THE GARDENOF SIN & SEDUCTION

LESBIAN ORGIES, MARTINI-FUELED FIST FIGHTS, SPOILED CELEBRITIES, RECREATIONAL SEX, MAFIA HIT MEN, PEYOTE PARTIES, POOLSIDE TRYSTS, AND SIMMERING FEUDS—THE GARDEN OF ALLAH HOTEL & VILLAS OF THE 20S, 30S, 40S & 50S WAS THE ONLY PLACE TO BE IN HOLLYWOOD.

By Kirk Silsbee

In 1938 infamous writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a now famous postcard—to himself! It read, “Dear Scott, How are you? Have been meaning to come in and see you. I have living at the Garden of Allah. Yours, Scott Fitzgerald.” The writer of The Great Gatsby was living at the Garden of Allah in 1938, drowning in debt, struggling with alcoholism and the demands of screenwriting in Hollywood; he was flailing to bang out a draft for The Last Tycoon while his wife, Zelda, was rotting in a dank sanatarium back east. He justified the then costly $400 a month rent as a “business expense.” He was, in actuality, living and working under a dark, Scotch-laden hedonistic cloud. After a late night binge, Fitzgerald crawled a hundred yards from his bungalow to the front desk. The horrified clerk asked if a doctor was in order. Fitzgerald gasped in protest, “No doctor. Just get me somewhere where I can die in peace!” (Fitzgerald, subsequently, suffered two heart attacks in late-1940. After the first, he moved in with Sheilah Graham, the ornery gossip columnist, who lived one block east of the Garden.)

Around the same time, the diminutive, free-swinging bisexual French actress, Lili Damita, was hooking up with the suave, debonair, devil-may-care ladies-man Errol Flynn—a tryst of equally voracious libidos, martinis and violent love—and only the Garden, where the affair called its home-away-from-home, knew the true sordid details. (They then married and divorced a few years later.) But when Flynn began a torrid affair with actress Lupe Velez in 1937—much of their meetings also taking place at the Garden—she introduced him to a novel use for the “white powder.”  The Mexican Spitfire would reportedly dab the head of Flynn’s manhood with cocaine to dull the sensation and enable him to last longer. Flynn would indulge in coke until his death in Vancouver in 1959.

Time magazine wrote in 1959, as Allah was closing its doors: “Through the intoxicating ’20s and ’30s, the Garden of Allah was more house party than hotel. Robert Benchley was resident clown; John Barrymore kept a bicycle there so as not to waste drinking time walking between the separate celebrations in the sprawling, movie-Spanish villas. Woollcott, Hemingway, Brice, Flynn, Olivier, Welles, Bogart, Dietrich all lived at the Garden during its green years.”

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