When It Comes to Malibu Ironies, She Wrote the Book

It looked like your standard-issue residential street for incredibly rich people. Or at least healthily compensated people. But this was, in truth, no mere run-of-the-mill run. This one bitty slice of Malibu real estate accommodated both Johnny Carson and at least three emus.

“This is the weirdest street in the world,” Merrill Markoe was saying.

Who knew?

We are driving around Malibu in Merrill’s silver Honda Accord in pursuit of ironic places. Merrill, a humor columnist for L.A. Style and the Emmy-winning founding head writer for “Late Night With David Letterman,” collects ironic bits the way other people collect airline miles--sort of a mad archeologist who can’t wait for the 20th Century to be over before she begins picking at it.

Even at Merrill’s woody Malibu home, early irony is the decor of choice. Her shelves fairly groan under the weight of Las Vegas Liberace Museum memorabilia. Before you even pass go, a sign at the door warns: “ALL I.D. CARDS WILL BE CHECKED UPON ENTERING PLANT.”

“That’s my security system,” says Merrill, who puts her age at over 40. “I figure if anyone wants to break in, they’ll go, ‘Oh God, I don’t have an ID.’ ”

Just minutes before we embarked on our ironic tour, Merrill’s extremely large dog, Lewis, had greeted me at the door with great joie de vivre , as much as could be packed into his 94 pounds of canine muchness. I nonetheless emerged from this encounter still generally vertical, and I began to get the feeling that, somehow, I’d gotten off easy.

“He likes to swim in the pool, which is great because it kills fleas. On the down side, he’s wet all the time, so that thing where he greets you within an inch of your life is even worse when he’s wet,” Merrill trilled. “That’s what I refer to as his greeting disorder.”

So here we are on tour, sort of, a dramatic re-enactment of the Malibu chapter from Merrill’s new collection of essays about Los Angeles, dogs and men: “What the Dogs Have Taught Me.”

To your left is the Johnny Carson celebrity tennis compound, which looks to the untrained observer like a curving wall with lights on top.

“When they were putting it up, I was thinking, ‘What are they putting up there, a drive-in movie?’ ” She points to another endless fence across the street. “See that little guard booth in the front? The loneliest guy in America, the guy sitting out in front of Johnny’s house. We have to hope he really likes to read.

“By the way, in all my years of running around his tennis compound, I’ve actually laid eyes on the man once. He walked across the street, and he’s so famous-looking that it looks like George Washington on a dollar bill. What are you doing with legs and a body? Get back in there! Too famous for words.”

Merrill never exchanged words with the late-night presidential impostor: “He didn’t actually focus on me, I believe. I think he was actually taken by my running style, though. He just quietly thought to himself, ‘Wow, there’s a girl who runs like the wind.’ ”

Which brings us to a central condition of Malibu life--the dread Malibu anxiety. Markoe explains:

“It’s worrying that you’re making the wrong face when you’re waiting in line in back of Mel Gibson. You have to make a determinedly non-visible face. It’s kind of the same face they make on ‘The Dating Game’ or ‘Studs,’ where somebody’s saying something rude about you and you can’t really register any facial expression at all.”

Merrill’s bouts of Malibu anxiety tend to be concentrated at a certain supermarket frequented by Gibson, Sam Elliott and Nick Nolte.

“It’s quite a market. It’s the Market of the Cute Guys. It’s changed hands. It used to be Mayfair, the Market of the Cute Guys. Now it’s Westward Ho. I don’t know whether Westward Ho is attracting the same level of guy. We’ll have to wait and see.”

We are now cruising south on Pacific Coast Highway. Coming up on our right is an unassuming photography studio-cum-polling place. Outside it is an extremely large framed photograph of a dog. “Great photo opportunity,” Merrill notes. “Take your family there and pose in front of the giant golden-framed dog.”

We press on. Merrill is musing about her Malibu beginnings 10 years ago, when she bought her home with her then-boyfriend, David Letterman. “It was the early ‘80s and Mr. Letterman made the location choice. L.A. is kind of hard to connect to emotionally, and I never felt I lived anywhere until I lived out here because I could connect to the ocean. I feel like, ‘Oh, boy, it’ll be fun to go back to the beach.’

“If I’m in a really bad mood and you see a stretch of ocean, it just makes you feel better. When I say you , I mean me.”

They like warm fuzzy feelings like that in Malibu. I know that because I read it on a bench.

“This is our stop on the tour,” Merrill says, directing me to a fairly chatty bench amid a cluster of stores with such will-to-chic names as Malibu Country. The bench is, in fact, relentless. “LOOK. SEE. FEEL. BE. LOVE,” it says on the back.

“That’s a lot to ask, isn’t it? Here you are walking along, and all of a sudden, all that demand. That’s exhausting. That’s the kind of over-expectation you run into in Malibu.”

Thus pooped, we repair to the Honda and head for home. As we pass Bison Court, Merrill offers to cap the tour with an introduction to a neighborhood buddy of Lewis’ (Lewis is lounging in the back seat with Markoe’s stepdog, Beau, so classified because he’s a neighbor who found her environment more dog-friendly than his official home).

“I could show you another Newfoundland-Golden Retriever. I know all the dogs in the neighborhood. I know the lower-third of the neighborhood better than I know the upper two-thirds because that’s where the dogs are all sitting. I take him for all these walks, and we stop at every dog and say ‘hello.’ ”

I observe that on the tour, Lewis seemed to use the opportunity to scream at them.

“He does. Lewis has foul things to say to every dog in this neighborhood,” she says. Her voice swells with pride: “It’s a tradition he’s learned from me.”