Live Internet Television

“The trail may be cold, but the stories are hot!”

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

Part 1 of a series of 2 posts.

In the history of Hollywood, few places have seen more celebrities in their times of celebration and/or desperation than the Garden of Allah Hotel. The story of the Garden of Allah is synonymous with the saga of Hollywood’s golden-age glitterati (1919 to 1959).

The Garden was the scene of glorious celebrity courtships, drunken orgies, flights of amazing creativity, brawls, heartwarming generosity, and mysterious death. The property is considered by Hollywood aficionados to be the site of the wildest parties the film community has to this day ever witnessed; considering the group in question, this is an incredible claim, especially since no one is talking…much.

The Garden must be included as part of the personal stories of dozens of well knowns, including just to name a few in no particular order, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Robert Benchley, Alla Nazimova, Dorothy Parker, Greta Garbo, Errol Flynn, Gloria Swanson, Ava Gardner, The Marx Brothers, especially Harpo, Gilbert Roland, Ernest Hemingway, George Kaufman, Laurence Olivier, Ramon Navaro, Clara Bow, Theda Bara, Buster Keaton, Tallulah Bankhead, and Claudette Colbert.

Our story commences during the era of Valentino, Chaplin, Lloyd, Pickford, Bara and Nazimova, all heroes and heroines of the silent screen.

Like Theda Bara, Alla Nazimova, having arrived in America (in 1905), was discovered by film producer, Henry Miller (not the author) at the Russian Lyceum in New York.

Nazimova had been a child prodigy on the violin, but after seeing a few silent movies of the day, she wanted nothing more than to become an actress. She studied under the famous Russian, Konstantin Stanislavsky, who has been called the father of Russian Method Acting, an important platform upon which American Method Acting is based.* That is all to say, when Nazimova came to the US, she was already an accomplished artist, ahead of most actresses in terms of the use of her body to convey situation and emotion.

Once discovered, Nazimova was generally cast in films as a vampish angel, a mysterious seductress, the answer to every man’s prayers, and the instrument of his soul’s destruction. (see photo).

Upon her arrival in Hollywood in 1918, Nazimova quickly invested $50,000 for the ninety-nine year lease of a Spanish-style mansion at the then very end of Sunset Boulevard. The property was owned by William May who it seemed owned most of Encino. The mansion was surrounded by three and a half acres of ferns, bamboo, strange birds, and banana trees that never bore a single piece of fruit.

The original structure, named The Garden of Alla, without the “h,” by its new mistress, was immediately graced with a new pool, constructed in the shape of, if not the same size as, the Black Sea. It is said that this was to remind Nazimova of her place of birth in the Crimea. (See photo of the pool). The pool was the largest in the Hollywood of that time, until William Randolph Hearst built a larger one for Marion Davies on the property he called her “shack” by the sea.

In 1925, with the film, Cammille (1923), starring Nazimova and Valentino, a waning memory, Nazimova had a series of bungalows — twenty-five in number — constructed on her estate, at the back pool area away from the traffic on Sunset Boulevard(see photo). She also renovated the main building in order to include a bar and restaurant, and built a bungalow for herself on what was then the handball court. She didn’t choose the second floor of the main building for her rooms because they were too dark and dreary. Even during the Hotel years, the second floor proved impossible to make commercially successful for the same reason. By 1927, Nazimova was nearly broke, the Garden of Allah Hotel having cost her almost her entire fortune. (The crash of 1929 took whatever money was left.)

Because of her financial difficulties, Nazimova was asked to sell the estate back to William May for tax and debt relief purposes. She did so happily.

It seems an astounding coincidence that, after Nazimova had poured her considerable fortune into the property, she sold the improved property back to the same man from whom she had leased the gloomy Spanish mansion in the first place. William May profited hugely from the transactions, and Nazimova, well, Nazimova was a fine silent film and stage actress with a past that once included being prosperous. (At the height of her popularity, Nazimova was being paid $14,000 per week by the studios. She was second only to Mary Pickford in terms of popularity and salary.)

The new owner, William May, over the weepy objections of Nazimova, added the “h” at the end of Alla, thereby changing the name to the place of legend, i.e., the Garden of Allah Hotel. (See Aerial View Photo). To the day she died in 1945, that final “h” produced a torrent of recriminations from Nazimova whenever anyone was foolish or ignorant enough to mention it.

It wasn’t too long after the opening of the Garden of Allah Hotel before Hollywood royalty discovered the place. At $200-$400 per month, the rent was very high for the 20’s. Eventually though, the glitterati began to show up on the Garden’s doorstep, having emigrated from the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire, and the Alexandria Hotel. None of these were as beautiful as the Garden of Allah, and, so inevitably, the Garden, with its gigantic pool, and paper thin bungalow walls, became headquarters for the lives and deaths of Hollywood’s greatest personalities.

To present a brief peek at the Garden of Allah Hotel in this, Part One of our story:

• For a time, the famous Robert Benchley served as the resident comedian at the Garden. Benchley was willing to fulfill this role at parties only if he was carried from bungalow to bungalow in a wheel barrow when walking was out of the question.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald spent many drinking and inwardly unhappy months at the Garden of Allah making his final attempt to write for Hollywood. During this period Fitzgerald would often mail post cards and letters to himself, thus producing the momentary illusion that someone cared about how he was getting along.
• Humphrey Bogart, after his last drunken brawl with Mayo Methot, his third wife, retreated to the Garden to be with dear friends Dotie Parker and Bob Benchley. It didn’t hurt Bogart’s disposition that Lauren Bacall was often with him at the Garden. While Bogie, Benchley, Parker and others drank heavily, Bacall sat back and in her word “learned.” Bacall didn’t begin to join in the drinking until later in her career, and, even then, she was a moderate imbiber.

An important part of Hollywood history was lost in 1959 when the Garden of Allah disappeared under the bulldozer, to be replaced by a pink strip mall, a bank, and a fast food restaurant.

Betty Blythe and Francis X. Bushman are the only people with the distinction to have attended both the opening eighteen hour party at the Garden of Allah Hotel in January of 1927, and the demolition party in August of 1959, which was considerably shorter.

Bushman was asked at the party how he was enjoying himself, and he sighed, “Nice! Nice Party! I just wish there were more of us here.”

* We say “important source” because, unlike Russian acting, American Method Acting relies almost entirely on psychological techniques while Stanislavski explored character and action both from the ‘inside out’ and the ‘outside in.

In late 19th century Russia, actors could spend many years studying at understanding how to be conscious of every movement on the stage. Unlike in the United States in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, Russian actors often spent an entire lifetime with one troupe, slowly developing their stage art. Acting in that environment was an artistic commitment different from that experienced in the West.