notorious," but "we explained to her that it referred to the troubled times she had and was a good way to sell a movie."

Page's career began one day in October 1950 when she took a respite from her job as a secretary in a New York office for a walk along the beach at Coney Island. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs admired the 27-year-old's firm, curvy body and asked her to pose.

Looking back on the career that followed, she told Playboy in 1998: "I never thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It's just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous."

Nudity didn't bother her, she said, explaining: "God approves of nudity. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds."

In 1951, Page fell under the influence of a photographer and his sister who specialized in S&M. They cut her hair into the dark bangs that became her signature and posed her in spiked heels and little else. She was photographed with a whip in her hand, and in one session she was spread-eagled between two trees, her feet dangling.

"I thought my arms and legs would come out of their sockets," she said later.

Moralists denounced the photos as perversion, and Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Page's home state, launched a congressional investigation.

Page quickly retreated from public view, later saying she was hounded by federal agents who waved her nude photos in her face. She also said she believed that, at age 34, her days as "the girl with the perfect figure" were nearly over.

She moved to Florida in 1957 and married a much younger man, as an early marriage to her high school sweetheart had ended in divorce.

Her second marriage also failed, as did a third, and she suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1959, she was lying on a sea wall in Key West when she saw a church with a white neon cross on top. She walked inside and became a born-again Christian.

After attending Bible school, she wanted to serve as a missionary but was turned down because she had been divorced. Instead, she worked full-time for evangelist Billy Graham's ministry.

A move to Southern California in 1979 brought more troubles.

She was arrested after an altercation with her landlady, and doctors who examined her determined she had acute schizophrenia. She spent 20 months in a state mental hospital in San Bernardino.

A fight with another landlord resulted in her arrest, but she was found not guilty because of insanity. She was placed under state supervision for eight years.

"She had a very turbulent life," Todd Mueller, a family friend and autograph seller, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She had a temper to her."

Mueller said he first met Page after tracking her down in the 1990s and persuaded her to do an autograph signing event.

He said she was a hit and sold about 3,000 autographs, usually for $200 to $300 each.

"Eleanor Roosevelt, we got $40 to $50. ... Bettie Page outsells them all," he told The AP last week.

Born April 22, 1923, in Nashville, Tenn., Page said she grew up in a family so poor "we were lucky to get an orange in our Christmas stockings."

The family included three boys and three girls, and Page said her father molested all of the girls.

After the Pages moved to Houston, her father decided to return to Tennessee and stole a police car for the trip. He was sent to prison, and for a time Betty lived in an orphanage.

In her teens she acted in high school plays, going on to study drama in New York and win a screen test from 20th Century Fox before her modeling career took off.

Associated Press writers Denise Petski and Raquel Maria Dillon contributed to this report.

Playboy Mansion to open in Macau

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070627/ap_on_re_as/macau_playboy_mansion

Playboy Mansion to open in Macau
By MIN LEE, AP Entertainment Writer
Wed Jun 27, 2007

Hugh Hefner is planning to open a Playboy Mansion in the burgeoning gambling mecca of Macau, complete with female "bunny" dealers, a villa-style hotel and several dozen gaming tables, his daughter said.

The 40,000-square-foot Playboy Mansion Macau, scheduled to open in late 2009, will give Hefner's company a key foothold in China after a failed attempt several years ago to build a club in Shanghai, which some blamed on the Chinese government's conservative line on public morality.

Macau, located an hour by high-speed ferry from Hong Kong, has seen its gambling revenue grow rapidly since the government ended a monopoly in 2002, letting in Las Vegas casino brands like Wynn, Sands and Venetian.

As the only place on Chinese soil where gambling is legal, Macau draws many tourists from the mainland who can't bet at home. It overtook the Las Vegas strip in gaming revenue last year.

"Asia ... is a very important region for us," Christie Hefner, head of Playboy Enterprises Inc., told reporters Tuesday.

The company is attempting to rebound after reporting a loss in 2005 and earning profits of only $2.3 million in 2006. Christie Hefner said 40 percent of the $800 million made in retail consumer sales last year came from Asia.

The Playboy Mansion Macau, styled after the original Playboy Mansion in the U.S., will follow the company's planned opening of a club at the Palms Resort in Las Vegas in October. Christie Hefner declined to say how much the new mansion will cost.

Plans for Playboy's Shanghai club fell apart in 2004 ostensibly over a disagreement between investors and local officials over how to value the amount of the investment, although some questioned whether it had to do with the company's racy reputation.

While Playboy can sell men's clothing in China, its magazine is officially banned.