Is Austin Powers house hunting?

Wilt the Stilt's kinky bachelorium ready for the right buyer. Plus: What's that big diamond doing on Britney's finger?

Published August 3, 2001 4:31PM (EDT)

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?

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Like a rock

"He's not dumb."

-- Sheryl Crow, singing the praises of her ex-boyfriend Kid Rock, in Esquire.

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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.

Jerry and the sopranos

The name calling, the chair throwing, the ... opera?

A new opera based on "The Jerry Springer Show" is being workshopped in London. And though the production is now being termed a "work in progress," the British brains behind it are convinced it could be big. Really big.

"The purpose of these shows is to try to raise money to stage it on a 'Lion King'-size budget," director Stewart Lee told Ananova.com.

Already, a London critic has toasted the score (which apparently "varies in style from gospel to Herbert Howells, by way of Bernstein, Kenneth Leighton, Chausson, Stevie Wonder and Copland") and dubbed the work "hugely funny, highly topical and humane," lending credence to Lee and scribe Richard Thomas' aspirations of bigness.

So what does Jerry himself think of all this? "They say the opera isn't over until the fat lady sings," he tells the New York Post. "Maybe we can provide them with that."

But only if they're fat ladies who've slept with their husband's ex-wives.

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Extra bits

A blatant cry for help: Robert Downey Jr. will lip-synch before the cameras in an upcoming Elton John single. The song he's "singing" is called ... "I Want Love." Awwww.

Is Britney Spears taking a page from Angelina Jolie and her bro? According to the U.K. Sun, Spears has been seen sporting a whopping diamond ring of late, but it's not from her beau Justin Timberlake. The "official" word on the bauble: "It is a gift from her brother." Um ... OK.

Once a couple has butt-painted together, what further testament to partnership and commitment do you need? Tea Leoni says she's considering taking her husband David Duchovny's surname, telling the L.A. Times that, since she was born Elizabeth Tea Pantaleoni, "Leoni isn't even my real name." If she does decide to make the switch, Duchovny would be nothing but pleased. "It's the only way my name will ever be on an Oscar," he says. Maybe she should change her first name to David, too.

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Miss something? Read yesterday's Nothing Personal.


By Amy Reiter

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