There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

When Raymond Chandler wrote those words in “Red Wind,” one of his hard-boiled Philip Marlow detective stories, Chandler was living in Pacific Palisades, my hometown, which was obliterated in a fire propelled by powerful Santa Ana winds on the night of Jan. 7, 2025. 

The original residential neighborhood of the Palisades lost virtually all of its homes. The second and third oldest residential neighborhoods suffered destruction of more than 90 percent. Today there is nothing but rubble and toxic waste where thousands of homes once stood. My old family home and the homes of nearly everyone I grew up with are gone. The original business block is gone. The first public elementary school lost all of its bungalow classrooms and half of its main building. That which remains standing is badly smoke damaged. A second public elementary school that wasn’t built until the mid-1950s was incinerated. The town’s library, community theater, two markets, and two gas stations are no more. The Catholic, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches are gone. Will Rogers Ranch—the house, stables, and outbuildings—an iconic Palisades landmark, is ashes. 

More than two dozen actors lost their homes in the Palisades, although their names—revealing my age—are not familiar to me, except for Anthony Hopkins, Billy Crystal, Jennifer Grey, and Eric Braedan. The last named is a German immigrant who came to America as Hans-Jörg Gudegast. Before he acquired his stage name, he starred in a 1960s TV series about the Allied African campaign in World War II, The Rat Patrol. His son Christian took classes from me at UCLA and I subsequently spoke before a group of Eric’s German friends at his Palisades home, which had a commanding view of upper Rustic Canyon and Will Rogers Ranch.

I was far more familiar with actors who made the Palisades their home in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Some I only knew of, others I knew casually, and a few I knew fairly well because they were fathers of kids I grew up with. Many of the homes of those actors are now nothing but ashes, including that of Grace Kelly. She lived a few houses away from my childhood best friend, Denny, and a few blocks from me. She power-walked the neighborhood daily. Not only was her natural beauty stunning—everything about her seemed perfect—but she looked and moved as if she could have been, like her dad, a great athlete. 

Nigel Bruce was another whose old home is gone. He was next door to Denny. We spent some time in Bruce’s backyard whenever one of our flyballs cleared the fence. Bruce looked exactly like he did when he starred alongside Basil Rathbone in the Sherlock Holmes movie series. He also walked the neighborhood, but in a tweed suit, with his dog on a leash. He could have been out on the moors.

Francis X. Bushman’s old home, a few blocks from my family home, is gone. As a young kid, I knew him only as an older character actor in movies and on television shows and as a friend of my mom’s “from the old days.” It wasn’t until I was almost a teenager that I learned this old guy was one of Hollywood’s most famous leading men, known as “King of the Movies” in the silent and early talkie eras. Among his starring roles was as Messala in Ben-Hur, the megahit of 1925. He appeared in some 200 movies. 

The home that James Arness built in the Palisades in 1949 and moved into early in 1950 is now nothing but rubble. It was a Cape Cod-style house a block off Sunset Boulevard that backed up on one of the many canyons in our small community. “It was beautiful,” Arness wrote in his 2001 autobiography, “and brand new and all ours, complete with shingles.” He had already appeared in four movies and was in five more during his first year in his new home. He would appear in 20 more movies before he dedicated himself to the role of Marshal Matt Dillon in the television series Gunsmoke, which ran from 1955 to 1975.

I got to know Arness because he was the father of Craig, who was my age and played on our Palisades youth baseball team. Craig was actually the adopted son of Arness, but none of us knew that as kids. Craig had come into Arness’ life as an infant when his mother, Virginia Chapman, married Arness. Arness would climb into the stands at our baseball games, trying not to draw attention to himself, but that would have been impossible even if he were not Matt Dillon. He stood 6’7” with a bone structure that carried his 235 pounds with ease. It’s not surprising that in the 1951 sci-fi hit The Thing from Another World Jim Arness was The Thing. 

Very often sitting with Arness were two other Hollywood stars, David Niven and Cameron Mitchell, there to cheer on two more of my teammates, Jamie Niven and Freddy Mitchell. A lifetime later, when I started writing for Chronicles, I met Taki Theodoracopulos and learned that he and Jamie Niven were friendly rivals for the beautiful women of Switzerland and the French Riviera. 

Richard Boone’s old home is also now a pile of rubble. Although probably best known for starring in the television series Have Gun—Will Travel, where he played the gunslinger “Paladin,” Boone appeared in two dozen movies before the series and a couple dozen afterwards. Besides his appearances in movies and TV shows, I knew him for racing his sports cars on Sunset Boulevard in the Palisades. He seemed to have a new one every few months. We all enjoyed going by his house to see what was sitting in his driveway. If he were outside, he’d gladly talk with us about his cars. 

Coming home late one night, he lost control of his Maserati on a turn, slid into and bounced off a parked car, and wound up against a tree. The Maserati was badly damaged and Boone suffered a broken nose and rib and various cuts and bruises. He climbed out of the wreckage and walked a short distance to his home before being transported to St. Johns Hospital in Santa Monica. 

Typical of a small town, word spread like wildfire that Boone had crashed. I kicked over my first motorcycle, a BSA, and rode to the scene. All of us there came to the conclusion that it was the result of high speed and reduced nighttime visibility, and, since it happened at 4 a.m., possibly a night of drinking. 

Although popularly thought of as a goofball because of his role as Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobe Gillis and later his character Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island, Bob Denver was actually a sharp guy with a degree from Loyola University in Westchester, near the LAX airport. Before having success with acting, he taught history and math at Corpus Christi Grammar School in the Palisades and also served as head coach of a youth football team. I was one of his players. Practices and games were serious business. Off the field, though, he was a fun guy. He treated us to a BBQ at his house, one of the thousands destroyed in the fire. While he was our coach, he auditioned for Dobe Gillis and surprised himself by landing a part. 

More of an athlete than an actor, Bob Mathias moved into a neighborhood next to Will Rogers Ranch in the mid-’50s when he appeared (as himself) in his first movie, The Bob Mathias Story, about his Olympic feats. He would appear in several others as well as in television shows. We were in awe of him. At 17 years old, he had won the Gold Medal in the decathlon in the 1948 Olympics at London and won it again in 1952 at Helsinki, breaking his own world record. He also was a star running back in college, leading Stanford to the Rose Bowl in 1952. He served in the Marine Corps after graduating from Stanford and would have been the favorite for the decathlon in 1956 at Melbourne, had the Olympic Committee not ruled him ineligible because he made money from playing himself in The Bob Mathias Story. The fire toasted Mathias’ old house, along with nearly every other house in the neighborhood. 

Bobby Driscoll was a Palisades kid who made it big in movies as a child actor. In age, he was halfway between my older brother and older sister, and they both knew him. By 1950, when he starred in Treasure Island as Jim Hawkins, he already had substantial roles in 15 movies. At the Academy Awards in March 1950, he received a smaller version of the Oscar for best juvenile actor. His career continued on the upswing for another two or three years before it stalled and then plummeted as a consequence of his drug use, first marijuana and then heroin. Despite being married and having three children, and going through rehab, his lack of adult success in Hollywood drove him again and again back to drugs. He was dead by 31. His family home is also now gone. 

Another one of our kid actors was Billy Gray, who starred as Bud in 200 episodes of the long-running television series Father Knows Best. He had been in some 50 movies before the series made him a household name, but nearly all of those movie roles were uncredited with no lines. His breakthrough came when he played a major role as Bobby Benson in The Day the Earth Stood Still, a 1951 sci-fi hit. His family home, now another casualty of the fire, was a short distance from mine. I was friends with his younger brother, Freddy. Their mother was actress Beatrice Gray, who appeared in more than a dozen movies during the 1940s, including as the female lead in Westerns starring Hoot Gibson, Johnny Mack Brown, and Bob Steele. 

One of our own Palisades-reared kids who made it big in Hollywood, but not until he was an adult, was Doug McClure. He was friends with my older brother. His family home was in our neighborhood. After McClure graduated from high school, his family moved to another Palisades neighborhood. Both houses were victims of the fire. 

Tall, lean, and handsome, McClure began acting in high school plays. His friends had fun ribbing him for his first professional work—modeling underwear for the Sears catalog. However, by the time he was 20, he had landed a bit part as a soldier in the 1956 Civil War film Friendly Persuasion and the next year, a small part as an ensign on a destroyer in the World War II U-boat film The Enemy Below, starring Bob Mitchum. Then came a minor role as a pilot in South Pacific, followed by a substantial part as Waikiki in the comedy Gidget. McClure was the only one of the actors in Gidget who actually grew up on the beach and surfed. Altogether, McClure appeared in 42 movies but is probably best remembered as the cowboy Trampas in the long-running television western series The Virginian. 

Another one of our own was Ryan O’Neal, although we knew him as Pat. I was friends with his younger brother and stayed overnight at their house a couple of times. Although their father was a screenwriter, Ryan, like Doug McClure, didn’t get into acting until his late teens. Before that, he was known around the Palisades for his boxing skills and bad temper. While still a senior in high school in 1959, he was in an episode of Dobe Gillis. I don’t know if O’Neal and Denver told Palisades stories on the set. O’Neal was then in episodes of one TV series after another until, by 1962, he had made a dozen appearances. He landed his first major role on the western series Empire, appearing in 31 of its 33 episodes. 

However, it was Peyton Place, a soap opera that began in 1964 and ran for more than 500 prime-time episodes, that propelled O’Neal into starring roles in movies, including Love Story, Wild Rovers, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Barry Lyndon, A Bridge Too Far, and dozens more. Both of the old O’Neal family homes, their first one that fronted on Sunset Boulevard and a second one a few blocks away, were razed in the fire. 

The destruction of Pacific Palisades need not have happened. We Palisades kids grew up with Santa Ana winds and fires. Wind-driven brush fires were part of living in a community that was built on land sandwiched between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean—in the words of the founders of the community in 1922, “where the mountains meet the sea.” 

Every fall and early winter, which is also the driest time of the year for Southern California, Santa Anas intermittently blow. If a fire ignites in the hills to the north or northeast of the Palisades, it will head for the town. It’s always been a problem and houses by the dozens have been lost in fires over the years. However, those houses have nearly always been in areas especially exposed to brush-covered wildlands: hillsides, rims of canyons, and the canyons themselves. Until now, never have the fires roared into the heart of the Palisades and burned everything right down to the beach. 

There are good reasons for the devastating destruction this time. We once had controlled burns in the Santa Monica Mountains, done during May and June, when it was typically overcast and occasionally drizzling or foggy. Only certain sections of hillsides would be burned each year so animals could flee to nearby unaffected areas and erosion would be reduced. As I learned at a young age while on a hike into the hills, the fire crews were composed of young adult offenders from prison camps who volunteered for the job. They enjoyed getting out of the camps, even if it was to burn and clear brush, and they earned credit that reduced their incarceration time.

Meanwhile, fire department tractors were grading the fire roads and, wherever possible, churning up all vegetation on either side of the roads, making for firebreaks throughout the mountains. There were also water tanks at strategic locations. These prophylactic measures didn’t stop all fires but did reduce fuel for the fires and provide lines for containment.

These practices were discontinued decades ago, principally for misguided environmental reasons. Controlled burns are actually ecologically sound if done frequently enough. They prevent great buildups of fuel that create fires so intense they kill trees. If properly contained, they also allow an endangered animal or plant to remain unaffected in areas not subject to the burn. Moreover, ash from the burned flora acts as fertilizer when the rains come and nutritious plants spring up in burned areas, providing ideal browsing for deer. 

The first Europeans to arrive in California noted the native Indians would ignite fires in the hills when offshore winds were blowing. There’s no evidence the Indians were practicing any kind of fire ecology. They simply wanted a hunt made easy. They stationed themselves at the mouths of coastal canyons and waited for deer and other game fleeing the infernos to run directly into their hunters. 

The failure to create and maintain firebreaks and to reduce the buildup of brush in the Santa Monica Mountains were among the most important reasons for the unprecedented devastation of the Palisades Fire. But there was also the utter incompetence of three critical figures in the city of Los Angeles: Mayor Karen Bass, Fire Chief Kristin Crowley, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO Janisse Quiñones. 

Mayor Bass, the first woman and second black person to be mayor, who’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, left L.A. to visit Ghana in West Africa just before the fire erupted. She claimed she was not personally warned of the imminent danger by Chief Crowley. Crowley said that’s untrue. Whether she was personally warned or not seems immaterial. For a week before the fire erupted, meteorologists gave daily warnings that powerful Santa Ana winds were on their way. These forecasts repeatedly included ominous descriptions of how the brush had become tinder-dry after nine months without a drop of rain. When Bass got back to L.A., she was rudderless, feckless, and demonstrated no leadership. She might as well have stayed in Africa. 

Chief Crowley, “openly gay” and the first woman to head the L.A. Fire Department, blamed the failure of her department to adequately prepare for the fire on the $17.6 million that Mayor Bass cut from the department’s budget. Crowley’s right about that, but she doesn’t remind anyone that her priorities as chief were diversity, equity, and inclusion, a “progressive work environment,” and an end to “toxic masculinity.” According to department’s strategic plan documents highlighted after the fire by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, those progressive goals ranked above “technological innovations” and “disaster recovery capabilities.” A war of words between the two women and two promoters of DEI resulted in Bass firing Crowley. Crowley has vowed to sue the city. 

The third critical figure in the Palisades Fire disaster is Puerto Rican-born and educated Janisse Quiñones, head of Water and Power. She was hired by Mayor Bass a year ago as the first woman to head the department and received at a salary of $750,000, far exceeding the $400,000 salary of outgoing CEO Martin Adams, a white male. 

What the Department of Water and Power has failed to do during Quiñones’ tenure is shocking. Pacific Palisades has two reservoirs, the original one located at the top of Chautauqua Boulevard, and one built in the late 1960s well up in Santa Ynez Canyon. At that time, the canyon was a beautiful wilderness, but it has since become a large housing development known as Palisades Highlands. It was in Santa Ynez Canyon that the Palisades Fire erupted.

The Santa Ynez reservoir, which holds 117 million gallons of water, was drained in February 2024 to repair its cover. Since the area was in the middle of a wet winter and the fire danger was nil, the timing was propitious. But when the fire erupted 11 months later, repair work had not even started and the reservoir was still bone dry. Meanwhile, the Chautauqua reservoir was reportedly only two-thirds full. This meant that as soon as holding tanks ran out of water and the Chautauqua reservoir’s level dropped precipitously, there was no longer enough pressure to deliver water to the tanks and onto the hydrants. Firefighters hooked up to hydrants, but nothing came out. All they could do was watch houses burn. 

Quiñones has gone silent and hired the prominent law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olsen at a rate of $1,975 an hour to defend the department against anticipated lawsuits. 

Because the Palisades was full not only of actors but many wealthy and politically connected people, I expect to see lawsuits aplenty. One of the expected plaintiffs is Maria Shriver, the former First Lady of California. “Heartbreaking. Devastating. Beyond belief,” Shriver said on Instagram on Jan. 8. “Everything is gone. Our neighborhood. Our restaurants. All our friends have lost everything. We have evacuated, but are safe. But people have lost everything.” 

All gone with the wind. ◆