Smack against Water
The centerpiece of the Garden of Allah was its famous swimming pool. It became notorious for the frequency with which famous people fell into it, and no wonder. At 65 by 45 feet, its size made it a hazard. “The pool … is so situated as to be a menace to those who return late and tired from parties,” Amy Porter, a frequent guest in the 1940s, wrote in Colliers magazine. “The residents are not much alarmed if along about 3 a.m. they hear the smack of a body against the water. They just turn over and go back to sleep.” Lucius Beebe, a columnist and other frequent guest, agreed. “It is conventional to fall into the pool,” he wrote. “All the best people do it. It wakes one up.”
One oft-told tale involves Robert Benchley, the Garden’s unofficial master of ceremonies. After a long night of drinking, he reportedly quipped, “Get me out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.” The line made its way into the 1937 Mae West film Every Day’s a Holiday, delivered by Benchley’s friend, Charles Butterworth. Benchley himself used a variation of it in The Major and the Minor, suggesting to Ginger Rogers, “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”
Tallulah Bankhead took the plunge one night wearing a heavily beaded gown. She was rescued by Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic swimmer who played Tarzan. By the time he reached her, Talullah had shucked it off the heavy gown and emerged wearing nothing but diamond jewelry. “Everyone’s been dying to see my body,” she said. “Now they can see it.” Bankhead was also likely the “throaty Broadway actress” who, according to Time Magazine, answered a knock at her villa door wearing nothing but her pet monkey perched on her shoulder. The Western Union delivery man, stunned, handed the telegram to the monkey and fled.
The pool’s odd shape was the subject of endless debate. Some claimed Nazimova had it built in the shape of the Black Sea, in commemoration of her homeland. The problem with this argument is that the pool lacked a representation of the Crimean Peninsula, site of Yalta, her hometown. Nazimova’s young lover, cinematographer Paul Ivano, who designed the underwater lighting, saw it differently. “It was more like an elongated figure eight,” he told Sheilah Graham. What’s certain is that before the cement dried, Alla etched her initials – A.N. – just below the watermark.