IT WAS beautiful in its own way. I am talking about the fire that swallowed Malibu last week. Don't get me wrong. I'm not some sick pyromaniac who gets her kicks from such scenes. I'm just a person who has lived in Los Angeles for most of her days. And one day last week, I was walking on the Strand boardwalk alongside the Pacific Ocean just a few miles south of Malibu beach. The ashes were swirling around me in graceful drifts as if I were strolling through the first snowfall of the year.
Only it never snows in Southern California. It never rains in California - if you believe everything you hear in bad pop songs about the Golden State. Southern California, with its 300 days a year of cruise-in-your-convertible weather, its disproportionateallotment of beautiful people, and their aggressive pursuit of the good life, has always glowed in America's mind - hell, make that the world's mind - as paradise found. But on this scorching mid-autumn day, Southern California glowed for a different reason.
On this late afternoon, 26 fires were raging across the region, one of them consuming thousands of hectares just over the hill from where I was digging my toes into the sand. The horizon glared with orange light. I stood under the hot flurries, along with a dozen or so transients, local residents who make their home on the sandy expanses that line the Strand. Some had tattered sleeping bags in hand, others pushed shopping carts (the 'Family Car of the 1990s' as more than one hip L.A. Westsider has callouslyquipped) piled high with empty aluminum soda cans and clothing rummaged from the local bins. They stared, awestruck, into the flaming hills.
For once it wasn't their homes that were being taken. Instead the multimillion-dollar houses of the rich and famous - the folks on Robin Leach's dream guest roster - were disappearing hour by hour: Sean Penn's $4 million home; Ali McGraw's Southwestern-style cottage. Demi Moore and Bruce Willis threw their furniture and artwork on to the beach in a panicked effort to save something, anything. Local news coverage showed Lethal Weapon's Gary Busey loading up his gleaming black Mercedes with whatever he could shove into its contours.
Of course, the fire didn't just target the members of the Screen Actors Guild. More than 350 houses were destroyed by that blaze alone. As California Governor Pete Wilson poignantly put it: 'It's pretty heartbreaking to look down from a helicopter and see these orange squares glowing in the blackness of the night - because you know that's somebody's home.' Fire has been called The Great Equaliser. It discriminates not according to race or sex - nor even the number of zeroes on your pay cheque. It's only objective is to clear the land. To cleanse the region so life can begin again.
Cleansing Los Angeles. Make way for something new and pure. The irony of such thoughts hasn't been lost on the bitter many who have done their time there, only to despise it and spend the rest of their days praying for the City of Angels to drop into Hell,or at least the Pacific. It is my hometown but I have to admit there are a lot of people in LA for whom a little behaviour modification would do a lot of good. Which reminds me of a joke that was making the rounds this summer: Question: did you hear about the studio executive who sold his mother for the rights to a screenplay? Answer: you mean that guy at Paramount or the one at Columbia? You get the picture.
The disaster has struck hardest at the industry's own. Still, this cynicism, this ironic humour, this refusal to take anything too seriously - modern-day survival techniques - has pervaded the collective psyche of the Film People, even as the fires raged. The Malibu fire jokes have been endless. Perhaps the most heartless are the dinner-party stories about British director Duncan Gibbins, who suffered fatal burns when he endeavoured to rescue his cat, cowering in a tree. He started his Hollywood career by directing Paramount Pictures' 1986 film, Fire with Fire. Gibbins also wrote the screenplays for Third Degree Burn and The Eve of Destruction.