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Then along came Access for All. Executive director and ex-Sierra Club staffer Steve Hoye says he formed the nonprofit group in 2000 to take on the job of accepting these OTDs, after he learned there were 1,300 of them on the California coast that were still not taken up, leaving large sections of beach closed to the public.

Hoye’s first target for liberation was the offer for passage alongside Geffen’s house, which could provide a second accessway to Carbon Beach. Hoye believes Geffen was stunned when he learned his OTD was more than a public relations exercise.

The legal battle that followed drew in the City of Malibu--which backed Geffen--and led to a proposed bill in the State Assembly that would have retroactively stopped nonprofit groups such as Access for All from accepting an OTD. “We sunk it,” Hoye says.

On Memorial Day in May 2005, the soberly named “Carbon Beach East” accessway opened between Geffen’s home and a neighboring property. Hoye reckons about 5,000 people now use the high-walled entrance each summer. Access for All maintains it with a grant from the Coastal Conservancy.

The first summer, Hoye says, beachgoers were confrontedby aggressive private security guards hired to ensure not a sunburned toe went over the invisible line onto a private beach.

“It’s been terrible,” he says.

A Victory for the Public?
Just two days after the dancer incident on July 4th, I went down myself to Carbon Beach to see how the public and the homeowners were getting on. If it wasn’t for the brown footprint sign reading “Coastal Access” on the Pacific Coast Highway, I would never have found the nine-foot-wide entrance, which was tucked into a seemingly impenetrable wall of hedges, rock pillars, and bricks.

I arrived at the shore and looked around. It could have been a Sunday afternoon on any California beach--except that the sunbathers, volleyball players, joggers, kids, and dogs all had plenty of room to breathe. No sand-kicking crowds. No hordes of screaming kids. Just some jolly white waves, pelicans, and scattered tan and white bodies.

As for public liberation . . . it was being demonstrated to excess. Several sunbathers were parked with their towels, unperturbed and undisturbed, on private beach lots.

“No, I didn’t know,” said Danielle Gordon, a Santa Monica sales representative, when I told her she was on private property. “I come as regularly as I can, and I always choose this spot,” she said. A family of four sitting on another private site expressed the same surprise. Both parties said they had never been hassled.

Their logistical mistake was not surprising. I had printed out the Coastal Commission map showing Carbon Beach’s patchwork of private and public beachfront. It covered four pages and was color-coded with seven different sizes of public easements. Some extended from the Mean High Tide Line (an elusive average) to the private homeowner’s “structure.” Others extended from the “Daily High Water Line [wherever that is] inland 25 feet and no closer than 10 feet” from the structure. If you come, pack a tape measure.

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