In California: A Fading Hollywood

By Russell Leavitt

On a clear Los Angeles day--the kind that usually happens only in winter--it presents a picture of undeniable elegance. A half-block west of the old Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the ornate fac,de of the Garden Court Apartments stands as a monument to another era when the building's tenants included the likes of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Mack Sennett, John Barrymore and Louis B. Mayer. Sculpted angels still hang from its flanks; a trio of cherubs intertwine arms on the fountain out front; inside, despite a rich cache of old whisky bottles, dusty phonograph records and faded copies of the Los Angeles Times, the palms rise in pleasing arcs around an empty pool in the silent courtyard.

"They say the movie stars used to live here in the '20s," says Douglas Meltzer, 59, a former aircraft worker and a long time Hollywood resident who is out for a morning stroll. Meltzer's father came to Los Angeles to play violin in the orchestra of the Million Dollar Theater, another of Showman Sid Grauman's grandiose palaces. Meltzer, an earnest man with bushy eyebrows, wispy white hair and a chuckle for punctuation, remembers the Hollywood he knew then.

"I saw Charlie Chaplin once," he says, standing in front of the Garden Court. "He was just walking down Hollywood Boulevard. And I saw Joan Blondell coming out of one of those fancy shops. I was at the age when I was sort of movie-struck, you know. I was collecting autographs. There used to be a beauty salon--it was on Sunset. I remember seeing Dick Powell pull up in one of those Cord automobiles. It was quite a place, Hollywood."

The Garden Court--190 rooms, a baby grand piano in each of its 72 suites--began its life just a few years after Hollywood emerged as the world's movie capital. When it opened its doors on New Year's Eve, 1919, the staff unrolled a long crimson carpet down to Hollywood Boulevard, then a dusty lane, where lines of limousines deposited their elegant passengers. As the silent movie era gave way to the talkies, and Hollywood's business and glamour grew proportionately, the residences of its stars became more lavish too. There was the Hollywood Hotel, where Rudolph Valentino married Actress Jean Acker and spent his honeymoon. The Garden of Allah, which opened with an 18-hour party, was a haven for writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker.

Those two fell years ago to the wrecking ball, and now it looks as if the Garden Court may go the same way. After granting the building historic landmark status last year, the Los Angeles city council will soon decide whether to allow a local developer to demolish the four-story structure and put up a 16-story office building on the site.

The controversy now swirling about the Garden Court might easily be one of the screenplays hatched within its walls years ago. The list of characters is pure Hollywood. C-D Investment Co., a huge real estate developer, attempted to demolish the Garden Court without a city permit last year because, as a C-D employee explained to the city council, "she was a beautiful old lady, but now she's gone. Someone has to pull the plug."

Opposing C-D is the Gordon Group, a partnership composed mainly of Hungarian immigrants who have become successful in the construction business. They want to restore the building and convert it into a tourist attraction, including museums of early Hollywood. The partners see their manifest destiny as Americans in saving a piece of old Hollywood. Bill Gordon, sixtyish with sad, deep-set eyes, fled Hungary in 1956, crossing the Ferto Lake into Austria with his family in a rubber raft. He wrote his sister-in-law, then living in Los Angeles, asking, "How far do you live from Hollywood?" Gordon became entranced with the image of Hollywood when he saw his first Greta Garbo movie at age 15 in Hungary. He still remembers that movie well--it was called Queen Christina. Says Gordon, speaking in somewhat halting English: "Now, most of the world, they do not know about Los Angeles. But they do know about Hollywood. From outside, Hollywood always seemed really glamorous. If anyone is coming to this city, what can they see of Hollywood?"

He will get little argument on that score. It is not unusual nowadays to come upon a tourist in Hollywood, looking bewildered, wondering if he has been misdirected or, worse, rather cruelly misled.

"Yeah, it's changed a lot," muses Meltzer. "As recently as ten years ago, there was a cafeteria on Vine Street, next to a theater where there were a lot of these television shows. You'd see people like Danny Thomas and Milton Berle. But those are the people who wouldn't be caught dead around here any more."

The Gordons and those who want to save the Garden Court say it could be the center of a revitalized Hollywood. Others would prefer a shiny new office building to spruce up the neighborhood. Meanwhile the battle goes on, as the Gordon Group continues its legal fight that in the words of Bill Gordon's lawyer son Peter, "does justice to the building's fac,ade--it's labyrinthine and byzantine." Says his weary father: "It's a nightmare. More than a nightmare."

Both sides, though, still appear to have plenty of energy. Police have been called in to guard the structure from demolition crews; preservationists have staged all-night vigils; private security guards have barred the Gordon Group from access to the grounds. City Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson, who led last year's fight to declare the Garden Court Historic-Cultural Monument 243, decided later that the building should go--a flip-flop that, she insists, has nothing to do with CD's $2,500 contribution to her campaign.

C-D achieved the distinction of becoming the first landlord in Los Angeles to ask the city to declare one of its buildings unsafe because it did not meet earthquake standards. Then its attorneys argued that the company wanted to remove the Garden Court because "the longer the building stays up, the riskier it is that somebody might get hurt." Replied an unconvinced Superior Court Judge Robert I. Weil: "Well, my God, there are 500 buildings in downtown Los Angeles that are subject to the same ordinance, and nobody is making them take those buildings down. So why should this one be any different?"

The city council is waiting for the developers' report on the environmental effects of ripping down the building before it decides whether to lift its historic status. From the look of things, the Garden Court may have received only one last stay of execution.

But whatever happens, it seems unlikely that Hollywood can ever return to its former glory. Los Angeles and its suburbs have gone west, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The movie stars, the affluent and much of the industry have moved along with them to Beverly Hills and Malibu. Left behind is the shell--streets still hugged by low buildings, as in some abandoned Midwestern downtown. Yet, even today, the name Hollywood retains its mystical appeal. In a sense the name and the place diverged long ago--the name symbolic of faded glamour; the place filled with the shiftless, the criminal and the crazy.

But occasionally, as the evening traffic--prostitutes and pimps, bedraggled mental cases and loiterers--begins to saunter up the boulevard, one can sense something of old Hollywood. In front of the Chinese Theater, a knot of tourists may be gathered, staring at the imprint of Jean Harlow's heels in the cement, TO SID: IN SINCERE APPRECIATION: JEAN HARLOW: SEPT. 29, '33.

In places along the boulevard, the sun's slanting rays silhouette the remaining palms. And in the familiar salmon glow of a Western sunset, one can almost see a jaunty Charlie Chaplin, high-stepping up the boulevard, on his way, perhaps, to the ballroom of the Garden Court.

--By Russell Leavitt

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