Model of the Garden of Allah Hotel

Earlier this year, CA California Home+Design published an article about the demise of the Garden of Allah Hotel. The money quote came from Martin Turnbull, author of the Garden of Allah novels and Alla Nazimova Society co-founder:

“It became a magnet for a certain type of person,” says Martin Turnbull, a novelist who has extensively researched the property for his book series The Garden of Allah. “It tended to draw the New York intelligentsia, who had come out here to earn money writing for the movies.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx and Robert Benchley were just some of the tenants who fell into that category. Regular visitors included actors such as Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Errol Flynn and Tallulah Bankhead (who reportedly enjoyed skinny-dipping in the Black Sea–inspired pool).

One small fact-check quibble with an earlier section of the article, however.

“Famous Film Folk: A Gallery Of Life Portraits And Biographies” by Charles Donald Fox was originally published in 1925, and then reissued in 2012.

It contains an entry on Alla Nazimova.

If you have any information on this book, especially if you have a photo of the cover, please let us know.

From left: director Herbert Blache, Charlie Chaplin, Nazimova and Charles Bryant

This photo was associated with Metro Pictures’ promotion of Alla Nazimova’s 1919 production of “The Brat.”

From the publisher’s book description:

Whether in or out of the closet, gays and lesbians played an essential role in shaping studio-era Hollywood. Gay actors (J. Warren Kerrigan, Marlene Dietrich, Rock Hudson), gay directors (George Cukor, James Whale, Dorothy Arzner), and gay set and costume designers (Adrian, Travis Banton, George James Hopkins) have been among the most influential individuals in Hollywood history and literally created the Hollywood mystique. This landmark study-based on seven years of exacting research and including unpublished memoirs, personal correspondence, oral histories, and scrapbooks-explores the experience of Hollywood’s gays in the context of their times. Ranging from Hollywood’s working conditions to the rowdy character of Los Angeles’s gay underground, William J. Mann brings long overdue attention to every aspect of this powerful creative force.

From the publisher’s book description:

THE GIRLS lifts the veil on the private lives of early Hollywood’s most powerful and uninhibited goddesses…The most unforgettable and immortal women of Hollywood’s golden era thrilled to a hidden world of exciting secrets. In THE GIRLS, Diana McLellan reveals the complex and intimate connections that roiled behind the public personae of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and the women who loved them. Previously unseen FBI files, private correspondence and a trove of unpublished documents reveal a chain of lesbian affairs that moved from the theater world of New York through the heights of chic society to embed itself in the power structure of the movie business.

Why did Garbo and Dietrich deny knowing each other to the bitter end? THE GIRLS documents how they not only knew one another, but the swoon that started their ill-starred amour. How did Garbo-worshipper Tallulah Bankhead save Dietrich’s career? FBI files make it clear how an intervention with J. Edgar Hoover helped. When was Marlene Dietrich first married? Not when her official biography claimed she was-an early marriage to a sexy, smoky communist was hushed up; THE GIRLS shows how and why.

From the uninhibited appeal of lover-to-the-stars Mercedes de Acosta to the role of Garbo’s lover Salka Viertel in torpedoing her career, from the sapphic world of silent star Alla Nazimova’s Garden of Alla to Rudolph Valentino’s lesbian brides, THE GIRLS explores a rich stew of film, politics, sexuality, psychology and stardom.

Reader reviews on Amazon:

On the cover: Alla Nazimova in a still from “Eye For Eye” (1918)

Between 1917 and 1941, Hollywood studios, gossip columnists and novelists featured an unprecedented number of homosexuals, cross-dressers, and adulterers in their depictions of the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle.

Actress Greta Garbo defined herself as the ultimate serial bachelorette. Screenwriter Mercedes De Acosta engaged in numerous lesbian relationships with the Hollywood elite. And countless homosexual designers brazenly picked up men in the hottest Hollywood nightclubs. Hollywood’s image grew as a place of sexual abandon.

This book demonstrates how studios and the media used images of these sexually adventurous characters to promote the industry and appeal to the prurient interests of their audiences. Illustrations, notes, bibliography and index.

From the publisher’s book description:

The First Female Stars: Women of the Silent Era rediscovers the fascinating lives and pioneering achievements of 15 women who dared to venture into early motion pictures, an industry dominated by men, and who not only succeeded but became the focal points of the industry. Each star earned a position at the height of her profession, and though many are largely forgotten today, made a lasting and significant contribution to early cinema. In this entertaining and informative volume, author David Menefee reveals these women and their signature roles, drawing on many original sources to show us how such actresses as Theda Bara, Sarah Bernhardt, Dorothy Gish, and Norma Talmadge were received in their time, and the many ways in which their influence remains important today.

Each profile contains a biographical treatment, an analysis of key films from her career, a discussion of the actress’s influence on the medium, and selected filmography. Each also includes two photographs, most often one of the actress herself and a still from a film.

Reviews for The Trouble with Scarlett, by Martin Turnbull:

As a fan of The Garden on Sunset, it was a joy to join again in the endearing story of the three Hollywood ascendants: Marcus, Kathryn, and Gwendolyn. Through an adept combination of skillful character development and evocative settings, Martin Turnbull has, in the second novel in a promised series, become even more of a solid and resonant storyteller.

In The Trouble with Scarlett, Turnbull’s characters have become (as real people do over time) more stable and clearly defined, and what might have deteriorated to an expected “gimmick” of involving his fictional characters with real people in historic events has instead become even more seamless, what might have been a clumsy technical contrivance is now an organic and properly rhythmic narrative voice.

More after the jump »

Flowers placed on the grave of Alla Nazimova to commemorate the anniversary of her death, July 17, 1945 (Click to enlarge)

Alla Nazimova died on July 13, 1945, in Los Angeles, as a result of a coronary thrombosis that she suffered in her villa at the Garden of Allah Hotel. She was buried in Forest Lawn Glendale.

The inscription on her marker reads:

In Memoriam

Madame Alla Nazimova

1945

“Voice of World’s Conscience – Immaculate beyond our concept – Christ is they name. Teach us to shun the ways of greed and prejudice and strife; to earn our bread, to share our bread; to heed, to follow Thee forever.

Amen”

A.N.