For roughly two decades, the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood has been the epicentre of entertainment industry glad-handing and deal-making. Regulars at its restaurant and bar include the actress Jennifer Aniston, the mogul Jeff Bezos and the designer and film director Tom Ford.
But the scene was different Wednesday night. The hotel – like the Beverly Hills Hotel three miles away – was booked to capacity with local residents who fled the Palisades, Brentwood and Laurel Canyon neighbourhoods because of the wildfires ricocheting through Southern California, razing mansions and starter homes alike.
Some brought children. Some brought dogs. Some brought both. Lorrie Bartlett, an agent at Creative Artists Agency whose clients include Samuel L. Jackson, Regina King and Michael Keaton, was seated near the front of the restaurant at the Sunset Tower Hotel, with Olive, her Rhodesian Ridgeback, to her left. Bartlett was staying at the hotel after leaving her house in Laurel Canyon earlier that day out of what she called an “abundance of caution.” Fires had just started to spread to Hollywood Hills to the east. But her uncle in Altadena had just lost his house, she said.
A few tables behind, Natasha Croxall, a philanthropist who lives on the edge of the Palisades and Brentwood, was sobbing as she spoke into the phone with one of roughly 20 friends she said had lost their homes in the previous 36 hours. She was lucky not to have been among them, but she was nevertheless “thunderstruck,” she said. There were some indications that the worst was over. But it all depended on the weather, Croxall noted. “Nobody knows,” she said.
Mansions were reduced to ash in Pacific Palisades, a celebrity enclave. Subdivisions burned to the ground 56km to the east in the tidy suburb of Altadena. Homeowners in freshly built developments hours away in inland communities like Pomona braced for evacuations as 94kmph winds rattled windowpanes and palm trees.
“The only thing I would compare with this would be a massive earthquake,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, 76, who served for decades in LA as a councilman. “Except that quakes have an epicenter. This thing is all over the place,” he said. “This morning, a big black cloud hung over the city. It was biblical.”
