“Junior Malibu”
by Pablo Capra
Part of a series
on overlooked Malibu history
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| The Carrere family on the balcony of the Yellow House, circa 1941. Photo c/o Carrere family. |
The “Yellow House” (later, the “Yellow
Submarine”) is best remembered from Anthony Friedkin’s photo on the cover of Topanga Beach Experience by Paul Lovas (2011). Located near
the current lifeguard tower, it was burned down in 1979 by surfers who wanted
to spare this symbol of their neighborhood from being bulldozed when the beach
became public.
The earliest known owners of the
Yellow House, in the late 1930s, were Frank and Ruth Lacy, with their children
Mary Alice, Katherine, and Billy Scott—of whom little else could be learned.
In 1940, the Lacys sold the Yellow
House to Eduardo “Edward” Carrere (1906-1984), his wife Helen (1905-1979), and
son Leon Robert “Bobby” Carrere (b.1935). Edward and Helen met at the Bullocks
Wilshire department store, where she worked with his sister in the hat
department. He’d emigrated from Mexico City with his family to escape the
Mexican Revolution in 1919. She was born to Norwegian immigrants in Brooklyn,
and relocated to Los Angeles after visiting her older brother there in 1926.
Initially, the Carreres moved to the
beach from Sherman Oaks as summer renters in 1939, but decided to stay. Bobby shared pleasant
memories from childhood, like his mother sending him up the creek to pick
watercress for their salads. They also gathered the grunion that spawned on the
beach at night. When his bucket was full, he’d jump in the ocean. “It felt like
I was in a can of sardines,” he says.
On Wednesdays, Helen drove Edward, a
draftsman, to work at Warner Bros. studio in Burbank so she could use the car to
run city errands. When Bobby was on summer break from Roosevelt Elementary
School in Santa Monica, it was the one day of the week that he had to wear shoes.
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| Leon “Bobby” Carrere, circa 1941. Photo c/o Carrere family. |
Bobby’s best friend was neighbor John
“Jack” Sykes (1935-2017). Instead of opening a lemonade stand, they found a
novel way to earn a nickel by digging a channel into the lagoon and rowing
their neighbors across. The boys made the water flow parallel to the beach houses, cutting off as many as they could from the ocean. One could wade across, but how much more adventurous to ride in the boys’ borrowed rowboat. And the neighbors didn’t mind the channel because it brought firewood to everyone’s doorstep.
A great place to explore was Parker
Mesa to the east. The boys reached it by a dirt road a quarter mile up Topanga
Canyon. Claude I. Parker (1871-1952), a tax attorney with a large Hollywood
clientele, had purchased the property in 1921 from Perfecto Marquez
(1887-1942), a descendant of the area’s first ranching family. Claude and his
brother Ivon belonged to the Elks club that threw a giant rodeo at Topanga
Beach in 1923. They also owned cabins there that burned in 1926.
Near today’s Getty Villa, Claude and
his second wife Blanche (1885-1936) built a mansion that they called La Casa
Contenta en La Cañada Sentimienta (“The happy house in the sentimental glen”),
rhyming on the canyon’s Spanish name. It had a movie theater, an adobe barbecue
that could feed 500, a pool with a waterwheel, beds of prize-winning roses, and
stables for breeding horses. On the Mesa, they cut riding trails, and planted
avocado and citrus trees. Blanche, in poor health, died early of pneumonia.
Claude sold the mansion to J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) in 1945, while Parker Mesa
was sold separately to the Sunset Mesa housing development, which opened in 1962.
Further east, the boys discovered an
abandoned palace, the Villa Leon, whose name sounds like it was built for
Bobby. In fact, Jewish-Austrian businessman Leon Kauffman (1873-1935) built it
for his wife Clemence (1886-1932) to fulfill her dream of having a castle by
the sea. Kauffman made his fortune processing wool, and filled their home with
every luxury, including statues, topiary gardens, frescoed ceilings, waterways
with tiny boats, rare birds in cages, the first-ever central vacuum cleaner, a pipe
organ, tables with golden angels for legs, an elevator, and a funicular railway
to the beach. The castle was completed in 1928, but only briefly enjoyed, since
Clemence and Leon both died a few years later. Caretakers oversaw Villa Leon
until it was finally sold at auction in 1952. It remains a coastal landmark.
When Bobby and Jack explored it, they
chanced upon an open window and decided to climb in. “I went first,” Bobby
says. “I saw furniture all covered with sheets… real Halloween time! Then I
turned around and realized that I was not going to be joined, so I quickly
headed back out the window.”
In the summer of 1941, the Carrere
family rented out the front of the Yellow House, and moved into two apartments
above the garage. Their tenants were married actors Vincent Price (1911-1993)
and Edith Barrett (1907-1977). Price had just made The
Invisible Man Returns (1940), embarking on a career in horror that would
include a monologue in Michael Jackson’s 1983 song “Thriller.” Barrett, a
Broadway actress, would make her film debut that September in the noir Ladies in Retirement (1941), which also starred the couple
who lived one house west, Ida Lupino (1918-1995) and Louis Hayward (1909-1985).
Film columnist Hedda Hopper noted that Topanga Beach was becoming a junior
Malibu Colony.
At the mouth of Topanga Canyon
there’s a colony of actors and they call the place "Junior Malibu." The Vincent
Prices and Louis Haywards have cottages with balconies facing the sea. And
during their after-dinner coffee they chat back and forth to each other. They
got in the habit of calling out, whenever a woman walked by on the beach, "There
goes Garbo!" Last week one night just at dusk, when a woman strolled past, they
repeated this—then looked suddenly at the woman, and b’golly, it WAS Garbo!
They ran indoors as guilty as a couple of young kids who had tied tin cans to
puppies’ tails.
—”Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times 1941-08-19
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| Vincent Price circa 1940, and Ida Lupino circa 1942. Publicity stills c/o MGM, Universal Pictures. |
Ida Lupino was Bobby’s favorite
neighbor, and would invite him and Jack in for cookies. She came from an
English family that had acting roots going back to Renaissance Italy. By seven,
she was writing and performing plays in her backyard. By 10, she’d memorized
the lines of every female Shakespeare lead. At 14, she starred in the film Her First Affaire (1932).
An unfortunate consequence of coming
to Hollywood was that she contracted polio in a swimming pool during a 1934
epidemic. Although she recovered, she decided that she needed a broader skill
set. “I realized that my life and my courage and my hopes did not lie in my
body,” she told Hollywood magazine in 1942. So, when
not in front of the camera at Warner Bros., she studied how films were
produced, and eventually became the only woman to write and direct in 1950s
Hollywood.
It may have been her idea to create
the “Malibu Summer Theater,” which put on a backyard play (her hallmark!) with
the children of Topanga Beach in 1941. Their performance of The
Return of Noreen, about fairies and elves, was hosted by Don “Chick” and
Sarah Dawson, who lived one house east (where bikers Terry and The Pirates
lived in the 1970s). Helen created the costumes by dyeing the children’s
underwear green. Admission was a dime, and went towards ice cream and cake for
the actors: Bobby, Jack, his sister Beverly, sisters Eve and Joneen Tettemer,
Prudy Jackson, and Marion Heath.
In the audience were Ida Lupino, Louis
Hayward, Vincent Price, Edith Barrett, Ziegfeld Follies
girls Ann Pennington (1893-1971) and Fanny Brice (1891-1951), Broadway star
Sophie Tucker (1887-1966), and actors John Conte (1915-2006), Frances Robinson
(1916-1971), and Richard Haydn (1905-1985). The women wore pants and the men wore
swim trunks to the casual event, yet their celebrity status ensured another
write-up, in which a reviewer highlighted the fun of it all.
Asked if he would like an Academy award for his performance as Elf No. 1, Bobby replied: “Sure, how can I get it!”…
Frequently the leads acknowledged
the presence of friends "out front" by grins and hand waving. One actress
became so happy at seeing her mother in the back row, that she stepped across
the footlights and sat with her.
—“A Play Premiere,” The Daily News, 1941-08-05
The play would be remembered as a special moment in time, shortly before the US entered World War II, and
everyone’s lives changed.
After the war, the Carrere family
moved to Westwood, where Edward fulfilled his dream of building a house. In
1947, Warner Bros. promoted him to art director. He went on to win an Oscar for
the musical Camelot (1967), and to design sets for
over 50 other films, including The Fountainhead
(1949), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), and The Wild Bunch (1969). His younger brother, Fernando
“Ferdie,” also became an art director, receiving an Oscar nomination for The Children’s Hour (1961), and working on other major
films like On the Beach (1959) and The Pink Panther (1963).
Leon, who dropped his childhood name
Bobby, grew up to work at Warner Bros. like his dad, as a film and TV editor,
with credits on the hit shows Charlie’s Angels
(1976-1981) and The X-Files (1993-2002). Today he’s
retired and lives in Carpinteria.
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Pablo Capra is the Archivist for the Topanga Historical Society and author of Topanga Beach: A History 1820s-1920s (2020).
