Kenny Rogers's Funicular

A trip to Malibu

This past weekend, Memorial Day, my husband, my sister, our friend Emily, and I visited a Malibu beach. This beach is only accessible by a set of perilously steep stairs off the side of a highway. This is because it’s lined with multi-million dollar houses and stairs are one of the many ways to keep out the riff-raff.

good fences make private beaches

The riff-raff need to be kept out because Malibu is beautiful—cliffs protect the gently curving coast, the air is blue and misty enough to make you forget LA’s grey smog—and stunning places should only be enjoyed by those who have earned enough money to deserve them. Unlike other places, California beaches are public up to the high tide line. So mansion owners must resort to measures like endless stairs and fake private property signs to protect their domains. Only then can they safely retreat to their compounds, look out over the Pacific Ocean, and earnestly whisper to themselves, “It’s all mine.”

There are two places to build your Malibu mansion: right on the beach or on the cliff overlooking the beach. Right on the beach, the favored style is what I call “Miami Cocaine Chic”: white steel and glass. On the cliffs, the favored style is…well, I don’t know, because those houses are hidden on the cliffs. They all feature some means of conveyance down to the beach. And because stairs are for riff-raff, this often means small trains, AKA funiculars, terminating in some kind of cabana, AKA shelter from the riff-raff.

We camped out in front of a cabana that featured a heinous outdoor kitchen complete with a flat-screen TV. We puzzled over its origins—who would build such a structure? Who could build such a structure? Where were they now?

(The next day, thanks to Emily’s exhaustive Malibu real estate research, we found out that this complex once belonged to Kenny Rogers. That’s right. We were in front of the beach kitchen that “The Gambler” built.)

picture via this article which thinks this is not a funicular but rather a “single car inclined elevator”

Despite the extensive efforts of Kenny Rogers et al. to discourage non-millionaires from enjoying the ocean, there were a few groups of us bravely staking our claims in the sand. And we felt good about ourselves because we were avoiding the crowded nightmare of the public beaches, absolutely chock full of riff-raff.

After a gorgeous day of living like Kenny Rogers, we left before sunset, which is perhaps when the residents of these mansions and cabanas finally emerge, because I’ve never seen them anything but empty. I bet they’re busy splashing in their cliffside pools—like the ocean, but cleaner.

We stopped for dinner at a fried seafood stand and ate on a tiered patio overlooking the ocean. I enjoyed the vegetarian option: iceberg lettuce and a baked potato.

Some of our fellow diners had brought their own tablecloths and bottles of wine, lending the picnic tables an air of casual elegance the flat-screened adorned cabana could only dream of. Together, we watched the sun set as darkness fell on it all: us, the sea, Kenny Rogers’s funicular.