CENTERPIECE : Reinventing Wheeler : The popular, remote hot springs has faced fire and rain, family tragedies, and now, obstacles to an ambitious expansion plan.

If anything, Jenny Sullivan is articulate. The accomplished director of “The Baby Dance,” which played off-Broadway last year, Sullivan has long devoted herself to finding just the right words at just the right moment.

Except when Wheeler Hot Springs is the subject.

That’s when Sullivan goes, well, ga-ga.

“There’s something about that place,” she says. “It’s a very powerful spot, a very charged place.”

She pauses, as if preparing to explain, then adds:

” Really charged.”

OK.

Can she be specific? Yes: Once or twice a month, her work schedule permitting, Sullivan drives from her home in Santa Barbara up the winding Route 33 six miles north of Ojai to Wheeler, where she soaks for a half-hour in a roiling 104-degree sulfureous mineral bath. Then she takes a deep massage. Sometimes, she’ll stay for dinner at the restaurant. Either way the result is the same:

“It changes my whole way of being,” she says. “It’s about clarity. I do it for the clarity. That’s what’s important in life, after all, isn’t it?”

Another pause.

“That water has got to do something to you.”

It does. And it has for years, probably thousands of them.

Chumash Indians were drawn to the springs here and downriver, at Matilija Springs, not only for salubrious bathing but in the belief that the hot waters, rising from magma deep within the Earth, were conduit to certain gods ruling their fate. Spanish missionaries clambering on horseback up the rocky Ventura River bed and up the north fork of Matilija Creek discovered the springs anew.

And then, in the late 1800s, as Ojai itself would take form and the Chumash go extinct, entrepreneurial settlers would do the modern thing: Buy the land featuring the pungent springs, put a meter on them and build a road whose terminus would be within sulfur-sniffing range. The charge to take of the waters would be nominal. But the world, once word got out, would show up for a bath.

It did, almost.

When Wheeler Hot Springs was first established, more than 100 years ago, it grew into a resort of regional note, with moneyed Easterners, having read Charles Nordhoff’s writings about magical Ojai in Harpers, adding it to their vacation destinations. Full tilt, the place boasted a dance hall, bowling alley, restaurant, hotel, cabins and tent sites, a licensed U.S. Post Office, horseback riding, deer hunting, massage services, soaking tubs at the sulfureous spring, and a rectangular “plunge” pool whose waters promised everything from improved circulation and digestion to alleviation of arthritis and kidney dysfunction. People would simply go to Wheeler to feel better, and many, like Jenny Sullivan, got hooked.

But as quickly as success arrived, so did the strangeness, the natural and man-made disasters, and the human tragedies that have marked Wheeler’s century of existence.

What Sullivan calls a “charged” place is really an 85-acre cleft of land between steep, vaulting mountains covered in mixed chaparral, live oak, Venturan coastal sage scrub, white alder forest, and, incongruously, palm trees. At 1,200 feet above sea level, the land is savage, muscular, Guatemalan. While neither tropical nor truly of the desert, it is green in winter and given to sudden slides, erosion, wild swings in the natural order of things. It is cut through by the creek, in dry weather a charming gurgler, in pounding winter rains a surging river so thick with tan silt it appears as foaming coffee. The land, plainly, is as unforgiving as it is beautiful. And it has ruled its inhabitants and shaped Wheeler’s troubling history with brute force.

Fires have raged through here, leveling the place and killing people. Floods have crashed through here, tossing boulders like pebbles, removing some Wheeler buildings like toys and filling others with ooze, ancient silt raked from canyons of the Santa Ynez mountains looming above.

And fortunes--both financial and personal--have simply vanished: Proprietors have lost their minds, succumbed to unaccountable damages, been foreclosed upon, committed suicide. The current owners lost the unthinkable: a son, to a tree toppled by the weight of its own capillary water, and an employee, in the same haunting, improbable accident.

Nature and fate have consistently punched Wheeler down to size. Today the place functions as a day-stop, with no overnight accommodations or amenity beyond hot tubs, a pool and a restaurant. It is an anorexic, if classier, version of its go-go turn-of-the-century self.

Still, Wheeler’s lure is strong, even charged, and people keep trying to make a go of it here.

The current owners, Evelyn and Frank Landucci, have in recent years established a spa of rustic charm and a profitable restaurant of notable cuisine and first-rank musical entertainment. And this week they stand poised to turn things over to Wheeler’s most ambitious entrepreneur yet, Thomas L. Marshall, who arrives here from a business itinerancy that includes stock brokering in New York and Louisville, restaurateuring and real estate development in Miami and New Jersey, and stints in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. He has moved into a house in Ojai and is focused exclusively on taking Wheeler over and expanding it.

Marshall, if he can pull off an elaborate plan to reprise Wheeler Hot Springs as an overnight destination, will be accomplishing two dramatic things. First, he would be building an expanded, completely overhauled resort in a naturally wild setting that, in the 1990s, is under environmental scrutiny as never before. Second, he would, through the private and public sale of stock for the project, be raising enough money to buy the place from the Landuccis, owners for the last 23 years, thus creating yet another cycle of life for the historically beleaguered hot springs.

What nobody knows, however, is whether it will happen.

Marshall, who says he has spent nearly $500,000 on, among other things, preliminary reports to the county and in project design work, insists it will.

But the county, dutifully reviewing these materials, has yet to move things forward to full environmental assessment and a public hearing stage, a level of provisional approval that could affect when Marshall’s stock sale, and thus his purchase, take place.

The Landuccis, meanwhile, eagerly wait to get out from under and have Marshall take title to the property. For them it is a property sale that has been promised repeatedly in recent months and conceived nearly two years ago, when Marshall approached Evelyn and moved into her office to learn the workings of Wheeler alongside her. As it stands now, Tom Marshall and Evelyn Landucci are partners in proposing the development, while Evelyn still owns the place.

Much is at stake, all round. The Landuccis, after 23 difficult years and a previous failed attempt at selling, want their money, which before stock ownership is taken into account will hit $1.5 million. Thomas Marshall, while coordinating a stock sale and development application to the county, needs to gain momentum on a project he has already spent a bundle on.

If failure should revisit Wheeler this time, it would painfully echo a history of hard luck and dashed hope. Among other things, it would not be unlike the time in 1969, only four weeks after committing all their cash resources to buying Wheeler, the Landuccis stood helpless as floods cruelly washed much of their investment away and set them on the difficult course of rebuilding.

Decision to Buy Was Quick

Fifteen minutes after Evelyn Landucci first saw Wheeler Hot Springs, she said: “I’ll buy it.” She did.

“The land is fantastic,” she says.

Everything seemed right. Evelyn had spent time at Esalen, in Big Sur, and had the dream of starting “a growth center of some kind,” she says, something that would transform Wheeler from an isolated sulfur spa to an early outpost of the human potential movement. And there was a large dance hall that extended out behind what is today the dining room’s fireplace--perfect for a chautauqua.

But quickly, hell broke loose.

She and Frank were living in Los Angeles and saw it on TV: the surge of water that crashed through the canyons in the floods of 1969. Then, their home phone started ringing: Tenants of the 23 trailers on the Wheeler property were trapped, needed help getting out, begged for a bridge.

Frank Landucci and Evelyn’s son Michael Kaufer made it to the site, though they, too, would eventually need help in getting out. The dance hall--”we bought the place for that,” says Evelyn--was gone.

“I stood here, on the property, and looked at the big hole the water had created, and then I looked at all that water,” Frank recalls. “I couldn’t believe the water; it seemed to be coming from everywhere. There was nothing but water and mud. It was nothing like I’d ever seen.”

Insurance? Zip. Act of God, they were told. Besides, one insurer told Evelyn, “ ‘You’ve got the Manson crowd living up there (in the trailers).’ ” The Landuccis describe the trailer tenants during their tenure as “a few retirees.”

Still, vandals were tearing up what was left of the place, and so son Michael and his brother Lanny, who now manages Wheeler Hot Springs, were dispatched to live on-site and protect things.

It was an inauspicious start but represented “all of our savings,” said Evelyn. They had married only a few years before, in Los Angeles, following by a few years the death of Evelyn’s husband. Frank had been Evelyn’s hairdresser. While they needed the income of his shop now more than ever, they nonetheless moved to Ojai to salvage and rebuild Wheeler.

They would apply to the Small Business Administration for a loan, but to the SBA anything called a “growth center” was voodoo. Evelyn took a job in a doctor’s office; Frank commuted to Los Angeles four days a week to cut hair, then worked in an Ojai bakery. To this day, Frank keeps baker’s hours: He drives up 33 from Ojai at 3 or 4 in the morning to start his day maintaining Wheeler.

The trailer park got an income stream going. After work, Evelyn made chili and sandwiches and sold them in the tavern. The Landuccis’ mortgage on the property was to Art Linkletter, a previous and unsuccessful Wheeler owner, and that was paid off when the SBA finally came through, in 1973.

With the same pluck with which Evelyn and Frank bought the place, they decided, never having run a restaurant before, to open a “serious restaurant” with vegetarian entrees. Casa Landucci opened at Wheeler in 1975. Soon the couple would pack 300 people in on Friday and Saturday nights for rock ‘n’ roll dances, with Phil Salazar and Martin Young performing. Evelyn, however, got punched while tending bar one of those nights, a brawl ensued, and the dancing was halted.

In 1976, Jim Messina, Kenny Loggins’ former half, suggested the placement of hot tubs near the pool. By 1978, Frank had installed redwood tubs in a small spa building next to the pool, and the spa was relaunched and pool reopened. Word got out, and again Wheeler started drawing people for the magical waters.

But by 1980 Evelyn and Frank were getting tired. They were their own employees, working seven days a week keeping the place up and afloat. Moreover, they’d done battle and “were dissuaded,” Evelyn says, by financial institutions and government agencies, from expanding in any substantial way. Their dreams of a growth center seemed beyond reach. That they might salvage their resources depended, as it does today, upon unloading the place.

They got lucky, found a prospective buyer quickly, and made arrangements in 1980 for Wheeler to be taken over by Barbara Bowman, now the owner of a flourishing Ojai boutique.

Bowman and her former husband, however, failed over the next four years to obtain permits to expand Wheeler. They ran the restaurant with some success, and yet through it all just couldn’t make ends meet. Meanwhile, the Landuccis, in 1983, opened Landucci’s, an Italian restaurant, in Ojai--precisely as Bowman’s money was running out. They were forced to take Wheeler back from Bowman. (Bowman declined to return numerous calls from The Times.)

Wheeler was again Evelyn’s and Frank’s, and they immediately put it on the market without restarting the restaurant or spa. But soon after that, in 1985, Evelyn’s third son, John, came up from Los Angeles and announced he’d like to lease Wheeler and, for starters, reopen the restaurant. John had a vision for the place as a full destination resort--a resort not unlike what Thomas Marshall now promotes.

But in a haunting replay of what happened to Evelyn and Frank upon buying Wheeler, John suffered a catastrophe. On the day he signed the lease papers to take over, a fire laid to arson raged down Wheeler Gorge and through the property, though seven firetrucks using Wheeler as a base staved off destruction. Still, damage was substantial; today the trunks of palm trees surrounding the bathhouse and office remain blackened from the blaze.

John Kaufer pressed forward, however, and reprised the restaurant as The Inn at Wheeler Hot Springs. Things began to flourish under John, who had also relaunched the spa and, in the summer of 1987, brought his brother Lanny on board. Guests at Wheeler would come to know all manner of Landuccis and Kaufers, but John, it is said, had a particular charisma and presence when on the property.

“He loved it,” Lanny says of John. “He just loved being in the center of things and greeting people as they’d arrive.”

John was repairing the pipe at a natural cold-water spring at Wheeler in the fall of 1987 when a huge old live oak tree, its center hollowed from the 1985 fire, fell on him and his assistant, killing them. The loss to the family was, and is, incalculable. Their goal, since then, has been to “keep the place successful,” Evelyn says, “and to help (John) achieve his dream” for Wheeler.

They have done a good deal toward that goal. The spa is busy enough to require reservations on weekends, and the restaurant, featuring lean but stylish fare, has reached a new level of excellence under chefs Gael Lecolley and Guy Leclerot. Moreover, musical programming over the last year has been nothing short of stellar, featuring Manhattan Transfer and Kenny Burrell, among others.

Now that Thomas Marshall is on the premises daily and seeking to buy the resort, Evelyn sees as one of her jobs “to help Tom get the permits” to develop the property. Not only will it make a final sale of Wheeler possible, and give Evelyn and Frank Landucci their long-sought exit, but “it will help bring about change that fulfills my brother’s dream for the place,” says Lanny.

Marshall Pays Repeat Visits

Tom Marshall first heard about Wheeler on his car radio in Los Angeles in October, 1987. He called, reserved a tub, and when he showed up he couldn’t, like so many, quite believe the place.

He met Evelyn, and in his post-soak, post-massage elation said to her: “It must be fun to come to work here.”

Grimly, she looked up at him.

“It was, until my son got killed, weeks ago,” Marshall recalls her saying.

Marshall would come back for more soaks, more massages, and within five months call Evelyn and Frank Landucci to ask after their plans.

“I was sure they were trying to sell it,” Marshall says. “Three years later, I talked to them seriously. It had the potential of being a white elephant, and so negotiations were very tedious. I’ll tell you this: She runs that family with an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

Marshall’s plans for Wheeler were big from the outset: raise $3.3 million from a private and public stock offering, pay Evelyn Landucci $1.5 million in cash, and then create clusters of small guest cabins to accommodate 72, construct an administration building featuring banquet and meeting halls, install a sewage treatment plant, add six more hot tub rooms and six more massage rooms, and expand the restaurant and its kitchen. Further, a portion of the funds would be spent establishing an on-site bottling facility, to market Wheeler Hot Springs Mineral Water, taken from the cold spring where John died. (In the deal, Evelyn would also receive a trust deed for $1.5 million and 14% of the company’s new stock.)

The goal, ultimately, is that Wheeler become a 12-month-a-year resort for health-conscious vacationers and corporate and academic groups seeking a retreat-like atmosphere. Lanny would stay on as manager, Evelyn as a director and minority shareholder, and Marshall as president holding 30% of the shares.

It sounds very go-go for rustic little Wheeler, up bucolic 33 in the wild Los Padres National Forest.

But then Thomas Marshall is no stranger to promotion. And neither is he a stranger to conflict arising from business ventures.

Brooklyn-born--”Nobody talks about ‘growth centers’ in Brooklyn,” he quips--Marshall ran a stock brokerage firm in Louisville, Louisville Bond and Share Corp., in the early to mid-1960s, closing it in 1966. He ran afoul of the National Assn. of Securities Dealers (NASD) and the Securities and Exchange Commission, however, for withdrawing funds and leaving his firm below its net capital requirements. The NASD revoked his license for good in 1967.

But Marshall appealed to the SEC, citing, among other things, domestic trouble relating to his estranged wife, the firm’s bookkeeper. No clients of the firm had ultimately lost money, and so the SEC, according to SEC records in Washington, D.C., blunted the NASD ruling by suspending Marshall’s registration for just 30 days. In its ruling, however, issued in January, 1969, the SEC cited “Marshall’s conduct as evidencing a lack of responsibility” and added “the proviso that Marshall shall not thereafter act in a supervisory capacity” of a securities firm belonging to the NASD.

This, of course, does not mean Marshall cannot run Wheeler Hot Springs, should he succeed in the stock offering and ultimately be its majority owner. And the stock offering is not being managed by him; Network 1 Financial Securities, in Red Bank, N.J., and Palm Beach, Fla., is taking care of that, and Marshall has no supervisory capacity with the firm.

Well before the SEC issued its 1969 ruling, however, Marshall had left Louisville to make a shot a the big time, in Miami.

There, in 1968, he and two others founded Broadway Joe’s, the restaurant chain of football star Joe Namath’s name, and took it public on a stock offering in 1969 that raised $2 million. The chain opened outlets in Florida and New York City, and, under Marshall’s direction, purchased more than $5 million worth of real estate in Nevada, New Jersey and Florida.

But late the same year, in 1969, Marshall resigned as president and director of Broadway Joe’s, remaining the second-largest shareholder after Namath and insisting that the departure was a happy one and taken for unspecified opportunities. Today, however, he cites other reasons: “I had problems with my board. Some of (the members) wanted to lend money (from the company) to certain directors, and I couldn’t allow myself to go through with it. I felt the board members were acting dishonorably, and left.”

Broadway Joe’s ultimately folded altogether. As for the firm’s considerable land holdings, among them a Las Vegas motel and 1,000 building lots in Ocean County, N.J.?

“What happened to it?” Marshall asks, hunching his shoulders. “I wish I knew.”

Marshall moved on, became involved in hotel and restaurant management in New Jersey and television and movie production in Florida and Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles in the early 1980s, he “had an arrangement” with MGM in which he acquired the rights to a series of spy books that would form the basis of a film. The project, however, fell through.

So Marshall picked up stakes in 1982 and went Bulgaria to become involved in the making of “The Glory of Khan,” a film that would be seen there but never in the United States, with the result that “the Bulgarian government owes me $1 million, something that’s still pending,” he says. The government had confiscated the film, Marshall says, prompting him to file suit in Los Angeles in 1985 and win a judgment. But he’s still waiting for money.

“I went back in 1990 and was unable to get anywhere,” he said. “Nobody could take responsibility.”

Along the way were various consulting jobs, one of them lasting six months in helping establish a Nevada television station.

Now Wheeler Hot Springs.

So far Marshall has filed numerous reports to Ventura County planners establishing that, overall, the proposed expansion would be consistent with past use of the property and, he says, “be friendly to the environment.”

Marshall is, for one, undaunted by water. Indeed, the creek running through Wheeler has deepened over the years and, as a result, was large enough to accommodate the surging waters that resulted in 1992’s devastating floods downriver. Wheeler took no flooding or damage whatsoever, a fact that delights Frank Landucci and a fact that is argued to county officials concerned with the creek’s capacities.

Marshall also has determined, with the help of UCLA’s vast archeological library, that the Wheeler Hot Springs property is free of even one discovered Chumash Indian burial site--defying a popular belief that sought, no doubt, to assign responsibility for Wheeler’s “curse” of bad luck. The nearest known burial site is in a gorge well up Route 33.

Still, records on file with the county Planning Department show the numerous concerns of county and state agencies that Marshall and the Landuccis must satisfy before moving forward on the project.

Among those are the creek’s capacity to carry 100-year flood waters; the stability of the land itself, for the purpose of determining building setback distances, as Wheeler is in the Santa Ynez Secondary Fault Hazard Zone; potential overuse of creek water that ultimately replenishes the Upper Ventura River Basin, downstream; the distances of springs from sewage disposal sites; the discharge of treated sewage through leach lines on the property or directly into the creek; building setback distances from the creek itself; the capacities of Wheeler’s three cold-water springs to actually support an expanded facility in the dry summer months, and the reliability of those springs, not to mention the famous hot-sulfur spring, if movement along the nearby fault should occur.

Marshall is optimistic: “This is something I believe in. And I don’t see hurdles because I approach things from the bleakest side and take it, step by step, through till it is rosy. We’ve received a conceptual approval from the county and also been told: ‘Don’t push too far, now.’ So we’re being careful. But we’re not doing anything different that hasn’t been done there before. There’s no damage to this property that wasn’t done 100 years ago.”

This is Marshall’s only hint, indirect as it is, at his and the Landuccis’ wild card in the whole ordeal. If the county, under pressure from environmentalists, turns them down, Frank Landucci is sitting on a legal permit issued in 1975 to rent out 69 mobile homes on the property.

“If all else fails,” concedes Marshall, “the Landuccis have the right to put in 69 mobile homes, rent them out, landscape them, and just make sure they have no kitchens, otherwise it’s not a mobile home. Then, you’ve protected your investment.”

He pauses a moment.

“The county realizes there’s a better way to go. Why do it half-baked?”

Gunshot Mementos

Two bullet holes remain in the glass at the Wheeler Hot Springs restaurant: one, above and to the left of the entry door, and the other in the plate-glass mirror behind the bar where Evelyn got slugged and facing a picture of the late John Kaufer mounted on a support column.

Asked who fired the shots, Frank Landucci smiles, scrunches his shoulders up, and says: “Before our time.”

So much here was. And so much of the Wheeler mystery is locked up in it.

Perhaps the only reliable, tangible vestige is the thing that keeps it all going, the gold mine that separates Wheeler from just another threadbare camp in the woods: a lone sulfureous hot spring. It is inconspicuously situated above the spa’s office in a palm-fronted grotto, originally the site of Wheeler’s soaking tubs. And it flows slowly and steadily at 102 to 104 degrees, laden with concentrations of sodium chloride, potassium sulfate, magnesium carbonate and sulfureous hydrogen gasses--enough to change anyone’s electrolytes.

Just as surely as it drew the Chumash it drew the resort’s founder, Wheeler Blumberg, while out hunting from his father’s facility downstream at Matilija Hot Springs. Wheeler homesteaded the place in the mid-1800s and admitted his first paying guests in 1893 with the completion of a rough road to the spring.

There’s no accounting for Wheeler’s incipient madness, however. One published report suggests that he decided his wife’s heart was on the wrong side of her chest and so commenced, unsuccessfully, to pound it back into place. But as Wheeler’s resort expanded and flourished, things for him got weirder still. By 1907 the Ventura Ranger, George Bald, was stopped on horseback while approaching Wheeler Hot Springs and told that a guest had gone berserk and was shooting anything that moved.

It was Wheeler. An armed posse was dispatched to take him, dead or alive. He was taken alive but he later died in a straitjacket and handcuffs, in “an insane condition,” says a Ventura County Historical Quarterly report. No one noticed, or at least recorded, whether bullet holes in the glass, if they were even there yet, were Wheeler’s.

The resort then shifted ownership to Webb Wilcox, who had married Wheeler’s daughter, Etta, and established cottages where The Wheel Tavern, across Route 33, is today. He also maintained the 6-by-7-foot Wheeler Springs Post Office, cited in “Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not” as the smallest registered post office in the United States (later challenged by Ochopee, Fla.).

But disaster struck in 1917, when fire claimed much of the resort, killing five. The fire raged all the way down the gorge to Ojai. Wilcox rebuilt things substantially, and Wheeler’s became popular for boxers who trained at a camp nearby, among them Jack Dempsey, reputed to have his own nine-ton brass soaking tub at the hot springs. Though none of the reports appear documented, a repeated account has it that a member of the Costello crime family was blown up in one of Wilcox’s cabins.

In any event, fires in 1932 and 1948, and a flood in 1938, continued to punish Wheeler Hot Springs, slowly taking out buildings and challenging what would, after Wilcox unloaded the hot springs in the late 1930s, become a succession of owners and sad fates.

Sam Sklar operated the resort in 1953, proposing to build a 400-room hotel. No luck. The property, with some 30 furnished cabins still in place, went into receivership.

Enter Art Linkletter, who snapped it up in 1955 and installed a kiddie park with rides, lending Wheeler Hot Springs a family touch and expanded theme. It didn’t fly. Then, more tragedy: Linkletter sold it in 1961 to Rollen Haslan, who eventually committed suicide in one of the cabins.

Among other things, Linkletter was left holding a note. He thus became a mortgage holder briefly for Evelyn Landucci.

Evelyn and Frank Landucci have outlasted all Wheeler proprietors. But whether the new development plan flies or crashes will never bear connection to Evelyn’s judgment of the last 23 years, some of them joyful, others so filled with loss as to defy words.

“It was worth it because I can’t negate 23 years of my life,” she says, her characteristic smile opening up, light coming to her eyes. “By my friends I’m considered a kook. But I take chances. I learned: I can do anything I want to do.”

She looks out toward the creek. It is surging, filled with coffee.

“Everything happens as it should.”

The Plan

* An enlarged spa featuring six more hot tub rooms, six more massage rooms, and rooms for health and beauty treatments not currently available.

* Construction of a series of clustered cabins at both ends of the property. Together these cabins would accommodate 72 overnight guests.

* Construction of an administration building--replacing the modest cabin now in use for an office--featuring corporate offices, guest registration desk, banquet and meeting halls, and exercise and aerobics facilities.

* Construction of tennis courts.

* Construction of an on-site sewage treatment plant.

* Modification of the pool to allow for year-round swimming.

* Development of a bottled-water business that, drawing upon cold-water springs already tapped for the restaurant’s use, would market to the public and restaurant trade Wheeler Springs Sparkling Mineral Water. Potential to develop new springs on the property was cited in a prospectus filed with the SEC.

* Enlargement of the restaurant and an overhaul of its kitchen.