The Legend of The Pink Lady




Early on Saturday morning, October 29, 1966, motorists traveling northbound on California�s Malibu Canyon Road were startled by the sudden appearance of a giant figure painted on the canyon wall above a tunnel entrance. The 60-foot-tall painting was of a voluptuous pink-skinned nude woman, with her long black hair flowing in the breeze, carrying a bunch of flowers in her hand. Needless to say, as the word got out, traffic increased on the rural highway at an alarming rate, and soon county officials decided �The Pink Lady� had to go. At first, firefighters tried hosing her down, but to no avail, and liberal applications of paint remover just enhanced her pink skin even more.

As county officials pondered what to do, Lynne Seemayer, a 31-year-old secretary from nearby Northridge, appeared on the scene and admitted that she was the mystery artist whose work was about to be destroyed. Annoyed by the grafitti that marred the canyon wall, Seemayer had been secretly climbing up the cliff on moonlit nights for some ten months, suspended by climbing ropes as she meticulously removed the grafitti. Finally, at 8 P. M. on October 28 (another moonlit night), Seemayer began painting her masterpiece using ordinary house paint, which made it very difficult to remove. By dawn, The Pink Lady was finished, but just a week later, she would disappear for good. Despite a lawsuit filed by Seemayer, on Thursday, November 3, workers covered up the painting with 14 gallons of brown paint. Unfortunately, Seemayer was hounded by crank callers and received hate mail for months afterward, and ended up losing her job.
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