There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband's necks. Anything can happen.
Raymond Chandler, Red Wind (1938)
The 2025 Palisades Fire served as a stark reminder to all Southern Californians—rich/poor, white/hispanic/black/asian, straight/gay/lgbtq+—that if the Santa Anas are blowing, whatever security you once enjoyed is gone. I learned this harsh fact of life in Malibu at age 5.
My older sister Robin and I were probably playing on the beach in front of our house at 101 Malibu Colony when the fire started.
At around 8 a.m., a downed power line at Clampitt Road, near Beale’s Cut, the low mountain pass that separates the Santa Susana from the San Gabriel Mountains, sparked the drought‑parched grass and chaparral. With every gust of the 80-mile-per-hour Devil Winds, the fire grew.
Within minutes the entire “Oak Woodland Ecosystem” was burning, and the flames were spreading downhill fast as the gale force winds that carried blazing embers, acorns, and debris miles west to start new fires.
Some say the term “Santa Ana” comes from the Native Californian word for wind. Others claim Spanish missionaries felt the presence of Satanas (Satan) in the seasonal winds that occur when the cool, dry air from the U.S. interior loses moisture and moves west. Like box canyons that narrow rivers and create rapids and waterfalls, the mountain passes that are the gateway to greater Los Angeles funnel, pressurize, and heat these winds like a cosmic turbo charger. As the Santa Anas descend from the mountains to the flatlands, their temperature rises 5 degrees Fahrenheit for every 1,000 feet they drop.
Since the time of the Chumash, fire has been an integral part of life in Malibu. During the 20th century, Malibu averaged two major fires per decade.
1929 – “Malibu Colony Fire,” 13 homes burned.
1930 – “Potrero Fire,” Decker Canyon Road, 15,000 acres.
1935 – “Malibu Fire” Kanan/Decker Corridor, 30,000 acres.
1938 – “Topanga Fire,” Topanga Canyon, 14,500 acres.
1943 – “Las Flores Fire,” Malibu Canyon, 5,800 acres.
1943 – “Woodland Hills Fire,” Kanan/Decker Corridor, 15,000 acres.
1956 – “Newton Fire,” Kanan/Decker Corridor, 26,000 acres, 100 homes, one death.
1958 – “Liberty Fire,” Malibu Canyon, 18,000 acres, eight firefighters injured, 74 homes destroyed.
1961 – “Topanga Fire,” Topanga Canyon, 8,000 acres.
By late morning, the Clampitt Fire was moving west fast. Soon a twenty-mile wall of flames would stretch from Newhall to Malibu.
Our parents, Rob Maguire and Joan Tewkesbury, were not home.
Separated and soon to be divorced, we lived with our working mother, aspiring screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury. Many days she left before we were up and returned after we were asleep. Theoretically, we were under the care of Iliana, our spoiled, indifferent young Brazilian babysitter and her idiot sidekick Daisy.
The Brazilian version of Lucy and Ethel lived in the apartment above our garage. My sister and I despised them. Worse than their weird food was the conspiratorial way they used their weird language. Whenever Iliana and Daisy began to scheme in front of us, they would suddenly and conspicuously shift into high tone Portuguese. However, their Malibu halcyon days were coming to an end. Soon, Daisy would make an illegal U-Turn on the Pacific Coast Highway and nearly kill all of us in an accident.
To avoid Iliana and Daisy, I spent as much time as possible on the beach. There, the world was my oyster. With a private entrance and armed guards, “The Malibu Movie Colony” had been home to stars since the 1920s. The bohemian, beach lifestyle that has come to be associated with Malibu was well established long before World War II. Douglas Fairbanks swam naked, and Gloria Swanson practiced vegetarianism and yoga.
Malibu Colony had a rich surfing history. Hawaiian waterman extraordinaire Duke Kahanamoku taught Academy Award-winning actor Ronald Coleman and actresses Clara Bow and Myrna Loy how to surf there. Child star Jackie Coogan, world record‑holding XR-71 “Blackbird” test pilot Bill Bridgeman, and early action movie star Richard Jaeckel all surfed the Colony’s reef breaks.
By the 1970s, surfboards were as common in Malibu Colony as Schwinn Stingrays. The private beach even had its own lifeguard squad and an underground surf club called “The Colony Cool Cats.” In addition to Fourth of July and Labor Day parties, tennis tournaments and luaus, there was an extremely competitive annual surf contest at Old Joe’s.
Our house sat at the foot of Old Joe’s, a mostly left reef break that was a magnet for South Swells and thus a hub of summertime beach activity. The Colony’s surfing tribe was now led by the sons of pioneer California watermen like Santa Monica lifeguard Ralph Kiewitt, “Coast Haole” Hawaiian surfers George Elkins, Jr. and Tim Lyon. All owned beachfront homes and their sons were the older surfers I looked up to most.
The transient movie and rock stars were so ubiquitous in the Colony that they didn’t even raise an eyebrow, much less carry any weight. Some were nice, others were just plain weird. Even at 5, I knew that none of these people were as cool as the Colony’s surfers. While I studied and admired the top surfers from afar, my best friends were the retirees who enjoyed the quiet early morning hours as much as I did.
The beachcomber, Mr. Klein, lived a few doors down. The prolific author of Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder, Oceans and Continents in Motion, World of Measurements, Surfing, and a dozen other books. His front yard was full of lobster, crab, and abalone shells, weathered rocks, and Japanese glass fishing floats. To me, it was better than the Museum of Natural History.
If I was lucky, I would catch Mr. Klein’s eye, he would wave me up to his deck and tell me about his latest finds. Our southern neighbor, Mr. Young, was one of American Airline’s first 747 pilots. He once flew me over the Colony in a small, single engine plane and dive bombed the line up at Old Joe’s. His teenaged sons were also very nice to me, although they occasionally sent me home with sexually explicit questions for my attractive, young mother—“Mom, what is a pussy?” Then there was our northern neighbor Miki Warner. Beneath her gruff, radical chic exterior was a kindhearted and generous woman. Her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, on toasted, buttered French bread, were, to this day, the best I have ever eaten. Although she had three sons, Miki treated me like one of her own, and we remained friends until the day she died.
These and other neighbors made time for me and my endless stream of questions during my pre breakfast rounds on the beach. As cute and curious as I was, I was a lost and lonely little boy.
My sister tried her best to console me, but I missed my mother badly. Malibu was isolated and lonely. The highlight of each day was the sound of Joan’s keys jingling as she walked in the door.
My mom was a beautiful and streetwise Angeleno who had lived by her wits since she was a child. An illegitimate child, my mom’s career in Hollywood started at 10 when she played a ballerina in the 1947 MGM’s film, The Unfinished Dance.
By 18, Joan was dancing on Broadway as the ostrich in Mary Martin and Jerome Robbins’ Peter Pan.
Now she was choreographing, directing plays, and beginning her career as a screenwriter. After Joan watched a rough cut of our Malibu neighbor Bob Altman’s film MASH, she asked him for a job. He offered her the position of script girl on his next film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
We rarely saw our father, the swashbuckling, real estate buccaneer Robert F. Maguire III.
A volatile, mercurial sort of guy, Rob’s greatest strength and weakness was his unwillingness to consider, much less accept, the limits of the possible. Born in Oregon in 1935, he could make his exotic childhood sound quite romantic. However, when Rob described it to me towards the end of his life, he said simply, “I had no childhood.”
After World War II ended, my also swashbuckling pilot grandfather moved his young family to the Philippines, where there was an ongoing guerrilla war (Hukbalahap Rebellion). Many nights, Rob hid under a table, listening to the staccato sounds of gunfire outside his door, wondering “what was going to happen next.”
My grandfather first flew Jews from Shanghai to the Middle East, then moved to Tel Aviv, Israel, and flew more than 40,000 Jews from Yemen, Iraq, and Iran to Israel.
During this time, my father worked as a mechanic’s assistant, accompanied his father on flights and by 14 was a competent pilot. After my grandfather started a new family with a Flying Tiger stewardess, my dad was sent to school in Paris where he made friends with a French aristocrat orphaned by the war. Rather than go to school, they spent most of their time riding bikes around the countryside. Although the school “made a valiant attempt to teach me,” my dad later recalled, “most of the time they had a hard time finding me.”
By the time Rob moved to LA to finish high school, he was a worldly, Gauloises-smoking, trenchcoat-wearing sophisticate who had experienced the aristocratic good life in Nice, the bordellos of Place Pigale, and the jazz clubs of St. Germain. More than anything else, these experiences left my dad with not just a sense of independence, but great faith in himself, and a feeling that he was destined to do big things.
Thanks to his upbringing, chaos and instability was Rob’s natural habitat. This gave him an appetite, not just for taking big risks, but also doubling, then tripling down, again and again and again. It wasn’t about the money. For the future real estate titan who would later be dubbed “The Cat with 10 Lives,” it was about the game, the caper, the action, and the deal.
Even at 5, I knew that my dad was a dangerous guy. Rob drove fast cars fast, flew planes without a license, and preferred boating when waves were breaking across the harbor entrance and everyone else was running for a safe harbor.
I remember returning home from a ski trip in a borrowed plane in first grade. As we descended to land at Santa Monica Airport, I noticed that the runway was lined with firetrucks. “Dad, why are there so many firetrucks?” “Give me a sec,” he replied distractedly. A long pause and an aborted landing later, we touched down. “Little problem with the landing gear,” Rob said as the plane’s tires chirped on the tarmac. Afterwards we climbed into his metallic blue BMW 2800 CS and roared off like it never happened.
Rob was at his Century City office and Joan was at Altman’s Westwood office when they heard that a fire was headed towards Malibu fast. By lunch time, the Spahn Movie Ranch, the one time redoubt of the Manson family, had burned, and the fire had spread to Malibu Canyon. As the flames drew closer, the volume of smoke and frequency of the sirens increased and neighboring families began to fill their cars with kids, pets, and valuables.
It was around this time that Miki Warner came to our house and told us that we would be evacuating with her. Miki loaded us all into her car and we drove to a large house in West LA where there was plenty of food and a pool. It felt more like a slumber party than a crisis. Although there were rumors that we would be spending the night, Joan arrived at sundown, and drove us back into the smoke and fire of Malibu.
When we got back to our house in the Colony, my dad was already there. He had spent most of the afternoon putting out flying embers and reveling in the chaos. Firemen from all over California had mostly stopped the fire from crossing the Pacific Coast Highway, but it was not yet contained. My sister and I changed into our pajamas and watched the glowing orange wall of flames blazing in the hills behind us.
“Wanna see the fire?” Rob asked rhetorically, and a minute later, me, my sister, and our 11‑year‑old neighbor Matt Warner were in his BMW, leaving the safety of the Colony, crossing the Pacific Coast Highway, driving up Civic Center Way towards Webster School and into the flames. I had no fear because my dad had no fear. “The fire was raging on both sides and your dad was narrating as we were driving,” recalled Matt Warner. “I was just fascinated by the fire storm. It was like we were in our own bubble inside his car.”
We turned around and headed back down towards Cross Creek. The wind‑driven flames reminded me of a gigantic blow torch. We made our way towards Serra Retreat, and the flames grew larger, generating so much heat that we could feel it inside the car. Houses, barns, and trees were burning and collapsing on both sides of the road.
Suddenly, through the smoke, we saw ghostly silhouettes, then people leading panicked horses away from the fire. As we passed them, Rob said calmly but forcefully, “Kids! Don’t touch any metal!” Long pause. “Just went over a live wire.” We continued up the hill, but the fire got so bad that Rob finally turned around and retreated back to the Colony. “It just got too hairball,” recalled Matt Warner. “Even for your dad.”
In the end, the Clampitt/Wright Fire scorched 107,103 acres of brush and forest, destroyed 80 structures, and killed four. It stood as L.A. County's deadliest wildfire until the 2009 “Station Fire.” It is hard for people who have not lived in Southern California to understand both the physical and psychological power of the Santa Anas. “The violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability,” wrote native Californian Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”