Malibu Winter Sure There Are Celebrities. But This Is The Time Of Year This Quaint, Semirural, Sun-kissed And Salt-splashed Town Takes The Starring Role.

MALIBU, Calif. — On a winter day, with the sun flying low and a southeaster blowing, the town looks new. Dry hills the color of sun-bleached surfer hair spill into the Pacific, which stretches and sparkles like a carpet of wrinkled aluminum foil all the way to Catalina Island.

Houses on stilts defy the crashing surf, and a lone surfer and a couple peeking into a tide pool are the only human life around.

This is Malibu in winter. Land's end. The rim of southern California. And it does not tax the imagination - if you erase from the landscape the houses and the asphalt ribbon that is the Pacific Coast Highway - to see the place as it was when Robert Louis Stevenson first saw it, and became one of the first people to describe the coast of California.

Malibu is a beach town, a strange town in a strange part of the country. Chevrolet names cars after it, and television filches its name for soap operas. Yet the place does not capitalize on its huge recognition, something that more ambitious tourist destinations would kill for.

Malibu basks in all that fame, yet it likes to think of itself as a reclusive starlet, a Greta Garbo wanna-be, despite being one of the most famous beaches in the world. You will not find racks of slick brochures in travel agencies luring visitors here. It adheres to a rigid "no growth" policy to maintain its semirural charm. Consequently, there are no multistory tourist hotels anywhere in sight.

Its mystique spreads far and wide because of the film-star gossip emanating from behind the gates of megabuck mansions dotting its shore, yet its residents take it all with a grain of salt.

But put aside its fame, and what is left is plain Malibu, a quaint, sun-kissed and salt-splashed town stretching 27 miles up the coast but less than one mile wide in places. There are only about 27,000 residents in all this very expensive beach-front real estate with rugged canyons in the backyard.