Legend of the Pink Lady : Twenty-five years later, a painting of a nude woman that appeared on a Malibu cliff hasn’t been forgotten

For an instant, artist Lynne Westmore spotted the naked lady who changed her life 25 years ago.

“I see her breast,” said Westmore, 56, searching the rocks on a cliff in the Santa Monica Mountains for any sign of her creation.

“It’s not there,” she said a few seconds later. “Actually, I can’t make out anything.”

There was nothing there. Cars zoomed through the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road, four miles north of Malibu. Nobody stopped.

In late October, 1966, everybody had stopped. Overnight, a painting of a pink, naked woman had appeared on the rocks above the tunnel. For a few days, the painting made more headlines in Los Angeles than President Johnson and the Beatles. She was art to some, an obscenity to others. She was dubbed the Pink Lady, and those who saw her have never forgotten her.

“I was blown away by it,” said Dan Rich, an Encino hairstylist, who was 8 at the time. “Every time I go through that tunnel, I mention the Pink Lady. I look up to see if she’s popping back through.”

Westmore, now a grandmother, isn’t surprised by the lady’s enduring legacy. The Northridge woman was 31 when she scaled the cliff after dark and painted one night what she imagined would be another anonymous contribution to the California landscape. Instead, she lost her privacy--and her job. She received marriage proposals and death threats. Nudist groups asked her to join; Hollywood asked for her story.

And the Pink Lady wasn’t even her first choice. Initially, Westmore hoped to draw a bird, but realized its wings would be obstructed by the brush. The lady won by default.

“There was graffiti on the rocks all the time,” said Westmore, who passed by the tunnel frequently on the way to her mother’s Malibu home. “If someone was going to that trouble, why not do something creative?”

Gradually, the lady took over Westmore’s life. Several nights each month, starting in January, 1966, when the full moon provided sufficient light, she climbed the mountain to prepare her canvas. Supporting herself with nylon ropes attached to her waist and nearby bushes and pipes, Westmore took months to erase the graffiti. In August, she sketched the outline, which remained undisturbed on the cliff for two months.

Finally, on Oct. 28, 1966, a Friday, starting at 8 p.m. and working with just the light from a full moon, Westmore finished her work--a 60-foot-tall naked woman, running with pink flowers in her hand. At dawn, Westmore drove home to greet her dog, who had delivered puppies overnight, wake her two children and resume her normal routine.

For two days, she did. But, on Monday, word of the painting spread. By Tuesday, stories about it were all over local newspapers and TV newscasts. County officials, who weren’t concerned with its artistic merit, complained that it would become a traffic hazard. Any motorist approaching the tunnel from the south could be distracted and miss oncoming vehicles. The Pink Lady had to go, officials said.

The public came to watch her execution; cars were parked half a mile back on either side. It became a hangout for the serious art admirer and for those just trying to cash in on California’s latest fad.

“We went there to meet girls,” said Harvey Kubernik, 39, a Reseda record producer. “We heard about it, and we knew there were going to be girls there.”

I. L. Morhar, who headed the county Road Division, was only concerned about one girl, and how to get rid of her. At first, firefighters turned on high-power hoses, but that only made her brighter. Paint remover was tried, but that failed too. This was one resilient woman. Westmore had used house paint, which is very difficult to remove.

Each time the county failed, many in the crowd applauded. Some signed petitions protesting the action.

Initially, because of the difficulty in executing the painting and the subject matter, the public assumed that the artist was a man. It wasn’t until midweek that Westmore came forward.

“It was very exciting,” said John Van Hamersveld, a Malibu artist who designed album covers for the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. “Everybody wanted to know how she did it.”

Westmore arrived on the scene, and was horrified. She had assumed that she would feel no sentimental attachment to the Pink Lady, but would easily forget her as with other art projects and move on to the next. But when she saw the road crew trying to erase her work, her emotions changed.

“I usually don’t have a feeling that everything I do is precious,” Westmore said. “But in this case, I became its mother, and it became important for me to save her. It was the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen.”

There was little Westmore could do. She had always wondered if the painting might land her in jail, and the county’s response only heightened that concern. She stayed silent.

Finally, when she realized the only way to stop the lady’s removal was a court injunction, she went public. She appealed to Morhar to stop the proceedings. It made no difference. On Nov. 3, 1966, using 14 gallons of brown paint, workers covered up the Pink Lady.

But paint couldn’t wipe out the legend.

“As I was leaving that day,” said Westmore, who couldn’t bear to watch her creation be removed, “this woman came up to me and said, ‘Let me just touch you.’ That’s when I knew this was starting to get out of hand.”

Another woman called Westmore every other night for two months, contending that the Pink Lady was an exact portrait of her young daughter who ran away from home.

“She thought I had used her daughter as a model,” Westmore said. “It was so pathetic. She was so convinced.”

Westmore received hate mail from people offended by the nude portrait, including one letter from someone threatening to tar and feather her and her two children and dump them off at Sunset Boulevard. She turned the letter over to the FBI.

She received pictures of men masturbating. An arts group asked her to judge pictures that apes had painted.

“It was too crazy,” she said. “One woman accused me of all the rapes that had been committed, that the Pink Lady brought out the lust in men.”

Westmore changed her telephone number, but the calls kept coming. Finally, the stress was too much, and she was hospitalized with pneumonia and lost her job as a legal secretary. But even in the hospital she wasn’t immune from attention.

“This nurse came in, wanting me to sign something,” Westmore recalled. “I thought it was for some kind of medical work, but she wanted an autograph.”

Her artistic career got a boost, though. Despite, according to Times art critic William Wilson, the art community’s viewing the Pink Lady as “a joke, like streaking,” galleries quickly offered to show some of Westmore’s work. She scrambled to enlarge her portfolio and held a few shows.

Still, Westmore continued to mourn her loss. She sued the county for $1 million in damages for the loss of the work and for invasion of privacy. The county filed a countersuit for about $26,000 to cover the cost of erasing the Pink Lady, and for the “public nuisance” created by the spectacle.

The court threw out both cases, determining that the property belonged to a land development company, which was the only party with the right to file suit. The company did nothing.

Hollywood got involved too. Jim Tugend, an associate producer for television’s Chrysler Theater, paid Westmore $200 so she wouldn’t give the rights to her story to anyone else. Westmore said Tugend talked about getting Candice Bergen or Suzanne Pleshette to play the lead in a filmed version of her story.

“He was trying to introduce all kinds of subplots that never happened about why I painted her,” Westmore said. “And I didn’t like that.”

The project dissolved, but it was symbolic of how people around Westmore often misinterpreted her motivation.

The Pink Lady, she said, was no feminist statement or bid for financial profit.

“I did it simply as an art piece, and that was all,” Westmore said. “I was just trying to do something that was my own.”

She assumed that people wouldn’t care about her creation. She even left a rope at the site after completing the work so she could return to fix the Pink Lady’s mouth.

“I was never happy with that mouth,” Westmore said. “There was a rock protruding through her lips, and I thought I could do something about it if I had more time.”

After about four years, the controversy dissipated. Westmore resumed her normal life of making art in her studio and raising a family.

Every two years, when she’s compiled enough pieces, Westmore displays her work--mostly sculptures now--at local galleries. As a child, she learned to love art from her grandmother, and received valuable guidance from her father, Academy Award-winning makeup artist Ern Westmore.

But the Pink Lady is never far away. Hardly a week goes by without someone reminding her of it.

Dan Rich had been styling Westmore’s hair for two years when he learned a few weeks ago that she was the Pink Lady’s creator. He immediately got everyone’s attention at the salon.

“You’re more famous than the Beatles!” Rich shouted.