Paul is a past President of the Malibu Association of Realtors and has been a real estate broker in Malibu for more than 20 years. Rebecca is a landscape designer (for Rebecca Bonney Garden Design) and jazz pianist. After ten years together, they were married in 2016. They each had two children from previous marriages.
Rebecca says that, “The day of the fire, I was originally scheduled to go to Las Vegas. It was a long-planned weekend getaway with the girls, for one of the girl’s birthdays. Then we got the evacuation notice that morning.
“Paul told me, ‘Oh, you’re absolutely going. If the fire comes over the ridge, I’ll evacuate with the dogs. Go. I’ve lived here for 30 years and the house hasn’t burned yet.’ I already had my suitcase packed for the trip – but with the fire threatening, I took three pieces of art. One I got in the 80s by Francois Gileau (Picasso’s girlfriend): it wasn’t even hanging on the wall, but I thought ‘I’m taking it.’
“We each have two kids, so I also took my kids’ baby books and albums. I grabbed my oboe, which was very strange because I hadn’t played it in 25 years. It was sitting on the piano and I just threw it in the box. My packing was very haphazard. I saw my yearbook sitting there: it was out because I had just gone to my class reunion, but for some reason I didn’t put that in the box.
“Paul and I had matching T-shirts that said ‘Wine Drinking Team,’ and that’s what I happened to be wearing when I drove down to Pacific Coast Highway and got stuck in traffic. PCH was a parking lot and I had no cell service. An hour or two later, suddenly there was cell service, and all my text messages started pouring in. I got one from Paul that said the power was out and he was going to evacuate.
“I had to use the restroom and finally stopped at a porta-potty along PCH. I come out of the restroom, and here I am in my bright green ‘Wine Drinking Team’ t-shirt in front of all the cars. I’ll bet people thought, ‘Wow, that’s what she evacuated in?’
“Traffic was so bad that it took 5½ hours just to meet up with my friends at Westchester (on the west side of LA). I was supposed to be the driver but was already physically and emotionally drained; all of the friends who’d been waiting hours for me had already started drinking, so we ended up cancelling our trip.”
Paul picks up the story from there. “I’ve lived in Malibu for 34 years and been in that house for 24 years, so during that time I’ve had a lot of experience with fires and disasters. The closest any fire had ever come was about seven miles away. I told Rebecca to go to Vegas and have a good time. I thought it was impossible for a fire to reach our house, and was calm about it. The smoke came more and more, and by 11:00 am I could see flames coming over the ridge – but I was still calm because I didn’t think the fire would reach us. Brush had been cleared by everyone.
“When the wind really came up, it sounded like a freight train. But even then, I thought that, at worst, I’d have to sleep on Zuma Beach for a night or two – so I grabbed a bag and packed lights, batteries, dog food, underwear, T-shirts and the dog.”
Rebecca interjected, “He didn’t take a piece of beautiful art we had in the living room, that I was beating myself up over for not taking with me when I left.”
Paul continued, “I was able to reach my son, Josh, who lives at Zumirez and PCH (across from Point Dume) and whose wife, Jamie, was 8½ months pregnant. We decided to meet at a parking lot and not have to brave the traffic on PCH. I was very antsy: after a while, I tried to drive back to the house but only got as far as Busch Drive, where the fire department was putting out flames in houses all around me right there.
“I couldn’t see our house, just the ravine with boiling smoke and flames. I assumed right then that our house was gone. I knew it couldn’t survive down there. For the next few days, people kept blowing sunshine at me, saying, ’Oh, you never know, I’m sure your house is okay.’
“I went back to the parking lot and hung out there for a while until the smoke got really bad. Jamie was really uncomfortable – so when the traffic cleared up a little around 2:00 pm, we went to the Ralph’s Shopping Center (in mid-Malibu). Then I decided to drive out to the desert, to our home in La Quinta.”
Rebecca: “We were lucky to have a home there, and that’s where we rendezvoused. The yard at our house in Malibu was moist and irrigated, and it was terraced, and I was holding out hope that the house didn’t burn. But we didn’t know either way until the next day.
“Josh ended up at a hotel in Marina del Rey, and he and his buddy brought a boat down from Oxnard and paddle-boarded to the beach. He had stashed a bicycle nearby and rode it around to check on everyone’s house. His condo was fine, he found out his mother’s house was okay, and also his brother Jeff’s place at Paradise Cove. Then he biked up to our place and sent us a photo. We were so grateful to finally know one way or the other.”
Paul: “By nature, I’m what you’d call a flatliner. At first, I didn’t get very emotional about the whole thing because I kept telling myself ‘It’s just stuff. You still have the memories.’ But gradually, I started to think about things I lost that were really important to me, like the handwritten letters I received from my son when he was in the US Marine Corps boot camp 20 years ago.”
Rebecca: “I continued working as a landscape designer a week after the fire. I couldn’t change what happened and I said the serenity prayer a lot. One of my clients had a house burn down previously, and she said, ‘People will tell you, ‘It’s just stuff,’ but you have to grieve your stuff’’ –and I had my moments where I got really sad. For me, it was the photographs, all my music books from being a professional piano player, all my gardening books for landscape design, my daughter’s pencil drawing that it took her 50 hours to do in high school, and my hand-designed Christmas cards from over the years. Like I would dress my kids as angels and have a cute little saying. I didn’t grab the envelope that had all those cards in. I was so sad about that. Fortunately, I found out later that many of our friends had saved those cards over the years and they gave theirs back to me. Now, I have all of them except one. I’m so touched and tickled, and now I’ve taken pictures of all of them so I have the photos backed up in the cloud.”
Paul: “I’m very proud that Rebecca, in the end, has been so accepting that this is what happened. She has adapted, and taken the time to mourn her things appropriately, and has helped us move along. Two weeks after the fire, our granddaughter (Decker Jane) was born, so there was real joy in that.” Rebecca added that, “I golf, and that took my mind off the fire in the beginning. On the golf course, I’m out there in nature on the golf course – and that helped me appreciate the positive.”
Paul and Rebecca then started to talk about the strange contrasts between some of what survived and what did not. “When we went back to the house to see it for the first time, the Bentley in the garage was beyond toast,” Paul said.
Rebecca joined in, “Even though every house had burned down around ours, my pickup was completely untouched. The little memorial statue of my dog Pippa (taken by a coyote last year) survived even though the plants burned all around it. In the rubble, I only found a few things: a little wheelbarrow ashtray with all of its little trays, another ashtray, a roach key clip I had in college, and a couple ceramic mushrooms. It’s funny that it was mostly smoking paraphernalia, and I don’t even smoke that much.”
In conclusion, Paul confirmed that, “We are going to rebuild, and we have an architect. The exciting part for me is, ‘What are we going to do different?’ We’re considering putting everything on one level, or maybe changing where the garage was located. I love to cook, and I got new pots and pans and new knives already. We literally got about 10 Amazon boxes a day for a while (ordering replacement items online). We bought a bed and a refurbished piano. We had piles of broken-down boxes. I keep thinking of more stuff I want, like cooking spices, spice jars and even little things like nail clippers.”
