WeHo News:

The Los Angeles Visionaries Association (LAVA) has revived its free monthly Sunday Salon series. For their first program, they invite you to South Broadway, to the mezzanine of Les Noces du Figaro, which was recently opened by the family behind Figaro Bistro in Los Feliz. This handsome space was formerly Schaber’s Cafeteria (Charles F. Plummer, 1928), and the mezzanine features wonderful views of the Los Angeles Theatre.

The Salon’s theme [on Sunday, June 30, 2013, at noon] will be Jazz Age Los Angeles, and the two talks (45 minutes each) will focus on that theme at the intersection of Crescent Heights and Sunset Blvd…

Presentation One: Martin Turnbull on The Garden of Allah

Martin Turnbull, author of The Garden Of Allah novels will be discussing life at that hotel and its infamous bungalow courtyard during the 1920s and 30s. Its bootleg liquor, fizzy flappers,and all night parties defined the Jazz Age in Los Angeles. When Scott Fitzgerald came to L.A. in the mid 1930s with his $1000/week contract at MGM, it was at the Garden of Allah he chose to land. It was also the home-away-from-home for Algonquin Round Table refugees Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Donald Ogden Stewart and Marc Connelly, so Fitzgerald must have felt at home, as did anyone answering Hollywood’s siren call who was lucky enough to get a room there. Martin’s talk will be punctuated by readings from his first novel in the series, The Garden On Sunset.

Presentation Two: Marc Chevalier on the Crescent Heights Shopping Center & the ballyhoo spirit of the Jazz Age

For his talk, Marc Chevailer, the historian of the Oviatt Building, will focus on the Crescent Heights Shopping Center, just across the street from the Garden of Allah. First drawn to the building because of James Oviatt’s proposed, but never realized, “satellite” shop for his famous haberdashery downtown, Marc soon become ensorcelled by this beautiful French Norman revival building. Built in 1925, this towered, marble-trimmed and mansard-roofed Norman ‘chateau’ housed Schwab’s Pharmacy and the Crescent Heights Market, which fed, drugged and boozed the Garden of Allah’s voracious guests. It was where Hollywood’s movielanders shopped, schmoozed, strove and scrounged for generations … where F. Scott Fitzgerald nearly died and Marilyn Monroe got her final prescription, and where Robert Mitchum, already a star, stocked grocery shelves just for fun.

It was home to the Sunset Medical Center, the upscale Talmadge Jones Flower Shop (with its Rolls-Royce delivery trucks), a bakery, a dry cleaner, a beauty parlor, the infamous Crescent Heights Market (owned and managed by a cantankerous ex-speakeasy operator from New York, who randomly overcharged Hollywood’s elite for its groceries), and a pharmacy that would be bought out by Schwab’s in 1932. In 1949, Googie’s would build its first coffee shop next to Schwab’s.

The Last Days of F. Scott Fitzgerald Walking Tour, Saturday, June 29:

Adrienne Crew will host The Last Days of F. Scott Fitzgerald Walking Tour (West) Hollywood and the places that were significant to him at the end of the writer’s life. The tour will begin at the corner of Sunset Blvd & Crescent Heights (exact details furnished upon registration) and conclude at Greenblatt’s Deli, where Sheilah Graham purchased the Hershey bar which was the last thing Fitzgerald ate.