For reasons too tedious to explain, but having a lot to do with taking
over ownership of a cat, I found myself a couple of weekends ago in Malibu, a
ritzy little beach town just up the coast from LA. Now, I would be the first to admit that I
don’t “get” Malibu. I was told by
somebody in the know that it’s the place people move after they make their
first serious money in Hollywood. They
move out, get the beach house, the view, the seclusion, then a couple of years
later they realize they’re paying way too much money for this place, that
they’re out of the action, that they have to drive an hour and a half to get
anywhere they actually want to be, and then they move back into a house in the Hollywood
Hills.
Whether all that’s true or not, it was certainly a mighty tedious drive
to get to Malibu from where I live, so it seemed that having gone all that way
I should at least have a walk along the beach.
I didn’t go very far - the cat was calling - but I walked for 40
minutes or so, and hell yes, I could see the attraction of having a Malibu
beach house. In fact the whole stretch
looked like an architectural theme park; all manner of quirky, individualistic,
slightly over the top beach houses, some of them so close to the beach that any
damn fool could ignore the no trespassing signs and walk right up to the front
door and poke around, although you could be pretty sure you were being filmed
by security cameras.
And eventually I walked past, and in due course poked around (didn’t go
inside – though others clearly had done), a genuine Malibu ruin, that looked in
fact as though it became a ruin before it was even completed.
The story as I hear it (and my source may not be 100% reliable), is that
a Getty heir began to build a house for his mistress. Now, I don’t know what constitutes
extravagance in the Getty clan but looking around this place it seems as though
the architect or the mistress, or both, decided to blow as much of the old
man’s money as possible. There’s enough
marble on the outside, to furnish a small showroom, most of it gorgeous, garish,
madly expensive, and not quite matching.
Then again, bits of it look kind of tacky. Are those columns with the rebar bar sticking
out of them supposed to look classical? Are those arches meant to be Moorish?
Anyway, I’m sure it’s very unfair to judge a project before it's finished, but it appears that unfinished is how it’s going to stay. Getty heir and mistress apparently fell out,
and both parties just shrugged their shoulders and walked away. You can do that in Malibu I guess, certainly
if you’re a Getty. But as I say, I’m
happy to be corrected on all this.
It was a certain amount of fun poking around the ruin, looking for
clues, feeling like a gumshoe. And let’s
face it, it doesn’t take much to make me feel like Philip Marlowe, and although
I find it hard to think of either Marlowe or his creator Raymond Chandler as
beach boys, the fact is if you live in LA, you’re bound to end up walking on
the beach sooner or later.
I haven’t found much evidence for this in Chandler’s case. Most of the extant photographs show him in his
study, smoking a pipe and fondling a cat.
But there is this rather nice
picture of him walking somewhere that could very possibly be a beach, though I wouldn't swear to it: it
might equally be a quarry or conceivably a studio backlot.
And here he is in Palm Springs in the late 50s, by the pool rather than
the beach, and very definitely eschewing the hardboiled image.
It’s easier to imagine Humphrey Bogart at the beach, but if you really
want a picture of Bogie also letting his image slip just a little there’s this:
also Palm Springs as far as I can tell.
But there is one locus where Marlowe, Chandler, and Malibu all come
together, and that’s in Altman’s The Long
Goodbye; a movie I never quite love as much as everybody else seems to, but
it does have the very clever and telling conflation of Marlowe (Elliott Gould) – a man
of the mean streets – having a case that takes him to the Malibu Colony, an
even ritzier enclave within the ritzy little beach town; and has him walking
along the beach, giving rise to this fabulous (and I assume entirely constructed) image.
