Monday, Jul 7, 2008
Wilt the Stilt's kinky bachelorium ready for the right buyer. Plus: What's that big diamond doing on Britney's finger?
Aug 3, 2001 | Those of you who thought the appointments at Charlie Sheen's up-for-sale bachelor pad were over the top might wanna show up at the next open house for Wilt "The Stilt" Chamberlain's hilltop manse, which also happens to be on the market.
Not surprisingly, the late, legendary basketball player and alleged lover of 20,000 women apparently had a little help from his house when it came to slam-dunking in the seduction department.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Chamberlain's Bel-Air estate has a bedroom that is, metaphorically speaking, all net. The three-level, partially glass-walled triangular room peaks at the bed, which at one point was covered, headboard to baseboard, in the fur of "Arctic wolves' noses." Above the bed is a mirrored ceiling, natch, which retracts to allow loungers to gape at the stars. (Chamberlain named the estate "Ursa Major," inspired by his own nickname, the Big Dipper.) A control center within arm's reach of the bed allowed Chamberlain to dim the lights or get things moving in the quick-filling, sunken, 18-karat-gold-tiled, Roman-style bathtub at his feet.
Chamberlain said he wanted the house to embrace dirt, but the bedroom alone offers many options for getting clean and watching yourself do it -- including a mirrored triangular shower with separate his and hers entrances and presided over by a scarlet-red skylight.
And that was just one setting for Chamberlain's '70s-style lovin'. According to the Times, there was also a "playroom" with a wall-to-wall waterbed floor, a guest room featuring a wall relief of a nekkid woman (a light switch positioned where a fig leaf might be) and a bedroom outfitted with a traffic light indicating "love" in green and "don't love" in red.
If this dicor, which Chamberlain himself called "kinky," gets your juices flowing, you might be able to snap this place up at the bargain basement price of $4.3 million -- down from the original asking price of $7.4 million.
The house is a "pretty sexy place," Chamberlain's friend and executor, Sy Goldberg, tells the L.A. Times.
It "has the cachet of being a house where a famous man who had a lot of women lived," he says. "If that makes some people uncomfortable, they're not the right people to buy the house."
Mirrored shower, anyone?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Like a rock
"He's not dumb."
-- Sheryl Crow, singing the praises of her ex-boyfriend Kid Rock, in Esquire.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Who will be ... The Weakest Brady?
Will Cindy freeze up when the cameras click on? Will Peter's voice break in the middle of answering a question? Will Greg argue with Anne Robinson over the meaning of her "exact words"?
The mind reels at the possibilities that might befall the lovely lady and her six very lovely kids (and cute adopted cousin) as "The Brady Bunch" visits "The Weakest Link."
You heard me right. Robinson will get her crack at all the living members of the Brady family (Robert Reed, dead these several years, who played paterfamilias Mike Brady, will not be there, of course) this fall, USA Today reports. The competition will mark the first time the entire cast has reunited on TV since 1980, when the very special "The Brady Girls Get Married" aired.
Under the black-clad British host's disdainful gaze, Florence Henderson (Carol), Barry Williams (Greg), Christopher Knight (Peter), Mike Lookinland (Bobby), Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Eve Plumb (Jan), Susan Olsen (Cindy) and Robbie Rist (Cousin Oliver) will duke it out for charity -- and for viewers' horrified amusement. (I guess Alice was too busy holding down the home front to make it.)
Remember, Marcia, Greg, if you get nervous, just picture Ms. Robinson in her undies.
Get Salon in your mailbox!