In Beverly Hills, ‘It’s Fat Cats vs. Fatter Cat’ : Neighborhoods: Residents such as Jack Lemmon say London financier’s 46,000-square-foot estate would overwhelm the area.

Neighborhood disputes hardly get any more basic than this: Rich guy buys a property and makes plans to build a house that would dwarf all the others on the block. The folks in the smaller houses raise a fuss and try to stop him.

But the lush northwest corner of Beverly Hills is no ordinary neighborhood. The smaller houses are certainly not small, and by no stretch are the people who live there little folks. The ones doing most of the fussing are actor Jack Lemmon, MCA President Sidney Sheinberg, Ticketmaster chief Fred Rosen and developer Stuart Ketchum.

The rich guy they are taking on is a low-profile London financier named Robert Manoukian, who wishes to build an 18-bedroom, 21-bathroom estate complex, with about 46,000 square feet of floor space--more than a football field--on a four-acre parcel on narrow, winding Tower Road.

The war of wit, wills and wallets began with preliminary hearings last summer and has raged unabated through eight public meetings. The ninth one will be on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, when the matter lands in the lap of the Beverly Hills City Council.

The council, apparently recognizing that the firepower of the combatants means that this is not a simple neighborhood squabble after all, has set aside nine hours over two nights for the hearing, and is braced for a crowd of up to 500 people in the city’s opulent Civic Center.

Lemmon and his neighbors, organized under the name Citizens for the Preservation of Beverly Hills, are trying to define the issue in broad terms, contending that stricter city regulations are needed to protect neighborhoods from being overwhelmed by out-of-scale new buildings. It is not simply a NIMBY (not in my back yard) issue, they insist, nor is it, in Lemmon’s words, just “a case of the fat cats being mad at a fatter cat.”

“When I moved into Beverly Hills over 30 years ago, I thought this is one of the most beautiful, small towns that I’ve ever been in, in my life, including Europe,” said Lemmon, whose house is about 6,000 square feet, and is next door to Manoukian’s property.

“It has done nothing but become uglier and uglier, thanks to the government of Beverly Hills.”

Taking full advantage of the star power in their midst, the Tower Road neighbors, with developer Ketchum the main strategist, have made Lemmon their principal spokesman. They also have hired a political consultant, gathered more than 8,000 petition signatures against the project (more than voted in the last municipal election), and sent out a slick, campaign-style mailer attacking the “Manoukian Entertainment Compound” to more than 12,000 registered voters.

Manoukian, said to be an intensely private man, is not trying to contest the fight in the court of public opinion. He has made no public appearances. He has retained two attorneys to speak for him and confined his battle to city hearings.

So who is he? According to one of his lawyers, Murray Fischer of Beverly Hills, he is a “good-looking, intelligent businessman in his mid-40s” who has maintained a part-time home in Beverly Hills for 14 years. At the public hearings on the project, Fischer has said Manoukian intends to live on the estate for just one to two months of the year with his 17-member extended family and about a dozen staff.

The lawyers decline to comment on Manoukian’s business dealings. Some have been as a real estate consultant to the Sultan of Brunei. Brunei is a tiny nation on the island of Borneo with large oil reserves, and publications that monitor such things regularly rank the sultan among the world’s wealthiest individuals. It was Manoukian who negotiated the sultan’s purchase of the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1987.

Manoukian first got his neighbors’ attention last year when he proposed a 59,000-square-foot estate in an area where homes of 5,000 to 8,000 square feet are the norm. (A conventional Los Angeles tract house is about 1,500 square feet.)

He won Planning Commission approval of the project in April after agreeing to pare it back to 46,000 square feet. The main house is to be 37,667 square feet, built in a classical style with stone columns and a copper roof. The remaining space is to be for staff quarters, a pool pavilion and garage.

His lawyers also agreed to surround the complex with dense landscaping to hide it from view, and accepted 81 conditions that regulate everything from the 2 1/2-year construction period to the number of parties that can be held each year once the home is finished.

Attorney Fischer said last week that he expects the City Council to approve the project because it complies with what is permitted under city codes.

“We haven’t thought beyond (the hearings) next Tuesday and Wednesday,” he said. “We will be prepared to present an honest depiction of the project and the facts, and answer the council’s questions.”

Lemmon and his neighbors have thought beyond Tuesday.

“We’ll give it our best shot, but we won’t quit,” Lemmon said. “If we have to sue, we will sue, we will continue. We will continue with every possible legal means and fight and fight and fight and fight.”

Lemmon contends that even the pared-down proposal is too massive for a neighborhood where many homes are one-tenth that size, and the traffic it will generate during construction and afterward is more than the neighborhood can bear.

And there’s no assurance, he said, that “quiet Mr. Manoukian” will stay there forever. “What’s going to happen if somebody else buys it and says, ‘Well, we’ve got three rock bands every night, come on up’?”

Beverly Hills real estate broker John Bruce Nelson, who said he negotiated the sale of the Tower Road property to Manoukian in 1988, said he does not think everyone in the city agrees with Lemmon.

The city has always had large homes, and this fight boils down to a case of Lemmon and his neighbors wanting to preserve their privacy, Nelson said.

Indeed, the city is home to the 46,000-square-foot Greystone Mansion, now a city park, on nearly 12 acres. Pickfair, the famed estate of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford a few streets away from Tower Road, has been virtually demolished and transformed into a 35,000-square-foot villa spread over 3.1 acres by actress-singer Pia Zadora and her husband, financier Meshulam Riklis. Nearby in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, producer Aaron Spelling has a 56,500-square-foot palace on six acres.

Meanwhile, City Council members have remained publicly quiet about the project.

“We’re approaching it as a brand-spanking new thing coming to us,” Mayor Maxwell Salter said. “Hopefully by the end of the second meeting, we’ll be able to come to a conclusion that’ll be as fair and as right as we can make it based on the laws.

“It’s a very emotionally charged issue where objectivity goes out the window,” Salter said. “It’s our job to bring it back.”