Once Again, He’s Going Elsewhere

Comedian and actor Howie Mandel and his wife, Terry, have put their Los Angeles-area home of a dozen years on the market at slightly more than $3 million.

The comic, 44, filled in earlier this month for Regis Philbin, who was on jury duty, as a host on the syndicated talk show “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.� Mandel, who will appear tonight onstage at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, temporarily stopped touring with his comedy act in 1998 to host “The Howie Mandel Show,� a daytime talk-variety TV show that was recently canceled.

The animated children’s series “Bobby’s World,� in which he does a number of voices, including Bobby’s and his dad’s, ran eight seasons on Fox and now appears in syndication in 65 countries. Mandel gained fame as a stand-up comic in L.A. before he co-starred in the Emmy-winning hospital series “St. Elsewhere� (1982-88).

The Mandels are planning to move to a Mediterranean-style house that is being built for them nearby.

Their French Country-style 9,000-square-foot home is on 1.5 acres with pastoral views. It has a seven-bedroom, 7.5-bath main house with cathedral ceilings and walls of glass plus a two-bedroom, two-bath guest house with a kitchen and a lounge-studio.

The grounds have a cabana and pool with a tunnel slide, waterfall and spa.

Bernard F. Uechtritz of Coldwell Banker Real Estate has the listing.

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The Brentwood home of the late J. Watson Webb Jr., a veteran film editor who also headed a museum of Americana created by his family in Vermont, has come on the market at $8.75 million. Webb died in June at 84.

He was the scion of a wealthy art-collecting family. His mother was the daughter of sugar tycoon Henry Osborne Havemeyer; his father was the grandson of railroad tycoon William H. Vanderbilt.

Webb, who once headed the editing department at 20th Century Fox, edited such films as “State Fair� (1945), “The Razor’s Edge� (1946), “A Letter to Three Wives� (1949), “Broken Arrow� (1950), “Cheaper by the Dozen� (1950) and “With a Song in My Heart� (1952).

He supported his mother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, in building the 45-acre Shelburne Museum for folk art and early Americana near Burlington, Vt. He succeeded his mother as president of the museum when she died in 1960 and headed it for 17 years before serving as chairman of the board until 1996.

Webb was also best man at the 1990 marriage of actor Robert Wagner and actress Jill St. John.

His home, on about 2.5 flat acres, includes a three-bedroom 6,000-square-foot house, which Webb, who never married, built in 1948. The grounds also have a pool and a tennis court.

An adjacent lot of more than an acre, which Webb also owned, is listed at $4.5 million.

Susan Keefer of Prudential-John Aaroe, Pacific Palisades, has the listings.

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David Saperstein, multimillionaire founder of Metro Networks, and his wife, Suzanne, have sold a 72-acre parcel to a group of investors for $12 million, sources have said.

The investors plan to develop a 12-lot residential community on the site near Beverly Park.

The Sapersteins once planned to build a horse facility for themselves on the Coldwater Canyon property but, after encountering strong neighborhood opposition, the couple decided to sell. They recently bought an 800-acre ranch in Simi Valley.

The Sapersteins are still building a 45,000-square-foot mansion on six acres in Holmby Hills, where they will have a ballroom large enough for a dinner party of 250, and they sold a nearby home for just under $5.7 million. They also have a home in Malibu.

Westwood One radio networks closed on its $1.2-billion stock purchase of Metro Networks in October, making it the No. 1 provider of traffic news. At the same time, David Saperstein, former chair and CEO of Metro Networks, joined the company’s board of directors and became the combined operation’s largest single investor.

Now in his late 50s, he got the idea for the Metro Traffic reports in 1978 when he was stuck in Baltimore traffic. He later expanded the company to include sports, weather and news.

Drew Mandile of Sotheby’s International Realty, Beverly Hills, handled the land transaction, other real estate sources said.

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Billionaire octogenarian Kirk Kerkorian’s first wife, Jean Kerkorian, has sold her home in Bel-Air in the mid-$4-million range, and she has moved to what real estate sources are describing as a $30-million mansion that she just built in the same area.

Jean and Kirk Kerkorian were married from 1954 until 1983. She is the mother of his two grown daughters, Tracy and Linda, whose names were combined for Kerkorian’s Las Vegas-based company, Tracinda.

Kirk Kerkorian, principal shareholder of MGM Grand Inc., is also building a house on the Westside, sources said. He was separated in September from former tennis pro Lisa Bonder, 33, the mother of his daughter born in 1998.

The 5,000-square-foot house that Jean Kerkorian sold is on about an acre and has a tennis court and a private drive.

Raymond Bekeris of John Bruce Nelson & Associates represented the buyer; Kathy Villa and Delphine Mann of Coldwell Banker Previews, Beverly Hills, had the listing, sources said.

The town of Samoa in Northern California is on the market and will be sold through a sealed-bid auction. Bids are due Sept. 15.

The price at which the seller is committed to sell with no contingencies is $1.75 million.

The town, near Eureka, dates to 1892, when it was promoted as the “Coney Island of the Pacific� because of its beachfront location on 60 acres overlooking the Pacific and Humboldt Bay. The town was called Samoa after the name appeared in local newspaper stories about warring chiefs in the Samoa islands.

Owned by Simpson Samoa Co., a Simpson Timber Co. subsidiary, the town has a Victorian-style inn, a restaurant, some commercial buildings, a women’s club, a gym, a post office and 98 houses, 90 of them rented for $350 to $800 a month.

The restaurant, the Samoa Cookhouse, is described as “the largest surviving loggers’ cook house in the West.� A tourist attraction, it serves more than 110,000 meals a year.

Realty Marketing/Northwest in Portland, Ore., is handling the auction.

Did you miss Thursday’s Hot Property column in Southern California Living? Want to see previous columns on celebrity real estate transactions? Visit http://ukobiw.net./hotproperty on the Internet for more Hot Properties. Ruth Ryon can be e-mailed at [email protected].