The old woman, ninety-five come July, had lived a life of fires.
She used to hear stories about the one in 1903 that ate the ranch nestled in the hills of the 13,000-acre Spanish Land Grant that her grandparents bought—Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Grandpa Freddy said that before anyone could blink, thirty miles of Malibu were burning. He said the embers took their beach house too. It sat right on Roosevelt Highway; that was what they called the road before thieving legislators decided PCH was more poetic. The name change happened a few months after her grandmother died and was no coincidence. Teddy Roosevelt was a close friend of Grammie May’s, so that was a final slap to the face.
Cowards! They wouldn’t have dared when Grammie was still alive …
Marjorie Rindge Adamson-Huxtable never left Malibu for any real length of time. (To this day, she remains sole executor of the shrunken dynasty.) In the late sixties, she moved to the gated hamlet of Serra Retreat—land once owned by the family—into a home that would be her last. Soon after, she donated 140 acres overlooking the Pacific to a wonderful Christian university in South Los Angeles that was named after its founder, the tire magnate George Pepperdine. The college quickly became renowned for having the most beautiful campus on God’s green earth, more fitting for a cathedral. The house in the Retreat was on Mariposa de Oro, not far from the magnificent beach hacienda, rebuilt after the fire, where she spent her girlhood summers. The beach house was to the south and to the north, just a ten-minute stroll up the hill, was what remained of Grammie May’s forever ‘dream castle.’ She never got the chance to live there. The place was boarded up when the old woman ran out of money in her decades-long war against land-grabbing lawyers and politicians. A true showcase, the unfinished citadel was studded with tiles from Malibu Potteries, the famous company her grandmother owned. (The factory was destroyed by a kiln fire in ’31.) Ayear after her death, it suspiciously burned to the ground. The remnants were sold to Franciscan monks, who built a seminary on the land with the proviso that lay persons seeking solitude and contemplation could rent rooms there. Marjorie was convinced that her daily walk to pay respects was her own private fountain of youth. With the fountain and the friars and the dream castle, what did she have to fear of fire?
She hated her children. The few that were still alive were good for nothing, especially her son Louis—he of the fraidy-cat demeanor and buffoonish brain. For years, he begged her for money. He sent simpering messages from that rip-off memory palace in the Highlands that she was paying for, when a lean-to would have been more than sufficient shelter for whatever mentality he had left. What he had, in abundance, were bogus complaints—those would barely have fit in the Taj Mahal! Marjorie winced at the idea, the truth, that she was underwriting slaves to make his bed, cook his food, and wipe his imbecilic ass. The only sweet memory she had was fleeting: a little boy clutching a toy fire engine while he slept, a replica of the Ahrens-Fox truck Grandpa Freddy imported for the ranch’s private brigade that he later bestowed upon Pacific Palisades’ first fire station. Her grandfather was a devout Methodist and the Palisades was started by all those folk in the 1920s. Even the famous Alphabet Streets were named after Methodist bishops and missionaries.
The single person left alive whom she enjoyed talking to (by phone because they hadn’t seen each other in forty years) was Betty O’Meara, a four-foot-ten firecracker who used to run the old movie house in the Malibu Country Mart. Betty still lived in an OG double-wide with nonworking tires and taillights at the mobile home park above Temescal called Tahitian Terrace.
Since her husband died, she was a proud, sarcastic shut-in, which was another thing Marjorie admired about her. The old women were about the same age and Betty got a kick out of hearing Marjorie go on about her eccentric Grammie May, the woman who conceived Malibu—and owned just about everything in it, including the birds and the bees—loved listening to those tallish tales of the matriarch warding off trespassers with barbed wire, feral pigs, and buckshot. Loved that her grandma built the Malibu Movie Colony ‘so she could have a little walkaround money,’ with the caveat that tenants could never own the land—after ten years, the ornery Queen retained the right to tear down any houses built on it! Oh, Betty laughed nonstop when she heard that. ‘Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin could go fuck themselves. Your grandma was just like Barbara Stanwyck! Barbara Stanwyck shoulda played Grammie May!’
‘Miss Executor’ (Betty called her that sometimes) got a kick too from the tales told by ‘Double-Wide’ (Marjorie called her that sometimes). As a teenager in Japan, Betty was assigned to accompany General Douglas MacArthur when the country surrendered. She had two qualities Marjorie thought were essential ‘if you ate, fucked, and breathed’: spunk and ingenuity. Betty worked at the Pentagon too—hell, she was maybe even a spy, but Marjorie never pressed. Then she and a war vet tied the knot, moved to Malibu, and started a movie house of all things! Betty’s husband doled out popcorn under the warden-like, watchful eye of a cinematic, real-life cockatoo.
There was one other person Marjorie tolerated, even loved—sweet Alejandra, her housekeeper of half a century, who lived downstairs. She wasn’t as spry as her boss. At seventy-three, she could barely make it up the hill to wave a monk hello. ‘Molasses’ moved through the house with a duster at a sloth-like pace, pausing now and then to take a breath while her gossipy employer took over the vacuuming chores. Marjorie would say, ‘You’re the only maid I ever had who needed a maid.’ ‘Well,’ laughed Alejandra. ‘That means pretty soon you can hire your son’s ass-wiper to help me out.’ The old woman laughed so hard her sides split.
But these days, fountain or no, she spent more and more time dangling her feet in the waters of the past. She chewed on all the marvelous houses she’d lived in as a girl—Muirfield Street in Hancock Park, and the hacienda next to the Malibu lagoon—and the schools too … Marlborough, and Santa Barbara College, where she met her husband. And the people she’d known … her thoughts always drifted—embers!—to her beloved horses. She rode before she could walk. In puberty, she would greet the dawn atop her cherished palomino on the beach, and at eventide, charge breathlessly up the windy, winding Chumash mystery trails. Mother only allowed that on a full moon but she and her friend, a fearless horseman, managed to get around that.
The colorful gymkhanas and silly parades in the middle of empty Roosevelt Highway! The wild scent of watercress and sage and smoke, horse and sumac!
And after sunset, hands around the waist of her first and only love, she galloped on ridgelines and painted chaparrals through the incense of wettened sage, manure, and the hidden smells of her own sex—cloaked in windy, winding, moonflower mystery.*
*
Marjorie is an excerpt from a new novel Amputation (to be published September 20, 2025) the first novel to be written about the inferno that obliterated two Los Angeles cities in January of 2025. Major characters are Marjorie Rindge, the daughter of the founder of Malibu; comedian Stephen Colbert; LA mayor Karen Bass; a Timothée Chalamet stunt double; a fiercely pro-Palestinian heiress and her Zionist father; and disgraced Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Finch.
Bruce Wagner is an American novelist and screenwriter based in Los Angeles known for his apocalyptic yet ultimately spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of the Hollywood entertainment industry.