What We Lost in the Fires

A Piece of Hollywood History

Starr Parodi on the Wizard of Oz piano.

I’d always wanted a Steinway. I just love the way they sound. I love the richness of them. Since getting my Steinway in 1993, I have played it on virtually every film score I’ve written. I always heard music in my head when I sat at the keys — whenever I put my hands down, ideas always came to mind.

Every piano has a distinct personality. I felt the livingness of the wood that my Steinway was made with, and the vibes that emanated from it through the people who had played it before on the MGM Scoring Stage, including Harold Arlen, George Gershwin or Irving Berlin. On all those great musicals culminating with The Wizard of Oz. I could imagine Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” along with this piano. Until last week, it still had the MGM tag with the serial number on its leg (pictured, below right).

On Tuesday morning when I woke up, it was windy, but beautiful and sunny. I sat outside with a cup of coffee. Dmitri, our dog, was sitting by my side. My husband was setting up for a vocal session in our studio that was supposed to begin at 11 o’clock. Our 21-year-old daughter was sick in bed getting over a bad flu.

Then we saw this cloud coming from the Malibu area. We’d been evacuated a couple of times from fires before, so we were on edge, but we weren’t super alarmed. We were planning on just going on with the session. Then we saw the cloud, now made of very dark smoke, which is not good. If you know anything about fire, white smoke is good, dark smoke is not.

A few minutes later, all our phones started ringing; it was the fire department. Evacuation. But it wasn’t mandatory yet. So we started packing up our stuff — photographs, some microphones, a little bit of artwork and a couple of pieces of clothing, not thinking that we would never come back. I went down to the studio and played my piano for just a minute.

We are so, so blessed: Two friends had an extra house that they offered to us. All of us went over there and felt safe.

Many people said to me, “I’m sure that your studio is going to be OK” — because it’s literally dug into the hill, and so much of it is made of concrete. If anything’s going to withstand this fire, it’s going to be that building. So I had hope.

Later, I was fortunate enough to be able to get back into the Palisades. I had to get there and see it. I got there and my worst fears were confirmed. It was gone. Everything was gone. Everything.

I have so many great memories of not only the house but the neighborhood. I’m looking at pictures now — I’ve been going through a lot of pictures for many reasons. For insurance purposes, as well as just memories. It’s heart wrenching to me because I feel like it is such a special spot on the planet. There’s just the way the light is there, a sweet smell in the air of eucalyptus and jasmine in the summer, and the way that you can see the city and the storms coming and going over the ocean. There was so much love up there — between the neighbors and between our friends and guests that would come to our home. There was always so much love.  

When the pandemic happened in 2020, my daughter got COVID literally the first week of March. There’s a lot of musicians and artists in our hillside neighborhood. So during the lockdown my daughter got her violin and we opened our studio door, she stood on the balcony and I played my piano from inside the studio and played for the neighborhood. We played everything we could think of,  Elton John songs, jazz pieces, classical pieces, Vivaldi, Chopin, gospel songs. We were massively socially distanced because we were literally up on the hillside playing to the street and neighbors below who all came to the sidewalk to listen. One of the neighbors told me just a couple weeks ago that that was one of her best memories ever, because she just felt like it brought everything and everybody together. It was just such an amazing memory.

On Thursday morning, I woke up, and I just couldn’t stop crying. I’m hearing from so many people that are heartbroken because they knew how much the Steinway meant to me. I can’t believe that piano is gone. We were a team.

I’m hoping to get another Steinway at some point. Right now I’m just going between waking up in tears and then feeling strong and determined to not let this stop me, saying to myself, ‘Well, I’m going to get through this.’ It’s funny, an old friend of ours, who is also a pianist, has been through many, many destructive hurricanes in Florida. He told me that the Chinese character for crisis is also the same character for opportunity. He said pleasant experiences and great success make life a joy, but mysteriously, only suffering leads to growth. He said ‘You can think of this as falling upward.’

I got to be a caretaker to a piece of the Wizard of Oz story, which is all about overcoming obstacles. And with the incredible losses my family and I recently experienced, that film and the piano remind us that we will overcome our current obstacles. — AS TOLD TO KEVIN CASSIDY

A Thriving Neighborhood  

A Black Altadena community sees its heritage razed by the Eaton Fire.

On Jan. 9, the day fires would rage through the predominately Black middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood of Altadena, Snoop Dogg was at the home of producer and videographer Joseph Austin working on an edit of the upcoming film The Greatest, a collaboration between the rapper and Ryan Reynolds. Hours later, in the middle of the night, Austin was ushering his fiancée and their young daughters out of the home they’d just moved into six months before, black smoke and embers from the fire encroaching so rapidly, they didn’t have time to grab their evacuation bags.

“Everything I’ve ever shot for the past 15 years is gone,” says Austin, who made a career directing music videos and photographing the professional highlights of such L.A. icons as rappers Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle and Lakers superstar LeBron James. “All my cameras, every lens, everything I’ve ever owned, gone.”

That’s the resounding refrain from Altadenians who are mourning both the loss of personal artifacts that bore witness to the richness of Black culture in the region and communal landmarks like the Lake Avenue business district made up of mom-and-pop shops and restaurants, where the “Greetings From Altadena” mural on the side of Grocery Outlet once welcomed shoppers. The faces of former residents — artist Charles White and author Octavia E. Butler, who wrote of a wildfire sparked by climate change ravaging Los Angeles in the year 2025 in her 1993 genre novel Parable of the Sower — are painted within the letters.

Famed jazz musician Bobby Bradford, who moved to Altadena in 1964 — just as the demographic of the once overwhelmingly white neighborhood was beginning to change — is among them. “I lost my two cornets and all my books and films from the last 50 years,” says the 90-year-old former lecturer who taught the history of jazz at Pomona College for 44 years until 2021. “All that material that I had that covered Charlie Parker and the beboppers, Louis Armstrong, all the photographs, everything’s gone.”

Gone also are the spaces that brought residents of the small town of 42,000 together regularly, like Altadena Community Church and Altadena Baptist Church, which once stood two blocks from Bradford’s home. “There’s a small community hardware store that everybody goes to a couple times a month to fix faucets or whatever, that’s gone,” he adds.

Actress Gillian White, who’s married to fellow actor Michael Jai White, lost the childhood home she grew up in. Her parents, both 76, bought the house in 1970 for $17,250. “Their down payment was a dollar,” she recalls. White fondly remembers perusing the shops on Lake Avenue as a young girl and getting candy from Webster’s Community Pharmacy, which miraculously survived the Eaton Fire. Such was not the case for another personally beloved landmark.

“The one thing that hurt my heart the most was Farnsworth Park,” says White of the space that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. “Farnsworth Park was a block from my mother’s house, and there was a little arena where they would do concerts. My friends and I would go up there when nothing was going on, put on little shows and pretend like we were singing to an audience in the stands. There are so many wonderful memories from that.”

The restaurant Fox’s was a personal favorite of Bob Hearts Abishola co-creator Gina Yashere, who frequently had breakfast there after she purchased her now-destroyed dream home in Altadena in 2020. Rhythms of the Village, a shop and cultural center celebrating African heritage, also was razed. “I used to have clothes made there all the time, and now they’re gone,” she says. “I’m just hoping to God that they’ll come back, because these kinds of stores, if you lose those, you lose the spirit of Altadena.”

It’s that possibility that gives Yashere, who’s now filming Star Trek: Starfleet in Toronto, pause about the future of her neighborhood. “I want to come back and rebuild, but I don’t want to be surrounded by tech bros and trust fund babies. I want to be surrounded by the mix of people that made Altadena what it was,” she says. Austin says he and his family, sheltering in Pasadena, will be one of the first to return when the time comes. “I’ll never move away from Altadena,” he says. “This is home.” — BRANDE VICTORIAN

A Local Favorite

Jennifer Meyer on The Reel Inn.

I have memories of being there from 30 years ago, so many memories. It had the freshest fish, the best vibe. Inside, it didn’t matter if you were a fancy person who just wanted a delicious meal or a surfer who had just run across the street barefoot to grab a fish taco. Everyone felt great there. You just knew you’d be getting a good meal from sweet people. You knew you’d be taken care of at a place that had been there almost 40 years. You don’t drive down PCH without wanting to read the silly puns written on the board. Every time I drove by, I would think, “Wow, that was a clever one.’” I would try to think of what my silly pun would be, and I could never think of one. I can’t believe it’s gone. It doesn’t make sense. The Reel Inn was the best. — AS TOLD TO CHRIS GARDNER

An Architectural Masterpiece 

Justin Davidson on Ray Kappe’s Keeler House.

Ray Kappe’s Keeler House was made mostly of two substances that fire can’t destroy: light and air. The rough concrete walls and silky wood banisters were just the tissue wrapping, really, for the feeling of living comfortably almost outdoors. Rain battered against the vaulted skylight. The afternoon glare hammered at the glass walls. A central staircase slinked along the house’s spine, connecting floors and mezzanines that stuck out into the air like a staggered stack of diving boards.

Precariousness was part of its magic. Like so many of L.A.’s modern structures, cantilevered out over plunging canyons and ocean views, it seemed to court its own spectacular demise. You could imagine it, shaken loose by a tremor or propelled by a mudslide, tobogganing down the hillside to the beach. Part of the pleasure it offered was the sheer improbability of its existence. And it lasted only 35 years, not even long enough to go out of style. 

Kappe, who died in 2019 at 92, was more influential and prolific than he was famous. He sowed the city with more than 100 houses, ranging from modest modular homes to deluxe aeries. His own house is a virtuoso assemblage of warm and airy rooms slipped in among the crevices of Rustic Canyon. In 1972, he and a group of like-minded renegades rebelled against the dogma-laced training establishments and founded the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or Sci-Arc — a freewheeling institution that encouraged risk-taking and aesthetic experiments. 

In his own best work, he merged two California trends. One was the hedonistic modernism of the 1960s, with its pools and decks and living rooms designed to complement the perfect martini. The other was a backwoods vernacular of redwood cabins, canyon shacks and hunting blinds. At the Keeler House, this fusion yielded an immensely livable castle, warmed by its wood finishes, dappled by all the (flammable) greenery outside, and shaped by a powerful sense of California romance. 

Our Recovery Haven

W. Peter Iliff on the Palisades’ 12-step community.

Our hearts are broken.

So many dear pals lost homes in the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles and Pacific Palisades. Many were neighbors, Hollywood pals and friends from my 20-plus years of sobriety in the 12-step recovery community, which has had an enormous presence in the Palisades and Malibu for decades. First, let me say, my wife Ruthanne and I are safe. We moved out of the Palisades some years ago. We bought a home across from a park near downtown Culver City, but we spent 28 good years in the Palisades.

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This story appeared in the Jan. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.