Author Archive
Five Degrees of Separation Between Alla Nazimova and Larry David
Five degrees of separation between film and Broadway star Alla Nazimova and Larry David: 1. Nazimova was in a faux marriage with British actor Charles Bryant (shown here) for 13 years starting in 1912. The couple never actually married because Nazimova had married a man in Russia whom she’d immediately abandoned — the fact that […]
Nazimova: A Biography, by Gavin Lambert
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From the New York Times review of Nazimova published not long after the book was released in 1997:

How in four years she went from being an unknown actress who spoke no English to an American star for whom the Shuberts named a theater is an amazing tale, and Gavin Lambert, in ”Nazimova,” a gracefully written, highly entertaining, surprisingly poignant biography, makes the most of it. The author of a biography of Norma Shearer (among many other works of fact and fiction set in Hollywood), Mr. Lambert charts Nazimova’s up-and-down career and squishy private life. Having jettisoned a casually acquired Russian husband when she emigrated, she lived for many years with a British actor, Charles Bryant, who piggybacked on her acting successes and soaked her for money but otherwise appears to have performed few husbandly functions. Still, he was publicly identified as her husband, and when he left her for another woman the truth emerged that she had lived with him out of wedlock, causing something of a scandal. She survived it. The secret she felt most compelled to guard was that most of her romances were with women, one of whom, Glesca Marshall, shared her final years, from 1929 to 1945. (Among the more incredible facts of this stranger-than-fiction story: Nazimova was Nancy Reagan’s godmother.)

Was Nazimova’s Swimming Pool Designed to Look Like the Black Sea?
Writing about the Garden of Allah Hotel for Collier’s in 1948, Amy Porter, a longtime resident of the Sunset Strip hotel, mentioned that the shape of the pool was an ongoing topic of debate among her famous neighbors as they sunned themselves by it on languid gin-soaked afternoons. The design of the pool is still […]
The Garden of Allah, by Sheilah Graham
bookshot-garden-of-allah-grahamSheilah Graham’s The Garden of Allah, a history of the famed hotel that anchored the eastern end of the Sunset Strip, is a must for any reading list on the history of Hollywood’s golden age in general and the Strip specifically. Graham unfolds the story of the hotel in roughly chronological order, but she was a gossip columnist, so the book reads like a series of columns, many of which focus on gossip and anecdotes (a number of which involve society people who are long forgotten) — rather than a comprehensive history of the hotel.
Nazimova’s Salome