I was hosting a shiva in LA — then the fires started
Countless friends have been forced to evacuate their homes — and leave too much of their history behind
Burned cars sat parked in front of a burning home as the Eaton Fire moved through Altadena, California on Wednesday. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman January 8, 2025
LOS ANGELES — We awoke this morning into what felt like another night. Smoke covered the sun, making 7 a.m. as dark as 10 p.m. I checked in with my friend, John Mankiewicz, who had evacuated from his home in the Pacific Palisades. “Looks like our side of the street scraped through but who knows,” he texted. “Embers.”
Around 11 a.m., worse news: His house was gone.
The evacuations started last night. My wife and I were hosting a shiva for a friend’s father at our home, and the guest count rapidly dropped from 25 to 10. A friend called to say she had paused only to grab family photos and some valuables before driving past incoming fire trucks to her daughter’s home. In the midst of the shiva the evacuation zone expanded. Two friends got up and ran out.
When we went to sleep, the fire had spread from 700 to 2,900 acres. By morning it was at 11,802 acres. Zero percent containment. There are five congregations in the Palisades fire area. The fire has consumed over 1,000 structures so far. But real estate doesn’t begin to describe community.
I have been a regular visitor to the Palisades for decades — playing tennis at Palisades Park, visiting friends, grabbing coffee. L.A. is a city of neighborhoods separated by moats of traffic, and the Palisades was a uniquely peaceable kingdom — clean streets, beautiful homes, nice stores.
My friends who lived there liked to call it Mayberry. The description was a little tongue in cheek; it was a small town feel with big, big names. I would tell visitors that if they wanted to see celebrities in L.A., forget Beverly Hills and its A-list restaurants. Just go to the Palisades Starbucks at Sunset and Swarthmore. It wasn’t a coincidence that when a TV news reporter stopped to interview a local resident helping clear the roads for evacuees, it turned out to be the actor Steve Guttenberg.
Larry David based his season five Curb Your Enthusiasm storyline about creating a “Larry David sandwich” at the former Mort’s Deli. The buildings where Morts and Starbucks once stood have all burned to the ground.
California is prone to wildfires. But the Palisades and Eaton fires, which broke out Tuesday, belong in a different category. A combination of fierce, dry Santa Ana winds rushing in from the east, months of sustained drought and dense, dry vegetation — the result of last year’s record rains — fueled a firestorm of the century. It has roared through neighborhoods, overwhelming overstretched fire crews and sucking water supplies dry. The high winds grounded air tankers, which would normally scoop up ocean water to douse the flames.
“We were not prepared,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Morone. “This is not a normal red flag alert.”
John Mankiewicz, my friend — and a movie and TV writer— thought for much yesterday that the fire wouldn’t touch him. He stood on his deck and took a photo of the fire soon after it started, about a mile away. The smoke plume looked distant and harmless.
“To go from this to what happened is insane,” he said.
The high winds blew the fire south, where it ignited Temescal Canyon. At 4 p.m. Tuesday, Mankiewicz, who is 70, and his wife, Katie Bergin, an event producer, packed their white Labrador, Daisy, in the car and fled.
“I kept thinking that we didn’t really have to,” he said, “It’s just all incremental, like, oh, it’s not going to get here.”
On the way out, Mankiewicz grabbed passports and a pocket watch that belonged to his grandfather, the late Herman Mankiewicz, who wrote Citizen Kane, among other classics. He also took a Sandy Koufax baseball card, a signed Bobby Thompson baseball, his son Jack’s journals and camera. “It was just stuff that was nearby,” he told me when I reached him this morning at the hotel to which they evacuated.
He decided to leave behind a beloved 1921 Martin guitar, and a mandolin Katie had made for him.
“I just thought we’d be back,” he said.
He spent the night checking the home security system loaded onto his iPhone. At 1 a.m. it stopped working. This morning he kept checking the online fire maps, with hope slowly giving way to dread. By late morning he learned that the embers that he feared had indeed floated up from Temescal and set the homes on Radcliffe Ave. on fire.
Along with thousands of other Angelenos — and other dear friends who have lost their homes — he is trying to come to grips with the past few hours.
“I’m trying to find the spiritual angle on this,” he had texted earlier. “It’s just stuff, right?”
But he and Katie raised their two children in the home, which they bought in 1987. Their emotions shuttle between gratitude and loss — and wonder at an uncertain future.
“If we rebuild, we would be rebuilding in an area where everyone has to rebuild,” he said. “You know, it would be so weird. I mean, there’s no more Palisades.”
Mankiewicz sent me photos a friend of his took as he drove out of the neighborhood, block after block of smoking ruins, skeletal trees, burned out cars. I thought back to the photo he had taken on his balcony yesterday, of the small plume of smoke rising in the distance, looking like trouble was far away. What, after all, were the chances?
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