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The biggest home in Los Angeles County is ready for a new nickname: The 56,500-square-foot Manor, dubbed Candyland after owner Candy Spelling, has been sold to another wealthy socialite, British heiress Petra Ecclestone, in an all-cash deal for $85 million. As steep as that price is, it's not a record or even close to what Spelling was asking. The priciest Southland home transaction was the 2000 sale of an 8-acre estate in Bel-Air to financial executive Gary Winnick in a deal that included the trade of other land, for a total value of about $94 million.

By the 2013 season, all NFL players will be required to wear knee and thigh pads. Or will they? NFL owners voted Tuesday to make those pads mandatory, but the NFL Players Assn. quickly responded that changes such as those need to be collectively negotiated, opening another of several battlefronts between the league and the union. "While the NFL is focused on one element and health and safety today, the NFLPA believes that health and safety requires a comprehensive approach and commitment," the union said in a written statement.

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

MGM had great success with several movie franchises in the 1930s and '40s, including "The Thin Man" with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the Andy Hardy family comedies with Mickey Rooney and the Dr. Kildare medical dramas with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore. The studio hit pay dirt again in 1939, when blond, brassy and endearing Ann Sothern was cast as a good-hearted honky tonk singer named Maisie Ravier. The first in the series, "Maisie" found her in the Wild West and falling in love with Robert Young.

Bob Brickman spent months fighting a ticket he got last fall from a red-light traffic camera at Wilshire and Sepulveda boulevards in West Los Angeles. The 61-year-old from Playa Vista eventually decided to give up the fight and fork over the $476 fine. Now he's regretting paying every penny. City officials this week spotlighted a surprising revelation involving red-light camera tickets: Authorities cannot force violators who simply don't respond to pay them. For a variety of reasons, including the way the law was written, Los Angeles officials say the fines for ticketed motorists are essentially "voluntary" and there are virtually no tangible consequences for those who refuse to pay. The disclosure comes as the city is considering whether to drop the controversial photo enforcement program, with the City Council scheduled to vote on the matter Wednesday.

You walk into Lynn Hollingsworth's trailer and you journey back in time. Hollingsworth is already there to greet you. His hands are busy restoring one of the first "candy bar" lures ever built. Plastered on his walls and filling his files are an entire history of sportfishing in California. Hollingsworth has been on a mission of sorts for the last 15 years: Collecting as much of sportfishing's past as possible for a book on the subject, which he says is long overdue.

Talking mannequins with video-animated faces, men in skirts, sweat-stained corsets worn by Madonna and a child's teddy bear that started it all. Get ready for another museum fashion blockbuster. "The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk" opened Saturday at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 19, spotlights almost four decades of the French designer's collections that pushed the boundaries of gender, sexuality, multiculturalism and good taste - all in the name of promoting diversity - and inspired a generation of enfants terribles (Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Martin Margiela)

Pragmatic investors and romantic history buffs spent more than $500,000 here Friday on buffalo skulls, a full-length buffalo skin coat, a tomahawk, letters, guns and other memorabilia from the life of William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said Carl Ontis, 39, who came to the auction dressed as Buffalo Bill in a fringed buckskin coat, high black boots and Stetson hat.

Reggie Jackson stood visibly shaken amid the burned-out skeletons of between "30 to 35" of his favorite classic cars Thursday, surveying the damage caused by an explosion and general-alarm fire that swept through two warehouses. The blaze broke out about 9 p.m. Wednesday night in a Berkeley Design furniture warehouse next to one storing part of Jackson's extensive classic car collection.

Jim and Ida Brucker always braked for garage sales, and usually bought the whole thing. Lock, clock and whatsits. It was a family career for decades. Ventura County rancher Brucker wrote the checks and Ida appraised. Sons Jim Jr. and Danny hauled and humped merchandise, sorted treasures from trash, antiques from kitsch, and stored loads wherever there was room in the Bruckers' barns and warehouses. They bought lots by the hundreds from studio property sales. Fox. MGM. Desilu.

PHILADELPHIA - Saturday the Barnes Foundation opens its new museum here on the busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With hundreds of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos, it's just up the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose officials were instrumental in pulling strings to make it happen. Anticipation has been running high. Eight years ago a local judge granted permission for the incomparable art installation to relocate from its unique home out on the Main Line, available to anyone who wished to visit.

"The Avengers"will take a big bite out of the opening of"Dark Shadows,"as the superhero blockbuster is set to dominate the box office for the second consecutive weekend. After launching with a record-breaking $207.4 million - the biggest opening weekend ever, not adjusting for inflation - "The Avengers" isn't likely to lose steam at the box office any time soon. In its second weekend, the film featuring beloved comic book characters such as Iron Man, Captain America and the Hulk is expected to collect an additional $90 million, according to those who have seen pre-release audience surveys.

The collector car market, which slumped with the economy, is coming back along with the rest of the auto industry. But don't expect to pick up a classic Tucker or Duesenberg without ponying up money like a Facebook executive. Many of these cars are selling for well over $1 million. By one measure, the value of collectible cars has surged 33% since the depth of the recession in 2009. The Hagerty collector car blue-chip index - a Dow-like gauge that averages the values of 25 of the most sought-after collectible automobiles of the postwar era - climbed to $1.25 million from $940,000 in September 2009.

To baby boomers, Barbara Bain is best known for the two TV series she did with her ex-husband, Martin Landau: "Mission: Impossible," for which she won three consecutive Emmys (1967-69) as the coolly efficient agent Cinnamon Carter, and the 1975-77 British sci-fi action-adventure, "Space: 1999," which aired in the U.S. in syndication. But despite her TV and feature film work, Bain is really a theater animal. She honed her craft in the 1950s in New York with the legendary Lee Strasberg, who remains a strong influence on her. "Lee was a very important teacher," she said.

John Gray, who rode off into retirement about 16 months ago after 11 years as president of the Autry National Center of the American West, is making an unexpected return astride one of the world's most-visited cultural institutions: He's been named director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History inWashington, D.C. "His passion for American history and scholarship is obvious, and it's what will make him a great leader...

Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa is pursuing another big boost in parking ticket fines, leaving some of them 70% to 90% more expensive than the year he was elected - and several times the region's inflation rate. With the latest proposed hikes, the city would collect about $40 million a year more than during Villaraigosa's first year in office, much of it from street-sweeping violations that leave many residents fuming. The mayor's budget calls for the street-sweeping penalty to reach $78, more than in any neighboring city and, in certain cases, nearly twice the amount charged elsewhere in Los Angeles County.

Remember those old rock concert posters you hung on your bedroom wall after yanking them off a telephone pole? If you can still find one--maybe under a dusty pile in the garage--you may have unearthed a gem that could help pay for your child's college education. Vintage concert and record company promotional posters are now fetching big bucks from collectors, who reportedly are paying upward of $10,000 for the rarest items.

DRESSED IN scruffy jeans, a tight, gray T-shirt and cowboy boots, Rudy Kurniawan slid into a front-row seat at a Christie's Beverly Hills auction room. He didn't blend with the cashmere and Cole Haan crowd hoping to pick up a few bottles of rare and old wine. And it wasn't just his wardrobe. In a few short hours that Saturday afternoon, the then-29-year-old Indonesian-born Kurniawan spent an estimated $500,000. For one case of 24 half-bottles of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc, the famed St.

When I knocked on a door in Torrance on Tuesday afternoon, I had just about given up on finding Fidel Lopez. Twenty years ago, at the corner of Florence and Normandie, the self-employed construction worker was dragged from his truck and viciously beaten just minutes after the same vengeance was served on Reginald Denny during the L.A. riots. Both assaults were captured on video that was played over and over, nauseating for the sheer brutality and the inhumane, triumphant swagger of the attackers.

The top administrator in Huntington Park stepped down this week after city officials learned his employment appeared to violate state retirement rules. Interim City Manager Raul Romero was notified by CalPERS last Thursday that he had exceeded the number of hours retired employees may work while still collecting pension benefits. He resigned Monday. Romero said he had retired from the City of Commerce in 2002 and continued working through his consulting company, R&R Municipal Solutions, over the last decade.