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Interpreting the History of the Garden of Allah Hotel at 8150 Sunset

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Interpreting the History of the Garden of Allah Hotel at 8150 Sunset Interpreting the History of the Garden of Allah Hotel at 8150 Sunset Prepared by the Alla Nazimova Society for Townscape Partners November 2013 For 32 years, the Garden of Allah was the favorite hotel of Hollywood’s bohemian elite. Its chief attraction was its aura of sophisticated hedonism, a vibe that was a legacy of its founder, Broadway phenom and silent film star, Alla Nazimova. Over the years, its guests included movie stars, world-renowned musicians and even a mobster or two. It was also closely associated with the Algonquin Round Table, the New York writers’ group from the 1920s, many of whose members made the Garden their base when they decamped to Hollywood in the 1930s. The Garden was demolished over 50 years ago, and yet its legend lives on. Its name evokes the glamor and romance of Hollywood’s golden age and, even now, the southwest corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards is still remembered as the Garden of Allah site. In 2013, Townscape Partners bought the former Garden property and announced plans to build a residential and retail complex on the site, which is called 8150 Sunset. Townscape has invited suggestions for ways to incorporate the Garden of Rendering of 8150 Sunset Allah’s history into the new project. In response to that invitation, this document, initiated by the Alla Nazimova Society, offers ideas for naming the property CONTENTS and identifies opportunities for integrating the hotel’s Opportunities for Interpretation Algonquin Square . 2 history into 8150 Sunset: Nazimova Fountain . 3 Benchley & Parker Plazas . 4 . Algonquin Square: A name that reflects the property’s historic 'Walk of Fame' . 5 association with the Algonquin Round Table Scale Model . 6 . The Nazimova Fountain: A water feature that recalls the About the Alla Nazimova Society . 6 Garden’s world famous swimming pool . Benchley Plaza & Parker Park: Outdoor spaces named for History of the Garden of Allah Garden mainstays Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker Rancho La Brea . 7 . “Walk of fame”: Hollywood-style paver markers throughout the Hayvenhurst . 8 property honoring the hotel’s famous guests The Garden of Allah Hotel . 9 End of an Era . 9 . Scale model: A new model of the hotel created using the latest technology installed for permanent display Addendum: Site Map . 11 8150 SUNSET | ALLA NAZIMOVA SOCIETY 2 OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTERPRETATION 1. ALGONQUIN SQUARE Integrate the property's historic association with the Algonquin Round Table by incorporating "Algonquin" in the name -- perhaps Algonquin West, the Hollywood Algonquin, Algonquin on Sunset or, with a nod to Round Table's famous word play, Algonquin Square. The Algonquins were an exclusive group of about a dozen of the nation's best- known columnists, critics, editors and other media figures who dined together every day at a round table in Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel. The one- liners, puns and witticisms they traded over lunch would often appear in each other’s columns the next day. Outsiders Clockwise from left at table in foreground: Dorothy Parker, Robert called their group the Algonquin Round Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman and Robert Sherwood. In Table but they referred to themselves as back, left to right: Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Vanity Fair editor "the Vicious Circle." Frank Crowninshield, and Frank Case. (Drawing by Al Hirschfeld.) Founded in 1919, the Round Table reached its peak of influence in 1925. Even so, within four years, the group had disbanded and over the next few years, about half its core members decamped to Hollywood and the Garden of Allah. Robert Benchley, one of the group’s founders, was the first to "go Hollywood,” when he was hired in 1925 by producer Jesse Lasky to write subtitles for silent films. Benchley moved into the Garden around 1933 and was soon joined by co-founder Dorothy Parker, as well as Marc Connelly (Pulitzer winner for drama), George S. Kaufman (Pulitzer winner and screenwriter for the Marx Brothers) and New Yorker columnist Alexander Woollcott. Founding Round Tabler Robert Sherwood socialized at the Garden after he moved to Hollywood. Associate Algonquinites Tallulah Bankhead, Harpo Marx and playwright David Ogden Stewart were also frequent guests at the hotel. The Algonquin Round Table was never an official organization with by-laws, dues and the rest, and its new incarnation at the Garden of Allah was even more ad hoc. Other writers entered and left the orbit: S.J. Perelman, Louis Bromfield, John O'Hara, Lillian Hellman, Somerset Maugham and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. The group also attracted actors of an intellectual bent. In particular, Humphrey Bogart chose to live at the Garden when he moved to Hollywood in 1935 (to film “The Petrified Forest,” based on Robert Sherwood’s play), in part because his friends Benchley and Parker lived there. Years later, another somewhat similar group of wealthy bohemians, the Rat Pack, morphed around former Garden residents Bogart, his wife Lauren Bacall and David Niven. After Bogart’s death the group coalesced around Frank Sinatra, who had also lived at the Garden, and moved with him in the 1960s from the Sunset Strip to the Las Vegas Strip, where the cycle finally ended. 8150 SUNSET | ALLA NAZIMOVA SOCIETY 3 2. NAZIMOVA FOUNTAIN Memorialize the Garden of Allah’s famous swimming pool by designing a water feature on the property to iterate its shape. The original pool was commissioned by Alla Nazimova, so it would be fitting to name it in her honor: the Nazimova Fountain, perhaps including a statue of her in one of her dramatic poses. Nazimova had the pool installed in 1918, within weeks after she acquired Hayvenhurst, the estate that would later become the Garden of Allah Hotel. The pool was large, 60 by 90 feet, and it was The debate about whether Nazimova designed the pool in the shape of the first in Hollywood equipped with the Black Sea went on for decades - implementing the same shape in underwater lights. Nazimova reportedly the Nazimova Fountain could extend the debate for generations to traced her initials, “AN,” into the cement come soon after it was poured. During Nazimova’s residency, the pool became notorious for the private women-only swim parties she held there on Sundays. In the hotel era, the pool was the Garden of Allah’s centerpiece, gathering place and main attraction. It was also known for the regularity with which movie stars fell into it. Lucius Beebe, the columnist and frequent Garden guest, wrote, “It's conventional to fall into the pool. All the best people do it. It wakes one up.” According to legend, John Barrymore held the record for the most falls. Guests might fall into the pool at night but as they sunned themselves beside it during languid gin- soaked afternoons, they debated whether Nazimova had designed it in the shape of the Black Sea, where she grew up. In surviving photographs, a map of the Black Sea is hard to discern. (The Crimean Peninsula is notably absent). If anything, it looks like a grand piano viewed from overhead. Finally, it is possible that the pool is still there, entombed under the parking lot. According to Nazimova biographer Gavin Lambert, in August 1959, Plans for 8150 Sunset already show a water feature (1) at “Nazimova’s original home was bulldozed along with the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights (for a full-size view, visit 8150sunset.com) the villas; the pool was drained and used as dump for the debris." 8150 SUNSET | ALLA NAZIMOVA SOCIETY 4 3. BENCHLEY PLAZA AND PARKER PARK Honor the memory of the two people who were most highly identified with the Garden of Allah hotel in its day, Robert Benchley, the humorist, critic and Oscar-winning filmmaker, and Dorothy Parker, the columnist, critic, poet, short- story writer and Oscar- nominated screenwriter, by naming outdoor spaces after them, perhaps Benchley Plaza Benchley and Parker and Parker Park. Benchley and Parker met at “Vanity Fair” in 1919 and later shared an office that Parker described as “so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.” That same year, they and others co-founded the Algonquin Round Table, a platform that put them in to the national spotlight in the 1920s and served as a stepping stone to Hollywood in the 1930s. As noted, Benchley moved west in 1925 to work for Jesse Lasky and was living at the Garden of Allah when Parker arrived in the mid-1930s. During her time in Hollywood, Dorothy Parker would work on numerous screenplays, two of which -- "A Star Is Born" (1937) and "Smash Up: The Story of a Woman" (1947) -- received Oscar nominations. She also wrote the script for Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur." Benchley became a popular comic actor, appearing in “Dancing Lady,” with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, and Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent.” He was perhaps best known for starring in 48 short films, starting with “The Treasurer’s Report,” released in 1927, one of the earliest “talkies.” His short “How to Sleep” won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject in 1935. (Many of Benchley’s shorts can be seen today on Turner Classic Movies.) Benchley stayed at the Garden off and on until he died, in 1945. Dorothy Parker left the hotel soon afterwards and moved several times before eventually buying a house nearby at 8983 Norma Place. She later returned to New York, where she died in 1967. While Parker is better remembered today, Benchley was, according to the columnist Sheilah Graham, not only the hotel’s “the host of hosts,” he was “the reflection and the heart of the Garden of Allah.” Finally, it is noteworthy that both of Robert Benchley’s sons became writers, as did his grandsons, one of whom, Peter Benchley, wrote the novel Jaws.
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