Mansion

The Pasadena mansion of Dovie Beams de Villagran, a former B-movie starlet who claimed to be a lover of deposed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, was sold during bankruptcy proceedings for $2 million. "I am very sad. I've got no money. I can't even eat," Villagran told reporters after the sale. The 30-room mansion was purchased by United California Savings Bank, to which Villagran owed $2.6 million, said Ronald Rus, an attorney for the bank.

It became official Thursday afternoon. Los Angeles Historic Landmark No. 167 was saved from the wrecker's ball. After nearly 11 months of frantic efforts, the once-stately Edward Strong mansion, a reminder of downtown Los Angeles' Victorian past, was towed away from its site of 102 years on West 15th Street, where it stood in the way of a $390-million expansion of the Convention Center. The slow move to the mansion's new site, near MacArthur Park, was to be completed by this morning.

Two teen-age boys were acquitted of raping a 16-year-old girl during a drinking party at the governor's mansion, a circuit judge said. The two 17-year-old boys and another 17-year-old have admitted to charges of underage consumption of alcohol stemming from the Nov. 28 incident in Pierre, Circuit Judge Marshall Young said Thursday.

Two masked gunmen ransacked a mid 18th-Century estate and escaped with an undetermined amount of valuables in the fourth mansion robbery in the oceanside resort in the last two months, police said today. The bandits broke through a side window of the 15-room Malbone Estate before midnight Monday, bound a caretaker with telephone cord and ransacked the Gothic Revival-style mansion before escaping, said Sgt. Timothy Brennan.

Firefighters knocked down a blaze in Chatsworth that heavily damaged a mansion. One firefighter suffered a leg injury. The fire broke out early Monday in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, officials said. It started in a garage about 3:40 a.m., then spread through the roof of the three-story, 10,000-square-foot mansion at 22536 Zaltana St., just north of the 118 Freeway, L.A. County fire official Ray Dong said. About 100 firefighters with the L.A. County, L.A. and Ventura County fire departments battled the blaze.

The party's over in Benedict Canyon--at least for a now. The Department of Building and Safety has ordered the owner of an ornate Benedict Canyon mansion to stop renting his home for commercial uses after neighbors complained that boisterous parties and excessive filming at the site were disrupting the tony enclave. Owner Mark Slotkin received notice from the department Friday.

While her husband was fending off summit controversy, Nancy Reagan spent Sunday settling into the Reagans' Geneva residence, the spectacular mansion loaned to them by the Aga Khan. In her only public appearances Sunday, the First Lady took a brief stroll with the President through the garden of the 18th-Century mansion, the Maison de Saussure, and she helped her husband rehearse for the meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

A two-year fight over the fate of historic Scripps Hall has ended amicably: a private school has bought it and has pledged to preserve its structure and five-acre grounds. Community leaders and members of the Scripps-Kellogg family, which once owned the property, applauded the sale to the Waldorf School of Pasadena as partly realizing their goal. "I feel rather gratified with this compromise," said William C. Kellogg.

At 649 W. Adams Blvd., just east of Figueroa Street and around the corner from secluded Chester Place, stands a well-kept Tudor-style mansion. Today, this tree-shaded,three-story home, built in 1905 by prominent businessman Randolph Huntington Miner, is a little-known reminder of West Adams Boulevard's heyday as Los Angeles' most desirable address from the turn of the century through the 1930s. (This mansion is not included in the West Adams home tour this year.

For nearly 10 years, the would-be dream mansion that Nancy Reagan helped design for California governors sat unwanted and unfinished. Cobwebs hung from the corners of the 18-foot cathedral ceilings. No rugs or furniture graced the bare concrete floors. A window was marred by a bullet hole. Utility systems broke down and stayed that way. Unmowed grass on the mansion's prime 11 acres dried up in the blazing summer sun.