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like money. It also felt predominantly feminine, as if you were trapped in a layout from Vogue magazine circa 1940. Had it been 1940, it might have been more tolerable, but I was there somewhere around 1954. The Arrowhead Springs Hotel was in operation until 1962.

    Six Hollywood fashion models at the Arrowhead Springs Hotel, circa 1948.
    Time + Life Pictures/Getty Images
    As it turned out, more people were interested in being by the Pacific Ocean than they were in poaching themselves in hot springs.They headed down to the ocean, first to Santa Monica, and then, as Santa Monica got crowded, to Malibu.
    Malibu began to become more desirable, and gradually became more exclusive since there’s less land there. Oddly, however, it took longer to settle than Santa Monica. In 1891, the Rindge family bought all thirteen thousand acres of what was then called Rancho Malibu for ten dollars an acre. The Rindges held on to the property for more than thirty years, finally letting go in 1927. It was only then that show people began settling in what came to be known as Malibu Colony.
    In 1930 or so, you could lease a lot with thirty feet of ocean frontage for thirty dollars a month. Dozens of people took advantage of that bargain, including Barbara Stanwyck, Warner Baxter, John Gilbert, and three great friends: Ronald Colman, William Powell, and Richard Barthelmess.
    The colony in those days was protected by a high stone wall, with a gate manned by an armed guard. When I got to California, they were starting to build houses to the south of the colony, and even in the mountains alongside the Pacific Coast Highway.
    By then Malibu residents had also begun looking out to the ocean, to see what they could see. What they saw was . . . Catalina. Literally. But that wasn’t unusual; all through the 1940s and into the 1950s you could see Catalina from Malibu. It seems impossible to believe now, but in that era you could even see Catalina from the hills above Hollywood, right up until the era when smog began to develop.
    The particular charm of Catalina has always been that it’s basically uninhabited. Twenty-two miles long and eight miles wide, the island is home to only about four thousand people, the vast majority of them living in Avalon, the town’s only incorporated city.
    Like Malibu, Catalina was for a long time the province of a single family—the Wrigleys, of chewing gum fame, who bought the island in 1919. William Wrigley Jr. spent the rest of his life preserving and promoting Catalina, and the fact that it remains so pristine is a testament to his foresight.
    But Wrigley wasn’t the first to see something special in Catalina. George Shatto, who was, like me, from Michigan (Grand Rapids, to be exact), had bought the island for two hundred thousand dollars in 1887. It was Shatto who founded Avalon, and it was his sister who gave that city its name, inspired by the idyllic island Avalon referenced in Tennyson’s cycle of poems Idylls of the King .
    But Shatto went bust, and the island existed in an uneasy limbo for a number of years. Los Angeles was only twenty miles away, and everybody knew that Catalina was destined to be some kind of vacation destination, but no one knew when its day would come.
    World War I put a crimp in tourism. When it was over, Bill Wrigley, flush with money, was looking for something to be altruistic about, and Catalina turned out to be his project. Wrigley opened a mine there, along with a rock quarry, and he even started a plant that produced stunningly beautiful decorative tiles that he called Catalina Clay Products. All this only increased his passion for the island; he built a house on a hill overlooking the harbor and Avalon.
    At that point, there were only two ships daily transporting people back and forth from the island to the mainland. Wrigley doubled the roster of ships, so now a lot more people could visit Catalina. In 1926, there were 622,000 visitors; four years later, the total was 700,000.