THE GARDEN OF ALLAH~ OPENING NIGHT~ 1927

 this is the los angeles times story regarding opening night~

 THE GARDEN OF ALLA~ circa 1927

The town’s big blast on Jan. 9, 1927 … was the merry marathon at Sunset Blvd. and Havenhurst Dr. It heralded the birth of the Garden of Allah.

There was joy afoot, caviar at hand and bubbles in the air — for 18 hours. By midnight, the waiters were harmonizing with the guests and wandering troubadours played madrigals from the middle of the pool.

It was climax piled on climax, including a virtual state dinner at which the mistress of the Garden of Allah, Yalta-born Alla Nazimova, dedicated the plush three-acre plot.

 
When it was purchased in 1919 by Metro Studios for their biggest star, Alla Nazimova, the Russian-born Broadway actress, the only structure on the estate was the main house, which fronted Sunset at the corner of Havenhurst. It has been suggested that Nazimova selected this particular estate because of its location just outside the jurisdiction of the city of Hollywood in the then-unincorporated stretch of Los Angeles County that would later be known as the Sunset Strip and, much later, incorporated as the city of West Hollywood.

In many ways, Alla Nazimova could be considered one of the Founding Mothers of West Hollywood. For one thing, Nazimova was, for her time, quite openly gay. While she had a lavender marriage with gay actor Charles Bryant, she earned a reputation as a ladykiller for her affairs with celebrities including Mercedes de Acosta, stage actress Eva Le Gallienne, movie director Dorothy Arzner, and Oscar Wilde’s lesbian niece Dolly. 

It was Nazimova who built the pool, which was meant to remind her of her girlhood on the Crimea, and stories that circulated around town about naked women frolicking by Nazimova’s pool contributed early on to West Hollywood’s racy reputation. By the end of the 1920s, however, three factors combined to doom Nazimova’s career.

First, she was in her forties when motion picture sound arrived, and her pronounced Russian accent, which had not bothered Broadway audiences, did not translate well on screen. Second, she formed a production company but chose high-minded artistic projects, culminating in a disastrous all-gay production of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” that bankrupted her. And finally, the stories that had circulated about the goings-on at her lesbian salon came back to bite her when the studios bowed to pressure from conservative moralists and accepted the Production Code, which restricted the behavior of Hollywood figures both on-screen and off.

Nazimova found herself facing a cash crunch. Her solution was to convert her estate, with its prime Sunset Strip location, into a hotel. The Times’ Swinton writes that in the “big revamp, [Nazimova] showered $1.5 million on the place, built 25 unique villas of Spanish design and packed them with the last word in charm and fashion.”

It was a concept that proved to be phenomenally successful, but not for Nazimova. She was considered an artistic genius, but she was no hotelier. She sold the property a few years later to company that added improvements that helped it become a favored Hollywood stopping place for everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Igor Stravinsky and Groucho Marx to Ronald Reagan.

The new owners kept Nazimova on, however, and she occupied her villa at the hotel until she died in 1945.

In 1959, before the bulldozers moved in, there was one last party at the Garden of Allah. Among the over 1,000 guests were former silent star Francis X. Bushman, star of the original, silent version of “Ben Hur,” and his wife, who had attended the grand opening soiree in 1927. As a final tribute, Nazimova’s 1923 version of “Salome” was screened.