Famed Club Prepares for Face Lift
Middle age goes down a bit hard in Newport Beach, where 50 is well past face-lift time. So says the image. And image is what the city’s Balboa Bay Club has cultivated for half a century.
The big yacht parked dockside. The big stogie puffed poolside. Collagen marvels perched barside, scouting for Mr. Rich. Such was the version offered by author Joseph Wambaugh, who immortalized and sensationalized the club in his 1990 novel “The Golden Orange.”
Rat Packer Joey Bishop has a different take, with him as busboy and John Wayne as waiter, both serving tables at the club’s employee Christmas party.
When they posed that night for a photograph, Bishop recalls, laughing, “I hadda stand on a chair next to him to be the same height.”
Peggy Goldwater-Clay cherishes memories of family summers spent living at this private club, where her dad, Barry, then an Arizona senator, took a break from politics to cruise in his Chris-Craft around Newport Harbor and yak on his ham radio.
Legend and truth, man-hunting vixens and salty heroes of the West, all in one storied past.
But a new chapter awaits the club’s venerable waterfront compound--50 this year and in need of a make-over.
The longtime private playground for Southern California’s better-off will get a $50-million overhaul and partly open to the public for the first time in its rich history. Construction may begin as soon as September.
Providing more public access to the club was required as a condition of its 50-year lease renewal. The club is privately owned but built on city-owned property deemed state tidelands, meaning that California law requires it to be available to its true owners: the public.
How will this social landmark manage to retain its exclusivity when it is no longer completely exclusive?
Many of its 3,000 members--a cross-section of establishment figures from business, politics, academia and old money--say they think sharing parts of the club with the public will improve it.
Only a few members express doubts.
One of them is Bishop, a teetotaler, who was given a free club membership 28 years ago in return for serving as master of ceremonies for its affairs. He still lives right across the channel from the club’s private beach.
Despite plans for fencing and signs that will clearly mark private areas, Bishop shook his head. “How are you gonna stop ‘em? I tell you what I predict: that all the private members are gonna become public members,” he said with a chuckle. “People are gonna pay [thousands of dollars] for something they can get for free? The whole reason you join a private club is to get away from the public.”
The shoreline of Newport Harbor--today the largest pleasure-boat harbor in the United States--was nothing but mud flats in 1928 when land baron James Irvine gave a 26-acre patch on the north side to the city of Newport Beach.
Photographs show a scruffy landscape dotted by crippled ships and shacks: the schooners had been used by the Navy during World War II to patrol the coast; the shacks were built as cabanas by the U.S. Army Air Corps, which trained pilots at the Santa Ana Army Air Base and had them taught to swim at the shore. The structures were abandoned after the war.
Though the area was attractive to manufacturing companies, Irvine protested against any industrial use. He argued that it would blight the view for high-end residential developments he had planned around the property, according to historian James P. Felton in the 1984 book “Host of the Coast: The History of the Balboa Bay Club.” Irvine got his way.
The Boy Scouts ended up with about 11 acres for a Sea Scout base, and the remaining 15 acres eventually were leased to a man who became the founder of the Balboa Bay Club, Kenneth T. Kendall. A colorful heir to a New York real estate fortune, Kendall was working at a Los Angeles stock brokerage that would later become part of Dean Witter.
The city accepted his bid to rent the land for the club at $25,000 a year plus 5% of gross income.
When it opened its doors in 1948, the club attracted the boating set but also those with the cool cash to swing with the original swingers.
“When I first moved to Newport in 1958, it was the place,” recalled John Crean of Santa Ana Heights, a multimillionaire who built his fortune on recreational vehicles.
The 1950s and 1960s were perhaps its glamour heyday, a time when stars like Frank Sinatra, Dorothy Lamour and Humphrey Bogart lighted up the lounge or lolled on luxury boats.
“Thirty years ago it was a completely different place,” said second-generation member Paul James Baldwin, great-grandson of California land baron E.J. “Lucky” Baldwin, who at the turn of the century owned huge parts of what is now Los Angeles County.
“There were hookers in the bar, people used to get really wild,” Baldwin said, fingering a cigar at a recent Balboa Bay Club do. “My dad would come here and play high-stakes poker with John Wayne and other guys, 60,000 bucks a hand.”
Driving south on West Coast Highway, past the Balboa Peninsula bridge, yacht brokerages and twinkly lights of the waterfront, the Bay Club is understated, like the old money that built it.
Though the club’s Terrace Apartments loom over the highway, the club itself is easy to miss: A discreet sign in aqua tile at the guard gate marks the entrance, but most of the club is hidden behind a wall.
The most impressive view is from the water: the First Cabin fine-dining restaurant, the infamous Shell Bar, the beach outside it, and docks for massive yachts like Crean’s 112-footer. There is a waiting list for the 140 slips, which constitute one of the largest private marinas in California.
Rents for the 144 apartments, each with maid and room service, range from $2,500 for a studio to $7,500 for a four-bedroom penthouse of more than 4,000 square feet. Whether or not they live on the property, members pay a $6,500 initiation fee and $150 a month in dues.
The move toward renovation began in 1986, 12 years before the club’s 50-year lease was scheduled to expire. William D. Ray, a financier who bought the club 15 years earlier, wanted to nail down a new lease to line up financing for an expansion.
“The Bay Club knew that a refurbishment was necessary or desirable from a business point of view,” said David C. Wooten, president and CEO of International Bay Clubs. The company, founded by Ray, owns both the Balboa club and nearby Newport Beach Country Club.
A 25-year lease extension good through 2011 was signed. But at the 11th hour, club and city officials said, the State Lands Commission announced that part--if not all--of the land qualified as tidelands.
An exhaustive study later determined the acreage did deserve that designation, which carries with it many restrictions for property owners. For one thing, the California Coastal Act bans permanent residences on state tidelands.
Legislation was necessary that allowed the Bay Club’s apartment building to remain for the life of the new lease. In return, the Bay Club would have to offer public access.
Under other provisions, at least 90% of profits the city earned from the Bay Club would go to a tidelands fund the city would use to provide marine services, harbor patrol and other maintenance of tidelands.
The remaining city profit would return to the State Lands Commission for administration.
Arriving at a plan to renovate the club turned out to be difficult.
The first proposal was for a larger, taller complex with a 300-room hotel and considerably more parking. But residents above and beside the Bay Club vehemently opposed it.
The bluffs homeowners were afraid their expensive views of the water would be blocked. Owners next door to the east feared added traffic noise. The Newport Beach Planning Commission approved the Bay Club’s expansion proposal, but the City Council in 1991 balked in the face of the public’s displeasure.
So the club, after consulting with neighbors, came up with a redesigned project that refurbishes and expands the club facilities and the hotel, shifting parts of the complex from one area to another to create a clear division between public and private areas. The plan called for an existing 128-room hotel to grow only to 145 rooms.
By the summer of 1995 it had gained approval from the City Council, the state Coastal Commission and the State Lands Commission. Under a new lease agreement with the city that takes effect once construction begins, the Bay Club will pay the city at least $1.1 million annually in rent.
Architecture of the pre-1960s era will be replaced with what Newport Beach Planning Director Patricia Temple called “Southern Provincial French.”
When the work is done, the public will be able to enter, park, walk straight out toward the sea and stroll along a pathway atop the sea wall. Most of the hotel, its pool and its restaurant and bar overlooking the water are open to the paying public.
Some say the plan for public access doesn’t go far enough--that putting a private club on public property is wrong.
“It’s a Ritz-Carlton look and it’s very intimidating to people who don’t have a Ritz-Carlton income,” said Ellen Stern Harris, the mother of the landmark California Coastal Act of 1972, designed to protect the state’s shore. “I think the beach is something everybody needs and it shouldn’t be eaten up by luxury facilities for the rich.”
But though a few more details need ironing out, smooth sailing is expected for the project, said City Atty. Robert Burnham. Chief Operating Officer and Bay Club President Henry Schielein, who for many years ran the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, says construction will take about 2 1/2 years, with member amenities built first.
Longtime member Crean is looking forward to the overhaul.
“With the way it is now, there’s too much competition for people’s attention,” Crean said. “I’d like to see a few more people around, myself. It’d be nice. For as classy a place as it is, it doesn’t have as much business as it should have.”