A Free Spirit : Welcoming Individuality While Preserving its Own Quirky Identity, Laguna Beach Has Been Many Things to Many People

In a time when we seem to opt for the safety of vanilla, Laguna is Neapolitan. And oh, how we love it. Like the beautiful free spirit of the family, it is a place that has always marched to its own tune and taken itself a tad seriously, but in the end who could resist its charms?

Now our artsy town with its own unofficial roadside greeter has taken a hit, and nobody is quite sure what we will end up as, now that the embers have begun to cool.

One hundred years ago last month, Laguna suffered its first fire--the newly built Brooks Hotel burned to the ground. Where else but in Laguna would the only material survivor of the hotel be a side of ham that someone rescued by tossing it out a window?

Tolerant, fanatically tree-hugging and irrepressible, Laguna is home to those who would seem to be on a collision course with each other. The richest man in America. Wealthy land barons. Middle-class environmentalists. And artists and craftspeople in lean-to sheds, living on sales of their ceramic pots.

What other Orange County city would declare itself a nuclear-free zone? Or declare a house too white? Or refuse building permits to a manse for casting too big a shadow on a neighbor?

But this is also a city that is building a 25-unit apartment building for poor HIV-positive residents. It is the only city in the county with its own shelter for the homeless; for years, residents have taken it upon themselves to bring food down to the park for street people.

And always there has been the romance of Hollywood, from Bogie and Bacall partying at Hotel Laguna to Harrison Ford, who got his chin scar in a motorcycle accident while he was an actor with the Laguna Playhouse. It has been a playground and second home to stars since the 1920s, when Mary Pickford and husband Douglas Fairbanks began leasing a quarter-mile stretch of beach in Irvine Cove north of Laguna. There they set up colorfully striped tents for their large retinue of family and friends.

The waterfront Hotel Laguna, a mission-style landmark built in 1930 after the original wood-frame hotel was razed, boasted a guest registry that read like a virtual Who’s Who of Hollywood’s Golden Age: Dick Powell, John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Rosalind Russell, Joan Fontaine and Bogart and Bacall.

But many celebrities chose to stay, and over the years other part-time and full-time Laguna residents have included Mickey Rooney, Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, Victor Mature, Fredric March, Claire Trevor, Elmo Lincoln (the silent era’s Tarzan), and character actor Slim Summerville (whose cottage on Sleepy Hollow Lane became the Beach House restaurant).

Bette Davis also owned a beachfront house on Sleepy Hollow Lane in the mid-1940s. She and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, a young artist she met in Laguna, lived there before buying a new home in nearby Wood’s Cove. A large black wrought-iron “D,” for Davis, on the chimney is still visible from the beach below.

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Ozzie and Harriet Nelson first bought a weekend home on Camel Point in the late 1940s and enjoyed Laguna so much they built another oceanfront home in the gated community of Lagunita in the mid-’50s.

Always athletic, Nelson would take daily swims off Victoria Beach to the north down to Blue Lagoon half a mile away, and play volleyball with the children on the beach. Harriet Nelson, who moved to Lagunita to live full time in 1978, after her husband died, always did her own shopping at the supermarket across the highway and enjoyed the “village atmosphere of Laguna. I know everyone down here, and they are all such nice people.”

Rick Nelson owned a condominium down the beach at Blue Lagoon in the late 1960s, and actor Kent McCord, who began his career playing one of Rick’s fraternity brothers on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” still has a weekend home in Lagunita.

Over the years, Laguna’s natural beauty and beach-town charm also attracted a sizable contingent of newspaper and magazine cartoonists, who operated on the theory that all they needed was a nearby post office. What better place than Laguna to pursue their cottage industry? As cartoonist Virgil (VIP) Partch once said: “What the hell. If you’re a free-lancer and don’t have to go to an office, you’d be an idiot to live in Cleveland or Yuma or Detroit.”

Partch was a member in good standing of the Street Gang, as management of Laguna’s Ivy House restaurant called him and fellow cartoonists Dick Oldden and the Interlandi brothers, Frank and Phil.

They, along with fellow Laguna cartoonists--a humorous and sometimes boisterous lot that at times included Ed Nofziger, Don Tobin, John Dempsey, Dick Shaw and others--made it a midday ritual to take a break from their drawing boards for some cocktail-lounge camaraderie.

In its finer moments, the Ivy House was called Algonquin West. But unlike the humor writers who once gathered at the famed Round Table in New York City’s Algonquin Hotel, the Street Gang bellied up to a leather-padded bar.

The midday ritual began after Phil Interlandi moved from Chicago in 1952 and made a habit of stopping in at the first bar he walked into: The White House on Coast Highway. The White House had the added benefit of being near the post office, where the cartoonists could drop off their morning output.

And when the post office moved to Forest Avenue a few doors down from the Ivy House in the 1970s, the cartoonists moved with it.

As the Ivy House manager said in 1982: “The restaurant could be burning down and they’d still be sitting here.”

“There is a camaraderie,” Partch acknowledged in 1982. “A bar is made by the guys, and you go there to see your pals.”

The daily bar stops at the Ivy House, alas, fell by the wayside after Partch and his wife, Helen, were killed in a freeway crash near Newhall in 1984. It just wasn’t the same after that. As Frank Interlandi said, “Something kind of happened after Virgil died.”

Long before Hollywood’s literati discovered Laguna, though, its cool ocean breezes and lovely shores made it a popular tent resort for inlanders throughout the late 19th Century. The Gabrielino Indians had named it “Lagunas” for its two fresh-water lagoons in the canyons. But the land was too rocky and hilly for agriculture or grazing, and so, over time, tourism became Laguna’s means of support.

There is no McDonald’s here, and the 7-Eleven convenience store downtown is well-camouflaged. There has always been the fear that its village atmosphere will be obliterated by tourist traps peddling Day-Glo “I Love Laguna” T-shirts.

That you can still call Laguna Beach a town is essential to our love affair with it. Stunning beaches, quaint buildings . . . it’s a place that clings to its heritage and historic buildings.

But Laguna is probably best loved and best known for the eclectic nature of the people, and the fact that all types of lifestyles are generally tolerated, if not embraced.

A gay community--that some estimate to be 20% to 30% of the population--is mainstream here, where the county’s first openly homosexual mayor was elected. Artists are not seen as underemployed flakes but as valued citizens. And it’s mostly tourists whose heads turn when Laguna’s Hare Krishnas wander down Coast Highway, chanting.

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Laguna’s 24,000 residents have shown unwavering devotion to the environment, mounting a two-decade battle to save the Irvine Coast north of the town’s border and, more recently, a mission to preserve the canyon that Wednesday was so gravely scarred by wildfire.

Laguna also is home to the likes of Peter Ueberroth and Warren Buffett, recently named by Forbes magazine as the richest man in the country with a net worth of $8 billion. The owner of the Berkshire Hathaway investment company has owned a home in Laguna’s Emerald Bay since 1971.

The serious art world long has scoffed at Laguna as a relative lightweight as art colonies go, but that has never dimmed the allure of the town, visited each year by 3 million people.

One of the biggest draws is the world-renowned Pageant of the Masters, a series of human re-creations of artworks that is simultaneously precious and amusing--especially when it was narrated by Thurl Ravenscroft, the voice of Tony the Tiger.

That sense of humor pervades Laguna Beach. A former mayor once tried to ban portable radios from Main Beach and to prohibit airplane advertising. The police chief good-naturedly reminded her that only New York City had rid its Central Park of boomboxes, and that the FAA, not the city, polices the skies.

A certain romantic nostalgia persists, perhaps because the place has remained so untouched by the modern vagaries of other cities.

For 17 years, before he moved to the University of Virginia, poet Charles Wright lived in Laguna while he was on the faculty at UC Irvine. One of America’s best-known poets, he once said he could work better in Laguna Beach, undistracted, because “there is really nothing to do.”

“I moved to the seas because I got the job at Irvine, to be honest,” said the author of such poems as “Laguna Blues” and “Laguna Dantesca.”

“But once I got there, I had that attraction for the seas. That’s what I liked best about Laguna. I never once went into the ocean, but I think there was something primal about it.”