Molly’s grandfather was a marketing consultant for children’s toys who came up with the idea of packaging a synthetic rubber compound in brightly colored plastic “eggs.” After his passing, the family used a part of their inheritance to buy a property in Malibu – which they called “Silly Putty Ranch.”
Molly and her husband, Eddie, moved into the family home in 1999 after her parents’ divorce. 20 years later, daughter Bonnie Mae and son Sebastian (“Bash”) were students at Malibu’s Juan Cabrillo Elementary School – but have since transferred to a school in Pacific Palisades (in West Los Angeles) after the loss of their home.
Eddie says that “The day before the fire was Bash’s seventh birthday, and we had a party for him at Trancas Park (just above the western edge of Zuma Beach). Molly and I dressed up like villains, Bash’s friends dressed up like superheroes, and we got to shoot each other with Nerf darts for about an hour and a half. It’s very therapeutic to shoot your kids every once in a while,” he joked.
“My sister came and stayed with us overnight for the birthday party – her first visit in 10 years – and then we had the Woolsey Fire the next morning. In the 80’s, Molly had seen a wildfire start in that same spot – that same fire corridor – so this time, she started packing the car about an hour before the actual evacuation order was issued. We packed her car with the two kids, a dog and three cats. My car got Molly’s cello; the children’s guitars, violins and an electric ukulele; and a box of photos.
“My mother-in-law, who also lived with us, was in a third car during the evacuation. She loaded up her car with crates and crates of family photos. Her name is Inger Hodgson; she’s a portrait painter of some repute, and she lost a lot of paintings in the fire (although she did save some of them).
“After the fire, we went to my sister-in law Emily’s home in Hawthorne. I had a job scheduled the next day: I’m a set designer/prop guy; I’m constantly amazed at the dumb things I get to do every day, like calculate how many tennis balls I need to drop on somebody – that kind of thing.”
“After the roadblocks were lifted and we were finally able to get back to the property, the chimney was still standing – so we hung all our Christmas stockings on the chimney and posed for a picture. That was going to be our Christmas card this year, but we didn’t manage to send them out – maybe next year.”
For now, the Murphy family is renting a house in nearby Pacific Palisades. “This place has kind of a funky 60’s vibe, with a lot of weird little details like painted cork – but so was our house in Malibu,” Eddie said. When he heard there were looters scavenging the burned-out lots in Malibu, he went back and retrieved his treasured hot-pink Cyrano de Bergerac statue, proudly setting it in the front yard of their Palisades rental.
“Itinerant Lithuanian journeymen originally built the Malibu house back in the 40’s, in pieces and parts. Over the years, it turned into this Frankenstein-type thing where they kept adding things, like a portrait studio and a car port. I’m used to living in a weird house. I don’t know if I could live in a normal house, but we’re not recreating the Malibu place again.”
“We’d been living there for 20 years after her parents’ divorce, and they didn’t really speak. They both owned half the house; when we moved there in 1999, we began paying the mortgage and doing all the upkeep. We didn’t even become owners of the property until her parents finally signed it over to us last April – which is kind of amazing: had we not done that, we would have been homeless with no insurance money after the fire. It would’ve been a total disaster. So that’s the weird upside to it.
“There are a lot of things that are great about the fire – like all the receipts and papers that I no longer have to file. And every single pair of underwear I own now are all exactly the same age and brand. The same with my socks – they’re all the same vintage, because they’re all new.
“As I started doing that stupid insurance company inventory list of what we’d lost, room by room, I realized one thing really did bother me. My mother spent four years making a huge needlepoint stocking for our daughter Bonnie Mae; and had given it to her as a gift last November, and that was lost. That really hit me. But I’m a prop guy, so I found a woman in Texas that could make another that was exactly the same – then let my mother finish the last 10 percent of it. So, we’ll have it for next Christmas.
“We’re all having a hard time functioning. Focus has been difficult lately, but we’re managing to muddle through. The whole experience has been difficult. Sometimes I still wake up at 3:00 am and wander around because I’m in a weird place: I’m in the city, and I can hear things I couldn’t hear out in Malibu,” Eddie said. “I’ve been taking things from the Malibu place [that I found in the ashes] and making art out of it.”
Eddie’s art project is in the garage of his rental house: a four-foot tall “tree” made out of items found in the rubble, like twisted metal wires. The tree is anchored in a burned-out section of filing cabinet. Eddie says that, once he finishes the piece, he’s thinking of setting it on fire again. “It’s cheaper than therapy,” he grinned.
