When I arrive in Malibu on a moody October evening, the mountains and sea beshawled with fog that looks as plush as double-faced cashmere, I’m flooded with a peculiar feeling of déjà vu. Have I actually been here before and somehow can’t remember it? Thanks to Hollywood, there are places that are so well mythologized, you feel you’ve visited them at least a thousand times before setting foot there. Then the memories — misty, watercoloured memories — light the corners of my mind.
I first visited , California’s most exclusive beach city, sometime in my teens, when I watched “The Way We Were ” In that classic 1973 love story, Barbra Streisand’s impassioned, loudmouth Katie Morosky and Robert Redford’s taciturn, impossibly handsome Hubbell Gardiner move to a glassy bungalow in Malibu when Hubbell lands a fancy studio contract. The couple, dressed in creamy knits, walk wind-ruffled shores (the tumult of their love affair finding pathetic fallacy in the histrionics of the Pacific Ocean), the California sand and sunshine as golden as Hubbell’s hair. There’s a sense of exclusivity in lounging on Malibu’s Carbon Beach, also called Billionaire’s Beach.
These scenes imprinted themselves on my adolescent imagination, and have since drifted in and out of my mind like the marine layer skimming Malibu’s . Over the years, I’ve spent more time in Malibu, mainly through reality television. In the aughts, I watched MTV’s “The Hills,” in which cast membe.
