Latest news with #TheGreenHornet
New York Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Gone With the Wind' star Ann Rutherford's ‘one-of-a-kind' Beverly Hills estate hits market for $42M
'Gone With the Wind' star Ann Rutherford's former 1930s Beverly Hills estate has hit the market for $42 million. The actress – who played Carreen O'Hara, one of the sisters of Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) in the iconic 1939 movie – and her husband, television producer William Dozier, lived at the French Revival-style residence, known as Rutherford House, for decades, according to the Los Angeles Times. Dozier was known for creating the 1960s TV series 'Batman' and 'The Green Hornet,' while Rutherford also starred opposite Mickey Rooney in the 'Andy Hardy' film series during the 1930s and 1940s. During their tenure at the residence, Rutherford and Dozier frequently hosted celebrity weddings at the home, which they nicknamed Greenway Chapel, according to the LA Times. Built in 1938, the estate was designed by renowned architect Paul R. Williams, who created homes for a number of Hollywood legends, including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and Barbara Stanwyck. 3 The actress lived at the French Revival-style residence, known as Rutherford House, for decades. REUTERS The 13,678-square-foot home boasts five bedrooms, nine full bathrooms along with two partial bathrooms and sits on more than half an acre of land. The estate was listed by Jacob Dadon of Sotheby's International Realty – Beverly Hills Brokerage. According to the listing, Rutherford House is a 'one-of-a-kind residence' that 'blends old Hollywood with modern luxury.' The main entry features a sweeping staircase and herringbone-patterned wood floors. The foyer opens to a formal dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the expansive grounds. 3 The 13,678-square-foot home boasts five bedrooms, nine full bathrooms along with two partial bathrooms and sits on more than half an acre of land. Nils Timm for Sothebyâs International Realty The main level also includes a formal living room, a bar with wood paneling and a marble countertop and a wood-paneled library and billiard room inspired by the style of master Art Deco interior designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. In addition, the first floor features a morning room with 18th-century wallpaper and the original fireplace, according to the listing. 3 According to the listing, Rutherford House is a 'one-of-a-kind residence' that 'blends old Hollywood with modern luxury.' Everett Collection / Everett Col The marble kitchen boasts white-painted wood-paneled cabinets, a mosaic-tiled ceiling, black and white checked flooring, a center island, stainless steel appliances and a breakfast nook with floor-to-ceiling windows. The primary suite is located on the second level and features two marble bathrooms, oversized dual closets and a separate lounge area with views of a manicured garden, per the listing. The second level also offers four en-suite bedrooms, an office and a family room, according to Mansion Global. A back pavilion outside leads to an oval-shaped pool and a separate pool house with an outdoor covered bar and spa. Per Mansion Global, the estate last sold for $27.625 million in 2018.
New York Post
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Livvy Dunne reveals she was rejected from purchasing Yankees icon Babe Ruth's $1.59M NYC home
You're out! Olivia 'Livvy' Dunne, the former LSU star gymnast and viral sensation, revealed Tuesday that she was rejected from purchasing Babe Ruth's former New York City home, saying that the building voted 'not to have me live there.' Dunne, who made an estimated $9.5 million through the 'name, image and likeness' rules in the NCAA, claimed she was going to buy Ruth's $1.59 million Upper West Side pad all in cash. Advertisement However, Dunne said she was denied days before she was set to get the keys to the co-op. 'I get a call. The co-op board denied me,' Dunne told her eight million followers in a video titled, 'I'm just disappointed that's all.'' Pretty much the people in the building voted to not have me live there, which is fine.' Advertisement If the co-op voted to approve the sale to the influencer, it would have been Dunne's 'first real estate purchase' ever. Dunne said she and her boyfriend, Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes, hired an interior designer to decorate the apartment when the sale appeared as it was favoring the couple. 'It got to the point where the realtor was so confident, Paul and I went, I got an interior designer because I didn't want to bring my college furniture to Babe Ruth's apartment, that would be like, criminal,' Dunne said. 4 Livvy Dunne was rejected from purchasing Babe Ruth's former New York City apartment. @livvy / TikTok Advertisement The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover model added that she had 'no clue' why residents rejected her from living in the building, which was constructed in 1915. 'Honestly, it wasn't financial. It could have been, for all I know, they could have been Alabama fans and I went to LSU,' Dunne quipped. 'Maybe they didn't want a public figure living there, but I was literally supposed to get the keys and that week they denied me,' Dunne added. 4 The former LSU gymnast claimed she has 'no idea' why residents in the building rejected her. @livvy / TikTok Advertisement The Yankee slugger's seventh-floor, three-bedroom, 2.5 bathroom prewar residence is located at 345 W. 88th St and hit the market in March, the Post reported. 'The Sultan of Swat' lived on the property with his late second wife, Claire Merritt Ruth, and their late adopted daughter Julia Ruth Stevens, from 1920 to 1940. The space featured high ceilings, oak floors, numerous storage areas, a modern open kitchen with a breakfast bar, and multiple closets. 4 Livvy Dunne is dating Pittsburgh Pirates' pitcher Paul Skenes. MLB Photos via Getty Images 4 The Yankee slugger's seventh-floor, three-bedroom, 2.5 bathroom residence is located at 345 W. 88th St. Getty Images There's even a commemorative plaque outside the historic home honoring the New York Yankees and baseball legend. 'My fondest memories [of the apartment] are of me and Father listening to 'The Green Hornet' on the radio and looking out to Riverside Park,'' Ruth Stevens told the Post in 2015. 'Mom and Dad loved to entertain there. We had a maid and a cook, and Dad would always invite Yankees who had been traded and were in town with other teams. He knew they wanted a home-cooked meal [while on the road].'
Motor Trend
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- Motor Trend
Driving Black Beauty, The Green Hornet's Special '66 Chrysler Imperial
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of MotorTrend Classic With trumpeter Al Hirt's manic rendition of 'The Flight of the Bumblebee' blaring in the background, thus began each episode of 'The Green Hornet,' the comic-book and radio show-inspired TV series of good versus evil that aired in 1966 and '67 on ABC. Comparisons with Batman and his sidekick, Robin (on the air, and immensely popular, during the same era), are inevitable. In fact, the four crimefighters appeared in a few episodes together—search YouTube. 'The Green Hornet's' scripts were a little more believable, with more typical thug/criminal-type characters instead of Batman's fun but caricaturish villains: Catwoman, the Joker, Mr. Freeze, and the like. Popular American actor Van Williams was cast as newspaper publisher Britt Reid, with the then-relatively unknown American-born Chinese actor and martial arts master Bruce Lee as Kato, his aide, sidekick, and chauffeur. Dean Jeffries, who already had considerable experience working with film and television studios, remembers receiving an early 1966 call from 20th Century Fox executive producer Bill Dozier asking for thoughts and design concepts for a Chrysler Imperial to suit the Green Hornet. 'They wanted something cool and smooth-looking, kind of a sporty limousine,' recalls Jeffries. 'And, of course, it had to have all sorts of capabilities: rockets and other weaponry, a flying saucer-like scanner that deployed from the rear deck (the feed from which could be watched on a TV monitor inside the car), rotating license plates, and green headlights that only the Hornet and Kato could see.' Jeffries sketched out his ideas, and the studio signed off with few changes. Chrysler provided many of the cars for the series, including Reid's unmodified 1965 Chrysler 300 convertible. Chrysler brought Jeffries a new black '66 Imperial Crown sedan, and he attacked the body with a vengeance. Off came the chrome bumpers, as Jeffries fabricated and hammer-welded in new metal that made all the bumperlines disappear. In typical custom-car fashion, he shaved off the door handles, replacing them with recessed electric solenoid switches. To give the car a more limo-like look without actually using a limo or stretching the Imperial's stock wheelbase or length (not enough time or budget money to do so), Jeffries extended the rear roofline, making the sail panels much longer. He also built in small flip-open gunports in the rear panel, next to the stock rear window. The front visage was reconfigured entirely, with a new hand-fabricated grille and rotating headlight clusters that flipped between conventional square white light clusters and the four eerie, green headlights the car used when on the prowl at night. The rear deck was also refashioned to incorporate new taillights that Jeffries cut and formed out of red plastic. Appliance Wheel provided the wide, finned, semi-spoked alloy mags. The rear and side windows were tinted nearly black. The rear-passenger compartment was reconfigured to meet the Green Hornet's special needs, including a wardrobe cupboard for his mask, hat, and trenchcoat. Kato always drove, and the Hornet rode in back, with the two separated by a partition. Jeffries built several consoles to house a telephone (long before the day of cellular communications, it was just a conventional, inoperable household 'princess phone') and all switchgear for the other weaponry, which was considerable. Panels just below the headlights opened to expose an armory's worth of rockets. Additional rockets could be fired from the rear bumper area. A pair of brooms mounted in the trunk could be deployed behind the rear wheels, ostensibly to whisk away tire tracks should the Hornet be pursued on a dirt road. Retractable 'guns' could be deployed at the front and rear of the car to lay down a smoke screen—a twist perhaps inspired by James Bond's Aston Martin DB5. Jeffries and his few helpers fashioned all the trick weaponry. 'I just drew it on paper and then built it myself.' Jeffries didn't feel that standard-duty off-the-shelf industrial hydraulic rams, motors, screwjacks, and such would be reliable enough given the hard life led by television stunt cars, so he built most of the goodies using 24-volt military surplus hardware. 'I thought, if it had to be reliable enough to work on a fighter plane or a helicopter, it should be tough enough for a TV car.' Running the motors on 12 volts slowed them down enough for the controlled deployment he desired. 'I didn't want the concealment panels to snap open and break. They had to open slowly and smoothly.' Which they did, and still do. The Imperial's 350-horsepower, 440-cubic-inch V-8 was judged to have enough gumption to do the job, so it was left stock, as were the factory three-speed automatic transmission and the suspension. (Jeffries might have installed heavy-duty shocks to deal with the extra poundage of all the wiring and defense hardware.) Jeffries never weighed the Black Beauty, but figures all the extra metal and electric hardware easily added 1000 pounds to the standard Imperial's 2.5-ton curb weight. One bit of TV magic that's especially cool: Reid's everyday Chrysler convertible sat in the garage atop a turntable, but not one that rotated horizontally or turned the car around nose for tail. Instead, the special turntable flipped top to bottom, like heads or tails, the theory being that the Black Beauty hung upside-down just beneath the 300 ragtop. Reid and Kato's routine was nearly the same in every episode. They entered the 'hornet's hive' through a secret panel in the closet of Reid's bedroom, then followed a narrow passageway built within the walls of Reid's playboy pad. The hallway led to an adjoining building that was supposedly abandoned. Kato fiddled with some buttons on the wall, and the turntable flipped over, hanging Reid's Chrysler upside down and revealing the Beauty, ready for battle. Each car had retractable rams that extended from the bumpers, while hydraulic brackets with clamps popped out of the turntable's floor in order to hold the hidden car upside down. For the cameras, the studio crafted small-scale models of each car and built the garage and turntable in scale, so the trick turntable flip and car swap could be shot in miniature. Dressed in their crime-fighting garb, the duo fired up the Beauty. The Hornet went through a brief quality-assurance sequence to ensure all their gear was ready for action—Hornet: 'Check the scanner.' Kato: 'Check.' Hornet: 'Hornet Gun.' 'Check.' 'Hornet Sting.' 'Check.'—before uttering the simple, magical command that ignited the mayhem: 'Let's roll, Kato.' Jeffries built two original Black Beauties, although several (none too accurate) clones and copies have been built since. Both cars appeared together once, chasing each other, in a Green Hornet episode bizarrely titled 'Corpse of the Year.' Our feature car (referred to as Beauty One) was the first built and has all the functional trick hardware. It's the car seen in most of the TV episodes. It wears a plaque on the dashboard that says, 'Designed and built by Dean Jeffries. This 1966 Chrysler Imperial was customized for the TV series Green Hornet in 1966. This vehicle 'The Black Beauty' is the only vehicle used throughout the filming of the TV series. A second Green Hornet Black Beauty was built by Dean Jeffries for car shows and was used in one of the TV shows. It is no longer original. This Black Beauty car was completely restored by Dean Jeffries in December, 1993.' 'The Green Hornet' TV series lasted but one season, with 26 episodes aired. (There was a feature film version in 1974). If nothing else, the series launched the stratospheric career of Bruce Lee as the world's premier martial artist/actor. Van Williams went on to appear in a variety of character movie and TV roles. The Black Beauty, unfortunately, was put out to pasture on a studio backlot, viewed as little more than an old prop from a canceled show. The car baked in the sun, deteriorating badly. A woman living in Santa Monica, California, purchased it but never restored or drove it. It ended up in the ownership of one J.R. Goodman, who returned it to Jeffries for the complete 1993 restoration mentioned above. Jeffries is understandably proud of the Black Beauty. He feels the design hit the mark, although he was a little disappointed that not all the trick features he engineered ended up on camera. His biggest disappointment is that he worked hard to make sure all the custom metalwork was finished to a high enough level to be painted gloss black and stand up to the camera's scrutiny. But the large, flat body surfaces finished in shiny paintwork caused too many reflections from the stage lighting. Within a few days of receiving the car, the studio painted it a near-flat satin black. 'It just ruined the whole thing,' says Jeffries. That's why his '93 restoration returned Black Beauty to its original glossy glory. A while after rescuing the car from certain destruction, Goodman put it up for auction. It was purchased in 2003 by Petersen Publishing Company and Motor Trend founders Margie and Robert E. Petersen. The Petersens had been collecting important movie, TV, and star cars for decades, and the Green Hornet's car was ideal for their collection. It will live out the rest of its days in the good care of their Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Other than the gloriously campy cool factor of sitting in the driver's seat formerly occupied by the legendary Bruce Lee, the Black Beauty driving experience is largely unremarkable. The big-block Chrysler V-8 starts with ease and purrs with purpose as I drop the Torqueflite trans into Drive—and, of course, whisper to myself,'Let's roll, Kato'—massage the pedal, and we're away. The steering is fingertip-light, largely devoid of feel, as the big, brooding Chrysler navigates through the Petersen Museum's multilevel, movie set-like parking structure. The headlights cast their strange green glow, but otherwise, the car acts and operates as would any other low-mile '66 Chrysler. We resist the temptation to squirrel it around a corner or two and make the big tires squeal, as it would be easy to oversteer Beauty's tail out on this smooth concrete surface—and clout a concrete structural pylon. I don't want to have to tell Bruce Lee's spirit, or Mrs. Petersen, that I wrecked their car. Road feel aside, Black Beauty is one of the great television hero cars of all time, combining the ingenuity and craftsmanship of an iconic designer/customizer, an appropriately menacing demeanor, and all the trick gadgetry one expects from a comic-inspired crime fighter. Let's roll. Ask the Man Who Built One Dean Jeffries is a self-taught automotive stylist, fabricator, customizer, and pinstriper. Why I Like It: 'I still think the look is just bitchin', and my goal was to smooth out the Imperial's strong square lines.' Why It's Collectible: It's the first of the real, original Black Beauties, and the one that appeared in the television show. Restoring/Maintaining: The Chrysler mechanicals are very straightforward, but it would be a lot of work keeping all the weaponry stuff working right all the time. Beware: Poor Black Beauty clones and fakes. Although this car is not for sale and likely never will be, a 'tribute' or reproduction is the only way a Green Hornet fan will ever own his own Black Beauty. Expect to pay: Stock 1966 Chrysler Imperial Crown Sedan Concours ready: $7,125; solid driver $3,750; tired runner: $2,100 Join the Club: Our Take The only Black Beauty that really matters. Cool in a wonderfully '60s way, a Dean Jeffries original. Our thanks: Petersen Automotive Museum, 6060 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, California.
