LOCATION Les Noces du Figaro 618 S Broadway Los Angeles, CA, 90014 United States Phone: (213) 915-8687 34° 2′ 45.9636″ N, 118° 15′ 8.6544″ W Map: Click HERE The Los Angeles Visionaries Association (LAVA) is hosting a salon on Sunday, June 30, 2013, that will focus on a pair of historic structures at the east […]

Reviews for The Garden on Sunset, by Martin Turnbull:

Like Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Martin Turnbull’s Garden on Sunset is steeped in Hollywood decadence–yet not so jaundiced and infinitely more fun. It grabs you by the throat and plops you smack down in the middle of Tinseltown during Prohibition, scraping elbows along the way with a constellation of stars, from Tallulah Bankhead to Greta Garbo. It’s one helluva kick-off for a promised series of page-turners. Count me in.” — Sam Irvin, author of Kay Thompson: From Funny Face to Eloise

“What a fun glimpse into old Hollywood and the fabulous Garden of Allah Hotel with its fascinating tenants. The three main characters, Marcus, Kathryn and Gwendolyn mix it up with such legendary names as Ramon Novarro, Tallulah Bankhead and George Cukor–not to mention the exotic Nazimova herself. Made me wish I was there!” — Debra Ann Pawlak, author of Bringing Up Oscar: The Story of the Men and Women Who Founded the Academy

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 […]

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.)

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 […]

Sheilah 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.