The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise by David K. Randall

Author:David K. Randall [Randall, David K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-03-02T04:30:00+00:00

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE, THE SIGHT OF LOS Angeles did not make Frederick happy. He had taken countless trips to the East Coast since grafting his life onto the bustle of California, and spotting his adopted hometown growing taller across the horizon on the return trip had never before failed to send pulses of excitement and pride through his body. This time, however, he approached it with dread.

The fire in Malibu had not just destroyed his favorite home and his collection of relics but had extinguished his conviction that, while God would test him, life would ultimately bend in his favor as recompense for a childhood spent lurking in the shadow of his siblings’ deaths. He felt the optimism that had carried him since he was a teenager waning in the face of the first setback in his adult life that neither his money nor his energy could easily overcome. His place of refuge was a charred ruin, and there was little he could do but wait for it to recover.

In early February 1905, he took the first step to rebuild. After a heavy storm washed out most of the trail along the beach, he hired a brigade of men, two hundred strong, to carve out a serviceable trail running from Santa Monica to the Malibu ranch that would not stop until it hit the rancho’s western edge. The men attacked the hillsides, blasting away any rocks that presented obstacles to the creation of a smooth, graded path sitting high enough up on the shore that a powerful wave could not destroy it. All the while, Frederick consoled himself by imagining tarp-covered wagons, laden with bricks and timber, lining the road as they delivered the materials to rebuild the family mansion.

The burst of road construction led to speculation that Rindge was using the reconstruction of his mansion as cover to clear a path for a long-rumored railroad line that would run across the Malibu ranch and up the coast, all the way to San Francisco. A few years earlier, the Southern Pacific had completed construction of a pier at the tip of Santa Monica that snaked nearly a mile out to sea. Dubbed the Long Wharf, it was the railroad’s attempt to claim the bay as the chief port of Los Angeles and control all of the traffic of goods flowing from its harbor. Rindge, while clearing a path along the coast, seemed to be outflanking the railroad, making space along a coastal path that it had never considered possible. He had hatched the plan in secret two years before, when he’d incorporated a company he called the Port Hueneme and Port Los Angeles Railway, then doled out nearly all of its shares to himself and May. Yet at the time he considered it a form of insurance, leaving it in his back pocket in case the railroads attempted to force their way into Malibu. Now, to tamp down the talk of his plans, he directed N. D.

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