Malibu movie theater owner, with a ‘servant’s heart,’ died in the Palisades fire

Betty O’Meara’s signature was a resolute brand of hospitality. It blossomed with her friends and umpteen pen pals and reached full flower at the Malibu Cinema, the movie theater that she and her husband operated for two decades in the heart of Malibu.

At the cozy cinema on Cross Creek Road, you could take in a double feature for less than $5, sit in an audience that might include Bob Dylan, Dyan Cannon or Burt Lancaster and be tickled by the squawking of the cockatoo that made its home atop the snack counter.

The theater was a cherished gathering place for a town filled with people who often had moved to Malibu from somewhere else.

California

The L.A. fire victims: Who they were

Coverage of the fires ravaging Altadena, Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Pasadena, including stories about the devastation, issues firefighters faced and the weather.

Jan. 13, 2025

“In those days, nobody was from here. We didn’t have a community center,” said actor Martin Sheen, a longtime friend of O’Meara’s from Our Lady of Malibu Catholic Church. “That was kind of a meeting spot. That was kind of where we came together.”

Understated, gracious and quietly beloved, O’Meara was one of at least 29 people killed in January’s wildfires. Sheriff’s deputies ordered her to evacuate her home in the Big Rock section of Malibu as the Palisades fire roared toward the sea. But O’Meara, 94, slammed the door in their faces, her family later learned.

O’Meara’s impact on her world was inversely proportional to her size. She stood 4 feet 10, at best, but routinely boosted herself over the 5-foot mark with constant companions — her platform shoes.

“She was so full of energy. Positive energy, most of all,” Sheen recalled. “She attracted people like an electric current. Betty was a mighty force.”

As her daughter, son and friends tell it, O’Meara’s early life had an air of mystery. They marveled at her real-life encounters with the likes of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Lakers legend Jerry West.

“This obviously was a woman of extraordinary wisdom and grit,” said John Ziffren, who met the O’Mearas as a teenage movie house employee, before a career as an entertainment executive. “But she was also someone who loved to hear stories and who would laugh every time I would use foul language.”

Undated photo of Betty O’Meara, who died in the Palisades fire and was known for her warmth and hospitality.

(Courtesy of Frances O’Meara)

Born Yuriko Monuki on Oct. 5, 1930, in what was then the U.S. territory of Hawaii, she was the third of four children of a doctor. The family maintained deep ties with its native Japan and returned there before the start of World War II.

She would later tell her family and many friends about how she came to work for MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander presiding over the reconstruction of Japan.

Monuki transferred to a job at the Pentagon, where her superiors asked her to make contact with a mysterious Chinese pilot, who the Americans hoped would defect to the West. She charmed the aviator and later turned her brush with espionage into an autobiographical screenplay.

She abandoned the project when the studio that expressed interest wanted to cast a white star in the role patterned after O’Meara, her daughter said.

It was at her Washington, D.C., apartment complex that Monuki met David O’Meara, the youngest of six children from an Irish American family from Boston. They soon became a couple, then married, as O’Meara launched a career in sales and marketing for the nascent computer industry.

The O’Meara family eventually landed in California in the 1960s. They fell hard for the beach, especially Malibu, settling in 1970 in Big Rock, an enclave of bluff-top homes.

O’Meara saw little reason to ever take a vacation. “It’s heaven. Why would I leave heaven?“ Frances O’Meara, a lawyer who lives in Playa del Rey, recalled her mother saying.

David O’Meara decided to buy the Malibu Cinema in 1972, a gambit to escape his somewhat rootless salesman’s life. He loved the movie business and the famous neighbors who became his patrons.

He ran the theater with love and a parsimonious budget, meaning that the ticket salesperson sometimes also ran the snack stand and tended the projector.

The light staffing meant the projector sometimes went unnoticed, as the film’s first reel ran out. Audiences were not infrequently treated to a blackened screen and the slap-slap-slapping of a spent film, spinning away, unattended. (Shouts from the crowd soon summoned the missing projectionist.)

Other unscripted moments arrived courtesy of the O’Mearas’ peach-colored cockatoo, Kittyhawk. The bird would unfurl its brilliant red under-feathers and feed on unpopped popcorn. If ignored for too long, Kittyhawk would protest. Loudly. That would provoke David O’Meara’s equally loud retort: “Microwave!”

That tended to render Kittyhawk mute.

As an independent, the theater struggled to get the most popular films. But Betty O’Meara would remind the studios that the audience at the 200-plus-seat theater included voters from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The studios didn’t then have screeners or digital inks for their films, so a run at the Malibu Cinema was a good way to reach Oscar voters.

The O’Mearas and their children, also theater employees, welcomed the bold-faced names, but that didn’t mean they got special treatment.

The younger David O’Meara recalled the time his father asked Lancaster to step outside to the sidewalk, because the Hollywood legend was gobbling down an ice cream cone from the neighboring Swensen’s shop. Malibu Cinema did not allow food from the outside. No exceptions.

Like today, Malibu brimmed with celebrities, but in the pre-Instagram era they tended to come and go without media histrionics. Barbra Streisand. Lee Marvin. Paul Newman. They all came. Without personal assistants. Without bodyguards. Without trailing paparazzi.

Frances O’Meara sometimes worked the snack counter and vividly recalls the time a man in an elegant silver Porsche double-parked behind her father’s car. It turned out to be Newman, who bounded into the theater, just to ask for a handful of popcorn. (The star was taste-testing as he prepared to launch his “Newman’s Own” popcorn.)

The teenage Frances obliged, her hand grazing the superstar’s. “Those bright blue eyes,” she recalled. “Just magnificent.”

California

In the ruins of Palisades fire, confronting my elusive Malibu life

Times reporter James Rainey ventured back to see if his childhood home in Malibu was still standing, while he reflected on ‘Old World Malibu.’

Jan. 12, 2025

Squeezed by rising rents at the Malibu Village Shopping Center as the 1990s dawned, the theater no longer seemed viable. The O’Mearas sold in 1991. The theater closed permanently in 2017.

If you go to the location now, you’ll find a swanky clothing store and a shop that sells “bespoke,” and “sustainably sourced” hats. One version will set you back $2,200.

Betty O’Meara left her mark not just at the theater but at her church and around Big Rock. She did it by delivering countless home-baked brownies and lemon bars. She did it by sending an endless stream of letters and cards. Friends knew their old neighbor was home, still corresponding, because the flag on her mailbox seemed always to be standing at attention.

David O’Meara died in 1993, when he was just 64. She had lived alone since then, though a broken hip in 2020 forced her to take on a daytime caregiver. She kept right on hosting her neighbors and other guests.

She’d once gotten Jerry West to come for a meal, then insisted he get down into a crouch, so she could learn about the finer points of defense. Not long ago, she had Sheen and his wife, Janet, over, throwing together some sushi and other things for dinner.

Mostly, though, she entertained her everyday neighbors, paying much more attention to what they were eating and drinking than to her own needs. She might not sit at all, so deep was her focus on her guests. “She had a servant’s heart,” said neighbor Robert Wolff, pastor to a group that unites Christians and Jews.

To Frances O’Meara, that made her mother a sort of modern-day geisha, “someone always knowing her audience, always knowing how to communicate, knowing how to relate.”

Before the Palisades fire began its push into Malibu on Jan. 7, O’Meara’s caretaker left to pick up her client’s medication. But the fire moved so quickly that a police roadblock made it impossible for the caretaker to return. Another checkpoint stopped Frances O’Meara from coming to her mother’s rescue.

O’Meara had made it clear over decades when other fires came that she had no intention of leaving. Maybe she had a false sense of imperviousness, given all the times the house on Roca Chica Drive escaped, unscathed.

Sheriff’s deputies later told Frances O’Meara that her mother simply would not heed their order to get out.

The daughter wondered aloud whether the authorities should force out the unwilling, especially residents who are old or infirm. But the family said it has no intention of casting blame, or suing.

O’Meara’s children believe she may have harbored a sense of fatalism about what was coming.

“My dad died there. She died there. And the house died too,” said Frances O’Meara. “It’s sort of a strange circle … There’s something kismet about the whole thing.”