Cox and Arquette’s Fire Escape

COURTENEY COX and her husband DAVID ARQUETTE were forced to flee the recent fires in Malibu, California when they spread so close to their home they could smell burning.

The couple grabbed their three-year-old daughter Coco in the middle of the night when flames reached the house across the road, late last year (07).

Cox says, “Malibu really takes a beating. Between the floods and the fires.
We live across the street from the last fire. I could smell smoke in the house.
It was scary.

“We saw the flames across the street, so we left. We didn’t know what to take so we took nothing. But we went back for some ribs that were marinating and David got his cigars.”

In a twist of irony, they were given a ride away from the danger area by a paparazzi photographer who had been stalking them.

Cox reveals, “We walked down the road with these bags of our belongings, and this car stopped to give us a ride. He was driving really badly and speaking on his phone in Spanish the whole time.

“When we got out, we turned around and he was a paparazzi (sic).” The near-disaster gave Cox an idea for her hit TV drama Dirt, in which she plays a ruthless tabloid boss: “I’m going to use it in Dirt.”

(IG/WNVLET/KL)