Endless Summer
The fabled Miramar resort has had a colorful history — and not just because of its former blue roofs
Written by Katherine Stewart | Photography by Dewey Nicks
Surfer, model, and actress Sanoe Lake hitching a ride to her room on the Miramar's pickup truck; the cast of surfers and models for a Roxy swim shoot take full advantage of the Miramar's pool during the mid-1990s.
A new series of Nicks' never-before-shown prints from this shoot and ’90s surf life debuted at the grand opening of the Montecito Mercantile at Montecito Country Mart. The show will run through September 15.
In the first decades of its existence, the Miramar resort was the kind of place that children imagine when they think about the way the world should be. “I assumed it would go on forever,” wrote Harold Keeney Doulton in his 1999 memoir, I Remember. Doulton, who was born in 1925, grew up in the Red Cottage, one of the first structures that his grandparents built—on a prime spot under two ancient oaks—after acquiring the oceanfront land in 1886.
Through the Roaring Twenties, the Miramar functioned as a health resort for the morning-after crowd. Montecito at the time was the kind of place where the loose nuts of a WASP world collected—the black sheep, the iconoclasts, the artists, and other refugees from East Coast civilization. Doulton’s childhood was a whirl of idyllic beach gatherings with the neighborhood children, punctuated by bonfires, fishing trips, idiosyncratic rituals, and some truly grand parties.
For Fourth of July celebrations, Max Fleischmann, son of the founder of the Fleischmann’s Yeast company, and Chris Holmes, his nephew, used to fund fireworks spectaculars at the hotel for Montecito residents and guests of the Miramar Beach. Chairs and benches were set out, and the pyrotechnics were shot off south toward Fernald Point. Doulton’s father hired two bagpipers and a drummer to march around the hotel grounds, paying them each five dollars and a bottle of Scotch to play songs like “Scotland the Brave” and “The Campbells Are Coming.”
“The Gilded Age resort morphed into a place for postwar exploration of the American Dream, California style.”
But the Great Depression brought an end to that first Miramar incarnation. Unable to keep the enterprise afloat, the Doulton family sold it to Paul Gawzner in 1939 for $60,000. The Gilded Age resort morphed into a place for postwar exploration of the American Dream, California style.
Gawzner transformed an old rail car into a coffee shop and painted the white rooftops of the buildings a striking blue. Mostly, he introduced a more relaxed and carefree feeling to the place.
Hillary Hauser, a photojournalist, undersea explorer, author, and environmental activist who cofounded Heal the Ocean, spent endless summers at the Miramar in the late 1950s, and remembers it as the scene of her first kiss. “I was maybe 14,” she remembers. “The ocean was wilder then. There was more kelp, there were sea anemones and tide pools. But for us kids there was the hamburger shack and the raft, which they anchored every summer. We would swim out there, talk, and hang out. And maybe have a kiss!”
For a certain crowd, Hauser recalls, gathering at this spot was a way of life, almost a religion, and it had a leader. “Hal Bates was our god, the center of our being,” she says, referring to a local radio jock who worked as a lifeguard at the beach. “We would have body surfing contests to see who would ride the waves the best,” she recalls. “And then there was a funny kid who showed up with a guitar he was always plinking. That was David Crosby, who ended up forming the rock band Crosby, Stills & Nash.”
“The Miramar drew masses of artists and writers and these wacky crazy eccentric trust-fund hippies”
For Ted Simmons, whose extended family owned the Miramar Beach Hotel and who was proprietor himself for several years, it was a place to grow up. “My first job after high school was working as a bellman. We wore these polyester blue coats. I worked under the legendary Grover Barnes, a true gentleman who passed away in his 90s after having worked at the property for over 40 years.” Tennis instructor Hilbert Lee was another Miramar fixture. “He was interested in people, and it didn’t matter who you were or where you were from,” says Simmons. “He’d be friends with Warren Buffett or the guy walking down the train tracks.”
Toward the end of its second life, the hotel had become a place with plenty of warmth and no pretensions. “The Miramar was run down, the bar was grungy,” says screenwriter and producer Tracey Jackson, daughter of Santa Barbara’s late society doyenne Beverley Jackson. “But the beach was as beautiful as ever, and that, along with all of its good vibes, was what the people came for.”
In fact, the artsy set loved it all the more. “The Miramar drew masses of artists and writers and these wacky crazy eccentric trust-fund hippies,” Jackson recalls. Many of these characters had discovered the place—and Santa Barbara—through the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, which Mary and Barnaby Conrad founded in 1973 and held every summer at the hotel.
“We put the Miramar on the map in the intellectual world,” says Mary Conrad from her home in Rincon, the site of the conference’s infamous opening- and closing-night parties. “We got Ray Bradbury, Dominick Dunne and Joan Didion, Charles Schulz, Gore Vidal along with his nemesis Bill Buckley, Neil Simon, Fannie Flagg, Alice Adams, James Michener, Eudora Welty, Artie Shaw—all the people of that era.”
Tommy's Miramar by Hank Pitcher. (From the book HANK PITCHER by Charles Donelan, courtesy Sullivan Goss Gallery.)
By the late 1990s everyone knew the hotel was due for a facelift. In a saga too well known to locals to belabor here, the ownership changed hands three times, and the old resort lay empty for nearly two decades.
Today, in its third era, the Rosewood Miramar Beach hotel, under the direction of Rick Caruso, is something new and strikingly opulent, from the graceful staircase in the Manor House, designed by the late Los Angeles architect Paul Revere Williams, to the well-appointed lobby, which evokes the ambience of a grand Montecito estate. The old train-car diner has been replaced with a festive aqua-colored drinks cart, shaped like a caboose, that serves the overflow from the Miramar Beach Bar. The old boardwalk, where children once rode their bicycles, now serves as a gathering spot for local glitterati.
But one feature remains the same. Two enormous old oak trees stand side by side in a grassy enclosure with a hammock strung between them. Most days you’ll see visiting children playing beneath the sturdy boughs, which are hung with lanterns that cast a warm glow as the sun fades.
Photographs; Skateboard and pool, Dewey Nicks; Writer’s conference, courtesy of Mary Conrad; Joan Didion, copyright Julian Wasser, Train-cars, Simmons, Barnes, Renon (5), Ted Simmons; Hauser, courtesy Hillary Hauser; Matchbox, Angel’s Antiques in Carpinteria
