Barbara Taylor Bradford’s $4.95 Million Park Avenue Co-op

A listing photo shows a portrait of Gemmy, Bradford’s first bichon frise, over a working fireplace.
Photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

The last owner of apartment 11B, at 975 Park Avenue, would probably have taken out a red pen if she saw the $4.95 million listing, which describes the three-bedroom corner unit in a 1929 co-op in a wash of redundant verbiage. (It’s both a “beautiful apartment” and a “charming apartment” that’s “superb in every way” and “special in every way.”)

Barbara Taylor Bradford was a sharp reporter who found a niche as a columnist on home décor before publishing her first novel at age 46. A Woman of Substance was a phenomenon, and Bradford wrote 40 more hits, ten of which became Hollywood productions. When she died last year, she had a $300 million fortune, earned in part off her scribblings on legal pads from a desk in this apartment’s library. Breaks from work included visits from a masseuse who “would arrive regularly to ease the tension of my shoulders — an occupational hazard for desk-bound writers — and a manicurist to repair the damage typing had done to my nails,” as she once wrote.

Photo: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

A listing photo shows the living room with views over Park Avenue and a working fireplace — a classic prewar co-op and a sparkling trophy for a self-made writer born in England to a mother who worked as a nanny and a father who was out of work during the Great Depression.
Photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

She had a taste for fine things that at one point included a collection of 24 Hermès bags and a dashing Hollywood-producer husband she referred to as her “most treasured possession.” They were married for 55 years and did everything together, even business deals. Robert Bradford was an executive for production companies in Spain and France, overseeing 1971’s Grand Prix–winning To Die of Love before using his skills to sell his wife’s work by taking out back-page newspaper ads and turning nine of her books into limited TV series. (The secret to their marriage, she once said, was separate offices and separate televisions.) The couple never had children. Instead, they referred to their beloved bichon frises as “the girls” and employed both a house manager and a pair of housekeepers, whose duties included daily dog walks and, later, tracking down powdered egg whites for the dogs’ special diets.

A listing photo shows antique porcelain that Bradford collected. The tile floor was unchanged from the last owner.
Photo: Sotheby’s International Realty

The couple moved to the apartment in 2014, after selling a larger unit at River House for $10 million to Uma Thurman. Robert died five years later, in 2019. The listing shows only four images of a cream-colored, eight-room apartment, furnished with spindly, French-looking antiques and frilly porcelain. But the clues that Taylor spent time here include head shots visible in a hallway and a painting over the fireplace of a fluffy white dog — her first bichon, Gemmy.