The Garden of Allah

Descripción

The Garden of Allah in Hollywood was a prison and a playground, a sanctuary and a glorified whorehouse, where the greats of Hollywood's golden years could carry on their private lives unobserved by the public eye. In her new book, the celebrated columnist Sheilah Graham takes readers behind the walls of this fabled hideaway to bring them the inside story of the madcap existence of its inhabitants. As the author notes, 'In the thirty-two-year span of its life, the Garden would witness robbery, murder, drunkenness, despair, divorce, marriage, orgies, pranks, fights, suicides, frustration, and hope. Yet intellectuals and celebrities from all over the world were to find it a convenient haven and a fascinating home.' 'I refuse to believe that such a place exists,' Thomas Wolfe wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived there during his final assault on Hollywood. It was an oasis for the intellectuals from the East - the Algonquin Round Table of the West. The register of its notable guests included_ Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara, Jascha Heifetz. Mischa Elman, Rachmaninoff, Katharine Hepburn, Garbo John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall. With twenty-five bungalows surrounding a lotus-shaped swimming pool, the Garden was a private place whose doors were open day and far into the night to anyone who belonged, but to no one else. It was a crazy, unconventional, uninhibited hotel that awakened at the cocktail hour and went to sleep at dawn. The entertainment was provided by the inmates - Benchley imitating a Mississippi steamboat, tooting around the pool into which Barrymore fell with clocklike regularity. . . . You could look out your bedroom window at five in the morning and catch Tallulah Bankhead whizzing by stark naked . . . or Garbo before she wanted to be alone . . . or Charles Laughton during the filming of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, floating in the pool with a great hump on his back. There was something for everyone: Hemingway making impassioned speeches for Loyalist Spain . . . John Carradine being chased by his wife as he recited Shakespeare to the adjacent hills . . . the betting on the battles between Bogart and Mayo Methot . . . the noisy fights between Errol Flynn and Pat Wymore. Miss Graham makes her readers a part of this incredible scene. You will play 'The Game' with Marc Connelly, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, and the Marx Brothers. You will be a guest at the strangest of grand hotels where the hotel was the star and the famous guests were the supporting players. Sheilah Graham is the person most qualified to write this book. During her thirty-three years as a Hollywood columnist she knew The Garden of Allah well, especially in the Golden Years of its tempestuous existence. It was here in Robert Benchley's apartment that she met F. Scott Fitzgerald. She lived at the Garden for a while in the villa next door to Errol Flynn. She was present at the parties, including the last party before the Garden and its ghosts were bulldozed into the earth, leaving nothing behind except the memory of what happened there. She has brought it all to life in a vivid yet sometimes poignant panorama of a world that outdid even the most glamorous and bizarre films of Hollywood's greatest era. All orders shipped protected in a box. N° de ref. del artículo 000896

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