The Other Madonna Has Own Brand of Fame

If you don’t look too closely, you might think it’s just another one of those not-in-my-backyard battles that roil neighborhoods all across America.

Alex Madonna, a feisty, 82-year-old Central Coast developer, repainted the sign outside his famed Madonna Inn. People complained that the startlingly bright pink and green colors were too gaudy. The city launched an investigation, then dropped it when officials could not prove that Madonna’s new sign is any more garish than the pink one it replaced.

In many places, that would be the end of the story. Not here.

The controversy over the sign, dubbed “kitsch on a stick,” quickly moved out of City Hall and into the court of public opinion. Letters deluged local papers. The TV station conducted a poll. The arguments still rage at local coffeehouses.

But it’s clear who the winner is: Alex Madonna and his pink inn.

“Hey, yuppies of SLO, Alex Madonna was here driving his tractor years before you had a license to drive that Beemer,” read one of many recent letters to local newspapers, most of them supporting Madonna. “I agree the new Madonna Inn sign is gaudy and bawdy. . . . All I can say is, atta boy, Alex.”

Strange as it may be to see a developer emerge victorious in a civic controversy, around here it makes perfect sense. Not only is Madonna a uniquely bigger-than-life American personality, as funny as he is combative, as shamelessly self-promoting as he is soft-spoken, but he also represents a past that people fear is fading fast.

Caught halfway between its clod-kicking past and an uncertain future, San Luis Obispo is suffering growing pains. Many old-timers bridle at the changes they attribute to an influx of outsiders who drive up housing costs, clog the streets with their fancy cars and join anti-growth movements as soon as they are done unpacking.

To traditionalists, Madonna is everything the newcomers are not. As quotable as Jesse Ventura and as tartly outrageous as Charles Barkley, he once threatened to put a hog farm on some land he owned if the city voted down his plan for a “big box” shopping center.

The traditionalists’ battle cry is a defiant “Let Alex be Alex.”

Madonna’s reaction to the critics is typically glib: “You have a handful of people who have been wearing black since they were born.”

Settled into a lovely, hilly landscape about midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, San Luis Obispo County has always had nature and geography on its side. Recently, it has begun to acquire a sense of style. The area has a flourishing wine industry, a symphony with its own state-of-the-art hall and some restaurants that can match cutlets with almost anything in Los Angeles.

Housing prices have risen to levels few could have imagined just a few years ago. The median price in the city of San Luis Obispo is now $237,000, a 36% increase in just five years, said John Karevoll, a real estate analyst. Many of the changes are being wrought by people fleeing urban areas to the north and south.

“San Luis wants to hang out with all the cool cities like Santa Barbara that are witty and urbane and have cute sidewalk cafes serving designer salads,” taunted a column in the alternative weekly newspaper New Times. “We’re like Frasier Crane sharing a house with the Beverly Hillbillies.”

Madonna is a son of the Central Coast who went to work with his hands. “It’s amazing how much you learn when you smash your finger,” he is fond of saying about the value of working with your hands.

He is strictly an old-school working man who made his fortune in ranching and road-building. A onetime business partner of John Wayne, the craggy developer put his name on everything from shopping centers to the mountain behind his eccentric inn.

His Madonna Construction Co. has built hundreds of miles of roads. It linked Canada and Mexico when it completed the last five miles of Interstate 5 south of Sacramento.

Like the cowboys he admires, Madonna can be as tough as overcooked barbecue one minute, chivalrous and generous to a fault the next. Phyllis, his wife of 52 years, says he would “give you the shirt off his back.”

But he doesn’t flinch from fights with even the biggest opponents. He recently sued the Army Corps of Engineers for ordering a halt to one of his projects.

Madonna has an artist’s nature as well; he has a passion for rocks. He believes there is a pattern to stones, as though God broke up a giant boulder and buried the pieces in the earth to be reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle. “Rock is made to go together,” Madonna says.

He got a chance to give full expression to his imagination in 1958, when he decided to open an inn along the highway. At the Madonna Inn, the rock roams freely. The faces of boulders climb out of the ground to interrupt the wooden sides of the inn. Showers and sinks made of oddly shaped polished stones make visitors feel as if they had entered a grotto.

Madonna created the famous men’s room with its waterfall urinal, sketching it on a piece of paper. Today, “We’re better known in Europe for the bathroom than the inn,” he says.

If some people hate the inn’s new sign, they’re not likely to be any happier about the latest idea hatched by the Madonnas. Daughter Connie Pearce, the inn’s general manager and “idea man,” said she wants to open a European-style topless swimming pool on the 2,200-acre property.

The trouble with the sign began when Madonna decided that the old one was faded. He repainted it, making it pinker than ever, and added a loud, neon-green fringe. The sign is impossible for drivers to ignore as they speed north on U.S. 101.

What especially upset some folks in town is that the sign is the first thing the visitor to San Luis Obispo sees.

“That is the gateway to the city,” said Alex La Chapelle, a spokeswoman for the local Chamber of Commerce. “Some people might think it sends the wrong message.”

The city investigated complaints that the new sign is “overly bright and out of character,” said Ron Whisenand, deputy director of community development. The inquiry turned on whether Madonna had altered the sign. It had always been pink, but Whisenand could find no evidence it had ever been that particular color of green. With only black-and-white pictures to go on, the city dropped the matter.

Whisenand chooses his words carefully in discussing Madonna. He said he likes him.

“Alex Madonna, as you can tell from the letters to the editor, is well-respected,” he said.

The local NBC television affiliate, KSBY, found out just how respected Madonna is when it took its poll. Of 400 people who responded, 82% said the city should leave Madonna alone. Just 18% said the sign should be removed or toned down.

While admitting the city has had an “on-again, off-again relationship” with Madonna, Whisenand denied it is in cahoots with people who want to turn San Luis Obispo into another beige suburb. He acknowledged that there are those who want the city to be tougher on Madonna, while others say officials should leave him alone.

“We’re kind of in the middle,” Whisenand lamented.

“[Madonna] feels in some cases people pick on him,” Whisenand said. “But I don’t think he fully understands the changing land use [regulations]. He’s used to doing things his own way.”