“Beach Houses Have More Fun”
by Pablo Capra
Part of a series on overlooked Malibu history
 |
| The Franklin family’s house (center), and Tommy Mack’s house (right), where Allen Jenkins lived upstairs, 1960s. Photo c/o Liza Ann Saenz-Bernard. |
Just past the Malibu Feed Bin, on Topanga Cyn. Blvd., was Weber’s Tow Yard. In 1941, Louis Franklin (1904-1979) went there to buy a junk car for The Globe Auto Wrecking Co. in downtown LA.
Bob Weber (1888-1957), who lived in an
adjoining house with his wife Katherine (1886-1972) and nephew Frank Weaver
(b.1910), mentioned a beach house that was for sale. Louis jumped at the
opportunity, and made this his family’s vacation home for the next 13 years.
Weber’s Tow Yard resembles a fictional
place in the detective-book series The Three Investigators,
first published in 1964 by Robert Arthur Jr. (1909-1969), about three boys who
solve crimes in Rocky Beach, a town based on Topanga Beach and Pacific
Palisades. Many of the stories start in Titus Jones’s junkyard, where his
nephew Jupiter has turned a travel trailer into the boys’ secret headquarters.
The series remains popular in Germany, where it’s called Die
Drei ???, and new writers continue to produce stories.
In real life, Weber’s Tow Yard wasn’t
kid friendly, according to neighbor girl Thais Sykes (1925-2021), who
remembered, “Everybody was really nice, except for Bob Weber, the tow-truck
driver. He was just okay.”
In 1943, Weber leased Weber’s Malibu
Service Station at Malibu Colony. He gave it up in 1946 after a string of
problems, including two robberies and an explosion that killed employee Harvey
Whelan, 16, of Pacific Palisades. Weber was found partially responsible for the
unsafe conditions, and fined for failing to provide insurance. Around 1950, he
leased the gas station at Las Flores Canyon; and in 1952, he leased one where
Boardriders Malibu is today.
The beach house that Weber tipped
Louis to happened to be the former Topanga Yacht Clubhouse of the 1930s, one of
the only houses that survived the swell of 1926. Louis and his wife Eva
“Evelyn” (1906-1982) had known each other since they were two and four, and
remained together until they died. They lived in Pico-Robertson, and spent
weekends at the beach with their children Lawrence “Larry” (b.1930), Samuel
“Sam” (b.1936), and Elizabeth “Beth” (b.1940), nicknamed Booky because she used
to say, “Mommy, read me a booky.” At mealtimes, Evelyn amused herself by
ringing a little bell to call the children to the glassed-in deck on the second
floor.
 |
| Evelyn and Louis Franklin at son Larry’s wedding, 1952-09-07. Photo c/o the Franklin family. |
 |
| Beth and Sam Franklin with Aunt Rose Berger, 1949. Photo c/o the Franklin family. |
The first floor was rented to Charles Pritchard (1887-1947), Director of Sales for the Pioneer Paper Company. Pritchard’s main residence was at the Jonathan Club, where he was on the Board. Under the house, he kept a folding kayak, and built a gymnastics bar for the kids. He was estranged from his upper-class family, and told the Franklins that he’d written them into his will, so they’d never have to worry about money. When he died after a brief illness in 1947, his will couldn’t be found. The Franklins suspected that his family destroyed it when they came to get his things.
Next, the Berkeley family moved in.
Randall Edward “Ted” Berkeley (1912-1997) worked as a greensman, providing
plants to film sets. His wife Sylvia (1919-2000) was a seamstress and taught
dancing. They had two daughters, Bonnie (b.1938) and Wendy (b.1943). Ted was a
great improviser on his upright piano, and could be heard making up crazy songs
to popular tunes. He also played the trumpet, and taught it to Sam. In the
1970s, Ted shared many memories in The Malibu Times.
After the Berkeleys left, around 1948,
Evelyn’s brother George Berger (1899-1962) and his wife Rose (1901-1967) rented
the first floor for vacations. George had a men’s clothing store in Pasadena
called Berger’s. At the beach, he enjoyed surf fishing with Sam, who sold sand
crabs to Wylie’s Bait Shop across the street. Wylie’s was built in 1949, according
to a permit published in The Malibu Times. However,
Larry remembers it being at Sunset Blvd. before that, and Sam says it was up a
flight of steps on a hillside. An offshoot of Wylie’s Sporting Goods in Redondo
Beach, the shop was run by Bill and his wife Ruth Wylie, with help from Bob
Varnum (1928-2000), who later took over.
To the east of the Franklins lived two
musical families. On the second floor were Joseph Lilley (1913-1971), a music director
at Paramount Studios, and his wife Dorothy (1915-2004). From their deck, the
Franklins could see Joseph composing at the dinner table at night, using only a
pencil and paper… no piano. On the first floor were Ray Miller, manager of
musicians Gordon Jenkins and Dick Haymes, and his wife Thelma, the owners of
the house. It burned in 1946 when Ziegfeld Follies star Tommy Mack (1898-1982)
and his wife Emily moved their house to the beach and knocked a telephone-pole
wire loose.
Part of the Franklins’ kitchen also burned
in the fire. Afterwards, the lot remained empty, and Louis turned it into a
horseshoe court, which became a popular gathering place. He used heavy axles
from his wrecking yard as stakes so the horseshoes would really clank.
The Lilleys moved to a nearby house,
where they had a daughter named Mary Susan (b.1948).
The Millers divorced. Thelma moved to
Ratner Beach, and built a house around a double-decker bus from a discontinued
line on Wilshire Blvd. Ray moved across PCH to Old Malibu Road, and married
Esther, who started a “Malibu Beautification Club” that envisioned
tree-bordered streets and flower-covered hills. This house burned too from
faulty wiring in 1948.
The Macks’ house, maybe the only
stucco house on the beach, survived the fire it had caused. In 1948, Mack
released a comedy song he cowrote with “Mr and Mrs. Harmonica” Jimmy and
Mildred Mulcay called “When Veronica Plays the Harmonica (Down on the Pier at
Santa Monica).” Performers Johnny Mercer, Gloria Wood, and Kay Kyser’s Campus
Cowboys helped make it a hit, with the The Malibu Times
writing, “You are hearing it every time you turn the radio on, the kids are
singing it on the buses. The supply of records in the record shops is bought up
as soon as they are obtained….”
The Macks lived on the ground floor,
and rented their second floor to actor Allen Jenkins (1900-1974), who also made
people laugh in 1948. After being arrested with his Malibu drinking buddy James
Davis, 30, for nearly hitting a police car on PCH near Sunset Blvd. at 4 a.m.,
he joked that his calico cat Smiley had been driving. At the police station, he
continued the silliness, asking the booking officer to take Smiley’s paw
prints, and insisting that his “inseparable companion” join him in jail. Upon
his release, he complained, “This is a fine jail. Everything for the lousy
drunks and nothing for the cat. We want some milk.”
 |
| Allen Jenkins with his cat Smiley, 1948. Photo c/o The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois). |
He pleaded not guilty at his DUI trial, and requested a jury, whom he entertained with more funny lines like, “I’m going to take the rap for Smiley.” He also won over the press, getting them to “take the part of the undercat” who was “catnipped to the whiskers,” and to “hope he don’t take it to heart, having a police record.” The joke overshadowed the trial, as journalists posed questions like, “When the cops saw it was a cat driving, why didn’t they look out?”
Allen even made his bad reviews turn funny,
e.g., “His lawyer can wrangle a quick acquittal by bringing into the court the
actor’s latest movie, The Case of the Baby Sitter,
which is enough to drive anyone to drink.”
His inevitable acquittal hardly
reflected his innocence. “It was a tight squeeze, but my personality finally
prevailed,” Smiley “wrote” in an open letter. Soon after, Allen included Smiley
in a vaudeville act called Musical Comedy Hilarities
that he tested out at The Seacomber restaurant (across from Nobu Malibu today),
then toured around the country.
The Malibu Times
would continue publishing stories about Smiley until 1950, when the cat died
crossing PCH. “Smiley became a legendary figure up and down the Malibu,” his
obituary read.
Allen later did voice acting for the
Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon Top Cat (1961-62), playing
Officer Charlie Dibble, who tries to police a gang of alley cats.
In 1989, 15 years after Allen’s death,
Saturday Night Live introduced a recurring character,
“Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car”… just not very well. Although two SNL writers were Topanga Beach alumni,
Tom Schiller (b.1949) and Gary Weis (b.1943), and the skits recalled Allen’s
joke, the writer, Jack Handey, couldn’t say how he’d come up with the premise.
After Allen, the Macks rented to two
other Hollywood friends: producer Robert Cohn, son of Columbia Pictures
cofounder Jack Cohn; and actor Jackie Coogan, star of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), and Uncle Fester in The
Addams Family TV show (1964-1966).
At the Topanga intersection, a space
between the beach houses allowed public access to a small strip of sand, but
residents resented when the crowd spread out onto their “yards.” In 1943,
fences, gates, and “No Trespassing” signs went up. One Topangan complained, “A
person, posing as a watchman and displaying some kind of badge, forbade
entrance to the water.… Is there a state law, or do they simply take the law in
their own hands?”
Whether or not the beach could remain
private became a major issue. Property owners the LA Athletic Club (LAAC)
wanted to develop it further, and State Parks wanted to bulldoze the houses,
which they finally did in the 1970s.
In 1953, the LAAC tried to clear out
the homeowners, who were living on five-year ground leases, by tripling their
renewals. The Franklins decided they’d had enough, and sold their beach house
in 1954, while others sued and won the right to stay on the beach for 15 more
years as monthly renters.
Larry went on to serve in the Navy in Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. He built a company called Franklin Truck Parts with his dad, which today has nine stores. Sam got a PhD in Psychology and became a professor at Fresno State. He wrote a book called The Psychology of Happiness (2009). Beth studied yoga at the Self-Realization Fellowship and became a teacher and healer. She still practices twice a day. They all say the beach left a joy that has lasted a lifetime.
