The Garden of Allah Hotel (cool name, right?) was located on Sunset Boulevard right next to the triangle of dirt where the Pandora’s Box nightclub once was and where Peter Fonda got handcuffed, probably by a cop named Rocco. (This post.)
The hotel looked like this:
Then a banker had an idea. He bought the hotel, tore it down, and made it look like this:
And people think my ideas are stupid?!
Last year, the wrecking ball showed up again and now it’s an empty lot surrounded by a green fence with an apartment building in the distance. I walked over today to check things out.
It all started when Russian-American actress Alla Nazimova (1879-1945) bought a private home on the property, added 25 villas, and in 1927 opened the "Garden of Allah Hotel."
Alla Nazimova
Film producer Adolph Zukor called Nazimova “the quintessential Queen of the Movie Whores,” as her exoticism equally provoked adoration and horror.
She was rather open with her bisexuality, enjoying a run of well-known relationships with actresses, wives of actors, and mistresses of actors. She’s credited for originating the phrase "sewing circle" as a discreet code for lesbian or bisexual actresses.
Nazimova was a close friend of future U.S. First Lady Nancy Reagan’s mother and ended up being Nancy’s godmother.
Nazimova’s Garden of Allah Hotel quickly became “the” place to stay in LA.
Greta Garbo
Actors who lived here included Buster Keaton, the Gish sisters, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, W.C. Fields, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, and Valentino.
Nazimova’s lovers included Chaplin’s and Valentino’s ex-wives.
And both Garbo and Dietrich enjoyed skinny-dipping in the hotel’s pool (at that time, the largest pool in Los Angeles).
Dietrich once complained, “Sex in America is an obsession. In other parts of the world it’s a fact.”
Joining the cast of actors at the hotel were writers like P. G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald (see this post), Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker (see this post), and Robert Benchley.
Benchley once had a friend steer him around in a wheelbarrow, from room to room throughout the hotel.
His mission? “More gin!”
“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” - Robert Benchley
Robert Benchley
Oh, and get a load of this, Albert Einstein also stayed here.
Einstein had a roving eye for women and he soon had his on Nazimova.
(Einstein was a bright guy, but sometimes couldn’t “read the room.”)
When I add The Garden of Allah Hotel hanky-panky stuff as a new chapter, the sales are going to go through the roof!
Smokin’ Sally
Meanwhile, Nazimova lived here at her hotel with actor Charles Bryant, who was paid 10 percent of her salary for pretending to be her husband.
Although the two flirted in public they did not share a bed.
Man, talk about a great job! 10% for doing nothing!
Only if I hadn’t fallen in love with Sally….