Donald Trump closed on his purchase of Ed McMahon's luxury Bel Air home last week, telling a hastily assembled Century City news conference that he wanted to perform an "act of mercy" for an entertainer he watched on TV for years.
"How could this happen?" Trump asked, referring to the 84-year-old McMahon's financial plight. "I could not let a national icon like this lose his home."
But the multibillionaire real estate developer promptly changed course and evicted McMahon from his home yesterday, explaining that McMahon had "failed to pay rent for months. Just because you're a national icon doesn't mean you can be a deadbeat."
Trump was able to take advantage of a loophole in California real estate law that permitted him to evict McMahon within hours of granting him a "lease for life."
"It's not what I wanted to do," Trump said. "My initial motivation was charitable, but after that, real estate is a business. I feel really bad for McMahon, but maybe he should have put more of his savings into an IRA and less into Jim Beam."
Trump put the house on the market the same afternoon he evicted McMahon, sold it within two hours, and netted a tidy $1.2 million profit.
"I never realized that indigent former celebrities could become such outstanding profit centers," Trump told reporters, and he said that he was now looking into purchasing the homes of, and promptly evicting, other celebrities of the past, including the entire casts of past TV sitcoms including Happy Days, Welcome Back, Kotter, and any surviving members of Gilligan's Island.
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