Mia Ammer had been through plenty of fire drills before. The seasoned Hollywood publicist spent a decade raising her kids in the Pacific Palisades, where blazes would often threaten her home from the hills to the north. Historically, however, “fire had never jumped Sunset Boulevard and threatened our town,” she said.
But that changed on Jan. 7, when an inferno tore through her idyllic neighborhood, just north of Santa Monica on the western edge of Los Angeles’ city border. The Palisades fire and the devastating Eaton Fire to the east that ravaged Altadena and parts of northern Pasadena have created the horror show of wildfire destruction that the world has watched unfold in real time via nonstop news coverage.
Only two door frames and a portion of Ammer’s fireplace remain intact at the home she purchased in 2015, on Bienveneda Avenue, near the now-leveled Palisades Charter High School (where 1976’s “Carrie” was filmed). In a harrowing twist, the house contained invaluable scrapbooks and the ashes of Ammer’s late husband — the beloved film marketing executive Geoff Ammer, who died unexpectedly 13 years ago. That was the last time Ammer had to rebuild her life from the ground up.
“It’s truly the only thing I cared about. There were some memory books that friends put together with photos and handwritten letters about what Geoff meant to them. It was the only thing I wanted for my kids and it’s gone,” Ammer told Variety. “His ashes were there, too. It’s where he’s meant to be.”
A family friend took an old sweater that belonged to Geoff after he died in 2012 at the age of 62. The friend returned that sweater on Saturday to Mia’s 19-year-old son, Geoff Ammer Jr., who traveled home from college at UC Santa Barbara to be with his mom and sister Annie, 17. He hasn’t taken the sweater off since.
All that remains of Mia Ammer’s home in Pacific Palisades: Photo courtesy of Bo Bridges.
Bo Bridges
Ammer tells a story that echoes the experience of countless others in the area during the past week. She has faced “panic,” “numbness” and “total shock” as she watched her home disappear in snippets of cell phone camera footage.
“We’ve lived through so many of these fire warnings and you don’t know how seriously to take it. My house has never really been in danger. All my neighbors were thinking the same thing — we’d just return. That’s why so many people left with just the clothes on their back,” she said. The Palisades fire is an unprecedented economic and environmental catastrophe, but Ammer said it’s first and foremost “a housing crisis, unless you’re uber-wealthy.”
The day the fires broke out, Ammer was at work as a VP of corporate entertainment at PR firm Sunshine, Sachs, Morgan & Lylis. She made a name for herself as an effective and well-liked corporate communications exec who has worked for studios including Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. Her daughter Annie was the only person at the Bienveneda house when fire warnings escalated.
“The alerts woke her up after I called about 27 times. I rattled off a few things she should take, and she got out of the house with one hoodie and our passports,” said Ammer. Annie, a student at Palisades High, was immediately trapped in gridlock upon her escape. She thankfully knew a shortcut by her school and avoided abandoned cars and “the utter chaos of evacuation. People were driving on the wrong sides of the street.”
Geoffrey Ammer Jr.’s destroyed truck. Credit: Bo Bridges.
Ammer’s house survived the night but soon caught fire (along with her entire block) on Jan. 8. Ammer, her partner Erik Logan, former CEO of World Surf League and former co-president of Oprah Winfrey’s OWN cabler, and her kids visited the remains of their home the following day.
“We lived next to a town house, and there was a ton of debris. The safe in my bedroom closet had blown apart. Everything was gone. We found a ceramic bear that Annie made in class, and the doorknob to her bedroom,” she said.
Ammer and her daughter have relocated to Logan’s home in Manhattan Beach. She said tears come often, inspired by “the way that this community has come together. Sunshine Sachs has been so incredibly supportive. [My client] Constance Schwartz-Morini from SMAC had a box of clothes delivered for my daughter in under two seconds. The generosity has been so overwhelming. I’m so humbled by it, and it makes you hopeful.”
As a widow and single mother, Ammer said she would not have survived the loss of her husband without having friends and neighbors in the Palisades that served as her village. Those same neighbors have organized a relief fund for the family.
“It was unique in that there was no better place to raise a family,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been able to get through it without the Palisades community. From driving my kids to school — I just I don’t know what I would have done without it.”
Silver linings are hard to find at present, but Ammer is encouraged by neighbors and friends who are relocating to L.A.’s South Bay area and sticking together.
“There are a ton of families who have moved down here in the South Bay between Hermosa and Manhattan Beach. We’re sort of rebuilding down here,” she said. “I know not everyone is this lucky.”
Geoffrey Ammer, Jr. takes in the remains of his childhood home. Photo courtesy of Bo Bridges.
