Of Sewers and Surf: Fear and Loathing on the Malibu Campaign Trail : Cityhood: Before the supervisors will let the ‘glamour capital’ go, they want to impose their sanitized vision on it. The result is raw politics.

Once more the deceptively laid-back community of Malibu is aflame with political fury. Billed as a fight over cityhood, the issue is actually sewers, a subject that has long dominated conversation at Malibu dinner parties.

Briefly, many residents hope to incorporate as a city, free of what they call the tyranny of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

In truth, the supervisors, wielding both legislative and executive powers, are closer to being absolute monarchs than any other elected officials in our democracy. As the late Supervisor John Anson Ford told me in 1937, when I was trying to persuade him to run for mayor: “Each of the five supervisors enjoys twice the clout of any mayor--and one-fifth of the headaches.”

Today’s supervisors, with Ed Edelman dissenting, want to impose a comprehensive and enormously expensive sewer system on Malibu before they will let it go. Without sewers--the need for them is still a subject for debate--there can be little further development, and developers are primary sources of the funds with which supervisors win elections.

The supervisors, in particular Deane Dana, in whose district Malibu lies, picture themselves as enlightened tribunes whose dreams of progress and sanitation are thwarted by the selfish millionaires of Malibu, lolling on their exclusive beaches. To the proponents of cityhood, it is a case of the sturdy yeomanry of Mailbu protecting their idyllic way of life from the rapacious barons of development and their ruthless seneschals, the supervisors.

At the moment, the supervisors have reluctantly yielded to a court order and scheduled a cityhood election for June 5, with the proviso that incorporation be delayed until March 28, 1991, when construction of the sewers could be under way. Although the original sewer plan has been greatly reduced by the California Coastal Commission, assessments for homeowners have been raised. So the battle will continue, with much figurative blood still to flow.

But then, politics in what Malibuites like to think is the glamour capital of the world have been tinged with ferocity ever since the redoubtable May K. Rindge’s armed horsemen patrolled the borders of what was then her private estate to fend off railroads, highway and other intrusive tentacles of development.

Since then, Malibuites have survived many threats to their cherished way of life: In the 1950s, it was plans for a nuclear reactor in Corral Canyon; in the 1960s, projected freeways from Santa Monica and the valley, interchanging near Malibu Canyon; in the 1970s, a grandiose plan by the county engineers to create a flat coastal plain by filling in all the coastal canyons (“You’ll love it,” a county official told us, “it’ll be just like Miami Beach”).

Sometimes, the warfare was internal. Malibu, with its many movie people, was a major battleground during the witch-hunts and blacklists following World War II. Like the current war over cityhood, this was not a class struggle. There were affluent members of the Communist Party here, and, living in hillside shacks, what could be described as right-wing hippies, who packed guns and hoarded food against an imminent takeover by the “commie hordes.”

In 1947, when I was helping organize a protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee, I was severely handicapped by not having a telephone, there being a postwar shortage of such amenities. I borrowed the phone of an opulent colleague and rang up several-hundred-dollars’ worth of calls to congressmen, journalists and New York theater people, enlisting their support and detailing our plans for a protest flight of stars to Washington. I was surprised by the distress my action evoked in my colleague, even as I handed over a check for the full amount. Years later, I learned that I had broadcast our plans over the telephone, probably tapped, of a stalwart member of the Communist Party.

Far less opulent was a handyman my wife and I employed, an equally stalwart member of the John Birch Society. He always asked for payment in cash, and when he died he left not only a large collection of guns, but bundles of cash concealed in lavatory cisterns, pillows and even garbage cans. I’m not saying that all was extremism in Malibu politics. My neighbor Kyle Palmer, then political editor of The Times and widely believed to be the de facto Republican boss of California, joined with me in launching charity drives in the community--and I had, quite erroneously, been identified by national political columnist Drew Pearson as Kyle’s Democratic counterpart. So here and there political sweetness and light prevailed.

But not much of it is in evidence today. As for the June election, my hunch is that cityhood will win, despite the combined political muscles of developers, land speculators and Pepperdine University, whose plans for massive expansion depend on the supervisors’ regional sewers. I base my guess not on the unpopularity of the sewer system itself and its huge assessments but the problem presented by Pacific Coast Highway.

PCH, as we Malibuites call it, is possibly the worst thoroughfare in all America. It is at once a principal route north, the commuter road not only for thousands of Malibuites but for commuters from inland developments who want to avoid Ventura Freeway gridlock. It is used by local shoppers and Los Angeles beach-goers, by tourists, by hundreds of bicyclists, by California Highway Patrol cars and ambulances screaming toward the all-too-frequent accidents, and by joggers and casual strollers in swimsuits, often accompanied by dogs, on and off the leash. If the traffic can move at all, to observe the 45 m.p.h. speed limit is to be tailgated, rear-ended, shouted at and even shot at.

There is absolutely no way that PCH can accommodate a huge buildup of traffic, and that will be on the minds of many voters. Even the developers must wonder how they can hope to sell choice properties if the buyers can’t get in or out.

But this is Malibu, where anything can happen. In 1962, Richard M. Nixon ran for governor of California, and looked like a shoo-in until the extreme right challenged him in the Republican primary with Joe Shell, a former USC football player. Malibu was ablaze with Shell bumper stickers and billboards, with Shell posters on every power pole. There were Shell meetings, barbecues and parades. Malibu Republicans, in effect, were so Shell-shocked that they seemed quite ready to jettison their quondam national standard-bearer. One day my wife was driving our children home from school when our 10-year-old spotted a car with a Nixon sticker. “Look, Mommie!” she cried--”Liberals!”

I have often wondered if Nixon lost the final election to Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. because enough rightists with 10-year-old mentalities mistook him for a liberal. In Malibu, it is unwise to bet the ranch on anything.