Famed French singer and actor Patrick Bruel is one of the many Europeans who had settled in the idyllic L.A. neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. Now, he has lost his home in the devastating wildfire that has been ravaging the area since last week.
He bought the house eight years ago after his two sons, 21-year-old Leon and 19-year-old Oscar, moved there with their mother, the well-known novelist and filmmaker Amanda Sthers. Johnny Hallyday, the late French crooner, also encouraged Bruel to buy a house there and become his neighbor. Hallyday’s house, where his widow Laeticia lived with their two daughters, has now also perished in the fires.
“It’s a small and beautiful village, a place in which we felt extremely comfortable. It’s hard for me even to talk about it in the past tense. I was there five days ago. It’s very overwhelming,” Bruel tells Variety. Today, the affluent Pacific Palisades village has been mostly destroyed by the wildfire, including landmarks such as the Will Rogers State Historic Park.
“I’d left the day before and my son was there. He was on his way to the airport. He said to me, ‘Should I go back home? Should I go try to save things, maybe there’s time?’ I said, ‘No way, don’t even think about it,’” Bruel recalls. “The first thing he thought of was getting back the cuddly toys from his childhood. It was an obsession for him.”
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Bruel says his home “was a small house, not a big one like the ones described in the media.” He regrets that “so much of the media focuses on all the famous people and how much their homes were worth because behind these headlines there are lives, there are families, there are stories, memories, things that don’t necessarily have a price tag.”
Above all, he says, “there are some 300,000 displaced people. So many of these people will end up with absolutely nothing. I’m hearing that some insurance companies canceled their contracts six months ago because they were afraid of this threat, so some people are without insurance today.”
One image he saw in the media which struck him portrayed a woman crying, saying: “How am I going to explain to my 3-year-old daughter that she no longer has a cuddly toy, that she no longer has toys, that she no longer has her things, that she no longer has school, that she no longer has a home, that we don’t know where we’re going to go or what we’re going to do?”
“For us, it’s very hard because it’s like turning over a new leaf,” he says. “The children are deeply sad to not have said goodbye to their home, their objects, their family photos and their drawings.”
“I had my son Oscar’s drawings in my room, which were little masterpieces,” he continues. Since their house burnt down, Bruel and his sons have been “virtually traveling through it and seeing every object, every nook and cranny, every memory, everything we’ve ever lived in. It was an important house for us. It was an anchor, it was another refuge. It was one of the places where I really felt at home.”
Looking at images of Pacific Palisades after the fire, Bruel says “it looks apocalyptic. You get the impression that a bomb has ravaged everything.” However, he acknowledges that “it could have been so much worse.”
“If it had happened in the middle of the night,” Bruel says, “it wouldn’t have been the same story at all.”