Posted by Verity (La Angelena) on June 22, 2001 at 14:30:48:
In Reply to: I'm only vaguely familiar with the Garden of Allah posted by Sam (of Sam's Place) on June 21, 2001 at 17:58:33:
: I just remember a night it was hotter than... well, you know, and that seersucker suit you mentioned before had gotten all wet. Talking with some guy about a BMW.
Once upon a time in California...
It's hard to tell you all when this story starts, but I can tell you that just as Cortez' men saw a dream of paradise when they saw Tenochtitlan, the Spaniards who camped by the Los Angeles River saw a more rustic but just as lovely place. It's generally accepted that the local indians, a subgroup of Gabrieleno,
would not live right on the area where the Pueblo de la Reina Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles de Porciuncula was founded. It's said they believed a non-human race lived there and would resent the invasion. But it might just be equally as true that every thirty years or so the lovely river would flood the vertile delta
for a hundred miles, creating a swamp all the way to the ocean.
Eventually the river was "controlled" so that this could not occur. Everyone here has seen what that lovely river looks like now; it is good only for the homeless to wash their clothes in and car chases.
But I'm getting behind myself...because we can review everything built and destroyed in Los Angeles for hours and hours...the lovely house called "Hollywood" with its gardens is a parking lot; the location of the signing
of the treaty between the Spaniards and the Yankees is a parking lot; a recent book I was reading listed twenty or thirty things I'd like to see that are parking lots.
We have learned, living here, the past few years, a phrase we say a lot, a variation of one in "The Razor's Edge". We don't say "He will not be missed." We say "We didn't like it that much anyway." When the restaurant disappears,
when the club closes, when the writer dies, when the new illness destroys our local Chardonnay vines. We didn't like it that much anyway.
But anyway.
Let's look at a rather halcyon time in the 1920's. Between the City of Los Angeles, where the cops were as mean then as they are now, and the City of Beverly Hills, where the populace was as elitist as it is now, there lay
a no-man's land that was truly free, the trolley stopped just before it got there on one end and the horsepath stopped just before it got there on the other end. There was just a section of road called Sunset. And on Sunset they built
clubs and gathering places for the people who wouldn't be accepted anywhere else; the musicians, the bohemians, the writers. And they built places for these scum to live. One one side of the street a lovely actress named Allah Nazimova
had built a gorgeous mansion, and when her fortune failed in the thirties or so she opened the mansion to the writers and the crazies who wanted to stay a while. There were gardens all around and parties every night.
Across the street, an hotelier had built a place he hoped would remind visiting Europeans lured by the movie industry of a European hotel. There was the main building, which looked like a chateau, and there were the bungalows all around.
And it was called the Chateau Marmont. And there was a pool, and there were parties every night.
Now if you wanted to come to Los Angeles because the studios were paying you and you wanted to stay a short while working on that screenplay, you stayed at the Chateau Marmont. And you'd take a bottle down to Dorothy Parker's room, and you'd
have a few drinks and you'd likely not get much work done, but *Gods* the ideas that would flow in that room. And if you wanted to stay a *long* time because the studios had even given you a long term contract and an office you'd filled with
Cocacola bottles, you'd stay at the Garden of Allah, and you'd take a bottle over to Bertolt Brecht's room and you wouldn't get any work done, but oh the ideas that would flow...
And you could always walk across the street if you needed a different idea from somebody else, Faulkner or Huxley or Evelyn Waugh or some other expatriate.
And it was good.
And later others came, and they took rooms, or maybe they were less sarcastic and more mystical and they'd drive up Laurel Canyon a ways and they'd find there an old hunting cabin, built in the '30s, that was falling apart, and they'd move in.
And Ms. Mitchell might take a pan of brownies down to Mr. Zappa's place and maybe you wouldn't get any work done but oh the ideas that would flow up and down beneath those trees...
But Allah Nazimova was gone, and her mansion was smaller, and the patrons less powerful. And Los Angeles still didn't meet Beverly Hills but the sherrifs made damned sure the old bohemians and new hippies
behaved themselves. And Laurel Canyon went right through to the Valley where the suburbanitesl lived, and they drove down the canyon to their jobs, and the land was so valuable now when it would be so nice
to have those jobs closer. So the 1950's they torn that Garden right down to the ground, and they put up a bank. And to show how much they cared about history, they put a model of the old Garden right there
in the bank lobby. Wasn't that kind of them?
And Joni Mitchell didn't walk down the canyon to talk with anyone when she heard; she wrote "Big Yellow Taxi" and hoped no one would forget those days when they We sat beneath the palms in the warm afternoons
And drank the wine with Fitzgerald and Huxley and they pawned a biting phrase from tongues hot with blood And drained their pens of bitter ink
But they were all Vainly reaching for the bottle full of empty Edens.
Because Eden is just another word for paradise.
And if you call something paradise...
So if you have Garden of your own, take that bottle over to that other room and fill it with ideas. Make sure some of them get written down.
And make sure you know what you have there...
Because it just might be gone tomorrow. And I'd hate to have to say again...
We didn't like it anyway.
Bring your seersucker suit, Sam, I'll buy you a drink at Boardner's, the bar where the Black Dahlia had
her last drink.
Before that's gone too.
-Verity