Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  Malibu

  “Malibu,” says one sage who has lived there for 18 years, “is the place where you lie on the sand and look at the stars—or vice versa.”

  It’s not a city or a town or even a village, although it has a post office, a sheriff and a weekly newspaper published on green paper. You can’t walk around the block in Malibu, because there isn’t a block to walk around. There isn’t even a movie house. Yet if you want to see movie stars, stay out of the Brown Derby. They’re all at Malibu.

  Picture a lazy dinosaur lying on its side in the noonday sun, and you get an idea of what it looks like on the map—a tiny slash of California coastline, 26 miles long and half a mile wide, spread like mayonnaise over 20,000 acres of sand, surf, canyons, rocks and rattlesnake dens, and stretched in Technicolor over a fabric of terrain being crowded out to sea by a sweaty, smoggy collage of hick towns connected by freeways called Los Angeles. At first glance, Malibu looks like a place to drive through fast. A tiny Vegas-like strip of liquor stores and tacoburger stands threatened daily with extinction by the violent mudslides which come crashing down from the Pacific Palisades every time it rains. For nine months of the year, this ugly little collection of motels and empty Coke bottles looks like any other boring retirement center marked by a bright flag on a Medicare map. Then comes June, when it all starts happening. The movie stars and jet-set buddhas pack up their sneakers, their cocoanut oil, their martini mixers, their poodles and the kids from all their previous marriages, and head for the sea, descending on Malibu like sand crabs in their blue jeans and their Yves St. Laurent chain belts. Then, for as long as the summer sun lasts, they get stoned on pot, barbecue everything but the delivery boys from Western Union, and work like hell to make their summer rent money pay off.

  It’s hard to figure out why. There’s no entertainment (except what goes on in the homes, and considering some of the scenes I’ve seen staged in Malibu, I’d say all the Oscars are going to the wrong people). There isn’t one good restaurant worth eating in. Unless you subscribe to a cable service, the barrier formed between Los Angeles and the oceanfront by the Pacific Palisades cliffs and the Malibu Canyon makes TV reception impossible. The water tastes like a combination of mineral oil and sulfuric acid. Every time you leave home there is the danger that when you return your beach house will either be buried under a rock slide, demolished by one of the several earthquakes which reliably occur each summer, or washed out to sea by the tide which rises higher each year, taking part of the beachfront back into the ocean with it.

  And still they come. According to the Malibu sheriff’s office, 14,000 strangers crowd into the place each summer like Ringling Brothers clowns in a two-seater Volkswagen, braving the elements and hardships for a whiff of air they can breathe without fear of lung collapse. None of them have anything in common, except that (1) they hate the smog of L.A., and (2) they love the sea. It’s enough. Dentists go scuba diving with starving actors. Angela Lansbury’s kids run up and down the beach drinking Fresca and digging for mussels with the kids of an Akron tire manufacturer. Surfniks and rock singers fry fish in a nest of water pilings while Warren Beatty and Julie Christie watch them, hand in hand, from the Malibu pier. Class barriers are down. Everybody’s equal. Nobody says don’t. All of them taking their bite out of this tranquilizer made of sand, for the price of a summer.

  I was there, for three months, last year. I had writing to do—a weekly column, some film reviews, a screenplay which never materialized—and Malibu seemed like the place to do it quietly. New York’s claustrophobia and heat were getting to me. I wanted a cool place, away from everything familiar, but not so far away that all the newspapers would be written in French. So I found a house on a slice of Malibu beach, a funny comic-strip house the color of lettuce, built Frank Lloyd Wright-style out of the bottom half of a London bus. The kitchen had a “No Smoking” sign and a series of hand straps along the ceiling, from which passengers held their balance years ago as they jogged along Piccadilly Circus. A winding metal staircase rose near the old conductor platform to a second-floor bedroom lined with wooden shutters; a collapsible door opened out onto a spacious brick terrace kissed with the scent of a labyrinth of cabbage roses and geraniums, beyond which the crashing surf splashed the cobalt blue sky as far as the eye could see. Anywhere else in the world, I would probably have felt like I was living in a double-decker house trailer, but in Malibu, where nothing much makes sense anyway, it seemed perfect.

  The summer frittered away there, in an endless pattern of word pictures which, thinking back, now bounce off my mind like raindrops on glass. I remember the garbage collectors, hippies and wild men, with the sun and salt air in their eyes, picking up champagne bottles along the beach from the exclusive party where Nureyev taught Streisand how to dance the night before, then clanging off down the highway in their flower-power trucks painted with McCarthy stickers. Malibu must be the nicest place in the world to be a garbage collector. I remember the dregs of marijuana left by the cops who used to hide out under the Malibu Pier and turn on with the yippies from time to time. Pot is no big deal in Malibu. It’s as much a part of life there as getting used to the sound of the waves breaking against the rocks when you go to sleep.

  And, of course, I remember the parties. If Los Angeles has what Phyllis Diller calls “a cesspool of culture,” it probably empties somewhere in the vicinity of Malibu. Afternoons, over at Jacqueline Bisset’s house, soaking up gin in the orange Sunday sun while Mia Farrow played in the traffic. Or sitting on crude, whitewashed sailor chairs at writer John Hallowell’s, listening to Melina Mercouri debate Paul Newman on American politics (“Hélas, le’s have ze Nixon; then we have ze disaster much sooner and we can start all over again!”); or watching Natalie Wood sparkling like ginger ale under a pink straw hat. Dark coming on, and moving indoors where, on a slow, calculated glide through the candlelight you could catch Christopher Isherwood in a rare moment of candor, telling Patty Duke about pre-war Berlin and the real Sally Bowles; Vincente Minnelli describing how he filmed Judy Garland on that trolley; Angela Lansbury telling us all she’d remake Harlow, only this time she’d play Harlow. Or moving down the beach to the warm, hearthside glow of Barbara Rush’s house, where Joanne Woodward confessed over homemade peach ice cream that she took her kids out of school the day she discovered Debbie Reynolds was head of the Girl Scouts. Or the afternoon playwright Jerome Lawrence, who has written almost all of his Broadway successes in Malibu, threw a party for Ingrid Bergman—50 and beautiful, without makeup, hair in an unstylish pony tail, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, she swam three times, clapped her hands, and joyously proclaimed, rising from the sudsy cold water, “Malibu? It’s the only part of California that hasn’t changed in 20 years. Smog and housing developments have taken over the rest.”

  Physically, Malibu seems as resistant to any claim on history as everything else in teeny-bopper-conscious Southern California. The minute something shows its age, the wrecking crew moves in. Yet Malibu does have a history, as offbeat and kooky as the people who live there. It was discovered on October 9, 1542, by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the Christopher Columbus of the West Coast, who sailed into the bay accidentally, searching for fresh water. Inhabited only by naked Indians who lived on raw fish and called themselves the “Maliboux,” the vast Malibu domain was claimed by Cabrillo in the name of the Spanish crown. A princely jawbone of shoreline, Malibu was composed of forbidding mountains, beaches, mesas and hidden valleys—a pristine land of mystery and romance which quickly became the Cornwall of America. At one time a dozen rum ships operated in the secretly guarded coves off Point Dume, which is now the hippie necking ground. Rum-runners drove officers to cover in constant gun battles off the Castle Rock coast. Horse thieves, smugglers and predatory bootleggers operated along the Malibu cliffs. There is one spot, near Carol Channing’s house, called La Chusa (“the Owl”) Canyon, named after a lady pirate who lived in a cave and terrorized the entire Malibu coast for years. There are so many tales o
f stolen treasure buried in the Malibu hills by “the Owl” and her band of cutthroats that even today the county of Los Angeles posts armed guards in the area to ward off treasure hunters.

  The first recorded date of the original Malibu land grant is 1805, when the king of Spain turned it over to a man named Don José Tapia as a reward for military services. In 1824, Tapia’s property passed into the hands of his go-getter son, Don Tiburcio, who, according to legend, buried several chests of hard cash in Malibu which have yet to be discovered. He died unexpectedly in 1845 and three years later the last of the Tapia descendants deeded Malibu to Leon Prudhomme, a Frenchman, for $400, half of which was paid in groceries and wine. Prudhomme sold it again in 1857 to Don Mateo Keller, a leader in the California wine industry, whose heirs sold the property for $10 an acre to Frederick Hastings Rindge and his wife May in 1892.

  The real history of Malibu as it is known today begins with the Rindge family. It is a history as bloody as any movie Hollywood ever filmed. Whereas Malibu had always been ruled by wild and unruly Spaniards and pirates, Rindge was a Harvard man, raised in an atmosphere of Cambridge wealth. He was an unrelenting foe of Demon Rum, a devout leader in the Methodist Church and a close pal of Teddy Roosevelt’s who was ruled by a mind bent on keeping the railroad out of Malibu. After his death in 1905 at the age of 42, his wife May took over his six-guns and became known as the “Queen of the Malibu.” Her armed vaqueros patrolled the vast rancho, creating a barrier along the coastal route to San Francisco that cut off trade and aroused the fury of Los Angeles merchants. Stories abound in Malibu of the traders and railroad barons murdered in the Malibu canyons by the Queen’s henchmen, hired to protect Malibu against the invasion of commerce and industry.

  In the bitter end, the fight to barricade the wild Malibu frontier against the forces of progress brought financial ruin to the Rindge estate and feudalism crumbled as the courts established a right-of-way for the railroad through the Malibu territory under the law of eminent domain. Instead of the million dollars May Rindge asked from the government for damages, California gave her a drop in the bucket of little more than $100,000. Before the Depression, the Rindge estate in Malibu was worth $100 million. By 1938 it was bankrupt. But even this debacle didn’t dampen May’s spirit. She was a game girl. In her last days she constructed a magnificent castle on a hill behind the Malibu Creek, where she lived in seclusion until she died. Later it was sold to the Franciscan monks for $50,000 and now it is used as a monastic retreat for tired businessmen. It’s a different world up there near the castle. On a clear day free of smog, you can even see a Basque shepherd tending his flocks, untouched by time or the Hollywood aura which has permeated the world below.

  Under the revised bankruptcy laws of the 1930’s, the Rindge fortunes showed promise of rebuilding. War industry helped real estate. The state of California acquired large sections of beach foreshore for parks. Crossroad settlements, business districts and private enterprises sprang up out of sand. Mansions and smaller, chic beach cottages are now scattered in profusion along the 26 miles of Malibu, resting indolently against indigo slopes. All the fears of the Rindge dynasty have finally come true, although they never lived to see the transformation of their wilderness into an oceanside panorama. In one respect, however, the Rindge ghosts have had the last laugh on progress. You still can’t get a train to Malibu. Nothing stops there.

  Nobody seems quite certain where Malibu begins. Some folks will tell you to drive out Sunset Boulevard until it runs right into the Pacific Ocean and that’s the starting place. Others insist you can smell the difference when you pass Ted’s Rancho, a glass restaurant overlooking the ocean near the official “Welcome to Malibu” sign. But no matter how you find the place, you will never find two people who will give you the same tour when you get there. Most of them say there’s nothing to see anyway; I disagree.

  My personally guided tour begins, if we cheat a little, farther down the coast near the Santa Monica Pier. This is the best starting point to catch the Malibu montage in all of its flavors, all of its history, and all of its fickle moods. Here, witness a scene right out of Inside Daisy Clover. Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate are in The Boathouse picking at their lobster and grog. Girls red as sugar beets hang around outside Clara’s Café smelling of Bain de Soleil, and eating 25-cent hot dogs on a stick. Doreena (“Psychic Clairvoyant—Tarot Cards and Palmistry!”) leans against her awning peeling in the sun rays and munching boardwalk cotton candy in her gingham apron and Spanish coin earrings. Maria Ouspenskaya, Sixties style. Pass the shooting galleries, the only penny arcade in the world where you can still get an autographed picture of Fatty Arbuckle, push on past the Plush Ball ‘n’ Cue Billiard Parlor and the Cocky Moon Burrito Stand, and look out over the bodies crumpled on the dirty sand like broken potato chips, all the way up to the old red frame of Synanon, where the addicts insist on being called “dope fiends” and Jennifer Jones sells candy bars in the concession stand.

  Memories begin. Drive up the coast toward Malibu proper, along the Palisades cliffs, and it is possible, on a night as blue and dark as a sailor’s middy, to conjure up a nostalgia for what it used to be like. Along the beach the once-famous casinos and bawdy houses once stood, where Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel and Good Time Charley Crawford played and gambled their lives away. The famous Hollywood roadhouses are all boarded up now; “the Gold Coast” they used to call it. Mae West still lives here, and Darryl F. Zanuck. Jennifer Jones has a Spanish style house with “No Parking” signs to keep away the surfers and beach bums.

  The sumptuous $1,750,000 beach house William Randolph Hearst built for Marion Davies has been torn down and turned into a parking lot, but old-timers still talk about it: Grinling Gibbons, England’s distinguished carver of decorative woods, executed the interiors. Special woods from India, carvings from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, original and hand-blocked wallpaper, and a 6 1/2-month gold-leaf covering job taken from the bedroom of the Earl of Sussex in 1740 were just a few of the movie crowd’s playtoys. There was also a banquet room, with $30,000 worth of paneled hardwood reassembled from the Georgian house of Eleanor, Duchess of Northumberland; a marble swimming pool; a Rathskellar from a 16th-century inn in Surrey; a $90,000 dining room; priceless mantels, Tudor paintings, Wedgewood medallions, and a tiled swimming pool crossed by a Venetian bridge of Vermont marble. Like most of the vulgar grandeur which typified Hollywood in the era when it was still unique enough to be amusing, the house has been torn down and washed into the sea, no more of a monument to the glory that once was Rome than the old Mocambo or Ciro’s. The guest house at the northern end of the property is, however, still visible through white locked gates. Its shadowy rooms, where John Gilbert drank champagne from Clara Bow’s shoes while the rest of the world went silently mad with ecstasy, have been turned into a private beach club. Hundreds of reputations remain secure forever; the ocean can’t talk.

  Not far away, a ghostly ruin stands hugging the cliffs like something out of an old Karloff film. This was the scene of one of Hollywood’s famous unsolved mysteries, the 1935 murder of Thelma Todd. Thelma was the movies’ angel-faced golden girl, and in private life the proprietress of a roadhouse called Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe, on top of which she also shared an apartment with her partner, movie director Roland West. At the time of her death, Thelma had a year to go on a Hal Roach contract and no money worries. Yet she was found dead on a hilltop 270 steps from her house in her chocolate-colored Phaeton, wearing a $20,000 mink coat, diamonds on her throat and wrists, and a mauve and silver evening gown.

  Thelma was divorced from a handsome Hollywood agent named Pat de Cicco. She had been expected to meet him at a party that Saturday night at the Trocadero, yet because post mortem investigation revealed she had eaten food not served at the Trocadero, it appeared she had eaten after arriving home Sunday morning. Her body was not found until Monday morning at 10:30. Nobody had noticed her absence all day Sunday, while she lay dead in the parked auto. She had not
entered her own apartment after arriving home, so where had she eaten, and with whom? All the famous stars in Hollywood were dragged into the case. The police said she died from monoxide poisoning. The case seemed closed. Then suddenly Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the late actor, announced she had been awakened by a mysterious phone call from Thelma—12 hours after the time of death!

  The case has never been solved and to this day the Sidewalk Café stands boarded up just the way Thelma left it. It is supposed to be haunted and if, on some midnight drive under a citrus moon, you look up at the broken windows overlooking the eerie rushing sound of the surf, you can almost swear ghostly figures from beyond the grave are moving about behind the dusty panes of forgotten glass.

  After you pass the foot of Sunset Boulevard, start looking for a bizarre, Arthurian-looking castle spire, rising up above the cliffs like a sentinel, guarding the J. Paul Getty museum. Most tourists (and many residents) think this castle is the Getty mansion. Not true. A millionaire built the castle for his wife in 1929 as a surprise, but she died on the train to California. Then the stock market crashed. The millionaire committed suicide and the house lay dormant until Aly Khan married Rita Hayworth, reigning glamour goddess of the Forties, and found the white elephant for a beach retreat. By the time the prince was ready to move in, Gilda had already done a retreat of her own—in a different direction—and they never lived there. Now everyone calls this spooky remnant of Hollywood’s ridiculous past “Rita’s Back Aly.”

  Down below, hidden behind iron gates, is the eccentric J. Paul Getty’s private museum, which goes unnoticed by the thousands of beachgoers who motor past it each day on their way to the Malibu sun. By appointment only, you can visit this curiosity on Wednesdays and Saturdays only at 2 p.m. After a burly guard right out of a prison-break movie checks off your name, you can park near a kennel housing two vicious, snarling watchdogs and proceed by foot into a courtyard with a sculptured fountain. A guide takes you through three major areas: classical sculpture (mostly Roman copies of Greek originals dating from the 5th century B.C.); French decorative arts of the 18th century; and Italian and Dutch paintings of the 15th to 17th centuries, both Renaissance and Baroque. The museum is housed in Mr. Getty’s former home, but he has never seen it. “For the past 17 years, Mr. Getty has said that he was coming back next month. So far he hasn’t,” sighs the guard. Then, at 4 p.m., he rushes you past a Landsdowne Hercules from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli which looks suspiciously like a bust of Elvis Presley, and you have to leave the premises. Otherwise, you get locked in with the snarling watchdogs.