by Bill Barich
You could almost hear Brian Wilson singing:
Well, East Coast girls are hip
I really dig the clothes they wear
And the Southern girls with the way they talk
They knock me out when I’m down there.
The Midwest farmers’ daughters really make you feel all right
And the Northern girls with the way they kiss
They keep their boyfriends warm at night.
I wish they all could be California
I wish they all could be California
I wish they all could be California girls.
Captain Rohrer was a mid-life lifeguard of fifty-seven. “You have to grow older,” he liked to say, “but you don’t have to grow up.” He had a cheerful, boyish air and the broad shoulders and chest of a dedicated swimmer. His hair was thinning, and his forehead was speckled with the benign skin cancers that were an occupational hazard, flaws to be scraped away by the dermatologist’s scalpel.
The beach and Captain Rohrer were wed. His father had worked as a lifeguard in the 1920s, and now he’d been one, too, for forty-one years. He had come of age in Venice and Playa Del Ray in the generous days when surfers were still polite to each other, and you could count on bringing home all the abalone you wanted for dinner.
Implements of the captain’s trade were spread around the tower. He had a rescue can that he tossed to victims, so that they’d hold onto it rather than grab at his arms and maybe drown him. He had a bullhorn, sunglasses, a bottle of sunscreen, and a first-aid kit. He had a good pair of binoculars, and he used them to scan the beach and give me an instant readout on the surf.
“It’s an average day for August,” he said. “We’ve got a riptide and two- to three-foot waves.”
He did a rough tally of the crowd and of the swimmers in the water. A lifeguard had to be aware of such things because the three miles or so of beach were much more dangerous than they appeared to be. The Santa Monica station alone had made about two thousand rescues the previous year. The total for the twenty-three beaches in Los Angeles County was about eleven thousand rescues. The old image of a lifeguard as a handsome, unambitious stud with zinc oxide on his nose used to be valid, Captain Rohrer confirmed, but it wasn’t anymore. The job involved real work.
Candidates had to graduate from a six-day rookie school in Los Angeles, for instance. To be admitted to it, they had to pass an entrance exam designed to test their swimming skills. At the school, they were rated on their speed in the water, their mastery of Red Cross procedures, and their character. If they were accepted as a lifeguard, they had to keep in training. The ten permanent men and women on the Santa Monica crew—there were a hundred or so part-timers—had to exercise for at least a half-hour per day and undergo periodic cardiovascular testing.
Anybody who rose to the rank of captain could earn between fifty and sixty thousand dollars a year.
The modern lifeguard had to be a pro, said Captain Rohrer. Budgetary constraints meant that the crews were often shorthanded. Six out of ten bathers who were pulled from the ocean were drunk or stoned or both, and that made them slippery, pumped up, and tough to handle. The temptation to let them sink must be ever near, I thought.
Drunks liked to leap off the pier, as well, and rescuing them could be gnarly because of the sharp-edged barnacles and mussels clinging to the pier’s stanchions. Often a lifeguard was reduced to being a beach cop, as a ranger was a wilderness cop, breaking up rights and clamping on the handcuffs when the real police did not arrive in time.
Captain Rohrer was also a clearinghouse for information. Certain familiar questions swarmed as commonly as jellyfish in the heads of visitors, such as:
“Is it legal to take the kelp from the ocean?”
“Have you seen my little boy?”
“Do you have something for sunburn?”
“When do the grunion run?”
“Are there really any grunion?”
Then there was the business about sharks. It was true that sharks infested the waters off Santa Monica, but nobody had produced any evidence to confirm a shark attack in the past fifty years. Still, the tales of mayhem persisted. Every summer, without fail, a swimmer claimed to have been almost torn apart by a blue shark or a basking shark that only he or she had seen. As proof of a shark’s existence, people surrendered teeth and jaws that they’d bought in Mexico. While patrolling in helicopters, officers of the LAPD had mistaken dolphins for sharks once or twice, contributing to the mania.
“A copter guy wouldn’t know a shark if it bit him in the ass,” Captain Rohrer said, kidding around.
We took a drive on the beach in the captain’s four-wheel Nissan Pathfinder. Santa Monica Bay looked so enticing that you’d never guess that it was polluted. Sewage and chemical waste poured into it from storm drains after harsh winter storms, and some locals avoided the water completely. In the wake of a serious rain, lifeguards posted warning signs along the beach, and they were not supposed to go into the ocean, except to make a rescue, until two days had passed.
Most Angelenos remained unintimidated, though. On a holiday weekend like the Fourth of July, as many as a half-million sunseekers would stake out their own little paradises in Santa Monica. On an ordinary August weekday, the county beaches would attract about 1.5 million visitors in all. The beach numbers in Los Angeles County could be staggering—$19 million in annual operating costs, about 2,000 pounds of trash hauled from Santa Monica each year, and 6,493 seagulls counted between Santa Monica and Playa Del Rey in a recent survey.
Captain Rohrer observed an intrepid lad paddling into the water on a surfboard. The scene reminded him of his own youth, back when a surfer never had to fight for a wave, when there were always enough waves to go around. If you heard that Palos Verdes Cove or Point Dume or Malibu was busy, he said, that meant fifteen guys, maximum. To beat the crush, all you had to do was put your board in your woody and head farther up or down the coast, into uncharted territory. In the old days, you could still catch breakers as monstrous as those in Waikiki, waves fourteen or fifteen feet high.
I thought, Gold, trees, fish, land, even waves!
It was clear that the captain was tied to the ocean in a special way. For him, the coastline was a living, breathing entity. He knew its specifics as a lover knows the beloved, every dimple and mole. He told me that the sand we were driving on was not simply beach sand but rather a mixture that included dredging material and also dune sand that had drifted to Santa Monica from elsewhere. Such subtle alterations affected the quality of the surfing. Dune sand was coarser than beach sand, for example, and it caused a tighter break.
The beach at Santa Monica was relatively stable now, and the waves tended to be long, rolling, and fairly gentle. In parts of the adjacent beach in Venice, by contrast, the berm was much steeper, and the surf still crashed and ripped. In the suck of the cycle, novice riders could break their necks and their backs. Real surfing was not for amateurs, the captain said.
IN THE ANNALS OF SURFING, the name of Captain James Cook came up frequently. He had sketched one of the earliest reports of Polynesians riding their boards at Oahu Beach in Hawaii, in 1778. The boards were probably made from koa wood, the same material that was used for royal canoes. Koa meant brave or fearless.
To prepare a board, craftsmen would select a koa tree and put a fish by it as an offering. Once the tree was uprooted, the fish was dropped into the resulting hole. Next, the tree was chipped and shaped with an adze before being carried to a canoe house, where it was worked over with coral, polished with stones, stained, and sealed with the oil of kikui nuts.
Every board had an elegance, the warm and rosy glow of patient enterprise. Their design was supremely efficient. The boards were of two basic types, alaia and olo. Alaias were functional and intended for day-to-day surfing. They were from three to twelve feet long—the smaller lengths were for children and for bodysurfing—and between eleven and twenty inches wide. Olos were what surfers now call “guns,”
or “Rhino Chasers,” very big boards for the biggest waves. Only chiefs got to ride them.
Duke Kahanamoku, a surfing pioneer from Hawaii, once recounted for Surfer magazine what it had felt like to catch a killer wave twenty-five or thirty feet high, at Waikiki in the 1920s. Hawaiians seldom used boards then, preferring to bodysurf, but Kahanamoku couldn’t resist paddling a sixteen-foot-long gun to a spot known as Castles due to the shape of its breakers.
“I looked at those doggone waves, and said, ‘Boy, these are really top waves,’ ” Duke explained. “Then I said, ‘I’m going to take one whether I like it or not.’ I had to go.”
He caught a wave and stayed with it giddily for a couple of hundred yards before his board hit the wave edge and dumped him into the suds. “That was the end of my run,” he continued. “Otherwise … I would have gone right into Happy Steiner’s Waikiki Tavern!”
Kahanamoku became an acclaimed Olympic swimmer at Stockholm in 1912 and later gave some surfing demonstrations in Atlantic City. On the West Coast, George Freeth, a Hawaiian-American in the hire of Henry Huntington, brought his board to Redondo Beach in 1907 to dazzle the public while promoting Huntington’s real estate ventures.
Yet surfing’s appeal remained limited. The sport looked dangerous, and the gear was cumbersome. Most boards were homemade, fashioned from redwood or balsa blanks, or a blank combining both materials. A redwood gun in the 1930s could be four inches thick and might weigh sixty-five pounds.
Surfing only took off in southern California in the postwar era. Techno-surfers began turning out lighter, cheaper boards in fiber glass and foam, and manufacturers adapted their methods. The new boards lost the sheen of wood lovingly worked and acquired instead a plastic neon brilliance that echoed the newness of L.A., its Day-Glo reds and its canary yellows, the colors of its strip malls and its custom cars.
The stereotype of the surfer as a meditative loner or outsider fated to pursue eternally the perfect wave also changed as the sport was suburbanized. Its styles and its attitudes were studied, packaged, and marketed to the youth of America in the form of movies, records, and clothing.
Gidget, the first surfing picture, was based on a doting bestseller that Frederick Kohner had written about his daughter. Columbia released it in 1959. Sandra Dee came across as Doris Day reformulated for teens, precisely as blond and virginal and equally incapable of anything more sexual than a chaste kiss. To deflower Gidget would be akin to dumping crude oil into the Pacific. Sealed in her bubble of purity, she went Hawaiian and dabbled in hot rods.
The real star of all beach movies was southern California, anyway. Frankie Avalon in a bathing suit only made a viewer aware of what a troubled place Philadelphia must be, but the Kodachrome surf behind him served as a five-star advertisement for L.A.
The Beach Boys were also responsible for selling surfing and beach culture to their peers nationwide. Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, the teens at the group’s core, were second-generation Californians. Their grandfather Bud, a plumber and a semipro baseball player, had brought the family to the tracts of Los Angeles in the 1920s and had gone to work in the Mojave Desert, where he laid pipe for the California Aqueduct. His son, Murry, was a hot-tempered, abusive man who instilled a keen interest in music in his kids.
Brian was the Wilsons’ pride, a prodigy who could hum “The Marines’ Hymn” as an infant and carry a tune when he was three. He sang in school pageants and at church and composed melodies on the family piano. He had an ear for harmony and an undying affection for the way the Four Freshmen employed it. For his sixteenth birthday, he received a tape recorder that enabled him to construct the multilayered, multivoice songs that would become his trademark.
There were as many as thirty thousand surfers plying the seventy-six miles of coastline in the county on a summer weekend in the 1960s. Every town had its own variant of a grungy surfer band like the Wilsons, who called themselves The Pendletones at first and recorded “Surfin’ ” in 1961.
Brian Wilson had never been surfing—he would never go surfing—so it was left to Dennis, who owned a board, to interpret the concept to the guys at Candix Records, an independent label. The company’s distributor balked at the group’s name, though, and suggested such alternatives to The Pendletones as The Lifeguards or the Beach Bums before hitting on the Beach Boys.
That December, “Surfin’ ” (backed with “Luau”) came out on X Records, a Candix subsidiary, and sold fifty thousand copies while climbing to the number seventy-five slot on the Billboard chart, paving the way for “Surfer Girl,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and the amazing “Surfin’ USA,” a song that tied together teens across the country in a Pacific Coast fantasy.
Brian Wilson sang, “If everybody had an ocean …”
Surfing spawned a style to go with the movies and the records. The baggy shorts and the cut-off jeans of the Ur-surfers were gradually replaced by designer togs—swimsuits in the same neon colors as the boards, and casual, off-the-water wear that ran to wrinkled Bermudas in outrageous plaids, T-shirts with the logo of a bar or a surfing manufacturer, and drawstring cotton trousers as loose-fitting as somebody else’s pajamas.
Surfing, finally, was awesome. When you surfed, truly surfed, you were one with all creation. In the ocean, all God’s creatures were equal, the starfish, the crabs, the eels, the manta rays, the grunions—especially the grunions, man—the kelp, the anemones, those little things that you could see but not identify, all equal. Astride your board you were transformed into a Surfrider, an environmentalist out to save the planet, right here in California.
BEACH-BUM DAYS. I gave it a whirl, trading in my jeans for some old khakis, donning a short-sleeved cotton shirt patterned with bogus tropical flowers, and going around sockless in a scuffed pair of loafers. Shaving became a nuisance, so I let a graying stubble grow on my chin—that badge of indolence that B actors cultivate between roles—remembering Jim Hutton and other deceased stars of infrequent romantic comedies. I felt purposeless, and it did not feel bad.
The Pacific Coast Highway ran along the ocean’s tracery beneath a sky pulsing with cormorants and pelicans, my road to everywhere and nowhere that caused me to take up the standard cry, “I love L.A.!”
At Surfrider Beach in Malibu, the waves were flat of an afternoon, but many surfers were trying to catch one anyhow to win the favor of some nonchalant, gum-popping sweeties in Jimmy Z suits. The coastal stretch of Malibu, some twenty-two miles, had been Chumash land until it was deeded to a soldier serving with the expeditionary force of Juan Bautista de Anza in the 1770s. In the twentieth century, the land was worked as a ranch and then sold to subdividers in 1941, who offered it in parcels to members of the movie colony.
Malibu Colony was still a special preserve, home to famous entertainers who were beyond such mortal concerns as money or ambition, the Johnny Carsons and the Larry Hagmans now cooling it on the golf links or on the tennis courts. Here, too, the dealmakers had houses, those whose power was so unlimited that an agent would actually leave the purview of Century City to take a meeting with them on the sand.
Malibu also had a stratum of demi-stars and stars on the wane, actors perilously close to devolving to the rank of mere celebrities, the Ali MacGraws and the Martin Sheens who’d been smart enough or lucky enough to parlay their brief moment in the limelight into a prime chunk of beach real estate.
Celebrities did not live in the Colony or anywhere in Malibu. They lived elsewhere—in San Fernando Valley, say. Their TV series were gone from syndication, and the only work that they could find was as guests on witless game shows or as accomplices to such events as the opening of a new car wash in Encino.
In Malibu, I sensed a world-weariness edging toward absolute repose. Any show of energy, except in sports or in sex, might be regarded as bad form. The town was as inbred and status-conscious as any society town in Connecticut. The beautiful people were highly visible, but I also saw the ones whose beauty was fading, sad-eyed men and women aging awkwardly and beginning t
o agonize over the possible gains and pitfalls of cosmetic surgery.
Special rites were obeyed in town. The owner of the only theater, a second-run house, had to be careful never to play one resident’s movie longer than another’s.
After a good dinner at a local restaurant, I thanked the waitress, who said, “This is Ali MacGraw’s place,” as if the participation of a demi-star guaranteed every customer superior food.
And in the weekly Malibu Times there were always items to puzzle over:
Angie Best, 34, former wife of internationally famous British ex-soccer star George Best, the personal trainer of Cher, was married this weekend in Malibu to Terry Amoud of San Jose, owner of a gym and a training facility.
Other days I lounged around in Venice, where my brother had once lived. Often I had flown down from San Francisco to stay at his apartment near the beach in the early 1970s. His upstairs neighbors were a chiropractor who adored Clint Eastwood films and a woman who kept a mastiff as a pet. Sometimes she’d put on a bikini and take the mastiff for a walk, delivering the ultimate in mixed messages.
In little cottages down the block, women who resembled the post-Hitchcock Kim Novak grew roses and reminisced about lovers past. One afternoon, we tossed some horseshoes with a grizzled old bugger who claimed to be Tom Mix’s nephew. Were we in California yet, or what?
Venice was a quaint dream that Abbot Kinney, heir to a tobacco fortune, had indulged. Kinney, an insomniac, had left the Midwest for his health. He was a freethinker, who founded two public libraries, published a book about sex (Tasks by Twilight, 1893), and planted some of the first eucalyptus trees in the state. In July of 1905, he opened his new real estate development, Venice-by-the-Sea, on 160 acres of tidal flats. It had canals, gondolas imported from Italy, and villas in the grand manner. Sarah Bernhardt did Camille on the pier, but the crowds turned out for the Ship Cafe, a replica of one of Cabrillo’s caravels that stood on pilings.
