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

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

Part 3 of a series of two 3 posts.
This is the last in a series of three articles (see numbers one and two) that speak of happenings at the Garden of Allah, a hotel situated on the then outskirts of Hollywood at the far end of Sunset Boulevard. The original Garden of Alla (without the ending “h,” was built in the 1920’s as  home to Alla Nazimova at the height of her silent film career.

After Nazimova’s career began to fade, she converted her home to a hotel by adding 25 bungalows on the property, and renovating the main house with a bar and restaurant, which, in turn, became a sort of social vortex for the film colony.

The Garden was residence to many of cinema’s most interesting personalities (acting, writing and producing) during the 1930s and 1940s, at times when  stars-to-be were just beginning their careers (Jackie Gleason, Errol Flynn) or when their  personal lives needed airing (Humphrey Bogart, Robert Benchley). The Garden was also a favorite for artists on sabbatical or retreat from the New York stage or for those simply trying their hand at “something”  Hollywood. For example, literary giants like Faulkner and Fitzgerald were to be found often at the restaurant or bar, the latter being the better bet.

Viewing the Garden of Allah as the historical stage it indeed was, in this piece, we are entertained by three random, true stories acted out by the glitterati, scenes that became part of the Garden of Allah’s rich legacy.

Scene one…

opens upon David Niven, Errol Flynn, and writer, Bill Lipscomb, lounging around the large Black Sea shaped swimming pool which serves as the central out-of-doors community gathering location at the Garden.

None of these gentlemen at this juncture in their careers earns the monthly $200-$400 needed to rent one of the Garden’s bungalows. Therefore, they are combining their resources, bunking together in one of the smaller units.

On this day, the total cash available to the three, reserved in preparation for the Garden bar’s Happy Hour, is seventeen dollars.  Other than that, the trio are reputedly without funds, better known in less refined circles as busted.

(Note: The Garden’s Happy Hour was actually several hours. The later patrons showed up, the more expensive drinks became. For example, at 4 o’clock PM, drinks cost 40 cents each. As of 5 PM, the prices were adjusted to 50 cents apiece. At 6 PM, 60 cents, and so on.  Therefore, Niven, Flynn and Lipscomb were feverishly watching their time pieces, all three desiring to enter the Garden bar no later than 4:01 PM. The current time on this day is 3:30 PM.)

There are many versions of what happened next. However, the favorite is the story as told by David Niven.

“Errol, Bill and I were sitting around the pool. The pool phone rang at 3:30.  It was Errol’s agent informing him he had been cast as lead in a film to be called Captain Blood. (As we will recall, Captain Blood was the film that launched Errol to stardom.)

After the conversation was completed, and Flynn told us the good news, we all congratulated Errol, and then continued absorbing the Southern California sun.

Ten minutes later, twenty minutes to Happy Hour, the phone rang again. This time it was Lipscomb’s agent, announcing that Bill had been selected to write the script for Clive of India, a major professional coup for Bill. Again, a round of congratulations.

As if on cue, at 3:55, just five minutes before we were going to head toward the Garden bar, the phone rang yet again.

This time, it was my agent.

I listened attentively, nodding and hmming into the mouthpiece.

When I placed the receiver back on its cradle, Errol and Bill could barely contain themselves, both shouting in unison, “Well, Well?”

I informed the two men that my agent had landed me a part in Barbary Coast for Goldwyn. In Barbary Coast, my principal duty was to allow myself to be thrown from a moving train.” Read the rest of this entry »

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

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

Most people who knew Charles Boyer and his wife, Pat, an accomplished actress in her own right, thought of them as a steady, happy couple.

Charles was of the quiet, distinguished sort, typical of a man who until the age of nineteen had spent every day of his life  in the conservative, picturesque, out-of-the-way village of Figeac in southwestern France.  Figeac’s people are agrarian even today, focusing their lives on the production of pate and entertaining tourists who come to view the quiet countryside as well as the 13th-century Benedictine abbey at the center of  the community.

Once he left Figeac, Charles’ only vice seems to have been gambling. He once confided in Ed Sullivan that he was always behind in his financial obligations in Europe because of his, Boyer’s, inability to resist the temptations presented by casinos in the large cities. When in the United States, Charles was a frequent visitor of  Las Vegas. Fortunately, Charles’ substantial fortune finally and magnificently outdistanced his ability to lose large sums in this way.

In contrast to her husband’s silent sobriety, even when he was surrounded by a tumultuous casino, Pat was prone to hearty laughter, possessing a sort of bubbly sense of delight as life’s surprises, no matter how small, presented themselves.

From the moment in 1920 when Charles was offered a leading part in the revised popular stage play, Les Jardin des Murcie (a part he had to memorize in less than twelve hours while being fitted for wardrobe, because of the sudden incapacity of the leading actor who collapsed on stage during the final rehearsal), Boyer was on his way to the peak of international stardom in live theater, cinema and television.

During their prime in the 30s through the 50s, Charles and Pat, discussing everything as an effective theatrical and business team, seemed to turn all they touched into box office diamonds.

Those born before the golden age of television remember when the local movie theater was at the heart of even small communities. Read the rest of this entry »

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

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

Part 2 of a series of 2 posts.
As you will recall from the Garden of Allah Part One, the Garden was an estate originally owned by Alla Nazimova, the famed actress who starred opposite Rudolph Valentino in Cammille. In 1927 the Garden was opened as a hotel consisting of the main house with a bar, restaurant, and rooms for rent on the second floor which no one wanted because they were dark and depressing.

There were also 25 bungalows with paper thin walls at the back of the property, with tiny kitchens and the fury that one would expect with all 25 structures occupied by unstable, top-drawer actors, writers, directors and therapists. The names of the people in the bungalows are the names of some of the most famous people the world has ever produced, including Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Kauffman, Errol Flynn, and Dorothy Parker.

However, there was one celebrity at the Garden, one person who had the confidence of every other; the one that no one at the Garden dared upset.

There was a person of such status that even such personalities as Hemingway and Parker gave way in his presence.

That person was named Ben. Ben the Bellboy. (See rare photo of Ben, center, at the Ritz with Hemingway in later years.)

Managers may have  arrived and departed the Garden in revolving-door fashion. Owners, chefs, bartenders, maids, gardeners, the same.

However, Ben the Bellboy was a mainstay, the support without whom the Garden of Allah and all it became in terms of a colony of volcanic misfits could not have evolved.

Ben was a relatively short, stout fellow, blondish hair, outgoing personality, and a logistics genius; a perfect fit for that particular place and time.

When he left the Garden, as the curtain began to drop on the place in the 50s, it was not necessary for Ben to ever work again. He had amassed a comfortable fortune gazing at and grazing on those personalities that the rest of us only viewed as stars in a distant firmament; stars with uncommon needs and appetites; needs and appetites Ben the Bellboy was only too happy to satisfy.

This is the story of Ben, as far as we know it. There are, we are confident, oddities, not to say horrors, that both rumor and written history do not reveal.  However, what we do know is sufficient to write an odyssey not to be outdone by any mortal either before or since. Read the rest of this entry »

“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.) Read the rest of this entry »

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

By ivi blog Guest Contributor Dr. Rob Moore

Humphrey Bogart (Bogie), despite his rough looks (See photo), was able to command the admiration of a significant portion of both male and female motion picture going audiences during the period 1936 to 1956. (Bogart received the nickname Bogey from his great pal Spencer Tracy in 1930, albeit with the slightly different spelling. Bogart himself spelled it Bogie.)

1936 has been chosen as the beginning of Bogie’s “run” of popularity because it was in 1936 that the film, The Petrified Forest, was released. This film was Bogie’s big break. In it, Bogart played the rugged Duke Mantee opposite Leslie Howard and Bettie Davis.

Davis replaced Peggy Conklin who had starred on Broadway in the part of Gabrielle Maple in the play of the same name, and Edward G. Robinson was scheduled to replace Bogart for the movie. (Play ran January through June 1935 -197 performances at the Broadhurst Theater — see photos)

When Bogie wired Howard, who was in England, about the replacement, Howard immediately telegraphed Jack Warner and threatened him (something that only Jack’s wife, and certainly no star of a lesser light than Howard could have done at that time…or ever.) Jack, to his credit, backed down, and Bogie’s career as a major film star was launched.

So, what’s this about Bogie’s Lucky Number?

Arguably Bogie’s Lucky Number was 4.

Why four?

Read the rest of this entry »