Writing about the Garden of Allah Hotel for Collier’s in 1948, Amy Porter, a longtime resident of the Sunset Strip hotel, mentioned that the shape of the pool was an ongoing topic of debate among her famous neighbors as they sunned themselves by it on languid gin-soaked afternoons. The design of the pool is still being debated today.
The Garden of Allah Hotel was never a great financial success. In June 1930, nine months after the stock market crashed, its owners commissioned architects to design a hotel tower that would replace the campus layout and villas. The tower was never built, of course, which is a shame only in the sense that it would be a big improvement over the soul-crushingly tacky shopping center that is there now. It was built after the GOA, along with its villas and landscaping, were bulldozed in late 1959.
Hollywood 1944: Glesca, Nazimova in her favorite “Chinese coolie” hat and goddaughter Nancy Davis (later Reagan)
That’s Alla Nazimova, age 65, in the center, her long time companion Glesca Marshall to the left and Nazimova’s goddaughter Nancy Davis, age 23, future first lady of the United States, standing at right. This was probably taken in Los Angeles, maybe even on the grounds of the Garden of Allah, about a year before Nazimova died.
This clip is from August 1959.
I’m not sure what the story is with the music, but the images are clips from Alla Nazimova’s 1923 version of “Salome,” which was said to have been inspired by the eponymous Oscar Wilde/ Aubrey Beardsley.
The Garden of Allah Hotel campus, viewed looking southeast. Photo is undated but probably late 1930s. High-rise in upper right is the Colonial Apartments on Havenhurst, which is still standing
Los Angeles came late to the historic preservation movement. The landmarks that have fallen to the wrecking balls is nothing less than tragic. The Sunset Strip has been luckier. Chateau Marmont and the Sunset Tower are standing and in fine fettle. Low-rise apartment building where notables like Marilyn Monroe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Dandridge lived are still in use. The building made world-famous as Ciro’s night club in the 1940s was repurposed decades ago as the Comedy Store. Even the one-time home of Cafe Gala, Judy Garland’s favorite gay bar, on Horn Avenue north of the Strip, is still standing, although it has dark since Spago’s vacated the building and moved to Beverly Hills location.
One significant loss, however, was the Garden of Allah, the most legendary and notorious of all the Strip hotels, which was razed in 1959 to make way for the bank building that is there now.
The Garden of Allah was originally an estate called Hayvenhurst, built in 1913, at 8150 Sunset Blvd. [map], at the northwest corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset — at the western terminus of the Sunset trolley line — it occupied a 2.5-acre park-like campus of villas built around an enormous swimming pool and the main house, which housed the restaurant and bar.
The buildings were torn down, the landscaping ripped out and a concrete parking lot was poured on top of the once-magical grounds — an event that was thought to have inspired the line “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot” in Joni Mitchell’s song, “Big Yellow Taxi.” Mitchell, who moved to Los Angeles well after the shopping center was built, has said she was writing about a trip to Hawaii.
In January 1927, the opening of the hotel was celebrated in typical Hollywood style, as described in the Los Angeles Times many years later:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
On the surface of it, it seems strange that F. Scott Fitzgerald died in an apartment off the Sunset Strip. But on Dec. 21, 1940, the shortest day of the year, Scott suffered a fatal heart attack in the apartment of the British gossip columnist, Sheilah Graham, at 1443 N. Hayworth Ave. [map], just south of Sunset Blvd.
What makes it strange is that, in his prime years, Scott and his wife Zelda were such a part of the East Coast literary set and were so closely associated with the Lost Generation of American exiles living in Paris during the 1920s — along with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas — that, had his life played out like the plot of his novels, by rights he should have died in Greenwich Village or a Parisian garret.
But he died in Hollywood, in Miss Graham’s apartment — a fact which proved to be awkward, given the tenor of the times, because Scott and Sheilah had been in love and sharing digs for three years, even though Zelda Fitzgerald was still very much alive, though institutionalized with mental illness — and Zelda and Scott were still very much married.
F. Scott Fitzgerald came to Hollywood for the same reason many of his East Coast literary colleagues did. He was strapped for cash. In fact, his arrival in 1931 was his second run at success in the Movie Colony. He’d brought Zelda with him in 1927 when had been invited out to work on script for Constance Talmadge. United Artists rejected the script, however, and the Fitzgeralds returned east.
It was then that Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized in a sanitarium outside Asheville, N.C. Scott returned to Hollywood. In 1937, he moved into Villa #1 at the Garden of Allah Hotel. It was there that he worked on the script for the Rita Hayworth vehicle, “Red-Headed Woman.”
“He is famous even in Hollywood, where his meteoric arrivals and departures are discussed in film circles as avidly as they discuss themselves,” wrote Dorothy Spear in a 1933 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.
In “A Taste of Hemlock,” published in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 19, 1965, Joseph Scott III described the Garden of Allah’s role as the epicenter for the movie colony’s cultural elite:
In a city renown for party animals, there have been few vivants more bon (sorry!) than Robert Benchley, the Algonquin Round Tabler who lived in the Garden of Allah Hotel in the 1930s and 1940s. Benchley and his remarkable career as a writer and editor for magazines like “The New Yorker” and “Vanity Fair,” and as screenwriter and movie actor — he won an Oscar for one of his short films — are largely forgotten these days.
But Sweet Old Bob’s fans should know that the Robert Benchley Society, based in Boston, is keeping the flame alive with a website that celebrates all things Benchley. It offers biographical information, current news, a humor competition, a list of Benchley’s books and movies and more.
One Benchleyism from the site: “Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of,” from “Phobias: My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew,” 1936.
During his years in West Hollywood, Benchley served as the Garden of Allah’s unofficial master of ceremonies, and was often seen being shuttled from bungalow to bungalow resting in the payload of a wheel barrow, quite possibly because he was too pixelated to maneuver the pathways on foot. He was an early adopter of Angelenos’ world-famous aversion to walking anywhere. For example, to get to Schwab’s Drug Store from the hotel, he invariably called a cab, even though the drug store was literally across the street.
Here’s Christopher Buckley, in a review of a biography of Benchley, Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley, by Billy Altman, published in the National Review in 1997:
At Harvard he was president of the Lampoon and became so notoriously funny an after-dinner speaker that the president of the university insisted on speaking before him. An early mentor was Franklin Pierce Adams, the best-known newspaper columnist of his day. Soon Benchley was pinch-hitting at theater reviews for P. G. Wodehouse at Vanity Fair, where he eventually became managing editor. Later he became chief theater critic for The New Yorker and a humor columnist for Life, producing enough material for 12 collections. He was present at the creation of the Algonquin Round Table, or the Vicious Circle, as they called themselves. He became an accidental star on Broadway for his “Treasurer’s Report,” the eight-minute sketch that led in turn to the career in Hollywood that brought him fame, bitterness, and misery. Any life is the more fascinating for ending badly.
Benchley made 48 movie shorts, including “The Sex Life of the Polyp,” and “How to Sleep,” which won him an Oscar for best short feature in 1935. Shirley Temple asked him for his autograph. His resume bears a technical asterisk: the 1928 movie short of his “Treasurer’s Report” was the first continuous-sound picture ever made, and in 1936 he took part in the first TV program ever transmitted. He so impressed Alfred Hitchcock that the director signed him to co-write and star in Foreign Correspondent. He had affairs with, among many others, Tallulah Bankhead, who gave him rave reviews as a lover. Bob Benchley had a bigger endowment than Harvard’s.
And:
The book’s most wrenching moment takes place one night in Hollywood at the Garden of Allah. (Benchley’s life can be divided into eras in terms of hotels: Algonquin, Royalton, Garden of Allah.) He was entertaining, among others, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his old Vanity Fair comrades Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood. Since their VF days, Sherwood had gone on to become one of the country’s leading playwrights and had received the Pulitzer Prize for Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
Benchley had, as usual, been knocking them back. Suddenly he caught sight of Sherwood across the room and said to Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s girlfriend, “Those eyes. I can’t stand those eyes looking at me!” At first she thought it was a joke. Then Benchley began backing away: “He’s looking at me . . . and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer — and he’s thinking, now look at what I am!” In the dark night of laughter’s gentle soul it was, to quote another writer in the room, 3 a.m.
Buckley began his review with this episode from the end of Benchley’s life in 1945. “How refreshing to read a biography of a humorist who was not, in real life, a son of a bitch,” he writes. “The worst that could be said of Robert Benchley was that he was a bit of a bounder to his wife, an absentee father to his sons, and ultimately a disappointment to himself. But for all that, his wife and sons were devoted to him, as he in his way was to them. His friends, who were legion, adored him. As he lay in the hospital, hemorrhaging to death from cirrhosis, forty people showed up to volunteer to give blood. How many writers could make that posthumous boast?”
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