Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  On up the beach, notice a peculiar white clapboard establishment right out of John Steinbeck, jutting out over the water which, to avoid trouble, I’ll call the “Ancient Mariner.” During the entire three months I lived in Malibu, nobody was ever able to tell me what went on inside this strange and awesome place, but half the residents think it is a bawdy house and the other half seem certain it's some kind of boarding house for beachboys. It is advertised as a restaurant, although nobody ever eats there and business is actually discouraged. (A hamburger costs $3.50.) There are never any cars parked in front of the place, yet it is crawling with blond, sun-licked, Man-Tanned Troy Donahue types. One night, out of a curiosity which was threatening to get out of hand, I drove up to the place and walked in. A rouged woman in her 70s (something like the part Jo Van Fleet played in East of Eden) stopped me at the door before I even got a foot inside. “We’re closed, babe,” she rasped, pushing me outside and turning off her neon sign. Later I learned she was the owner. One morning a week her purple Cadillac filled with beachboys drives into Los Angeles and drops them off on Wilshire Boulevard. The same Cadillac picks them up again at sundown. It’s the talk of the beach.

  Nearing the Malibu Pier, you’ll pass a great cleft in the chin of the coastline near Louis (The Count of Monte Crisco) Hayward’s house where Doris Day goes to meditate. It’s called Meditation Point. A private road veers to the right, leading up to the Serra Retreat. One afternoon I talked Dave Diefenderfer into driving me up toward the monastery to view the remains of the old Rindge ranch. Dave runs a real estate office at Coral Beach and looks very much like a Salvation Army Santa Claus who is up to no good. Nobody knows how old he is (Some folks in Malibu claim he was around during the Gold Rush), but a sign hangs in his window overlooking the ocean which reads: “We Know the Malibu.” Believe it.

  Dave angled his old Packard off the coast highway and another world opened up before my eyes, the world of the original Spanish land grants. The lemony sun shines through the white, muscular branches of imported Australian eucalyptus trees. The old Rindge dairies lie dormant, overgrown with ripe bougainvillea vines, and the orchards go untended now—fortunes in lemon groves, avocados, apricots and oranges, lost to the cruel passing of time. A few private homes are visible through the underbrush, carved out of old carriage houses, adobe barns and horse corrals. Palm trees, almond trees, flowering jacarandas and meadows of lush, wild geraniums slope gently forward toward the hills where mountain lions, rattlesnakes and wild deer roam. Sections of the old railroad bed and some of the original steel rails can be seen through the sagging trees. Houses like little seven-dwarf gingerbread cottages remain hidden in jungles of rare strawberry guavas and Mexican sapote trees, and, up on the rise, holly, live oaks and matilija poppies form shelters for patches of banana squash, pumpkins and watermelons. The Franciscan monks up at the old Rindge ranch eat as well as the movie stars who pull up to the hippie fruit stands on the highway, park their Bentleys and haggle over fresh tomatoes trucked in from the valley.

  Movie stars have always been drawn to Malibu, but they weren’t always able to get in. When Vitagraph moved west and opened its studios in 1911, the movie industry was born. William S. Hart, Sessue Hayakawa, Ruth Roland, and Marie Dressler all got as close to the beach as they could, but they couldn’t get through the barbed wire into Malibu, where the Rindge vaqueros in their Mexican hats and knee-length boots were still shooting at the trains which threatened to cross their private frontier. Hollywood became the production center, but the stars all wanted to live out by the sea. Malibu, with a climate governed by the Pacific as a giant thermostat, had the edge. (On the hottest day of the year the temperature seldom rises above 80 degrees, and in the winter it seldom drops below 54.)

  Then, as Los Angeles’ tide of automobiles and industry began to complicate atmospheric conditions, a new word appeared in the language: “smog.” The sea breezes, which keep Malibu clear of warm, polluted air, provided a natural sanctuary from the discomfort. In 1927, the famous Malibu movie colony began when May Rindge leased some land to silent screen star Anna Q. Nilsson with the promise that no alcohol would be consumed on the premises. Soon she was joined by W.C. Fields, Bebe Daniels, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Tyrone Power, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, and everybody who was anybody. Elzie Segar based his Popeye comic strip there. Thomas Mann wrote novels there. The early Mack Sennett comedies were shot there. Gloria Swanson cavorted in the waves, creating the first cheesecake.

  Some stars went to greater lengths for privacy. In Azuma Canyon, there is a lush hidden jungle with seven waterfalls shrouding the remains of the old Lewis Stone estate. One day in 1947, Stone, who played Judge Hardy in the Andy Hardy pictures, drove out to see Dave Diefenderfer. He wanted complete seclusion, he said. Old Dave sold him some land so remote his guests had to be lowered down on ropes from the top of a cliff. A poison ivy jungle grew like trees in a rain forest and Mrs. Stone was once in the hospital for two weeks from being exposed to her own front yard. A road now leads to the Stone ranch, but the surrounding area is still an impenetrable wilderness, impossible to reach by car.

  When May Rindge first leased her land to the movie stars who saw in Malibu a retreat from life and a clamoring public, it went for $75 an acre. Today, the half-mile strip known as the Malibu Colony recently replaced Newport Beach as the most expensive real estate in America. Property goes for about $2,000 per square foot. Adam (Batman) West just bought a postage stamp covered with vines for $97,000 from the producer of Catch-22. A beach house with one bath can run $200,000 and up. Most of the houses in the famous Colony are ugly and built so close together you can borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor without ever leaving your own kitchen. (One day I was having a drink with Carol Burnett and we heard one of her kids fall into Lana Turner’s swimming pool. It was that close.) Realtors ask anything from $2,500 to $5,000 a month in rentals, and get it. They’ll take a run-down shack with lopsided windows and a fence running halfway down a hill, pass it off as a “boat effect,” and get whatever they ask. Hollywood lawyer Greg Bautzer found a clever little place for “only $5,000 a month”—then he had to hire the maid along with it and give the owner of the house a free trip to Hawaii to close the deal.

  Lon McCallister (remember him?) was one movie hero of the Forties who knew he wouldn’t last forever as an all-American idol (smart boy). So, during the war, when the whole beach was blacked out and rumors of Japanese subs sent the beach-dwellers into panic, everyone sold out and moved away except McCallister, who bought a vast house for $18,000. Today the rental alone on that house supports the ex-star and is worth more than $250,000.

  And still they come, because it’s all they’ve got. To the film stars who rush to the sea like lemmings, Malibu is a place to get away from the cameras and, as my Southern belle mother used to say, “collect one’s thoughts.” In Malibu, nobody stares when they see Lana Turner in the Market Basket buying Tom Collins mix in a faded pair of Levi’s. They just smile and say, “There goes Lana Turner buying Tom Collins mix in a faded pair of Levi’s.” Because the Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu’s main street, is an extension of the Santa Monica Freeway leading into the coastal Highway One to San Francisco, they can also turn their Jags and XKE’s south and be at MGM in 15 minutes, or as far away as Warners-Seven Arts in the San Fernando Valley in half an hour. It’s one of the few sanctuaries in this crowded world where you can escape from the pressures of the workaday world and still be part of the action.

  To the retired businessman from Pomona, Malibu is a respite overlooking the sea, where the crash of the waves tells the time of day because nobody has yet figured out a reason why any of the clocks should work there. And to the surfers, it’s a place to ride the curls at Surfriders, near the pier, and smoke a little pot without getting busted. Serious California smokers avoid Hollywood, where the fuzz is always out trying to crack down on the hippies, and head for the private beaches where anything goes. A house-to-house survey of the swank beach house
s along the Malibu coastline would probably yield enough foliage—from simple Mary Jane to exotic peyote—to start a national forest. One movie star told me she returned to her home in Malibu after wintering in Palm Springs to find her garden overgrown with the stuff. When she went into the kitchen to make some hollandaise sauce, her teenage kids even had the blender turned to “medium,” grinding up the stalks. Ah, Malibu …

  I remember it all. Carol Channing, munching organic frog’s legs from a Mason jar and riding her private elevator down the side of a cliff to the lap of the sea. Ron Buck, owner of Hollywood’s “in” hangout, The Factory, teaching his young children how to fish. An 87-year-old salesman for Singer sewing machines who has had five wives, sitting on the sand to wrap his racing forms in old newspapers. Paradise Cove, an isolated spot where they make nudie movies at night. The TV repairman who hands out glossy 8x10 photos of his surf-champ son, hoping each new customer will be somebody important enough to get his kid into the movies. Laurence Harvey out on the highway at high noon, just waking up from the night before, with the sea breeze whipping his silk Japanese kimono about his naked legs as he washes off the windshield of his English touring car. And a funny, floppy dog named Bilbo, who appeared to be a hybrid mixture of half New Zealand sheep dog and half wharf-rat. Bilbo had an amusing, inquisitive face and two ears that had been chewed on by battalions of larger dogs for more years than anyone could count. He didn’t belong to anybody, but lived at all the houses on the beach, like a mascot, helping himself to whatever was cooking on everyone’s barbecue grill and nipping at the girls in their Helen Rose bikinis. Actually, I think Bilbo was obviously smarter than anyone gave him credit for being.

  Eventually, I said goodbye to all that. I got tired of being awakened at daybreak by the Hell’s Angels roaring up the highway each morning in a nauseous film of gasoline and body odor, on their noisy way to God knows what unspeakable ritualistic horror up the road. I lost a taste for the car accidents outside my window, especially after the afternoon I dragged a bleeding high-school junior from a burning Porsche. I got tired of eating barbecue and buying bottled water every time I wanted a drink, and cleaning off the windshield every time I had to drive into town (The salt air from the ocean, mixed with the dust from the canyons and the highway, cover the windshields at Malibu with a never-ending slime which makes driving there a hazard and a visit to one of Los Angeles’ 750 car washes a daily requirement). Somehow it dawned on me that I was spending all my time watching the pelicans and getting no work done, and I suppose that’s when I made my decision to leave. Summer ended, and so did my affair with the creamy lethargy which, in Malibu, becomes an atmospheric condition.

  But on nights like tonight, as I gaze from my window at the dirty snow dropping like fallout on Central Park in the middle of winter, I remember those evenings in August, when the moon rises early in Malibu, full and jolly like a pumpkin pie, and shares the sky with the sagging sun before it sinks into the sea. Side by side, the moon and the sun light the last bronze surfers of the day, riding the last hanger-on waves, lined up like lizards on their flat-stomached boards, being lifted and carried abreast into the silver curve of coastline that is Malibu at nightfall. And I know that Old Dave Diefenderfer was right. “Malibu,” he said, “is not so much a place to live, as it is a way of life.”

  I loved it.

  I hated it.

  I’ll be back …

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rex Reed, the master of the celebrity profile, was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, and spent much of his childhood in the South, moving from one town to another because of his father’s job as an oil company supervisor. He created his first of many firestorms when he wrote a blistering editorial about racism for the campus newspaper at Louisiana State University. As a senior he won a short story contest judged by Eudora Welty who urged him to become a writer.

  According to Reed, he has been “a jazz singer, a performer on a weekly Louisiana TV show…a pancake cook…an actor in the summer stock company in the Anaconda Copper Mine in Butte, Montana, and the editor of a college literary magazine started by Robert Penn Warren.”

  While still in his twenties Reed got a coveted position as film critic and columnist for The New York Observer, a job he has held for decades. Until the success of the Ebert & Siskel television programs, Reed was without question the most famous American film critic, familiar to anyone who watched “The Tonight Show” or saw his campy performances as a panelist on “The Gong Show.” His featured role in the film version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge made almost as many headlines as his denunciations of the film after its release.

  A second career as a master of the celebrity profile began in 1965 after he submitted an interview with Buster Keaton to The New York Times. In an irony not lost on his readers, it was Keaton’s final interview and his last words to Reed: “Hell, the way I feel, I just might live forever.” Thus became Reed’s signature as a literary profilist: finding the indelible, telling detail and letting the subject paint his or her own portrait, whether they were aware of what the end result would be or not. Writer Tom Wolfe has said about Reed: “Rex Reed…raised the celebrity interview to a new level through his frankness and his eye for social detail. He has also been a master at capturing a story line in the interview situation itself…Reed is excellent at recording and using dialogue.”

  Along with Truman Capote, Kenneth Tynan, Tom Wolfe, and Harry Crews, Rex Reed achieved a literary reputation for a genre, the celebrity profile, once relegated to gossip journalists who as often as not wrote studio-approved fantasies of the lives of the stars.

  In his first collection of profiles, Do You Sleep In the Nude?, Reed caught the comet tails of rising stars just tasting the fruits of superstardom, such as Barbra Streisand as she prepared for her pivotal television special Color Me Barbra and an elusive will-o’-the-wisp known as Warren Beatty as he was finishing Bonnie and Clyde. Reed also was brilliant at capturing the stars whose careers had eclipsed—for instance, a classic and much-anthologized piece on Ava Gardner. On occasion when the mood suited him, Reed could stray beyond Hollywood and the entertainment arts as he did with his stunning and revelatory up-close look at Lester Maddox, the Bible-verse-spewing segregationist governor of Georgia.

  Devault-Graves Digital Editions has reissued Rex Reed’s quartet of best-selling profile anthologies in the ebook format: Do You Sleep In the Nude?, Conversations in the Raw, Valentines & Vitriol, and People Are Crazy Here. Virtually anyone who was anyone during the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s in the movie and theater world is captured for the ages in these books. When asked why he no longer writes celebrity profiles, Mr. Reed answered simply: “The movie stars of today are no longer interesting.”

  But when they were, Rex Reed was there to file them away for history. It is to the reader’s pleasure to rediscover them.

  OTHER DEVAULT-GRAVES DIGITAL EDITIONS

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  Do You Sleep in the Nude? by Rex Reed

  People Are Crazy Here by Rex Reed

  Valentines & Vitriol by Rex Reed

  Weegee: The Autobiography

  Yiddish for Goyim: The Power Shmoozer’s

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  For more information on Devault-Graves Digital Editions ebooks we invite you to visit

  www.devault-gravesagency.com.

 

 

 
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