Algonquins and Others
All of this corporate maneuvering had very little effect on the Garden’s guests. It remained a home away from home for actors and writers from the East Coast and Europe. Among the first wave of guests at the Garden of Allah was Robert Benchley, a humorist, Broadway critic, actor (Foreign Correspondent), and winner of a Best Short film Oscar for How to Sleep. Nearly every year from 1932 to 1945, Benchley lived at the Garden, making him the hotel’s longest resident. He partied nightly with actor Charles Butterworth (Magnificent Obsession) and poet-screenwriter Dorothy Parker (A Star Is Born, 1937). (Benchley’s grandson, Peter Benchley, wrote the novel Jaws.)
Like Benchley, Parker was a founder in 1919 of the Algonquin Round Table, an ad hoc, ongoing series of luncheons at the Algonquin Hotel attended by New York’s top writers and editors. The Round Table disbanded in 1929. Three years later, 0ther Round Tablers soon moved west and settled at the Garden – George S. Kaufman (You Can’t Take It with You), Marc Connelly (I Married at Witch, featuring Robert Benchley), Robert E. Sherwood (The Best Years of Our Lives), New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott and comedian Harpo Marx of the Marx Brothers, among others. Sheilah Graham called this iteration, “the Algonquin Round Table gone west and childish.”
Among actors in the first wave of guests, 19-year-0ld Maureen O’Sullivan, fresh from being discovered in Ireland, moved into the Garden of Allah in September 1930. Best known as Jane in the Tarzan films, she met her future husband, director John Farrow, at the Garden. Their union produced seven children, including actress Mia Farrow and her son, journalist Ronan Farrow.
The Marx Brothers came to Hollywood in 1931 to re-create their popular vaudeville comedy act in movies. Harpo (Arthur) Marx, the silent member of the act, was the first brother to move into the Garden. He described it as “a collection of palm trees, bungalows and apartments grouped around a swimming pool built in the shape of the Black Sea.” He called the Garden of Allah “the most famous oasis in the stucco desert of the movie colony.”
Harpo’s on-stage persona was a cunning but silent clown who was unaccountably also a virtuoso harpist. He rehearsed for hours his villa, which was fine until Sergei Rachmaninoff, the famed Russian composer and concert pianist moved in next door. Rachmaninoff’ annoyed Harpo with his own thunderous practice sessions that drowned out Harpo’s harp. Harpo retaliated by playing Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C-sharp Minor” fortissimo, on a loop for two hours. Rachmaninoff gave in and asked to be moved to a villa far away from Harpo. “Peace returned to the Garden,” Harpo wrote.
Lillian Hellman lived nearby with her husband Arthur Kober. She was then a manuscript reader for MGM, not yet the celebrated playwright she would become. Ginger Rogers remembered Hellman lounging poolside in a skimpy swimsuit, eager for conversation. “Anything,” Hellman confessed, “to delay the work.” It was at the Garden that she told Kober she wanted a divorce. She had begun what would be a decades-long affair with novelist Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man novels.
Ginger Rogers and her mother Lela arrived in 1931, sharing a two-bedroom villa. The cramped quarters “gave us the needed feeling of home,” Rogers later said. She made three films at RKO that year and four more the next, culminating in her breakout performance in 42nd Street. Her rendition of “We’re in the Money” became an anthem of the Depression era.
Tallulah Bankhead, a fan of Nazimova since childhood, made the Garden her first home when she arrived in Hollywood in 1933. She was famously open about her sexuality and rumored to have had affairs with Joan Crawford, Delores Del Rio, Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, and George Raft, who, she claimed, gave her the clap.
Charles Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester moved into a villa in 1934. A Screenland reporter described their villa as “charming” and noted their twice-daily swims. Laughton had just won the Best Actor Oscar for Henry VIII and was filming The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Ruggles of Red Gap, and Les Misérables. Lanchester was a year away from her unforgettable role as The Bride of Frankenstein.
Errol Flynn arrived in 1935, fresh from Britain and newly signed to Warner Bros., where he was cast in his star-making first leading role in Captain Blood. He roomed at the Garden with David Niven, also newly arrived from Britain. Flynn met French actress his first wife, Lili Damita, at the Garden. She had been a frequent guest at Nazimova’s women-only pool parties a decade earlier.
In September 1935, Humphrey Bogart came to Hollywood to reprise his Broadway role in The Petrified Forest. Bogart had a long career on Broadway but his role as the sinister Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest was his first break through role. He likely chose the Garden of Allah because of friendships with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and other Algonquinites whom he met in Manhattan speakeasies. He expected to stay three months, but he lived in Los Angeles for the rest of his life. He would appear in over 40 films, including Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and The Big Sleep.