Land of Surf and Stars No Stranger to Disasters : Malibu: Fires are just one more page in a history full of blazes, landslides and waves eating away at Gidget's favorite coastline.

By MARIA LA GANGA

Nov. 3, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Before it was ever a city, Malibu was an image: a strip of sand known round the world, a line in a rock ‘n’ roll song, a frame in a movie about eternal youth, weekend home for the rich and beautiful.

Its map could be a “Guide to the Stars’ Homes,” its phone book a page from the Screen Actors Guild directory, its parking lots a showroom for expensive sports cars.

So strong is its pull and international recognition that the 20-mile strip of Pacific Coast called Malibu has given its name to a Chevrolet, an after-dinner drink, a surfboard style and any number of films whose only draw was a beach scene. It has stolen Hawaii’s thunder as the birthplace of surfing and become notorious as a celebrity-studded sanctuary for the homeless. After honorary mayor Martin Sheen opened its legendary sands to those less fortunate than his neighbors, Johnny Carson joked on “The Tonight Show” that the town’s well-heeled celebrities were offering to pay for valet parking and free sun block for Malibu’s transients.

Malibu is “a landscape which embodies all the states of consciousness of Southern California, from the Chumash Indians to the Getty Museum, via Hollywood,” says author Kevin Starr, professor of planning and development at USC. And when it burns, it “shows the extreme vulnerability of even the most protected patrician enclaves in Southern California.”

Not that such vulnerability comes as any surprise. Every couple of years, Malibu bursts into the international media spotlight due to some calamity of nature, viewed through a celebrity filter. Newswatchers have seen Cicely Tyson shoveling the sand out of her swimming pool after a storm, Larry Hagman loading sandbags and Rachel Ward racing to escape an uncontrolled brush fire.

Tuesday’s blaze merely added to the photo album of glamorous evacuees racing from their million-dollar homes. Charles Bronson’s house burned down.

Some put their valuables at the water’s edge while others took them out in caravans of Porsches, Range Rovers and even a Rolls-Royce Corniche. Vince Neil of Motley Crue rushed to save his gold and platinum records.

“If you look at Malibu aesthetically, it’s a very, very nice area,” says Clement Padick, a professor of geography at Cal State L.A. “But it’s one of the highest-risk areas in Southern California.”

As he watched the fires race toward the sea on TV, he ticked off the dangers that make Malibu life so tenuous: Landslides, seismic risk from the Malibu fault zone, the fires that come raging down the canyons on windy fall days and destructive waves in winter.

“All kinds of people have lost homes, and it doesn’t have to be a big storm,” he said.

Malibu was originally inhabited by the Chumash Indians, a tribe of seagoing fishermen who named it Humaliwa , “the surf that sounds loud.” In 1804, Jose Bartolome Tapia began to run cattle on what he dubbed Rancho Topanga Malibu y Sequit.

In the late 1800s came Massachusetts millionaires Frederick Hastings Rindge and his wife, May, who arrived in Southern California along with migrants called the Health Seekers. After Rindge’s death in 1905, the vast holding went nearly undeveloped because May had a vision and a temper.

“She hired armored mountain guards to patrol her boundaries, built high wire fences with barred and chained gates, plowed county-built highways under, turned droves of hogs upon cuts for new roads or planted them with alfalfa,” according to “California, a Guide to the Golden State,” which was written by the Federal Writer’s Project in 1939.

In 1938, a cash-poor May Rindge lost control of the land, and the fledgling Malibu Colony began to grow, quickly taking the huge area from pristine to precious. Silent film star Anna Q. Nilsson was the first celebrity to build a summer home on Malibu’s shores. Today, Malibu’s glitterati include Steven Spielberg, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Michael Ovitz, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Hanks and Nick Nolte, and the list goes on.

Between Nilsson and Nolte, Malibu spawned another breed of stars, the surfers. So what if surfing has its historical roots in Hawaii? To long- and short-boarders around the world, Malibu is Mecca, the promised land.

The late 1950 and early 1960s is when the image of the quintessential surfing life began, when Miki Dora, the first internationally known surfing champ, mooned his judges in youthful rebellion.

A surfer named Tubesteak took a look at tiny Kathy Kohner and dubbed her Gidget ( girl plus midget ), a move her novelist father let no one forget. In the 1959 movie, Sandra Dee and James Darren took youth culture from “greasy hair, pegger pants and obliquely raked cars to its first look at Southern California’s sun-bleached surfer cult,” said Leonard Lueras in “Surfing, the Ultimate Pleasure.”

To Australians, long boards are still “Mals,” after the sport’s honorary birthplace, said Steve Hawk, editor of Surfer magazine.

“From a cultural perspective, Malibu is all important to surfing,” Hawk said. “It’s a shame to see it burning. But it’s not going to change anything.

“Santa Ana winds are the greatest thing in the world from the surfer’s perspective. Talk to almost any surfer and some of their best surf memories are going to be when the air is filled with smoke, and there’s ash raining down on the water.”