Hermit chic.

It may not be Topanga, but for the enclave of artists, stars and assorted crackpots who live there, woodsy Rustic Canyon is the closest thing we've got to paradise

Secret? Not really. Not in the sense of something locked in a safe in a red-striped folder. It's four miles long, for goodness' sake, smack in the middle of L.A.'s Westside. Lots of people live there, it has the last free-flowing, unconcreted stream in the county--meaning, you can walk down it and float leaves in its pools--and one of the nicest public parks in the city.

Plenty of people, in fact, pass it every day to the north, as they take Sunset back and forth to the Palisades or, to the south, cut down Chautauqua Boulevard to Will Rogers State Beach. And it's certainly not that the streets lacing the place are unmarked or obscure. But when you see more than one car at a time moving on any given street, you can be sure that PCH has gone to hell somewhere up the coast and commuters are using the canyon as a detour.

But Rustic Canyon is, all the same, a secret--at least in the sense that not many in town know about it, including those rare natives, people here from Day One.

Rustic's one of the gaggle of canyons that swoops down from its source in the hills short of Mulholland Drive and crosses the wide alluvial bluff that lies north of Santa Monica. From an airplane, the bluff looks like a flat left hand, fingers gripping the blue velvet of the Pacific. The canyons--Topanga, Temescal, Potrero--are the spaces between the fingers, and Rustic, the southernmost, lies between the ring finger and the pinky.

It's been said there are two kinds of people--those who like to live in palaces and those who prefer cabins. Over the years, the people who've been drawn to Rustic Canyon are the kind who can probably afford the first but choose, for their own reasons, the second.

And that, of course, certainly takes in celebrities. They are there. But they are canyon people. Debra Winger rented 712 Latimer for a while and pushed her baby stroller with the other moms. Meryl Streep rented 2 Latimer a couple of years ago. A favorite Halloween memory of 1990 is of the two little girls who came trick-or-treating at canyon doors in perfect Marie Antoinette costumes straight out of some studio wardrobe department, down to the pearls and slippers--with a protective blond mommy, in a rumpled raincoat and scarf, waiting in the shadows.

John Travolta's supposedly down on Hilltree somewhere, but nobody's seen him, and it's not like people stand around waiting. Brian Wilson used to live on Greentree. He's gone, but there now is his therapist and alleged guru Eugene Landy; you may be able to find the dwelling if you look for deconstructivist doodads slapped onto a modest ranch house like some kid's stickers glued to a school notebook and, missing that, the several shades of purple. (No, not all canyon houses can make it to the pages of Architectural Digest.)

Lee Marvin, of fond memory, also lived at 2 Latimer for years, and Angela Lansbury was up on Haldeman. The speed bumps on Latimer were installed as a neighborhood response to Rusty Hamer, who played the son on Danny Thomas' '50s TV series and who, upon reaching the age of automotive consent, bought himself some beast of a deuce coupe and amused himself by laying rubber up and down the road until the berms stopped him.

Jerry Buss used to live on the big curve on Brooktree, and down the street from him was Gunsmoke's James Arness. Rumor, and nothing more, has it that James Dean was living somewhere in the canyon at the time of his death up on Highway 33, but an even darker, brooding presence was at one point a canyon resident--Charles Manson and his whacked-out crew bunked at 14400 Sunset in 1968, shortly before the Tate-LaBianca murders, according to Vincent Bugliosi in Helter Skelter.

And today the Terminator himself lives up on Evans, with his Desert Storm Humvee in the driveway and a horseshoe court on the lawn by the street--waiting for George Bush to show up someday and play a game--like one of those mock airports South Pacific islanders used to lay out on their beaches after the war to get cargo planes to land. But when you go up into Will Rogers State Park and somebody points out Arnold's Andalusian horse in the pipe corral up in Bone Canyon, or you go down to Patrick's at the beach, a favorite canyon rendezvous for breakfast or lunch, and proprietor Bill Fischler shows off Arnold's table, the conclusion is unmistakable--Arnold's just another Rustic Canyon guy.

But Rustic has traditionally been a cabiny kind of place, a place other than the city, a place in which to get away--a haven, green, lush, silent, very private, washed with spring fogs, and 10 degrees cooler, on the average, than anywhere else in town, studded with oaks, sycamore, eucalyptus and, its singular pride, the state's southernmost stand of Sequoia redwoods.

Canyonites tend to be liberal, artsy and funky in their lifestyles. They'd go to Tibet before they'd tackle Vegas, and someone could probably build a subway between the canyon and Aspen and pay it off in the first two years of operation. And canyon houses don't come cheap--even the cabins. Anyone can live in Rustic Canyon, but not everyone can buy there. And there's a reason: the privacy. There's no place in town quite like it.

Imagine a home in the country, whispering pines, sea breezes, the loudest sound being two blue jays squawking on a limb--and Westwood a mere 15 minutes away. Beverly Hills is 20, but who'd go there when everything one could need is over in Santa Monica (especially since the opening of the 3rd Street Promenade)?

There are no curbs, few street lights. Divorces are probably rare--no appreciable hanky-panky. No apartments. Little scandal, unless you count the neighbor on Latimer who was busted for aggravated naughtiness with Palisades High coeds on the state beach--but he's gone. And little crime--the bad guys tend not to know about the canyon any more than anyone else.

With its country feel, the canyon is a throwback to an earlier time in the city's life without being precious--old L.A. but not a museum. Seniors walk, kids dam the stream; in the winter, you can smell chimney smoke.

And the locals fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.

There's a tradition for this. In the '30s, noted California photographer Edward Weston lived in the lower canyon, with his sons Brett and Cole nearby in other properties he owned. A neighbor was a sculptor named Holger Jensen, and the whole street shared a concern that unscrupulous developers might overbuild the area. To counter this, when anyone in the Weston or Jensen families saw a real-estate agent entering the canyon--there were only a couple of them, and their cars were familiar--Mrs. Jensen would strip off her clothes, and Mrs. Weston would grab a kitchen knife and chase her, screaming, down East Rustic Road, in an early, experimental form of Not-in-My-Backyard.

Today, there's an active homeowner's association, the Homeowners Association of Rustic Canyon. It doesn't meet very often and doesn't concern itself with fussy things like architectural reviews, but it does keep the roads paved and sponsor a yearly block party, always well attended. It was among the first such groups in the city to go through a lengthy L.A. Fire Department course in disaster preparation (read: the Big One), training neighbors in fire-fighting, first aid and how to go through a smashed house looking for survivors. There's currently a cache of generators and power tools in someone's garage, and walkie-talkies have been handed out to designated households for communication if the lines go down.

Canyonites aren't nosy by nature, but a good emergency brings them together. When Rustic Creek flooded in 1969, cardiologists and stockbrokers slogged sandbags with everyone else. They've fought off a freeway to the Valley and a landfill beyond Camp Josepho.

The most recent threat, however, was perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Steve Tisch, a wealthy young movie producer and heir to the sizable Loews Hotel fortune, moved in a few years back and decided the portion of Latimer Road that ran by his house would be just right for a tennis court. So he hired a powerful, take-no-prisoners law firm and filed suit against each and every one of his neighbors, claiming they'd given up the use of that stretch of road and that its title was his by an obscurity of the civil code called adverse possession. For good measure, he threw a lien against everyone's house. The feeling in the neighborhood today is that he knew he had no case--it was scare tactics, pure and simple, Tisch banking that the neighbors would lack the cash, time and willpower to slug it out in court. Wrong.

The community, headed by a phalanx of wives--including my own--and a canny lady lawyer, beat him back. At one point in the five-year struggle, the neighbors had to post a $50,000 bond in 24 hours or lose the case. They found the money. They won the case. And Tisch has since moved.

Canyon houses and properties are just not ostentatious, though that's not to say they are not special--some by history, some by design. Ray Kappe has built several gems constructed of redwood, steel and glass, and there are enough Marshall Lewis houses, in his unique Sea Ranch style, to make up a suburb. There's a Charles Moore house at 747 Latimer--big but still cabiny--a number of Neutras, and Frank Lloyd Wright's son, Lloyd, built the Newman family house, most recently occupied by singer son Randy.

The mix is eclectic: A classic rambling Cliff May redwood ranch house, built by Aldous Huxley's second wife's lady lover on an acre-plus in 1947 and since expanded, sits cheek by jowl with a house that almost eludes categorization altogether and then at the last minute grabs Palestinian, built by a man named Browne who called himself a rabbi and designed it as a "tribute to the religions of the world." The odd thing is, it works--it seems to belong there.

Throughout its history, in fact, the canyon's been a major Los Angeles Dream Zone. And on several occasions, a utopia.

Start with the natives (where you must when you consider Los Angeles history), in this case using as a source Rustic Canyon and the Story of the Uplifters, a labor of love published in 1975 by the Young family--Thomas, wife Betty Lou and her son, Randy--the acknowledged canyon historians. Nobody's quite sure what the tribe that occupied the canyon through the early 19th century called itself--the Spanish labeled them "Fernandero," because they fell under the aegis of the San Fernando mission. They fished in canoes off the state beach, drew their water from Rustic Creek and, like good outdoors people, left little more than footprints behind.

Then came the Spanish, the Marquez and the Reyes and the Sepulveda families, in the 1830s, obtaining rights from the alcaide downtown to graze their sheep and cattle in the grassy meadows from Topanga Canyon south to the foot of what's now Montana Avenue.

But the city was growing, and the future of the canyon wasn't agriculture. By the 1870s, there were two hotels on the beach at the canyon's mouth--the Morongo House and the Seaside. You could come out to Rustic from the pueblo by stagecoach for a day in the sun, and if you couldn't pop for a hotel, camp out overnight on the sand in tents equipped with stoves and army cots in an early manifestation of the weekend getaway.

Land in Rustic Canyon was bought and resold during the great Southern California land booms at the century's end, as the Spanish sold off fractions of their land to Anglo developers. Among the first of these developers was Abbot Kinney, who'd already made a fortune manufacturing machine-rolled cigarettes and is better known to Southern Californians as the man who invented Venice.

But Kinney's vision didn't end with a replication of a Renaissance city-state in the brackish tide flats south of Santa Monica--he had eyes for Rustic Canyon as well, and in 1887 he bought 147 acres for $55,575. He planned to plot it out as a fashionable residential district, figuring people would travel to and from by a railroad he intended to build from the Santa Monica depot up the steep canyon's sides.

And he had major eyes for eucalyptus. That fast-growing Australian gum tree was the cold fusion of its day--word was it could do everything from cure cancer to frame houses and kill moths. But it couldn't--eucalyptus beams crack and warp, the oil smells nice but has no special medicinal properties and the heartwood's so dense the only current industrial application is testing chain-saw blades. But no matter--Kinney wangled six acres from the feds and set up the country's very first Forestry Experimental Station in the canyon's center, planting hundreds of eucalyptus species side by side as a test. A few acres of that station remain, in a grove south of Rustic Canyon Park, and the offspring of Kinney's first plantings today line the canyon's blufftops side by side like a fort wall in a cavalry movie.

Then came a few years near the turn of the century when Rustic Canyon might have become San Pedro. Early Imperial Los Angeles had no deep-water port, and big money began to circle around the various geographical possibilities. A senator from Nevada--John P. Jones, who preferred Santa Monica to the Humboldt Sink as a place of residence--was a major advocate for locating our city's port at the mouth of Rustic Canyon. His allies were two more names familiar to Los Angeles history, Charles Crocker and Collis P. Huntington.

In 1892, they financed the construction of a shipping pier, the Long Wharf--all wood and a mile long--at Potrero Canyon, the first ravine north of Rustic, but it and the rest of the scheme wound up an artifact of bare-knuckled California politics. San Pedro eventually got the nod, and Long Wharf rotted and was finally dismantled in 1920. A side note: The coming of the wharf resulted in a shack village of Japanese abalone divers and fishermen on the beach to the canyon's north, an early Malibu.

Rustic Canyon bumbled along through the city's quiet, laid-back years at the century's end. The first private home was built by George Edmond and his wife, Katherine--he was a Johns Hopkins-educated geologist who came west, like many at the time, for his health. Then the Gillis family moved in--their handyman was Sam Carson, a nephew of the famous scout Kit, who lived where Evans Road is now, north of Sunset, in a hut made of flattened kerosene cans. More families soon moved in, Santa Monica became the beach resort for the city--thanks to a new Southern Pacific streetcar line--and in 1894, there were enough kids to warrant building a city school. Canyon School remains today, its original building intact in the middle of the playground.

And then came the Uplifters, an offshoot of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, formed for businessmen and professionals in 1880. The Uplifters' first president, another familiar L.A. name, was Colonel J.B. Lankershim, but the real spark plug behind the group was a gregarious sort named Harry Haldeman, appointed the Uplifters' fellowship chairman in 1912.

It seems the Athletic Club wasn't a large enough canvas for the amount of fellowship Haldeman had in mind. So in 1913, the Uplifters were gathered for the first time, and L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books, delivered a report announcing that a president, vice president, secretary and treasurer had been chosen and named, respectively, the Grand Muscle, the Elevator, the Royal Hoister and the Lord High Raiser.

The first and most fondly remembered Grand Muscle was Haldeman himself. It would be sniffy to claim that what the Uplifters mostly lifted were beverages--they gave generously to hospitals and the city's poor--but it's also clear they were the more raffish members of the Athletic Club, and when Prohibition reared its head in 1919, the group felt some sort of manifest destiny to find a place close to the city where they could hang out, bond, sing, throw banquets, tell jokes and stories, indulge a particular fondness for things creative--and frankly, pound back a few. You get the idea--they drank.

Anyway, Big Bear was an early idea for a prospective base, but they eventually chose Rustic Canyon, purchasing shares in the forming of an association and buying 40 acres from the Edmond family in 1920 and 81 more over a 10-year period. For years, the Uplifters had been throwing an Annual Outing, a weeklong saturnalia of stage plays and sports and general hoo-ha at such faraway spots as Del Mar and Santa Barbara. And in the fall of 1921, a little over a year after Grand Muscle Haldeman had first led a convoy of club members from downtown to show off what became known simply as the Ranch, the Uplifters held their first canyon outing.

The members were ecstatic, burrowing off into the trees and bluffs to explore this special place, located "right where the salt breezes of the sea and the lighter perfume of the mountains mingle," according to club history. Meals were served in the clubhouse, and there was a swimming pool, tennis courts, a trapshooting range and bridle paths--riding was soon to become one of the most popular pastimes. That Friday night, the traditional High Jinks was presented around the campfire circle, a Wild West-ish allegory of the discovery of the Ranch, with members as cast and music by Uplifter--and noted composer--Louis Gottschalk.

The Uplifters set out to fix up the place, and by 1925 they'd spent thousands of dollars on roads, landscaping, terraces and retaining walls made from stream stones, as well as a baseball field and two tennis courts. Members began to lease lots and build their weekend cottages. The cabin motif--a main feature of the Ranch--was launched by member Marco Hellman, who purchased three log cabins built on location at Lake Arrowhead for the 1923 film The Courtship of Miles Standish, hauled them back to Rustic Canyon and rebuilt them whole. One still stands in its glory at 38 Haldeman.

Other houses sprang up--Latimer and Haldeman--some more substantial than cabins but none very grand, considering the owners lived in much more palatial year-round digs downtown. Entertaining was graceful and pleasant; there was a tradition of having your neighbors over, and the clubhouse boasted a first-rate chef.

The sense of the Uplifters' history is that women were appreciated but not around all that much. Not exactly San Francisco's Bohemian Club, whose Grove was no-woman's land, but the northern club inspired the Uplifters in many ways, and an account from 1922 mentions that women joined the High Jinks cast for the first time--as if it were a momentous occasion. It wasn't until 1935 that women were actually permitted to stay on the Ranch during the Annual Outing--and then they were advised to remain discreetly in their homes. Not without cause--two women at a later outing reported peeking from a window and seeing a bunch of men in their underwear cavorting through a grove, followed by another member, bare-assed, leading an elephant.

Riding took over as the sport of choice. In 1928, the Uplifters built a polo field, bounded by Sunset at the north and what are now Brooktree and Hightree streets, and several members kept stables of polo ponies. Bridle paths laced the canyon--their remains can still be found under the sumac and chaparral in canyon backyards--and riding formed the friendly connection between the Uplifters and Will Rogers, their neighbor across Sunset.

The Uplifters had 10 good, fun-filled, fairly sexist and well-lubricated years--and then the Depression hit. Many members couldn't pay their mortgages to the association--the polo field had overstressed its resources. Ranch homes started to sell, back to the association at first, then to nonmembers. The club folded in 1947--someone tried to run the clubhouse as a racquet club, but that failed, and the city wound up with it, along with the baseball field, the pool and the tennis courts, in the early '50s.

All that's left is a faded sign reading UPLIFTERS' RANCH, hung across Latimer Road as you approach the park from the south, and the buildings themselves, the former clubhouse donated to the city in 1953 when the group went belly-up. But the Uplifter spirit--strange, a little arty, fairly torqued--remains to this day, brushing the canyon with a flavor, a penchant for the good life. Specifically, the good life out in the country.

It was, however, in Upper Rustic Canyon, the portion between Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland, where the utopian notion really took hold, and Will Rogers was the first and best exemplar of how to achieve it. Rogers and his wife, Betty, owned eight acres in Beverly Hills when they purchased 176 acres of mesa and part of the canyon from Japanese gardeners in 1924--so it was not as if they needed a place to live. What Will wanted was space, a quiet place where he could get away from his busy life in films and newspaper columns, relax and mess around, as he said, "doing this and that and not much of either."

The ranch house now on the property--the popular and well-kept state park--is the evolution of what began as a one-bedroom weekend cabin. Will cleared a polo field and employed a large crew to build trails, corrals, roping rings, stables and fences--the workmen were practically permanent residents, although Betty, the more financially responsible, would cull their ranks when Will left on a trip.

To please his friend Fred Stone, who was living in an apartment over the couple's garage while recovering from injuries he sustained in an airplane accident, Rogers laid out a nine-hole golf course--four formal holes in front of the house and five more hairy ones winding up into the scrubby canyons and across the polo field. The family made a permanent move to the ranch in 1928--celebrities of the day lined up to pay their respects, and Will enjoyed treating them to his favorite chili and corn bread. In 1934, when a flood washed out the bridge over Rustic Creek at Sunset, Will rode down the hill with a lantern and spent the night warning motorists.

But even the ranch wasn't enough of an escape for him. That same year, he built a hideaway cabin on the creek a mile or so up the canyon from the ranch, in a beeloud glade closed in with yucca and century plants. A classic canyon cabin--double rock fireplaces, chuck-wagon door, a small wood cookstove and bunk beds. He loved the place but, sadly, didn't get to use it much. He died the following year--he and Wiley Post, their plane crashing in Alaska on an around-the-world flight.

The cabin itself burned down years ago, but the ruins remain and the chimney still stands. It's not a difficult hike, down the steep sagey hillside from Casale Road in the Riviera. And for those who make the trip, there are other ruins worth looking at, a bit upstream from Rogers' old cabin.

Then there was another utopia--this time belonging to the Nazis. National Socialism probably only crawls in under the wire as a "utopian" idea, but it took concrete form in Rustic Canyon during the '30s and '40s. Concrete is a slippery term--what's left to see of the place is largely cast concrete, but its origins are nebulous. County records show "Jessie Murphy, a widow," purchasing 50-plus acres north of Rogers' property in 1933, but the owners were actually named Stephens--Norman, an engineer with silver-mining interests, and Winona, the daughter of an industrialist and a woman given to things supernatural.

Local lore has it that Winona fell under the spell of a certain unnamed gentleman, who convinced her that the coming world war would be won by Germany, that the United States would collapse into years of violent anarchy and that the chosen few (read: the Stephenses, the certain gentleman and other true believers) would need a tight spot in which to hole up, self-sufficient, until the fire storm had passed. Then they could emerge not only intact but, thanks to the superiority of their politics, rulers of the anthill and, not incidentally, the origin of its new population. To this purpose, a 10-year construction program costing $4 million was implemented, starting with a water tank holding 375,000 gallons and a concrete diesel-powered generator station with foot-thick walls--both of which are still visible. The hillsides were terraced for orchards, an electrified fence circled the boundaries and a huge refrigerated locker was built into a hillside.

The one thing Murphy/Stephens couldn't seem to get right was their main house. The first architect hired was Welton Becket, but there are also sketches by Lloyd Wright, and in 1941, Paul Williams drafted blueprints for a sprawling mansion with 22 bedrooms, a children's dining room, a gymnasium, pool and a workshop in the basement. Rumors spread through the canyon of late-night military exercises, drills and the sound of gunfire, all presided over by a certain Herr Schmidt. But whatever the place was, it certainly was no secret. The FBI descended upon it the day after Pearl Harbor, Herr Schmidt was removed, to die eventually in prison, and the Nazi threat to Santa Monica was finally ended.

And a final utopia--this time artistic in nature--was built on the remains of the Murphy/Stephens empire. In 1948, Huntington Hartford, heir to the A & P grocery fortune, decided to establish an artists' colony patterned after the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies over in New Hampshire and New York. Hartford hired the ubiquitous Lloyd Wright to design a cluster of studio-residences, all featuring north-facing skylights, scattered through the upper-canyon meadows.

The colony offered nationally known artists six-month grants, freeing them from everyday distractions by supplying all their needs, down to a housecleaning staff and basket lunches left outside their doors, hanging on nails to keep them out of reach of the local raccoons. Edward Hopper came for a stay, as did Andrew Wyeth, Max Eastman, Van Wyck Brooks, Lukas Foss and Mark Van Doren, among many others. But the indulgence cost Hartford $100,000 a year, and in 1965, with his financial handlers insisting he throw in the towel, he closed the colony, and the dream--noble and expensive--was over.

But was it? You can make a case that the dream never ended, or better, that all these separate dreams were just fragments, folded into the One Big Dream that Rustic Canyon has always been. And you can make a case that roughly the same sort of person has always chosen to live here. Salted down and rounded out, that definition might be a bohemian with an eye for property values.

A favorite time of year is summer, especially in the evening, when the sun sets around 8 and some planet hangs over the eucalyptus up on Chautauqua like a lightbulb. You need a flashlight because the critters scurry about their business and you may startle a coyote. There's the thwack of the last softball hit for the night at the park, the crunch of sycamore leaves underfoot, the hoot of an owl and the cacophonous oratorio of the frogs in the creek. It sure doesn't feel like L.A. It's somewhere else, somewhere perfect--maybe heaven.

Actually, a photograph in the Young book says it best. It's one of the Edmonds, those early Rustic pioneers, the ones who were first to choose the canyon simply for a residence a hundred years back. The shot's taken in the living room of their Craftsman-style cabin, by the dark-wood wainscoting. George is sitting in a rocking chair by a brick fireplace, and Katherine is standing behind him, her hand on his chair. She's smiling. He's playing a guitar.

Heaven. No way it's not.