On December 7, 1941, at five minutes past ten Los Angeles time, Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor. Within days, the United States was at war. Hollywood mobilized along with the rest of the country. The Sunset Strip, including the Garden of Allah, fell inside the ten-mile coastal zone deemed vulnerable to air attack. Nightclubs doused their neon, blacked out their windows, and some shuttered for good. The Chateau Marmont’s basement garage was designated an air raid shelter. Humphrey Bogart, now living in Shoreham Heights above the Strip, became an air raid warden.
Movie folks at the Garden worked overtime in wartime film production. In 1942, Robert Benchley appeared in two feature films – The Major and the Minor and I Married a Witch – and made four shorts. Dorothy Parker co-wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, a domestic thriller about Nazi infiltration.
In the spring of 1943, the government began rationing meat and cheese. Everyone received a book of coupons – two pounds of meat and four ounces of cheese per week. Restaurants accepted coupons for meal portions, and “meatless days” became common. Most Garden residents avoided the hotel restaurant, preferring A-list venues on the Strip or in Beverly Hills. The villas had kitchenettes, but few used them.
Gloria Stuart’s Ration Card Dinner Parties
One exception was Villa 12, home to actress Gloria Stuart, her husband Arthur Sheekman, and their daughter Sylvia. Stuart had appeared in over a dozen films at Universal in the 1930s, including The Invisible Man. She would later be nominated for an Oscar at age 87 for Titanic. But in the 1940s, she was the Garden’s unofficial hostess. Years later, her daughter, Sylvia Sheekman Thompson, food reporter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote, “If Robert Benchley was the Garden’s master of ceremonies, Gloria Stuart was its house mother.”
At martini time, Benchley, Charles Butterworth, and Stuart gathered in Benchley’s living room with the door open, listening to Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, or Woody Herman rehearsing across the way. Their neighbors were top acts prepping for gigs at Mocambo, the Cocoanut Grove, and other nightspots.
Despite rationing, Stuart hosted lavish dinner parties. She collected ration stamps from guests in advance and shopped creatively at the recently opened Farmers Market on Fairfax. Her kitchen was tiny – a four-burner stove, a sink, and a small fridge. When cooking something elaborate, she used friends’ stoves and refrigerators, even if they weren’t invited to the feast. She loved to startle guests: tubs of stew, mountain trout in aspic, flaming dishes, and a 26-boy rijsttafel – an Indonesian feast. The more flamboyant, the better.
Her husband, Arthur Sheekman, was taciturn, preferring solitude and writing. Groucho Marx, who had brought Sheekman west to write for the Marx Brothers, called him “the fastest wit in the West” and described Stuart as “a great broad.” One of Stuart’s close friends was food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who lived in Hemet, 100 miles east. Fisher, who wrote How to Cook a Wolf, among other books, described Stuart as “a beautiful honey-colored actress” and recalled dining at a table crowded with flowers, nuts, Armenian jelly, Russian relishes, Indian chutney, beer, wine, and water.
Conversation at Stuart’s parties was for men only. Women, including Stuart, the screenwriter Frances Goodrich (The Thin Man), and even Dorothy Parker, were expected to remain silent. The lone exception was Lillian Hellman. “She was so prestigious, the men deferred to her,” Stuart recalled. After dinner, guests played charades – known at the Garden simply as “The Game.” Frequent players included Groucho and Harpo Marx, John Carradine, lyricist Yip Harburg (“Over the Rainbow”), and screenwriters Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath), Julius Epstein (Casablanca), Dalton Trumbo (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo), Adrian Scott (Murder, My Sweet), and Frances Goodrich’s husband and co-writer Albert Hackett, (It’s a Wonderful Life).