“My three dark minks, my white mink, my sables, some really very nice little jewels are gone. But the jewels and furs are replaceable, darlings. I lost my little dog in the fire. For that, I am heartbroken.”
Zsa Zsa Gabor (accompanied by friend Robert Straile and an unidentified gentleman) rummages through the remains of her Bel Air estate following the Bel Air fire of November, 1961. Started as a brush fire on November 6th, 1961, the hot, dry Santa Ana winds quickly fanned the blaze into a conflagration, prompting mass evacuations and causing the eventual loss of 484 homes over two days. Zsa Zsa was in New York when her home caught fire and was among many classic film stars who suffered losses during the event. From the Los Angeles Times archives:
-Film stars stood their ground against the encroaching flames, alongside other residents. Maureen O’Hara and Kim Novak risked their lives to douse flames with garden hoses. Fred MacMurray took studio workers with him from the set of “My Three Sons” to help evacuate neighbors and his family from their two-story colonial house in Brentwood. Then MacMurray stayed to help firefighters cut down brush around his Halvern Drive home, confining the fire damage to a portion of his house.
-Burt Lancaster lost his home on Linda Flora Drive, but not his $250,000 art collection, which happened to be on loan to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
-The lush Bel-Air canyons were covered in ash, the hills burned bare. Two chimneys from Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Bellagio Place home stood like eerie sentinels over the house’s charred remains. Gabor flew home from New York, where — with a shovel in hand, a 10-carat diamond on one finger and pearls around her neck — she sifted through the rubble.
-The flames leapfrogged through the verdant canyons of Brentwood and over Chalon Road to Mandeville Canyon, where actor Robert Taylor escaped with his dog, Henry, from his 113-acre ranch. Ranch hands took his 11 horses and two hunting dogs to makeshift corrals on the football field at Paul Revere Middle School.
-Actor Richard Boone didn’t believe in miracles and spent the night manning garden hoses at his ranch and at those of two neighbors. Boone had lost his Pacific Palisades home to a fire two years before. But this one was spared.
-Actress Joan Fontaine and comedian Joe E. Brown also lost their homes in the blaze.
LIFE magazine dubbed the fire “A Tragedy Trimmed In Mink” and it became the fifth-costliest blaze in U.S. history up to that point. Miraculously, no human lives were lost during the fire and it resulted in new laws regarding cedar shingled roofs and brush clearance near populated areas.
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