To Charlou of Malibu, Adieu

As a young woman, Charlou Larronde witnessed the birth of the 1 1/2-mile strip of sand known as Carbon Beach, building one of the first houses there with her late husband. Now, half a century later, Larronde is witnessing the death of a certain seaside style of living that she helped create. Twenty years after opening her home to paying guests, Charlou of Malibu closed up shop on Pacific Coast Highway last month, ending a singular bed-and-breakfast experience for hundreds of loyal and infatuated guests.

Charlou, who is 80, has borrowed butlers from movie stars (well, once) and thrown some of the craziest parties in the ‘Bu as a founding member of the now-defunct Malibu Martini and Surfing Society.

Her 4,000-square-foot house has survived storms that washed away her patio, and a fire that drove her onto the beach clutching a laundry basket full of recipes, bills and photographs, a friend’s harp, and her mink, as she sprayed a hose over her head to keep her hair from igniting.

She has watched this strand just east of the Malibu Pier go from funky escape to exclusive enclave, and seen vacant lots fill up first with beach cottages, later with villas, and now with multimillion-dollar mansions three lots long.

In the early 1980s, a friend putting together a guide book asked the Larrondes if he could list their home as a bed-and-breakfast for international travelers. The Larrondes loved to stay with people in Europe so they consented. Somehow--without their knowledge--a picture of their house was featured on the back of an American bed-and-breakfast guide.

“Our first call was from Sweden,” Charlou recalled. “A month later some people flew in and said they were from Texas. We said, ‘Texas? This is supposed to be international.’ ”

But from then on, Charlou and Jimmy Larronde opened one or two bedrooms of their four-bedroom home to guests from anywhere. A night in their home offered a taste of old Malibu--Charlou-style--with sea and sand and stories and music and martinis. Today Charlou is one of just two remaining original residents along Carbon Beach, and next month, she is leaving, perhaps for good.

On Jan. 13, friends from all over flew in for Charlou’s 80th birthday party, which she called an “Awakening” (as opposed to a wake). “I think it is time to change my lifestyle,” she said. “I like to use my house as a place to entertain, but it’s a lot of work.”

On Feb. 25, Charlou hosted her final three guests, Sandi and Christian Zorn, a couple from Mission Hills, and a reporter. Christian Zorn, well trained after more than 20 visits over five years, pulls what looks like a silver gasoline can from the fridge and pours a round of cocktails. They talk of the changes on the beach, and what will happen to the house if Charlou sells.

“I want a piece of something,” Sandi Zorn says sentimentally. “Can I have a doorknob from upstairs? Or a floorboard?”

When she toasts Charlou for the last time, Sandi Zorn almost cries.

This is an ode to Charlou of Malibu, and these are some of her stories.

Awesome Ocean View

Casa Larronde is at 22000 Pacific Coast Highway. The sign out front says 22THOU and is held up by a brightly painted wooden Hawaiian warrior. From the street, the house is unremarkable: a door in a wall. But open it and you step into another world. Windows extend floor to ceiling, and waves crash less than 20 feet beyond. It’s as close to being in a boat as you can be, and still be on land.

Charlou--born Charlotte Louise Schneider in Los Angeles--is 5 foot 2, with twinkly blue eyes. She sits on the sofa and drinks a martini while she soaks her feet in a frying pan and paints her toes. She is a wild woman who has traveled to more than 100 countries--from Tonga to Timbuktu--and hopes to travel to a hundred more. She has a quick wit, a bawdy sense of humor and more stories than you can shake a martini swizzler at.

Charlou and her husband, Jimmy Larronde, bought their property in 1950 for $15,000. “It was 120 feet of sand, or a half block in Brentwood for the same price,” Charlou recalls. “But you have to remember, nobody had $15,000 in 1950.”

At the time they asked themselves, why are we buying two pieces of property? “We decided it might be a good investment,” she said. Today the house is worth at least $4 million. The “Flip Wilson” property--as she still calls the house next door--sold for $3 million in 1998 and was being offered after refurbishment for $15 million. Charlou will lease her home for a year--the going rate for this beach is $20,000 to $30,000 a month--to see if she can live without it. If she can, she may sell her coveted spot on this swanky beach where Hollywood royalty now vies for lots.

If she does sell, she knows her home will probably be torn down. Only about three of the original Carbon Beach homes still stand. The rest have been razed to make way for palaces, gardens, pools--and even a screening room. The originals are wedged between the ever-larger dwellings that look as if they have been airlifted from Bel-Air to the sea.

Charlou and Jimmy Larronde had played volleyball together when they were young, and when Jimmy got back from World War II, he tracked her down. Although she was married at the time and had a small child, they fell in love, and flew off to Vegas in a friend’s four-seater airplane to get married in 1947.

Charlou designed Casa Larronde, Jimmy built it. Jimmy, who died in 1989, was the grandson of a Basque shepherd. The grandfather bought property in downtown Los Angeles, including the site where City Hall now stands, accumulating a fortune.

Charlou has three daughters. Kris Larronde, 56, lives in Malibu and works as a personal assistant; Nita Larronde, 52, lives in a tiny New Mexico town and bakes pies; and Janine Larronde, 48, lives in Oak Park and works as an etched-glass artist.

When the girls were small, Malibu was practically the end of the Earth to most Angelenos. “Friends said, ‘What do you want to live so far out for?’ ” said Dian Roberts, another original Carbon Beach resident, who built her house at the same time as the Larrondes.

In those days, Carbon Beach had a funky, offbeat feel. There were movie stars who drove out from Brentwood on the weekends, but their beach cottages were modest. Most of the residents were artists, writers and “normal” people.

Kris Larronde remembers the winter that her father and the men of the beach fished logs out of the ocean after a storm and used them to build a huge playground of driftwood on the lot next door. Roberts remembers galloping up the beach on horses--until some old biddy went on a rampage.

Life was lived on the beach. “In those days everyone knew everyone else,” Charlou recalled. “The beach is a great leveler. It didn’t matter what walk of life people came from.”

Charlou and Jimmy were inseparable. “They were the most romantic people I have ever known in my life,” said Carmen Dragon, 53, the famous harpist, who grew up 10 houses down the beach.

Jimmy Larronde was a free spirit who adored his wife and loved to play with the seals and sea gulls. He got bags of leftover food from local restaurants and tossed them to his flock when he got home. One time he dipped bread in vodka and tossed it to a bird, just to see what it would do. “Sure enough, it landed and it was a little tipsy,” Charlou said, imitating a drunk sea gull standing on one leg.

The Larrondes threw endless parties that were the stuff of local legend. In the 1960s the Larrondes were among the founding members of the Malibu Martini and Surfing Society. “We didn’t surf, but we did everything else,” Charlou says.

The group played for 17 years. They found a rival in the Bombay Bicycle Riding Club from the Northern California suburb of Burlingame. The two groups challenged each other annually, each trying to outdo the other with outrageous party themes. One year, members of the Surfing Society rode up the coast to Burlingame on the Lurline, an ocean liner that plied the Pacific. The riding club met them with a street car. The Surfing Society then marched through downtown Burlingame with its mascot, their bagpiper and a chorus of kazoos, drawing local shopkeepers into the street, and earning a write-up in the local paper.

For one giant domino party she hosted around 1970, Charlou was so short on help she borrowed actor Laurence Harvey’s butler from next door. “Some people borrow cups of sugar,” she says, “but we borrow butlers.”

Charlou’s house is open and light in a 1950s style. It is built around the grand piano. Guests, who paid $150 per night, stayed upstairs in the airy master bedroom, which has been dubbed the “John Travolta suite,” and features a framed picture of a young John Travolta sitting with the family cat.

A gnarled tree grows out of the dining room and the roof can open to let in sun and sea air. The wall of the dining room folds back to go straight into the garage. Tables to seat 150 can be set up, as well as a dance floor in the garage. Over lemon turkey jerky, which she always serves, she pulls out old albums, scrapbooks, and treasures from her trips around the world: stones from a Greek island, earrings of carved ivory from China, a necklace of sow’s teeth from Manila.

For some reason, she calls her guests “B&Bs;,” as in “One B&B; looked through one of my albums, and after he finished he said, ‘Oh Charlou, you have had such an interesting life.’ And I said, ‘That’s only a year!’ ”

Barefoot on a Winter Beach

On the final morning of her life as a hostess, Charlou rises early and prepares a three-course breakfast laden with tropical fruits. Then she leads her guests down the beach. Although it’s a brisk February day, Charlou is barefoot. She rolls up her lavender pants, and carries an old black umbrella as a parasol as she wades through the waves.

With a mere 120 homes, Carbon Beach is like a tightly compressed star map, and Charlou knows the history of every lot. She conducts her tour with a kindly irreverence for the rich and famous, and a dazzling array of juicy anecdotes, most of which cannot be printed here because they involve love and money.

The sound of power saws and the smell of freshly cut wood fill the air. Just a few houses down from Charlou’s stands the skeleton of a mansion for billionaire Eli Broad. He razed houses on two lots, she said, and hired architect Richard Meier (of Getty Museum fame). Further up the beach, cranes pound pylons into the ground on three lots for a mansion being built by Nancy Daly Riordan and her husband, the mayor of Los Angeles,.

“Candice Bergen used to live here,” Charlou says, pointing to a huge orangy house. She points to a gray-shingled Cape Cod with manicured green lawns on both sides--each grassy expanse no doubt worth millions. David Geffen owns it now; the property takes up about seven lots. “This house used to be owned by Jane Russell when she was being supported by Howard Hughes,” she says. “Then came Doris Day. She would walk down the beach with all her poodles. That one belonged to Johnny Carson,” she says. “On this side he bought that small house, but my observation is he never did anything but put a dish on it. I think he bought it so he could control who lived next door.

“I’d always say Bette Davis and Henry Fonda slept in this house,” she continues, pointing to another. “But not at the same time.”

She cackles and calls the most ostentatious mansions “magnificent erections.” “Mine looks like a little cabin now with the ones on either side,” she says. “A 4,000-square-foot cabin.”

She stops in front of a house she says belongs to Jeffrey Katzenberg. Bill Clinton stayed there when he visited Los Angeles. “When I walked by he stepped out onto the patio,” she says. “My friend said, ‘He waved to you,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m a woman.’ ”

Old-timers often say Carbon Beach’s newest residents don’t understand what it means to live at the edge of the sea, exposed to earthquakes, mudslides, fires and storms.

Roberts recalled one neighbor who left a rubber boat out on the beach overnight. The tide came in and carried it out to sea, so Roberts and her husband braved the waves and hauled it to shore, placing it on the side of the house for safety. The next morning the new neighbor knocked on her door and asked her to keep her children from playing with his boat. “I had to give him a little lesson on tides,” she said.

Charlou stops and gestures to a house in the distance.

“Bruce Willis is in the first white house down there,” she said. “During one of the storms, his boat was washed down and it sank in front of my house.”

She stops in front of one home and says solemnly, “This is where Robert Kennedy spent the last night of his life. Then he got shot down at the Ambassador.”

On this winter day the beach is eerily vacant. In most mansions, shades are drawn like blank eyes. Silhouettes of maids move in some. Otherwise, Charlou and her small entourage are alone.

“People now, they build these giant houses, and they are weekend homes,” said Roberts. “These people have five houses, and they come down maybe twice a year. Otherwise the houses are empty.”

Instead of children playing in the surf, you see dogs being walked by butlers, and babies being pushed along the beach by security guards.

Touchstone to the Past

For those who have already left the beach--children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and friends--22Thou is a touchstone to the past. For those who would never have access to Carbon Beach--like the B&B; guests--22THOU is an entry point.

Carmen Dragon, the daughter of Hollywood conductor Carmen Dragon, sister of Daryl Dragon of The Captain & Tennille, was best friends with Charlou’s daughter Nita. Dragon left Malibu a year and a half ago. Her family home was the only house on the beach to survive the great storm of 1930. Last year it was demolished to make way for the Riordans.

“I came back and walked down the beach and saw it and I got so sick,” she said from Kauai, where she lives now because it reminds her of the way Malibu used to be. “It was the weirdest feeling. Then I realized, the beach doesn’t belong to us. It’s God’s beach.”

But she was so attached to the house that she asked Charlou to sneak onto the construction site and steal some tiles for her.

Mike Slusarek, 42, of Arizona first came to Casa Larronde 10 years ago after reading about it in a guidebook. “I would hate to see her sell it,” he said of Casa Larronde. “It would be like cutting off part of her arm. She is the house and the house is her. She loves sharing that place.”

This month, Charlou leaves for Mammoth, where she will baby-sit her great-grandsons and maybe ski, then Vegas for a wedding, then Japan for a month with her 85-year-old sister. In December, she will take her three-generation-family to Bali, Laos, Singapore and Thailand, and in between she will continue work on her book, “Deja-Vu Malibu.” Who knows where she will go from there?

On the final morning of her final day as the diva of 22THOU, Larronde wakes to find guest Christian Zorn already gone. On the counter, she finds a handwritten note.

“As always,” wrote Zorn, “it’s like a drink for the soul to see you.”