Fed up with the graffiti despoiling the area around the Malibu Canyon tunnel, Lynne Westmore Bloom decided to do something about it. During the night she suspended herself with ropes down the rocks above the tunnel’s entrance. She went to work to chipping away at the defacement. Finally, after several months of nocturnal labor removing graffiti and clearing out scraggly brush, in one night, October 1966, using ordinary house paint, she created her gift to Los Angeles commuters: a sixty-foot-tall naked lady.
Drivers slowed to get a good look, or pulled over to take photographs.
Government officials did what government officials do. Being properly outraged at this affront to public morality, they sent fire trucks to hose it off. That didn’t work. They tried paint thinner. That didn’t work either. Finally, they used brown paint to cover the nude and protect their citizenry form this obscenity. The Pink Lady of Malibu Canyon disappeared after a week.
Lynne Westmore Bloom died last week at the age of 81. She did not live long enough to see her work re-emerge as the elements wear away the real defacement: the brown paint.
