End of the House Party

I'll be damned if I'll believe anyone lives in a place called "The Garden of Allah."

--Thomas Wolfe, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, July 26, 1937

Even Tom Wolfe, the country boy from North Carolina, should have known better. Everyone lived at the Garden of Allah Hotel--everyone, that is, who was part of the Hollywood elite in the old days when the town still managed to be wacky in the grand manner. Through the late, intoxicated '20s and '30s, the Garden was more house party than hotel. Robert Benchley was resident clown; John Barrymore kept a bicycle there so as not to waste drinking time walking between the separate celebrations in the sprawling, movie-Spanish villas. Woollcott, Hemingway, Brice, Olivier, Welles, Bogart, Dietrich all lived at the Garden during its green years.

Last week architects were busy drawing plans for an office building to replace the Garden--long since gone to seed--while bartenders and chambermaids were out hunting new jobs. Come fall, bulldozers will grunt across the grounds, toppling the tall cypresses and pepperwoods. Tons of earth will be dumped into the swimming pool in which wobbly guests once cooled their hangovers. Soon, sightseeing buses will drive along the curve of Sunset Boulevard between Schwab's Drugstore and the gabled Marmont Chateau, with rubberneck guides remembering nasally: "Alla Nazimova lived here once. Paramount built her a mansion. The swimming pool was in the shape of the Black Sea to remind her of Yalta, where she was born."

Men in White. Like Tom Wolfe before them, tourists will find it hard to believe that there was once a Garden of Allah. But it blossomed in lush profusion from the day in 1927 when Nazimova turned her once private domain into a super hostelry; 23 guest villas were added to the great stucco manor house--and an h was added to the mistress' first name, recalling the movie Garden of Allah. Alla objected to the spelling, but her modest protests were drowned in the gin-laced hubbub.

"Nothing," says Columnist Lucius Beebe, who became a steady visitor, "interrupted the continual tumult that was life at the Garden of Allah. Now and then the men in white came with a van and took somebody away, or bankruptcy or divorce or even jail claimed a participant in its strictly unstately sarabands. Nobody paid any mind."

Nobody paid any mind the morning a throaty Broadway actress gulped down some repairs for the damage of the night before and strode about her villa in the buff with a pet monkey perched on her shoulder. Only an outsider--a Western Union boy--was shocked. When he delivered a telegram, the boy took one look at the apparition bowing low before him, shoved the message into the monkey's paw and fled.

Splash in the Night. Everyone was delighted when Humorist Benchley moved in, accompanied by Columnist John McClain, who trundled Bob from party to party in a wheelbarrow when walking was out of the question. At the Garden Benchley created some of his most memorable epigrams. There, when a friend said that drink was a slow poison, Bob, nose down in a beaker of martinis, answered: "That's all right. I'm in no hurry."

Somehow, the party went on and on. Holdup men knocked over the front office from time to time (and once murdered a clerk), a waitress was arrested for peddling narcotics; the switchboard was taken over by a telephone operator who claimed to read character from voices, and who refused to put through calls from types he disliked. Still the guests came, and still they dropped into the pool. "I used to wait for them to come home and fall in," remembers Playwright Arthur Kober. "It was like waiting for a shoe to drop. I'd hear the splashes and then I'd go to sleep."

But in 1941, when Alla herself returned from Broadway to live in one of her own villas as a paying guest, an era was ending. The old faces were fading fast; the place was soon overrun by roaches and call girls. The last big spender was a happy drunk from Kansas City who made his fortune turning out horror pictures for the kiddies. For months last year, all drinks served in the Garden bar were put on his tab, and eventually he broke the record rung up by Benchley and his pals.

The achievement does not seem impressive mainly because it is far from enough to keep the Garden going. "It's all rundown now," mourned one of the maids last week, "but it's still got a lot of what you'd call dignity. The same people keep coming back. Oh, they go away complaining, but they come back because there's nowhere else like this. Now where will they go?"

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