Nearly two decades ago we spent a couple of enjoyable years living in a rented bungalow at the high end of Oak Street, Laguna Beach, looking out at Catalina Island on the rare days it was visible.
No offence to Americans who might be reading this, but it always amused us how paranoid our local friends and neighbours would get about any impending change in the weather, but then, a month after we went home to Noosa, it rained a bit and half of Laguna slid down the hill towards the beach, destroying hundreds of homes, but not, I hasten to add, our charming little renter.
So we weren’t surprised last week, when Hurricane Hillary started up the Baja peninsula, that Southern Californians started to brace for the “worst weather crisis in more than 80 years”. It came, it went. Some nuisance rain, a bit of a breeze and we flew out of San Diego for Philadelphia on schedule as the clouds began to clear. Which is where I am now, 31,000 feet above the Rockies pondering an interesting week rediscovering what the marketing people now refer to as “HIP Laguna”, meaning historic and interesting places, of which there are many. Let’s start with an old breakfast haunt, the Penguin Café.
A favourite of surfers and early morning dog walkers, this humble diner lays claim to be Laguna Beach’s oldest operating family business, opened in the late 1940s as a malt shop and passed between local families until the current incumbents took it over in the late 1960s, when Timothy Leary and other members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love would come down from the Canyon still in an acid haze after an all-nighter.
A sidebar here: When I first visited Laguna in the mid-‘70s I stayed with a friend out in the Canyon and the acid haze was still more abundant than the smog. Today the coffee at the Penguin is still undrinkable, the corn beef hash is excellent, the ambience is still, well, kind of ambient, but Tim and the Brotherhood have long gone.
Another landmark that has always interested me is the so-called Bette Davis House, which my friend Paul and I passed every afternoon last week, on our way to swim in the chilly waters of Woods Cove. This grand old waterfront house was built in 1929 as a summer home for Charles Prisk, a wealthy regional newspaper publisher. It was designed by Laguna Beach artist and architect Aubrey St Clair, who was responsible for a number of foreshore block fillers. Screen icon Davis only owned it for a handful of years, between the end of World War II and the early 1950s, but subsequent owners of the three-storey, white stucco Normandy-style mansion have preserved many of the features from when the actress lived there, and the name has stuck.
Bette spent much of the summer there, swimming in the cove with her third husband, the much younger artist and former boxer William Grant Sherry, and their daughter Barbara, and watching Bill paint at an easel set up on the narrow strip of sand below the house.
The six-bedroom, eight-bath estate with stairs to the beach first listed in April 2019 for nearly $US20 million, and finally sold last year for $US15 million, to a group of wealthy healthcare professionals, of which there are many in that part of the world.
I finished the week with a mescal-margarita fuelled “boys’ lunch” of poi, loco moco and Spam sandwiches at the newly reopened Royal Hawaiian tiki bar and grill. Anyone who has hung out in Hawaii and California a lot over the last 50 years or so – and that includes crusty old salts like me and my luncheon companions last Friday – will know that the authentic tiki bar with its dim interiors and plastic palms is a dying breed of kitsch chic, to be lapped up with the lapu lapus whenever you find it, which is why Laguna locals have jumped all over the renovated Royal Hawaiian, still in the same location and exuding the same charm I’m sure it did when Philippines-born Francis Cabang and his partner Harold “Hal” Hanna built it on Coast Highway in 1947.
Our Friday lunch, shared with long-time SoCal residents Paul Holmes, onetime editor of Tracks magazine in Australia and Surfer in the US, and Peter “PT” Townend, onetime Coolie Kid, Bronzed Aussie and 1976 IPS world surfing champion, ticked all the boxes: replaying all the hits and memories, eating good old-fashioned puu-puus with a warm glow of mescal flowing over the table from at least two directions.
Would I like to live in California again? Aah, probably not. But there’s always a certain buzz in seeing places you once called home that haven’t been gentrified beyond recognition (are you listening, Whale Beach!), and Californians on the whole, despite their weather phobia, are pretty nice.
Now we’ll find out what the natives of Bar Harbor are like. Stay tuned.
