Old Malibu Road Retains Glamour--and Sinking Feeling

There’s a road in Malibu that wants to be a river.

So far the Los Angeles County has spent more than $1 million--some say much more--trying to change the road’s mind.

But stubbornly the road goes on, behaving like the unruly child of the mountains above it and the sea below.

One might say, let the road have its way. Let it slip into the sea.

But this is a very important road, old Malibu Road is. And democratic too. Movie stars and show business entrepreneurs jog here. Nurses and school teachers loll on the sunny beaches beneath it. Music headliners and harried businessmen quit the rattle of their lives for the serenity and splendor of the sunsets, the womb-like solace of their hot tubs.

It gives one, they say, a sense of humility, having the strength of the mountains to your back and the soulful sea spread out before you.

Road Remains a Problem

But real humility comes from dealing daily with the road, which is oblivious to such human values and to the fact that its 2.5 miles carry the price tag of up to $12,000 a front foot, or about $16 million, not counting the 200 or so houses that line its wobbling path. They range in price from $600,000 to more than $1 million.

At various times in the last 20 years one could encounter rock musicians and movie stars guiding their Alfa Romeos and Mercedes over the eccentric slips and bobs of the road, only too aware that beneath them the road was dealing bare-fisted with the undercarriages, tires and suspension systems. Go ahead, they could hear the road saying, give me your best shot, make my day.

It is of little solace to know that such stars as Burgess Meredith, Miles Davis, Shirley MacLaine, Loretta Swit, Dom De Luise, Robert Redford, James Whitmore and Billie Jean King dwelt here, and dealt with the road.

One Special Stretch

The road doesn’t care--especially about 150 feet of it that is of particular importance to the county Highway Maintenance Department.

Road crews from the county highway station in Malibu Canyon a few miles away are out here in bad weather up to three times a day, shoring up this one especially bad-tempered slice of the road. In good weather they come out every few weeks.

This particular part of the road has been known to sink a foot a day, says highway supervisor Earl Voorheis, a man built like an earth mover.

He has other, more challenging problems with the falling mountains along the Pacific Coast Highway and the roads, like Rambla Pacifica, that climb into the hills. Rambla Pacifica is know for its landslides.

How to Cope With It?

The highway men have considered almost everything in dealing with this nasty stretch of macadam. They could build a sea wall, but the accumulating pressures would be strong enough to bend steel girders. They even considered letting this patch of road go its own way and building a bridge over it. But that would run into millions of dollars more and residents won’t pay for it.

Footings would have to go down at least 60 feet, because the slip plane--the line between stability and instability--is 40 feet below the surface.

On a shelf in Marty Cooper’s cozy living room, which like all living rooms here looks out on the broad Pacific, is a book called “Lost Highway.” Cooper, an advertising executive and musician and president of the Malibu Road Assn., assures you that it has nothing to do with the road outside. It is a biography of Jack Kerouac.

Tells Different Story

He would also like to dissuade you about the famed luxuriousness and elegance of Malibu. He points out that a lot of ordinary folk live here, and he ticks off the vocations of his neighbors--a psychiatrist, a carpenter, an actor, an aircraft executive, a magazine publisher and someone besides the writer’s family living in the old William Saroyan house.

There was a time when the fabled seaside attracted a lot of rock stars, he says, but they moved out the first time they couldn’t get into town.

The road again.

One long-time resident remembers a winter when the road was one-way all winter long. Then there was a major excavating job on the road about 10 years ago, but it tended to sink faster after the face-lift than before. Once the sinking was so bad that two houses were found leaning on each other. One resident describes the undulating surface as overdone lasagna.

But nevertheless the residents along the old road bear a grudging respect for this one link with the outside world. It affords a kind of privacy, a sort of cantankerous watchdog that would surely rise up from terra incognita and smite burglars and other interlopers.