Suddenly, Malibu’s big beach-erosion calamity whipped into view. Broad Beach is about one mile long, with 114 homes built right up against the Pacific. These homes have always been owned by the biggest of Hollywood’s big names. Jack Lemmon, Steve McQueen, and Frank Sinatra (who liked to sit on the beach in his fedora) once lived here. Sinatra’s widow, Barbara, does still. Current residents include Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Michael Ovitz, Sidney Sheinberg, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, the doctor who developed the cancer drug Abraxane and is L.A.’s richest man.
Over the past decade, Broad Beach residents estimate, they’ve lost up to 60 feet of their beach. This day, it wasn’t even high tide, and for the most part the waves lapped at a huge, 13-foot-high wall of rocks. The tiny bit of sand that Ford could spy between rock and ocean was dark gray; it had been wet recently and would soon be again. You couldn’t put a towel down without soaking your derrière. “I don’t call it Broad Beach anymore,” says Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena. “I call it Invisible Beach.” (...)
Nantucket, a disappearing spit of land deposited by melting glaciers 30 miles south of Cape Cod eons ago, has, like Malibu, long been a summer playground of the rich and famous. With its whale oil, Nantucket was once the uncontested Silicon Valley of its day, the supplier of light to America. Nowadays, Chris Matthews and David Gregory are seasonal residents, as is the 102-year-old Bunny Mellon (Matthews’s neighbor). There is a sprinkling of writers too: the late David Halberstam summered on the island, as now do Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize and The Quest, and columnist Russell Baker. (Vanity Fair contributing editor William D. Cohan, one of the authors of this piece, owns a home at 81 Baxter Road, just two doors south of the former Bluff House.)
In the early 2000s, as real-estate prices on the island shot into the stratosphere, rising as much as 20 percent a year, the summer people were increasingly made up of bankers, hedge-fund moguls, and industrialists, such as Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google; Roger Penske, the rental-truck and auto-racing magnate; David Rubenstein, one of the co-founders of the Carlyle Group; Bob Diamond, the former C.E.O. of Barclays P.L.C.; Lou Gerstner, the former C.E.O. of IBM; and Bob Greenhill, the Wall Street mogul. The late Mark Madoff, son of Bernie, used to summer on Nantucket. Current homeowners on Sconset Bluff include the extended family of fabled investor George Soros (they have three homes on the east side of Baxter Road); Amos Hostetter, one of the founders of Continental Cablevision; Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the N.F.L.’s Cleveland Browns and the C.E.O. of the Pilot Flying J truck-stop chain; and Norwood Davis, the retired chairman of Trigon Healthcare. Farther south on Baxter Road, where the erosion problems are less acute due to tidal flows and the curve of the land, lives Brian Simmons, the managing partner of the Chicago buyout firm Code Hennessy & Simmons. Michael Berman, the co-founder of George magazine, and his wife, interior designer Victoria Hagan, just built a new home off the bluff, across the street from Haslam and Davis, on Sankaty Head Road.
With such wealth and power concentrated among the homeowners along Baxter Road and in other areas with vulnerable shoreline elsewhere on the island, you’d think they could solve the erosion problem, but so far they have proved no match for Mother Nature and her fierce mission to reclaim the history-rich island for the Atlantic Ocean. A number of oceanfront homes in Madaket, at the southwestern corner of the island, look like Easter Island moais sticking out of the sand.
The burning question among island residents—one that pits the determined, deep-pocketed summer people against the working folks who live here year-round and occupy most of the positions in local government—is whether the politicians will finally allow the homeowners to spend their own money to save their multi-million-dollar homes with the stupendous views. So far, the answer has been a resounding no. Sarah Oktay, the managing director of the University of Massachusetts’s Nantucket Field Station and the influential vice-chairman of the island’s powerful Conservation Commission, which generally must approve any projects to stave off erosion, has been the principal thorn in the side of the rich homeowners. She is a pugnacious, determined, and articulate advocate for letting nature take its course. While she agrees measures can be taken to slow erosion, she argues, “Rarely can you stop it, and if you do stop it, you’re hurting someone else. It’s a natural process.”
by By William D. Cohan and Vanessa Grigoriadis, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Images: Mark Holtzman (left); George Riethof (right)
