Pickfair Owners Receive OK for Enlarged Lot : Development: The City Council vote would allow Pia Zadora and her husband, or a subsequent owner, to add a 19,600-square-foot house on the estate grounds.

Pia Zadora and her husband, Meshulam Riklis, won permission this week to change the lot lines at Pickfair, their storied estate atop Summit Drive in Beverly Hills.

The 4-1 vote Tuesday by the Beverly Hills City Council, which contravened a recommendation from the City Planning Commission, means that the Riklises or a subsequent owner could build a 19,600-square-foot house at a corner of the estate, on a separate hillside lot now occupied in part by a cantilevered tennis court.

Previously, a house only half that size would have been possible on the site, which was subdivided, but not sold, when Mary Pickford was still alive 15 years ago.

The lot was previously half an acre. Now it will be about an acre, and Pickfair and its grounds will be just over two acres.

City Councilman Max Salter was the only dissenter, saying that Riklis, who made several fortunes as one of the nation’s first corporate raiders, was a “pirate” who had to be closely watched. His wife is well-known as a performer.

The couple, who also own homes in nearby Trousdale Estates, Malibu and Las Vegas, have been rebuilding Pickfair since 1989, coming back to city officials four times since then for approval of various plan changes, including a 3,000-square-foot music room.

“They got their variances piecemeal, and now they’re going to go for the whole bundle,” Salter said.

Resident Gerald Oppenheimer also protested, saying Pickfair was the only large estate still left in the neighborhood, where once lived movie greats such as Charlie Chaplin, Ronald Coleman and Tom Mix.

All of them enjoyed large properties that have since been cut up into lots of half an acre or less, said Oppenheimer, who lives in the main house of the old Mix estate.

“There’s nothing wrong with what they want to do there, but it looks like they’re eventually going to cut it up again, and with a bigger lot they can make a hell of a lot more money on it,” he said.

But Mayor Vicki Reynolds said she found no reason to deny the request.

“The parceling-off of Pickfair does not impact something that’s important to Beverly Hills,” she said.

Vice Mayor Bernard J. Hecht agreed, as did Councilmen Allan L. Alexander and Robert K. Tanenbaum.

Zadora was not present, but Riklis, who identified himself by saying “I’m Pia’s husband,” told the City Council that the line change would allow construction of “not just a 9,000-square-foot home, but . . . a home that will be a credit to us and to our little hill.”

“We want it to conform with what we’ve done at Pickfair,” he said.

Conformity with the neighborhood was the sticking point in the deliberations of both the Planning Commission and the City Council; Pickfair is surrounded by many properties of half an acre or less.

There are also several larger estates, allowing city officials a judgment call in interpreting the legal requirement that newly created lots should conform with those around them.

Planning Commissioner Rose Norton told the City Council that much of the new lot would be unusable because of its hilly terrain. But under city law, the increased acreage would allow a much larger house to be built.

“It was implied that money was no object, and this estate was going to be restored to its original glory,” she said. “In my mind, that did not mean selling off part of the property.”

Joseph N. Tilem, attorney for the Riklises, said in a letter to the City Council that the Planning Commission was moved by a “Miniver Cheevy” sentiment. This was a reference to a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson: “Miniver sighed for what was not. . . . He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot.”

But Ron D. Rosen, chairman of the Planning Commission, said that nostalgic sentiment was not a factor.

“We really felt the shape of this lot was being gerrymandered to get the minimum of an acre (required for any new lots in the area) and that it was not consistent with the statute,” Rosen said Wednesday.

He also said the Planning Commission had been assured earlier that all the land would remain as grounds for the rebuilt Pickfair, scene of movieland frolics for decades.

“That was fine, and we were later presented with this alternative,” he said. “It’s a question of judgment, and we would have wished that the judgment would have been exercised differently,” he said.

Riklis said the couple have spent more than $10 million on the building, which was virtually demolished in April of 1990 because of termite damage.

The new Pickfair, looking more like a Venetian palazzo than the old hunting lodge bought by Douglas Fairbanks in 1919 and modified and rebuilt over the years, is rising slowly on its hilltop, where workers are busy with the cement, plywood and cinder block that will support marble walls.