February 4, 2022 • 28 mins
Rob Lowe moved to Malibu in 1976, when he was 12. The Malibu of his youth was crazy. He saw Fonzie jump the shark, at Paradise Cove. He saw Nick Nolte at the grocery store. He saw coke—at a 7th-grader’s birthday party. The kids were running wild and the parents were running wilder. His mind was blown, never to recover. In this Season 2 bonus episode, Lowe takes us on a trippy trip down memory lane.
You can hear more from Rob Lowe on his podcasts: “Literally! With Rob Lowe” and “Parks and Recollection.”
This episode comes out for free on February 4th and is available now for Pushkin+ subscribers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin. I'm Dana Goodyear on this season of Lost Hills.
I've talked a lot about the Malibu of forty years ago,
Malibu when the Railers lived there. How it was this
really small town, but with all these unusual things about it,
it had become desirable. And this, at least according to
(00:38):
the Santa Barbara Day, was what drove Fred Railer to
murder his two wives and his steps on the desire
to control of fortune in Malibu real estate and collect
a bunch of insurance money that would fund his life there.
Everything I learned made me think that Malibu in the
seventies and early eighties was an insane place, insanely wonderful,
(00:59):
insanely scary. It was this swirl of money and celebrities
and cowboys and drug dealers and musical geniuses living in
shacks on the beach. There were start to be snapped
up for millions, and just like on the Canyon Roads,
there were no guardrails. Malibu in the seventies was like
(01:20):
the movie The Ice Storm meets Boogie Nights meets Lord
of the Flies, directed by Swingers on Blow. This is
Rob Blow. Well. We could go on a tour of Malibu.
Go dead guy there. Car crashed there. Five people died there.
(01:41):
Three people that just on Point Doom alone. Roblow is
a super famous actor who spent his teenage years in
Malibu in the seventies and eighties, when Fred Jean Verna
and their kids lived there. Rob moved to Malibu with
his mom and brothers in nineteen seventy six. He was twelve,
a hay seed from Ohio with dreams of stardom. He
(02:05):
was not prepared. Yeah, it was it well, literally a
front tier the local supermarket had a hitching post and
people would get on their horses and go to the market.
When I got there, you also had to remember it
was never it was before it was gentrified. First of all,
what it was originally were outcasts, people looking to escape,
(02:31):
counterculture people burnt out actors and rock stars, and then
regular working class fireman, policeman, the odd architect. That was
the socioeconomics of Malibu. But like, I come to that
from wanting to be in showbusiness and knowing nothing and
having nothing like that in Ohio, and my mind was
(02:53):
blown blown, never to recover. His mom rented a little
ranch house on Point Doom. It had a corral for
horses in the back, built out of wood from the
set of Planet of the Apes. It was magic, it
was he just smelt safe and eucalyptus. And I remember
the ants. I remember I'd never seen so many ants.
(03:16):
The ants would come out of the electrical sockets. The
apocryphal legend was that the Captain and Tenniel had recorded
Love Will Keep Us Together in a makeshift studio at
the house and what became my bedroom. The way he
describes Malibu back then, it was surreal, like a dream,
(03:36):
populated by faces from your TV set. You'd go to
our elementary school and it would be shut down for
the day because Farah Fawcett Majors would be filming Charlie's Angels.
Linda Ronstat would come to My Talent show and we
would come out on the playground and hear planes flying
above and they would be shooting the air battle sequences
(03:57):
for the TV show Bob Bob Black Sheep. Fonzie Jumped
the Shark, the famous phrase about a show jumping the shark.
I saw Fonzie jumped the shark. You jumped the shark
at Paradise Cove in front of the house. My grandparents
rent in the winters, and on Fourth of July, the
fancy famous people would throw a big party and everyone
was invited. There were big rock stars and they were
(04:21):
all in the colony. I have great memories of the
colony and the Fourth of July, which was such a thing.
It was an open house. You would literally walk into
house after house after house that you didn't even know
whose house it was. And I remember walking into a
bedroom and seeing two naked people screwing and it was
(04:41):
like just a literally like almost like an orgy, drug
and alcohol, free for all. And you know, that was
like the Linda Ronstat, Peter Asher, Larry Hagman, Larry Hagman,
that's the famous that's a well documented story. You know,
when he was the cats Meow and Dallas. Now we're
(05:01):
obviously a little bit later in the timeline, but he
would legitimately lead a parade down the beach wearing an
Indian head dress every night at sunset, and you could
join in or not join in, and that's what he did.
But even more reliable than the Colony for a star
struck young Rob Blow was the grocery store on Point Doom.
(05:25):
One of the biggest things on TV at the time
was the miniseries rich Man Poor Man. I loved it,
and Nick Nolty was the star. It was Nick Nolty's
first thing, and I would run into him at the market.
I remember, you know, this is also in the era
where Martin Sheen was always like protesting. Remember he called
me once and said, will you come down and protest
the market with me and Sayesar Chavez over grapes. I
(05:48):
was like, no, I'm going to the beach my girlfriend, Martin.
But I would go to that market and one day
I ran into Nick and he's like, how it's Martin Sheen.
You ever see Martin. I was like, you know, he's
actually on a political sabbatical in Nicaragua. And I remember
nig niggara, niggaraba, nigger rah, and like moving back with
(06:12):
each time you said nigh until he fell over into
a stacked can of baked beans. Niggerain clank clink on
his back. And then and then there was a great
time where my mom was like, that's Steve McQueen, Robbie,
(06:33):
that's Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen was a movie star who
was married to another movie star, Ali McGraw. You heard
her in the first episode of this season. Ali and
Steve had discovered Malibu in the early seventies and they
ended up on Broadbeach. They were pioneers. This is Ali. Well.
First of all, I'm from New York and I found
(06:55):
myself living in Beverly Hills. Actually when I married Bob
Evans and we had a child, and when that marriage
broke up, I married Steve McQueen and we decided we
wanted to get far away from the center of la
There was a funky little movie theater which was great,
(07:17):
next to a pizza place owned by one of my
son's friends families. And John's Garden, which was this huge
kind of perpetual farmer's market with wonderful food, next to
a sandblock playground that Fred Siegel had created where all
the kids just played while we ate sandwiches and caught up,
(07:39):
and a place to buy blue jeans in bathing suits.
It wasn't this repository of somebody's sixth home, you know.
We really lived there. Shopped at the grocery store, we
walked our dogs, We went to the school, the public school,
and participated with our kids. And that's what I wanted
(08:03):
as a childhood for my kid. I don't know how
I would have done it in Beverly Hills. Back to
Rob Steve McQueen's story, and I'm like, sort of vaguely
knew who Steve McQueen was, because in the mid seventies
he was you know, he'd had a kind of cold streak.
But I knew he was famous enough, and I was
(08:24):
an audacious kid, and I went up to him and
excuse me, stir, could I have your autograph? And he
looked at me. First, he smelled like an animal with
a five o'clock beard, and this shirt untucked, really dirty,
and he was carrying like four or six packs of beer,
and hecaus, well, do you want my autographed? Kid? I
(08:45):
ain't no one. Never forgot that I ain't no one.
And then there were the people who were like seeing
Sasquatch or the locknet monster, where you knew they were around,
you were told they were around, but you meanwhile you'd
never seen them. And that would be like Barbara streisand
like nobody ever saw Barbara. I mean, Barbara's a legend.
(09:05):
I've gotten to luckily become very good friends with her,
but I didn't know her then. And that's in that era,
like that sort of What's Up Doc Stars Borne, Chris Christofferson,
he would have been around a little bit just unbelievable,
unbelievable times. And then you know, there was the moment
when Bob Dylan secretly bought up a bunch of properties
(09:28):
on Point Doom where I lived. That started that level
of people coming in. And then of course Johnny Carson
was the very first sort of establishment you don't get
any more establishment, the Johnny Carson and the music being
recorded in Malilu. It was legendary culture changing. Neil Young,
(09:49):
Bob Dylan and the band and everyone was recording at
Robbie Robertson studio overlooking zoom of Beach. We found it.
It used to be a bordello, this place that was
called Shangrila. That's Robertson, who we also heard from in
episode one. It used to be a bordello for cowboys,
(10:12):
cow polkes. That there's a lot of ranches out there.
This was a ranch. So we thought, wow, this place
is perfect, you know, so we turned it into something
and then over a period of time, more and more
music people started gravitating out to Malibu, and people wanted
(10:36):
to use this studio because it was cool, and it
still exists. Rick Rubin, the music producer, he has it
now and it's as beautiful as ever. All that got
rolled into the Malibu myth, which young Rob Blow spooned
up with his wheaties. You know. The other thing I
(10:58):
love is is that great song from nineteen seventy nine
called Gold. That's when the lights go down in the
California town. People are in and father evening that song.
It's Stevie Nicks singing duet in the great line, driving
over Canan singing to the soul because people out there
(11:20):
turn the music into gold. So clearly the adults were
having a grandall time. But what about the kids? That's
coming up right after the break. In just about every
(11:45):
interview I've done about Malibu in the three years I've
been making Lost Hells, there comes a point where the
person I'm talking to brings up the energy. With Rob Lowe,
it happened at minute fourteen. I actually think there's an
element to it of and this is going to sound
very I don't know, woo who is There's a there's
(12:07):
an energy in Malibu, sort of a karmic mana something there.
I really believe that that's that's really attractive and exciting,
But there's a real devil's bargain, and I think it
a lot of it, I swear to God has to
do with Malibu itsself. I don't know if that's Shoemash
(12:29):
Indian stuff or what. Listen, if there's such a thing
as a vortex and that there's a vortex that you
could tap into or go looking for, if those things exist,
then there's definitely one there for sure. What he means
is shit got real out there on Point Doom. What
people don't realize about Malibu in that exact area era.
(12:52):
I moved there in the summer of the bicentennial summer
of seventy six and lived there pretty much full time
until eighty six. Was how rugged and violent and dark
(13:12):
it was, in addition to all of the other things
I always say, like the toughest white people I think
that I ever encountered, that I could ever imagine would
have been a local resident in Malibu in nineteen seventy six. Man,
white people can be tough. And whenever I ran into
like Sean Penn, we like look at each other and go, dude,
(13:34):
oh fuck, dude, we have to do a movie about
our childhoods Rob Lowe, he's a writer too, and he's
written about what he calls the savage undercurrent that ran
through Malibu in those days. I went to it's now
the high school, it's now called Malibu whatever the hell
it is high school. When I went to their seventh, eighth,
(13:57):
ninth grade, three years eight kids died. Now today, if
eight kids died in a school over the course of
three years, it would be headline and there would be uproars,
and there'd be panels, and there would be think pieces,
and there would be you know, you know, Malibu strong
(14:19):
slogans and everything else. And in those days, you're like, yeah, no,
I was pretty radical, wasn't it. Okay? Next, there were kids,
so clearly there were parents somewhere, but they weren't as
a rule, raising their kids. There was no parenting. I
never saw parents ever. And in fact, my brother was
(14:39):
given his first joint by his best friend's mother in
the fifth grade. And the great quote was she wanted
to quote smoke him out. Hey, you want to get
smoked out? And she of course also had a water
bed with a gigantic vibrator that she hid underneath it.
(15:02):
And that was also a big moment in my brother's development,
finding that the adults were finding them selves in a
big orgy of self involvement, which was happening on top
of a mountain of cocaine. So it was the sort
of burn your bra movement had kind of happened. You know,
(15:23):
whenever something big culturally happens, is that moment of okay, now,
what that had happened. Divorce had become not a scarlet
letter for the first time. Like everybody was. Everyone was
doing it, you know, everybody was doing like est. Everybody was.
Est was a big thing. Everybody was doing EST and
(15:44):
everybody was we thought, you know, coke had just gone
from sort of the rock and roll culture into suburbia
and it was still good for you. You know that
that was the thing. It was. It was good for you.
I hope you think and and and it's what successful
people did, don't you know. So like those were all
(16:05):
of the men, And there were only two types of
pot Maui Wowie and how hilarious is that name, Mallie Wowie?
And what was the other one? Um gosh, I was
never a pot guy, So I don't know, two types
of pot. That was it. Do you remember the moment
when coke came in to Malibu? Oh? Yeah, you know.
(16:28):
I had moved to Malibu from from Dayton, Ohio. In Dayton, Dayton,
ohioh was very very different, to put it mildly, and
I was never really accepted by the cool kids because
I didn't surf and I didn't play beach volleyball. I
played tackle football, whiffleball, baseball. Those are my sports. Volleyball
(16:49):
was not on my thing, and like, if you didn't
do one of those two things, you were not a guy.
And then, of course I wanted to be an actor,
and no one wanted to be an actor then, which
was even in I thought moving to California, everybody would
be an actor and was not true. They were equally
as flummoxed by the thirteen year old wanting to be
an actors as the kids were in Dayton. Anyway, So
(17:10):
I was never really accepted by the cool kids. But
I did get to one cool kid's birthday party. It
was her seventh grade birthday party, and the big gift
she got from her seventh grade best friend was a
two grand vial of coke, and I remember that. I
was like, Wow, okay, I am in the inner sanctum
(17:34):
of Malibu cool seventh grade. I'm gonna say seventy seventy eight,
seventy let's say seventy eight, And I remember it was
in that You know those those like copper colored bottles
with a black top, screw on top with a chain
(17:55):
and a coke spoon hanging off of it. And do
you think she had got this kid had gotten it
from her parents, or how I mean, like stolen it
from her parents, or how do you think you even
get coke when you're fourteen years old in Malibu? Well,
I mean, you know, I know of one parent who
kept their coke in their sock drawer and the entire
(18:17):
neighborhood knew where it was. But if all the parents
are kind of acting like teenagers, I guess, on this
sort of quest for identity, then where does that leave
the kids? It leaves us running around in the gullies
smoking dope and eight kids getting killed overdosing on strychnine
(18:39):
which they think is coke and turns out its rat
poison or kludes and then deciding to go into the
ocean for a swim and never being seen again, or
being on another friend of mine on his ten speed
bike coming down self Ridge, someone goes wrong with a bike.
He crashes into a tree and a stick goes through
his eye and he dies. It's just like, not only
(19:01):
did the kids die, but they died in really like
horrible ways, you know, based on the times. We were
all freaked out about it for about a week and
then you kind of moved. Nobody's ever said anything. There's
never anything in the paper that I remember or nothing.
(19:22):
Disturbing stuff would happen all the time, like one long
after school special, all the blonde kids in op shorts
and hang ten shirts, but with a bizarro celebrity twist.
Do you know? Another great story is when Bob Dylan
was going through a custody battle and his wife sent
(19:44):
a bunch of goons into mister Seal's sixth grade class
at Point Dam Elementary to kidnap the kids, and they
hid in the closets while these guys ransacked the classroom narly,
really supernarly. My brother was in the class when it happened.
(20:07):
Really insane police like the whole and again today that'd
be TMZ. For a year, they'd be talking about it.
This kid, I can see his face, I can in
my mind's eye in his name. Well, I wouldn't I
wouldn't get I wouldn't give his name because he survived this.
(20:29):
But it was a kid in my school and again
in junior high who was hitchhiking on Canaan, got picked
up and the guy took him into the woods and
chained him to a tree and took a pair of
tweezers out and tweezed out every one of his pubic hairs.
(20:55):
As I hear myself say it, it sounds like bullshit.
It's a ghost story. Yeah, insane, insane, insane, And I'm
sure nobody ever found the guy or caught the guy
or no, oh no, are you kidding? Nobody ever said
a word. He was like oh wow, no way, yeah, way, dude,
(21:16):
that's so gnarly. And nothing, no announcement at the school,
no counseling, no like, it just was. I mean, he
just the one thing is he never came back to school.
He was just gone. Then there was Paul Hackett, the
first kid Rob Lowe knew, who got famous, a Malibu
(21:37):
demigod and a skateboarding legend. His story is after the break.
(22:10):
Paul Hackett, the Malibu skater Kid, made the cover of
Skateboarder magazine in nineteen seventy seven, which for Malibu kids
was super nova stardom. Paul Hackett was the first person
I ever knew who had his own poster, and he
was gorgeous, blue, crystal blue eyes, handsome. Every girl loved him.
(22:34):
I was super jealous of him. I think he was
like two years older than I was, and he was
a skateboarder. And this is That's the other thing that
was huge then, not this thrashing skate park ship that
we have now, but like you know, Lords of Dogtown,
like that kind of like real skateboarding. You'd you know,
find abandoned pools and skate and it. It was very
(22:58):
sort of counterculture and punk rock and badass, and kids
were super tough. Who did it. Nobody were pads and
Paul Hackett was as the star. He was on the cover,
first person ever knew to be on the cover of
magazine Skateboarder magazine, and the first person who did what
they call an aerial, which sounds quaint to even say today.
(23:22):
That's when you take your skateboard and fly up over
the lip of the pool, which is now any kid
does that, but in the day it was revolutionary. Well,
Paul Hackett one day, I think, took some PCP and
came home to his parents' house at the top of
(23:42):
what was then called Sunset Mesa, I think it still
may be up by the getty at the bottom of Malibu,
and asked his mom to make him a sandwich. His
dad was watching TV, and he'd been up all night
and I won't even tell you what he'd been doing
before he got home because it's that that's for offline,
but it was kind of gross and weird. But he
(24:02):
asked his mom to make him a sandwich. She started
to make him a sandwich, walked away from the knife,
he picked it up and stabbed her to death as
the dad watched TV. He then took his skateboard and skated.
If you've ever been to since A Mesa, it's way
steeper than Gray Fox and really longer. And he tried
(24:23):
to commit suicide by skating all the way down and
through PC to light, you know, hoping to get by
a car. Didn't get hit by a car, picked the
skateboard back up, walked all the way back up again,
did it again, didn't get hit by a car, ended
up in what was then the camar Rio Insane Asylum
in a four point tie, and that was the last
(24:45):
I ever heard of him. Still, Lowe talks about his
time in Malibu with a ton of affection. He calls
it a California Tom Sawyer type of childhood. So I
asked him why he didn't stay and raise his own
kids there. That version of Malibu was gone when it
became billionaire row. Look when I grew up there, there
(25:09):
was one movie theater and one record store, and you
couldn't get a record or a movie that was contemporary
or new for over a month. And now Malibu has everything.
It has paparazzi that didn't happen today. If you go
to get a you know, Starbucks, there's seven paparazzi taking
(25:32):
your picture. That was unheard of, and everybody's super wealthy,
and so you know that that Malibu. I knew that
sort of quaint ride your horse to the supermarket was
gone forever, so that it was never an option to
raise them there. So I tried to find the next
best thing, and I found Monticito in Santa Barbara, which
(25:55):
are the closest things, and that's now changed. But twenty
eight years ago, Monticito Santa Barbara was as close as
I could find in California to the Malibu I grew
up in. The one place he still feels the old
Malibu is Point Doom, where he grew up. It has
remained the most time warped area of Malibu. I think,
(26:17):
to its credit. I will say Point Doom when I'm
there all the time, because I go and I still
surf there, and I have a friend does it. My
friends the only property with a private gate onto the
actual beach, which is extraordinary, and as you know, it's
gated and you have to have a key to get
in there. So I'm on Point Doom a lot. The
(26:38):
horses have been replaced with high falutin, high tech golf carts,
so now the kids rip around and their parents' golf carts.
It's the milf capital of the world. There was one
milf when I was there, and that was my friend's mom, who,
looking back on it, she was probably all of twenty six.
(26:59):
She was a checkout girl at the Mayfair market and
she's the one who hit her doldo under the bed
and smoked us out. But now, you know, all the
moms are particularly cute in Malibu, and they're all driving
their toeheaded kids with their boogie boards and their gigantic,
you know, beach cruiser golf carts down to the to
the thing. But but what's weird what's happened now is
(27:20):
all of those little ranch houses are bought up by
people who don't live in them. So there's this weird
thing now of seasonal occupants that did not ever happen.
So a lot of people buy the houses just to surf.
Like I know a tech guy who bought a house,
you know, right on Gray Fox, and he's there, you know,
(27:40):
only when he wants to surf. The rest of the
time he's in the Bay Area, So you know, it's different.
Roblow's stories have this very particular Malibu quality, sundazzle, gold dusted,
but right under that menace fear, maybe death, growing up,
there was a wonderful trauma that he's still processing the
(28:03):
people who survived it, like whenever we see each other
that we like run and like clutch onto each other
like debris and a shipwreck. He feels lucky to have
lived in Malibu back then and to have made it
out Alive. For more Rob Low, check out his podcast
Literally with Rob Low, where he talks to friends like
(28:26):
Molly Ringwald and Jennifer Aniston. It's in its second season
and releasing new episodes. He's also got a new podcast
which he co hosts with Alan Yang called Parks and Recollection.
It's all about their work on Parks and Rack. As
for me, we have another season two bonus episode coming
up in a few weeks. Stay tuned. Lost Hills is
(28:49):
written and reported by Me Gain a Good Year. It's
created by me and Ben Adair and is a production
of Western Sound and Pushkin Industries.
Pushkin. I'm Dana Goodyear on this season of Lost Hills.
I've talked a lot about the Malibu of forty years ago,
Malibu when the Railers lived there. How it was this
really small town, but with all these unusual things about it,
it had become desirable. And this, at least according to
(00:38):
the Santa Barbara Day, was what drove Fred Railer to
murder his two wives and his steps on the desire
to control of fortune in Malibu real estate and collect
a bunch of insurance money that would fund his life there.
Everything I learned made me think that Malibu in the
seventies and early eighties was an insane place, insanely wonderful,
(00:59):
insanely scary. It was this swirl of money and celebrities
and cowboys and drug dealers and musical geniuses living in
shacks on the beach. There were start to be snapped
up for millions, and just like on the Canyon Roads,
there were no guardrails. Malibu in the seventies was like
(01:20):
the movie The Ice Storm meets Boogie Nights meets Lord
of the Flies, directed by Swingers on Blow. This is
Rob Blow. Well. We could go on a tour of Malibu.
Go dead guy there. Car crashed there. Five people died there.
(01:41):
Three people that just on Point Doom alone. Roblow is
a super famous actor who spent his teenage years in
Malibu in the seventies and eighties, when Fred Jean Verna
and their kids lived there. Rob moved to Malibu with
his mom and brothers in nineteen seventy six. He was twelve,
a hay seed from Ohio with dreams of stardom. He
(02:05):
was not prepared. Yeah, it was it well, literally a
front tier the local supermarket had a hitching post and
people would get on their horses and go to the market.
When I got there, you also had to remember it
was never it was before it was gentrified. First of all,
what it was originally were outcasts, people looking to escape,
(02:31):
counterculture people burnt out actors and rock stars, and then
regular working class fireman, policeman, the odd architect. That was
the socioeconomics of Malibu. But like, I come to that
from wanting to be in showbusiness and knowing nothing and
having nothing like that in Ohio, and my mind was
(02:53):
blown blown, never to recover. His mom rented a little
ranch house on Point Doom. It had a corral for
horses in the back, built out of wood from the
set of Planet of the Apes. It was magic, it
was he just smelt safe and eucalyptus. And I remember
the ants. I remember I'd never seen so many ants.
(03:16):
The ants would come out of the electrical sockets. The
apocryphal legend was that the Captain and Tenniel had recorded
Love Will Keep Us Together in a makeshift studio at
the house and what became my bedroom. The way he
describes Malibu back then, it was surreal, like a dream,
(03:36):
populated by faces from your TV set. You'd go to
our elementary school and it would be shut down for
the day because Farah Fawcett Majors would be filming Charlie's Angels.
Linda Ronstat would come to My Talent show and we
would come out on the playground and hear planes flying
above and they would be shooting the air battle sequences
(03:57):
for the TV show Bob Bob Black Sheep. Fonzie Jumped
the Shark, the famous phrase about a show jumping the shark.
I saw Fonzie jumped the shark. You jumped the shark
at Paradise Cove in front of the house. My grandparents
rent in the winters, and on Fourth of July, the
fancy famous people would throw a big party and everyone
was invited. There were big rock stars and they were
(04:21):
all in the colony. I have great memories of the
colony and the Fourth of July, which was such a thing.
It was an open house. You would literally walk into
house after house after house that you didn't even know
whose house it was. And I remember walking into a
bedroom and seeing two naked people screwing and it was
(04:41):
like just a literally like almost like an orgy, drug
and alcohol, free for all. And you know, that was
like the Linda Ronstat, Peter Asher, Larry Hagman, Larry Hagman,
that's the famous that's a well documented story. You know,
when he was the cats Meow and Dallas. Now we're
(05:01):
obviously a little bit later in the timeline, but he
would legitimately lead a parade down the beach wearing an
Indian head dress every night at sunset, and you could
join in or not join in, and that's what he did.
But even more reliable than the Colony for a star
struck young Rob Blow was the grocery store on Point Doom.
(05:25):
One of the biggest things on TV at the time
was the miniseries rich Man Poor Man. I loved it,
and Nick Nolty was the star. It was Nick Nolty's
first thing, and I would run into him at the market.
I remember, you know, this is also in the era
where Martin Sheen was always like protesting. Remember he called
me once and said, will you come down and protest
the market with me and Sayesar Chavez over grapes. I
(05:48):
was like, no, I'm going to the beach my girlfriend, Martin.
But I would go to that market and one day
I ran into Nick and he's like, how it's Martin Sheen.
You ever see Martin. I was like, you know, he's
actually on a political sabbatical in Nicaragua. And I remember
nig niggara, niggaraba, nigger rah, and like moving back with
(06:12):
each time you said nigh until he fell over into
a stacked can of baked beans. Niggerain clank clink on
his back. And then and then there was a great
time where my mom was like, that's Steve McQueen, Robbie,
(06:33):
that's Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen was a movie star who
was married to another movie star, Ali McGraw. You heard
her in the first episode of this season. Ali and
Steve had discovered Malibu in the early seventies and they
ended up on Broadbeach. They were pioneers. This is Ali. Well.
First of all, I'm from New York and I found
(06:55):
myself living in Beverly Hills. Actually when I married Bob
Evans and we had a child, and when that marriage
broke up, I married Steve McQueen and we decided we
wanted to get far away from the center of la
There was a funky little movie theater which was great,
(07:17):
next to a pizza place owned by one of my
son's friends families. And John's Garden, which was this huge
kind of perpetual farmer's market with wonderful food, next to
a sandblock playground that Fred Siegel had created where all
the kids just played while we ate sandwiches and caught up,
(07:39):
and a place to buy blue jeans in bathing suits.
It wasn't this repository of somebody's sixth home, you know.
We really lived there. Shopped at the grocery store, we
walked our dogs, We went to the school, the public school,
and participated with our kids. And that's what I wanted
(08:03):
as a childhood for my kid. I don't know how
I would have done it in Beverly Hills. Back to
Rob Steve McQueen's story, and I'm like, sort of vaguely
knew who Steve McQueen was, because in the mid seventies
he was you know, he'd had a kind of cold streak.
But I knew he was famous enough, and I was
(08:24):
an audacious kid, and I went up to him and
excuse me, stir, could I have your autograph? And he
looked at me. First, he smelled like an animal with
a five o'clock beard, and this shirt untucked, really dirty,
and he was carrying like four or six packs of beer,
and hecaus, well, do you want my autographed? Kid? I
(08:45):
ain't no one. Never forgot that I ain't no one.
And then there were the people who were like seeing
Sasquatch or the locknet monster, where you knew they were around,
you were told they were around, but you meanwhile you'd
never seen them. And that would be like Barbara streisand
like nobody ever saw Barbara. I mean, Barbara's a legend.
(09:05):
I've gotten to luckily become very good friends with her,
but I didn't know her then. And that's in that era,
like that sort of What's Up Doc Stars Borne, Chris Christofferson,
he would have been around a little bit just unbelievable,
unbelievable times. And then you know, there was the moment
when Bob Dylan secretly bought up a bunch of properties
(09:28):
on Point Doom where I lived. That started that level
of people coming in. And then of course Johnny Carson
was the very first sort of establishment you don't get
any more establishment, the Johnny Carson and the music being
recorded in Malilu. It was legendary culture changing. Neil Young,
(09:49):
Bob Dylan and the band and everyone was recording at
Robbie Robertson studio overlooking zoom of Beach. We found it.
It used to be a bordello, this place that was
called Shangrila. That's Robertson, who we also heard from in
episode one. It used to be a bordello for cowboys,
(10:12):
cow polkes. That there's a lot of ranches out there.
This was a ranch. So we thought, wow, this place
is perfect, you know, so we turned it into something
and then over a period of time, more and more
music people started gravitating out to Malibu, and people wanted
(10:36):
to use this studio because it was cool, and it
still exists. Rick Rubin, the music producer, he has it
now and it's as beautiful as ever. All that got
rolled into the Malibu myth, which young Rob Blow spooned
up with his wheaties. You know. The other thing I
(10:58):
love is is that great song from nineteen seventy nine
called Gold. That's when the lights go down in the
California town. People are in and father evening that song.
It's Stevie Nicks singing duet in the great line, driving
over Canan singing to the soul because people out there
(11:20):
turn the music into gold. So clearly the adults were
having a grandall time. But what about the kids? That's
coming up right after the break. In just about every
(11:45):
interview I've done about Malibu in the three years I've
been making Lost Hells, there comes a point where the
person I'm talking to brings up the energy. With Rob Lowe,
it happened at minute fourteen. I actually think there's an
element to it of and this is going to sound
very I don't know, woo who is There's a there's
(12:07):
an energy in Malibu, sort of a karmic mana something there.
I really believe that that's that's really attractive and exciting,
But there's a real devil's bargain, and I think it
a lot of it, I swear to God has to
do with Malibu itsself. I don't know if that's Shoemash
(12:29):
Indian stuff or what. Listen, if there's such a thing
as a vortex and that there's a vortex that you
could tap into or go looking for, if those things exist,
then there's definitely one there for sure. What he means
is shit got real out there on Point Doom. What
people don't realize about Malibu in that exact area era.
(12:52):
I moved there in the summer of the bicentennial summer
of seventy six and lived there pretty much full time
until eighty six. Was how rugged and violent and dark
(13:12):
it was, in addition to all of the other things
I always say, like the toughest white people I think
that I ever encountered, that I could ever imagine would
have been a local resident in Malibu in nineteen seventy six. Man,
white people can be tough. And whenever I ran into
like Sean Penn, we like look at each other and go, dude,
(13:34):
oh fuck, dude, we have to do a movie about
our childhoods Rob Lowe, he's a writer too, and he's
written about what he calls the savage undercurrent that ran
through Malibu in those days. I went to it's now
the high school, it's now called Malibu whatever the hell
it is high school. When I went to their seventh, eighth,
(13:57):
ninth grade, three years eight kids died. Now today, if
eight kids died in a school over the course of
three years, it would be headline and there would be uproars,
and there'd be panels, and there would be think pieces,
and there would be you know, you know, Malibu strong
(14:19):
slogans and everything else. And in those days, you're like, yeah, no,
I was pretty radical, wasn't it. Okay? Next, there were kids,
so clearly there were parents somewhere, but they weren't as
a rule, raising their kids. There was no parenting. I
never saw parents ever. And in fact, my brother was
(14:39):
given his first joint by his best friend's mother in
the fifth grade. And the great quote was she wanted
to quote smoke him out. Hey, you want to get
smoked out? And she of course also had a water
bed with a gigantic vibrator that she hid underneath it.
(15:02):
And that was also a big moment in my brother's development,
finding that the adults were finding them selves in a
big orgy of self involvement, which was happening on top
of a mountain of cocaine. So it was the sort
of burn your bra movement had kind of happened. You know,
(15:23):
whenever something big culturally happens, is that moment of okay, now,
what that had happened. Divorce had become not a scarlet
letter for the first time. Like everybody was. Everyone was
doing it, you know, everybody was doing like est. Everybody was.
Est was a big thing. Everybody was doing EST and
(15:44):
everybody was we thought, you know, coke had just gone
from sort of the rock and roll culture into suburbia
and it was still good for you. You know that
that was the thing. It was. It was good for you.
I hope you think and and and it's what successful
people did, don't you know. So like those were all
(16:05):
of the men, And there were only two types of
pot Maui Wowie and how hilarious is that name, Mallie Wowie?
And what was the other one? Um gosh, I was
never a pot guy, So I don't know, two types
of pot. That was it. Do you remember the moment
when coke came in to Malibu? Oh? Yeah, you know.
(16:28):
I had moved to Malibu from from Dayton, Ohio. In Dayton, Dayton,
ohioh was very very different, to put it mildly, and
I was never really accepted by the cool kids because
I didn't surf and I didn't play beach volleyball. I
played tackle football, whiffleball, baseball. Those are my sports. Volleyball
(16:49):
was not on my thing, and like, if you didn't
do one of those two things, you were not a guy.
And then, of course I wanted to be an actor,
and no one wanted to be an actor then, which
was even in I thought moving to California, everybody would
be an actor and was not true. They were equally
as flummoxed by the thirteen year old wanting to be
an actors as the kids were in Dayton. Anyway, So
(17:10):
I was never really accepted by the cool kids. But
I did get to one cool kid's birthday party. It
was her seventh grade birthday party, and the big gift
she got from her seventh grade best friend was a
two grand vial of coke, and I remember that. I
was like, Wow, okay, I am in the inner sanctum
(17:34):
of Malibu cool seventh grade. I'm gonna say seventy seventy eight,
seventy let's say seventy eight, And I remember it was
in that You know those those like copper colored bottles
with a black top, screw on top with a chain
(17:55):
and a coke spoon hanging off of it. And do
you think she had got this kid had gotten it
from her parents, or how I mean, like stolen it
from her parents, or how do you think you even
get coke when you're fourteen years old in Malibu? Well,
I mean, you know, I know of one parent who
kept their coke in their sock drawer and the entire
(18:17):
neighborhood knew where it was. But if all the parents
are kind of acting like teenagers, I guess, on this
sort of quest for identity, then where does that leave
the kids? It leaves us running around in the gullies
smoking dope and eight kids getting killed overdosing on strychnine
(18:39):
which they think is coke and turns out its rat
poison or kludes and then deciding to go into the
ocean for a swim and never being seen again, or
being on another friend of mine on his ten speed
bike coming down self Ridge, someone goes wrong with a bike.
He crashes into a tree and a stick goes through
his eye and he dies. It's just like, not only
(19:01):
did the kids die, but they died in really like
horrible ways, you know, based on the times. We were
all freaked out about it for about a week and
then you kind of moved. Nobody's ever said anything. There's
never anything in the paper that I remember or nothing.
(19:22):
Disturbing stuff would happen all the time, like one long
after school special, all the blonde kids in op shorts
and hang ten shirts, but with a bizarro celebrity twist.
Do you know? Another great story is when Bob Dylan
was going through a custody battle and his wife sent
(19:44):
a bunch of goons into mister Seal's sixth grade class
at Point Dam Elementary to kidnap the kids, and they
hid in the closets while these guys ransacked the classroom narly,
really supernarly. My brother was in the class when it happened.
(20:07):
Really insane police like the whole and again today that'd
be TMZ. For a year, they'd be talking about it.
This kid, I can see his face, I can in
my mind's eye in his name. Well, I wouldn't I
wouldn't get I wouldn't give his name because he survived this.
(20:29):
But it was a kid in my school and again
in junior high who was hitchhiking on Canaan, got picked
up and the guy took him into the woods and
chained him to a tree and took a pair of
tweezers out and tweezed out every one of his pubic hairs.
(20:55):
As I hear myself say it, it sounds like bullshit.
It's a ghost story. Yeah, insane, insane, insane, And I'm
sure nobody ever found the guy or caught the guy
or no, oh no, are you kidding? Nobody ever said
a word. He was like oh wow, no way, yeah, way, dude,
(21:16):
that's so gnarly. And nothing, no announcement at the school,
no counseling, no like, it just was. I mean, he
just the one thing is he never came back to school.
He was just gone. Then there was Paul Hackett, the
first kid Rob Lowe knew, who got famous, a Malibu
(21:37):
demigod and a skateboarding legend. His story is after the break.
(22:10):
Paul Hackett, the Malibu skater Kid, made the cover of
Skateboarder magazine in nineteen seventy seven, which for Malibu kids
was super nova stardom. Paul Hackett was the first person
I ever knew who had his own poster, and he
was gorgeous, blue, crystal blue eyes, handsome. Every girl loved him.
(22:34):
I was super jealous of him. I think he was
like two years older than I was, and he was
a skateboarder. And this is That's the other thing that
was huge then, not this thrashing skate park ship that
we have now, but like you know, Lords of Dogtown,
like that kind of like real skateboarding. You'd you know,
find abandoned pools and skate and it. It was very
(22:58):
sort of counterculture and punk rock and badass, and kids
were super tough. Who did it. Nobody were pads and
Paul Hackett was as the star. He was on the cover,
first person ever knew to be on the cover of
magazine Skateboarder magazine, and the first person who did what
they call an aerial, which sounds quaint to even say today.
(23:22):
That's when you take your skateboard and fly up over
the lip of the pool, which is now any kid
does that, but in the day it was revolutionary. Well,
Paul Hackett one day, I think, took some PCP and
came home to his parents' house at the top of
(23:42):
what was then called Sunset Mesa, I think it still
may be up by the getty at the bottom of Malibu,
and asked his mom to make him a sandwich. His
dad was watching TV, and he'd been up all night
and I won't even tell you what he'd been doing
before he got home because it's that that's for offline,
but it was kind of gross and weird. But he
(24:02):
asked his mom to make him a sandwich. She started
to make him a sandwich, walked away from the knife,
he picked it up and stabbed her to death as
the dad watched TV. He then took his skateboard and skated.
If you've ever been to since A Mesa, it's way
steeper than Gray Fox and really longer. And he tried
(24:23):
to commit suicide by skating all the way down and
through PC to light, you know, hoping to get by
a car. Didn't get hit by a car, picked the
skateboard back up, walked all the way back up again,
did it again, didn't get hit by a car, ended
up in what was then the camar Rio Insane Asylum
in a four point tie, and that was the last
(24:45):
I ever heard of him. Still, Lowe talks about his
time in Malibu with a ton of affection. He calls
it a California Tom Sawyer type of childhood. So I
asked him why he didn't stay and raise his own
kids there. That version of Malibu was gone when it
became billionaire row. Look when I grew up there, there
(25:09):
was one movie theater and one record store, and you
couldn't get a record or a movie that was contemporary
or new for over a month. And now Malibu has everything.
It has paparazzi that didn't happen today. If you go
to get a you know, Starbucks, there's seven paparazzi taking
(25:32):
your picture. That was unheard of, and everybody's super wealthy,
and so you know that that Malibu. I knew that
sort of quaint ride your horse to the supermarket was
gone forever, so that it was never an option to
raise them there. So I tried to find the next
best thing, and I found Monticito in Santa Barbara, which
(25:55):
are the closest things, and that's now changed. But twenty
eight years ago, Monticito Santa Barbara was as close as
I could find in California to the Malibu I grew
up in. The one place he still feels the old
Malibu is Point Doom, where he grew up. It has
remained the most time warped area of Malibu. I think,
(26:17):
to its credit. I will say Point Doom when I'm
there all the time, because I go and I still
surf there, and I have a friend does it. My
friends the only property with a private gate onto the
actual beach, which is extraordinary, and as you know, it's
gated and you have to have a key to get
in there. So I'm on Point Doom a lot. The
(26:38):
horses have been replaced with high falutin, high tech golf carts,
so now the kids rip around and their parents' golf carts.
It's the milf capital of the world. There was one
milf when I was there, and that was my friend's mom, who,
looking back on it, she was probably all of twenty six.
(26:59):
She was a checkout girl at the Mayfair market and
she's the one who hit her doldo under the bed
and smoked us out. But now, you know, all the
moms are particularly cute in Malibu, and they're all driving
their toeheaded kids with their boogie boards and their gigantic,
you know, beach cruiser golf carts down to the to
the thing. But but what's weird what's happened now is
(27:20):
all of those little ranch houses are bought up by
people who don't live in them. So there's this weird
thing now of seasonal occupants that did not ever happen.
So a lot of people buy the houses just to surf.
Like I know a tech guy who bought a house,
you know, right on Gray Fox, and he's there, you know,
(27:40):
only when he wants to surf. The rest of the
time he's in the Bay Area, So you know, it's different.
Roblow's stories have this very particular Malibu quality, sundazzle, gold dusted,
but right under that menace fear, maybe death, growing up,
there was a wonderful trauma that he's still processing the
(28:03):
people who survived it, like whenever we see each other
that we like run and like clutch onto each other
like debris and a shipwreck. He feels lucky to have
lived in Malibu back then and to have made it
out Alive. For more Rob Low, check out his podcast
Literally with Rob Low, where he talks to friends like
(28:26):
Molly Ringwald and Jennifer Aniston. It's in its second season
and releasing new episodes. He's also got a new podcast
which he co hosts with Alan Yang called Parks and Recollection.
It's all about their work on Parks and Rack. As
for me, we have another season two bonus episode coming
up in a few weeks. Stay tuned. Lost Hills is
(28:49):
written and reported by Me Gain a Good Year. It's
created by me and Ben Adair and is a production
of Western Sound and Pushkin Industries.
Host
Dana Goodyear
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