Taylor Swift Housed Kravitz and Bonet; Orpheus the Snake Escaped

During the Los Angeles wildfire emergency in January, Taylor Swift opened her Beverly Hills mansion to Zoë Kravitz and her mother, Lisa Bonet, for about two weeks. The arrangement ended with an unexpectedly dramatic mishap: Bonet’s pet snake, Orpheus, escaped into a hole behind a built-in banquette in Swift’s bathroom, prompting a frantic, and for the home, costly, retrieval that left the room in ruins but no one hurt.

Kravitz explained on a late-night program that she and Bonet were trying to leave the house in as good a state as possible, hoping to “leave places better than I found them.” The trouble began on the last day, when Bonet set Orpheus down briefly to wash her face. Orpheus slipped into a small hole in the corner of the upstairs bathroom, near the banquette. As the snake retreated deeper into the wall, Kravitz and Bonet held the tail and tried to pull it back, while the snake continued to vanish into the structure.

What followed was a high-pressure effort to rescue the reptile. The house manager arrived with a crowbar and proceeded to dismantle part of the bathroom—tearing up tiles and scratching walls—in a bid to reach the snake. Kravitz recalled the moment with a...