The bad news lair
TATUM O’NEAL, the poster child for “E! True Hollywood Story,” has sold her three-bedroom loft for $2.1 million.
The 42-year-old troubled thespian, whose career peaked at age 10 after becoming the youngest Oscar winner in history, put the 2,000-square-foot apartment at 27 Great Jones St. on the market last summer for $2.4 million.
Between the time she bought the NoHo abode in July 2003 for $1.69 million, and when she put it back on the market, O’Neal had become bad news to her neighbors, after she somehow set fire to her place.
Her insurance company, which paid the $75,365 damage, then sued Ryan O’Neal’s little darling by claiming that the fire was a result of “carelessness, recklessness and negligence.”
The ex-wife of tennis showboat John McEnroe previously lived in a three-bedroom co-op in the famed El Dorado on Central Park West. In 2002 she sold the 16th-floor park-fronting prewar place of 2,900 square feet for close to its $4.5 million asking price.
Homemore, not less
WEALTHY Democratic political gadfly Connie Milstein, who calls herself “an ordinary Park Avenue matron,” will now have to change her tune.
Sources tells us the heiress to the Milstein real-estate fortune has just gone to contract to buy a Fifth Avenue duplex apartment with a $15.7 million asking price.
Milstein made a name for herself in 2000 during the Bush-Gore election when she was caught on camera bribing homeless potential voters with cigarettes in exchange for a vote for Gore. She was eventually fined $5,000 for her spirited activism.
Unlike the homeless, Ms. Milstein has signed on to take a mint-condition 12-room apartment at 998 Fifth Ave. that features four bedrooms, 5 1/2baths, two maid’s rooms, leaded stained-glass windows and three wood-burning fireplaces. Maintenance is $7,300 a month.
The historical limestone-and-marble-trim building, completed in 1912, was designed by McKim, Mead & White, and is considered the first apartment house built for the truly wealthy and socially elite.
Kathy Sloane of Brown Harris Stevens had the listing.
Loss Vegas
YOU could call it condo-maximum in Las Vegas. With so many projects in the works, industry watchers are starting to believe that some developers might have more luck at the craps tables than in their own sales offices.
“The city’s official bird appears to be the crane,” chuckled one builder who got in and out of the condo market before the flock of construction towers landed on building sites.
The most notable of the troubled projects is George Clooney and Rande Gerber’s (aka Mr. Cindy Crawford) 11-building Las Ramblas complex, on 25 acres.
The plan called for thousands of residential units, a hotel, casino and retail area. Calls to fellow partner Jorge Perez and Marty Burger, The Related Companies president of its Las Vegas operations, were not returned.
Elsewhere, Ivana Trump’s condo project is tanking – with her 80-story, 945-unit “Lipstick Tube” tower coming up short of customers.
Her co-developers have put the site on the market for $49 million, The Post reported last week. Meanwhile, Ivana’s ex-husband Donald Trump’s residential project, a short distance away, is nearly sold out.
We’re told there are more soon-to-fail projects to follow. But Happy Holidays, anyway.
E-mail: bkeil@nypost.com