Tom Cruise Sells Beverly Hills Estate to Billionaire Financier Leon Black
SELLER: Tom Cruise
BUYERS: Leon and Debra Black
PRICE: reported to be about $40,000,000
SIZE: 10,286 square feet, 7 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms
YOUR MAMA’S NOTES: Last Fall this property heard word from impeccably plugged in snitches Ann T. Pasto and Our Fairy Godmother in Bel Air that Tom Cruise had surreptitiously engaged the services of at least one prominent real estate broker to quietly shop his Beverly Hills estate as a super-secret whisper listing with a price tag of about $50 million and today the celebrity gossip juggernaut TMZ reported the movie star is said to be in escrow to sell the heavily secured estate for around $40 million to conspicuously profligate private equity multibillionaire Leon Black. Mister Cruise and his third ex-wife, Katie Holmes, purchased the 1.3-acre spread in April 2006 for $30.5 million — the seller was Platinum Triangle real estate mover and shaker Kurt Rappaport who co-owns the prestigious Westside Estate Agency — and according to the L.A. County Tax Man’s records and other online resources the posh spread provides a 10,286-square-foot multi-winged manor house with seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms plus a motor court that circles up around a fountain, lighted tennis court with basketball hoops, lap-length swimming pool, children’s playground, and a couple of ancillary apartments for guests and/or staff.
The three-time Oscar nominee and outspoken Scientologist, now 53 and still a reliably bankable star — the latest installment of his high-octane “Mission: Impossible” franchise (“Rogue Nation”) has all by itself generated nearly more than $680 million dollars in worldwide box office receipts, has been much in the mood to lighten his once fat property portfolio. In 2013 he sold a 10th-floor condo at the American Felt Building in New York City’s East Village neighborhood for $3 million, last September (2015) he quietly unloaded a multi-residence compound above Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills for $11.4 million to “Telenovela” star Eva Longoria, and his rustic-luxe 298-acre compound in Telluride, CO, remains available on the open market at $59 million.
Mister Black, an art hoovering Manhattan-bred financier whose fortune is estimated at $4.7 billion — in 2012 he paid $119.9 million for Edvard Munch’s iconic “Scream” painting and the following year coughed up $47.9 million for a small drawing by Renaissance master Raphael, is certainly no stranger to the property gossip columns. In the fall of 2014 he and his wife, theater producer and dedicated melanoma activist Debra Black, paid London developer Christian Candy $50.25 million for a 30-room Italian Renaissance-style fixer-upper mansion on New York City’s Upper East Side and last year they shelled out $16.5 million for a 4,730-square-foot ocean-view condo at the sensually curvaceous Faena House in Miami Beach, FL, that’s likkety-split already back up for sale at $18.5 million. Our research indicates the Manhattan-based Blacks’ extensive private residential holdings also include a sprawling, full-floor co-operative apartment in a prestigious Park Avenue building along with a 100-plus-acre country estate in bucolic Bedford, NY, and a multi-residence compound in Southampton, NY, that spans 6.68 couldn’t-be-more-prime oceanfront acres.
Aerial photo: Pacific Coast News
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