It’s been over thirty years since Ali MacGraw lost her home in the 1993 Malibu fires. Now, in light of the LA fires, the 85-year-old “Love Story” actress is sharing her emotional story of loss and resilience. She details the moment she knew it was time to flee Los Angeles and offers advice to those who have recently been impacted by the devastation.
“When it happened to me, I lost everything,” MacGraw, who currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, told The Hollywood Reporter. “The sleazy little outfit I had on for yoga was literally all I owned after the fire. I had just rented the house and everything I owned was inside. Right before I left to do a job in Thailand, I had put everything exactly the way I wanted it and anything that didn’t fit in that house, I got rid of. I knew where absolutely everything was, including every book.”
MacGraw had always dreamed of living near the Pacific Ocean and rented various Malibu homes throughout the ’70s.
In November 1993, however, a blaze erupted and burned 18,000 acres of Malibu over the course of ten days, according to the Malibu Times. MacGraw’s rental home was burnt to the ground.
“Everything was gone,” she told THR. “The only thing that was there was a funny piece of property overlooking the ocean along with metal outdoor furniture from the owner of the house. Looking out over this churning ocean with the sky full of horror and deep smoke, it was like a movie scene.”
“I remember saying very calmly, ‘What am I supposed to be learning from this?’ Which is a sort of sophisticated version of, ‘Why me?’ But it wasn’t why me,” she continued. “What happened was so bizarre and enormous, that the end of Malibu was absolutely destroyed. It was then that I heard this message: It’s time for you to get out of Los Angeles. I burst out laughing and thought, “Wow, isn’t there a subtler way to make that suggestion?”
“For some reason, I never cried,” she added. “I never carried on. This is not a comment about how fabulous I am or any of that, but I was stone-cold calm. I don’t know why, because it was horrific. It was considered one of the major fires in Malibu, but nothing that’s ever happened can begin to touch what’s going on right now.”
MacGraw made a name for herself in Los Angeles.
Throughout much of the 1960s, MacGraw spent years working at Harper’s Bazaar magazine as a photographic assistant and, later, at Vogue as model and stylist.
In 1969, she earned worldwide recognition for her role in “Goodbye, Columbus,” and one year later, starred opposite Ryan O’Neil in “Love Story.” Los Angeles was home.
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MacGraw said she wanted to stay in Malibu, but came to a realization.
“That realization coincided with a moment that same week when I was walking with my friend in the heartbreaking part of the Palisades that’s just been destroyed,” she said. “We were walking the streets looking for a house in which I could live. Nothing. I can remember my friend and I were holding our Starbucks and we were with our dogs, and we went down every single block. I started to cry because I had been doing that every day for months. This man had apparently seen me crying, and he said, in a really gruff way, ‘Why are you crying?’ I said, ‘I can’t find a place to live.’ He said, ‘But I heard that you had a house near Santa Fe?’ I told him that it was for sale and he said if it hasn’t been sold, ‘Why don’t you just go down there?’”
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“I didn’t know if I would like it,” she added. “I never was somebody who wanted to live in the desert or a dry, dry place. I loved having the ocean nearby, and living among greenery and flowers. He said this unbelievably obvious thing that changed my life: ‘If you don’t like it, don’t stay.’ What a concept! I went down for ‘a little while.’ That was 32 years ago.”
MacGraw said it’s important for people to understand that disasters can happen to “any one of us” at any time.
“The more people behave with kindness and generosity, the better off we will be,” she said. “I would like to hope that anybody with any sort of empty dwelling feels inclined to offer it up to help these people for a year with the most amazingly reasonable rent that they ever imagined, not as a big moneymaking opportunity. We live during a time when people have more money than entire countries and for whom helping a couple of families would be really impactful.”
Having been through a similar situation, the actress urges people to show more “compassion, kindness and generosity all the way across the board.”
“[It] could change our civilization,” she said. “Whatever happened to the phrase, ‘There but for the grace of God go I?’ Treat others the way you would like to be treated, and somehow with deep breaths and kindness, you move into another feeling as time goes by.”
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“Now is an amazing time for people to reach out,” she added. “It doesn’t have to be enormous, even the smallest gesture makes a world of difference. We have to start flipping the language and the emotional behavior of how the world seems to be operating to me right now, with high hysteria, anger and judgment. I’m sick to death of it. There’s an easier, softer way.”
While MacGraw once lived a busy life in Los Angeles, she’s enjoying the peace and quiet that Santa Fe brings.
“I’m a strange old bird at this point. I live north of Santa Fe, kind of in nature, and I’m very involved with the community,” she told The New York Times in May. “I’m blessed to be in good health. And I know so many people who don’t have that choice. I have a life that makes me happy.”
“I’m grateful I had all that, but I live a very different life now,” she added. “I don’t care at all about being seen in the latest piece of clothing or knowing the latest song. I don’t feel diminished by not knowing those things. I did it all and was looked at, and that was for another time.”
