Malibu Dreams Disappear in the Smoke

The air off Malibu was thick and nearly unbreathable. Soot and ash rained on the roiling waves. The fishing boat Derek Sherman and Mark Stevens had chartered out of Marina del Rey at $250 an hour could not get any closer to shore.

They had a decision to make. Should they give up and turn back? Or should they do what they came to do?

And so Sherman, the graying 39-year-old owner of a cellular phone company, and Stevens, a 26-year-old former swimmer for the British Olympic team, donned life jackets and plunged into the cold sea. “We’re going to regret it later if we don’t,” Sherman said before jumping.

They swam the breast stroke for a tenth of a mile until they reached Sherman’s oceanfront house, below a steadily descending sheet of fire. As they came ashore, drenched and elated, they let out a whoop.

This was Malibu, after all, home to the filthy rich and the just plain wealthy, favored haunt of those who are famous and those who aspire to be. This fabled seaside enclave, its glittery image seared in the collective memory of America thanks to the Beach Boys and Gidget, slipped into a hellish inferno Tuesday afternoon.

That great California equalizer--wildfire--had struck. Yet as flames raged in the hillsides, swallowing up million-dollar homes, hopscotching across canyons and clawing at the ocean’s door, Malibu remained peculiarly Malibu.

Residents staged a mass exodus, trudging along the coast highway as if in a grim wartime death march. A surfer in T-shirt and shorts toted his board. Los Angeles Laker Vlade Divac, fresh from practice and clad in his purple shorts and blue Lakers T-shirt, hustled to get his 2-year-old son out of day care.

“It’s terrible,” he said. “This fire is really terrible.”

A businessman, meticulously dressed in a suit, bow tie, suspenders and sunglasses, pleaded desperately with authorities to let him past police lines to his house. “Listen to me,” he begged. “I’ve got a deaf wife with a newborn.”

But it was too dangerous. He was not allowed to return. He scrambled down an embankment and began walking up the beach in his tasseled loafers, disappearing from view as he moved toward the orange-and-black horizon. Not far away, a homeless man ambled by, gray and disheveled in his soiled clothes.

While most residents were evacuated, one elderly woman refused to go. As hillsides and homes blazed just to the south, she walked her two poodles through the smoke-choked, deserted streets.

“I’ve been here for more than 30 years and I’ve seen plenty of fires,” she said defiantly. “And we’re not about to be evacuated now.”

From down below the hillsides were lit in bursts of red as anguished residents watched their homes ablaze, palm trees silhouetted against the fiery storm. Dense smoke settled over the sea, giving the eerie feel of a June fog bank, only fouler and more menacing. As darkness settled in, a smoke column rose several thousand feet above Pepperdine University, obscuring the stars.

Some, like Lisa Grasso, deposited their treasured possessions at the water’s edge, hoping for the sea’s protection. But there were fears of looters on the sand. “There’s all these creepy guys down on the beach, just waiting there,” Grasso said.

Off the coast, a small armada of pleasure boats bobbed in the wind-roughened bay. Some residents told of neighbors packing up their belongings and children and just heading out to sea. One man rowed alone, fighting nature in his kayak. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard cutter Conifer was at the ready, standing by to evacuate residents if necessary.

Gordon Nelson, a retired engineer, stood in overalls and a fisherman’s cap, leaning against a metal gate at the beach. It was a surreal scene, Nelson standing there by himself, the sky lit by red emergency lights and leaping flames.

His house is--or maybe was--in Las Flores Canyon. He was forced out at 3:30 p.m., and thought he would wait a bit and go check on the house later. But as the day wore on, he was progressively forced further back, until it seemed pointless to return.

He has lived in that house since 1974. Four years earlier, he lost a house he was building--also in Las Flores Canyon--to wildfire. As he stood and watched the dancing flames, a mere 200 yards away, he could not bear to think of losing this house too.

“You go back and see everything all charred and ruined and twisted,” he said. “It’s a real sick feeling. These hills are bad luck.”

Michael Klein was one of the lucky--and prepared--ones as the fire roared down Villa Costera in the Carbon Canyon area, engulfing buildings all around his two-story, million-dollar home. Klein, 38, an aerospace engineer, raced home to protect his property, but was forced to leave by fire officials when the water pressure failed.

From below, he watched as flames leaped from house to house, wondering if his home was among them. He had cleared the brush. He had a non-combustible roof. But the intensity of the fire seemed to be consuming everything.

When he finally returned, he found a truck from Los Angeles City Engine Company 109 sitting in his driveway. With their 400-gallon water supply, the firefighters had saved his house. Klein emptied his refrigerator, giving all the food he could find to the weary crew.

“You wonder if it is worth it,” he said afterward, reflecting on life in the sometimes harsh Malibu canyons. “Tomorrow is going to be tough. It is going to look like a moonscape around here. It’s not going to look like Malibu.”

There is a reason people like Klein come to Malibu, beyond the glitz and the cache. Nature is one draw. Malibu is the beach and the mountains all rolled into one. And there is a private side as well, a tight-knit community where people know and look out for one another. This is the Malibu that Dick Gardner knows.

Gardner, a 74-year-old retired aerospace engineer, has lived in Malibu for 35 years. Standing on Pacific Coast highway, looking up at his house, he could see it had not yet caught fire. He was hopeful that it could be saved. He is used to this, the brutality of nature in the place he calls home.

“It’s burned around us three times,” he said. But he loves it nonetheless. “When you look out at the ocean it makes it all worthwhile. Most of the year this is a wonderful place to live.”

In the famous Malibu Colony, residents yelled for help and hosed down trees as the fire threatened homes of the rich and well-known. But in this area where movie stars are as common as sand crabs, to some it was, astonishingly, a ho-hum scene.

Robert Clay is landlord to the stars, owner of several homes in the colony. As he stood in the yard of his $10,000-a-month rental--leased at various times by the likes of Diana Ross and Beach Boy Brian Wilson--he said, “I’m not worried at all.”

Earlier in the evening a cluster of Colonyites, as they call themselves, parked about a dozen vehicles--loaded for evacuation if necessary--on the beach and watched the blazing hillside. Dana Miller, who owns a radio broadcasting company, said his beach home was built 60 years ago. His air was confident.

“I don’t think this thing is going to burn,” he said of his wooden-roofed house. “It’s all a question of karma. My feeling is this house has been here since 1933 so nothing will happen to it.”

Writer Richard Christian Matheson was practicing the drums in his new soundproof room when the carpenter who built the room peeked outside. “It sounds great,” he told Matheson, “but have you looked outside?” Matheson took a look. “It was just this filament of charcoal coming over the hill.”

Within two hours he had evacuated. He carted off all the books he could carry, signed by various authors, plus several black leather jackets and his cat, Miss Kitty. He said he spotted his neighbor, actress Ali McGraw, hiking in toward her house as he was driving out. His description of the scene was drawn from the movies, not unlike Malibu itself.

“By the time I left,” he said, “it was like ‘Apocalypse Now.’ ”