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Presley stayed in Room 1016. On Halloween night of 1936,
Harry Houdini’s widow held a séance on the roof of the
hotel to contact the vanished magician. (The Knickerbocker
has since been converted to a senior home.)
Up the hill, I parked in front of the Parva-Sed
apartments, a half-timbered, mock-Tudor building where
Nathanael West lived in 1935 when he was turning out
scripts for B movies. Here he got the idea to write
The
Day of the Locust,
his savage, comic novel of Hollywood
hopefuls and has-beens alienated at the margins of the
film business – a story that ends with an apocalyptic riot at
a movie premiere. Some characters were modeled on his
neighbors in the bungalow court across the street, leading
tragic lives among bird of paradise flowers, and on the
prostitutes who resided in his building and sewed buttons
on his shirts.
I climbed to the top of the hill to see an icon of
Hollywood history, the Alto-Nido apartments. In the 1950
classic
Sunset Boulevard,
this Spanish-style building was
the home of Joe Gillis, the failing screenwriter played by
William Holden. He confides to the audience: “I had a
couple of stories out that wouldn’t sell, and an apartment
just above Hollywood and Ivar that wasn’t paid for.”
Like so many others, he’d come to Hollywood seeking
the yellow brick road, but instead ended up on the
boulevard of broken dreams. The journey also ended
badly for another resident of the Alto-Nido, Screenland’s
most notorious murder victim of the 1940s. She was
Elizabeth Short, but newspaper headlines named her the
Black Dahlia.
The thick walls of the apartment house were once
painted creamy white. Today they’re pale pumpkin and
could use a cleaning. Broken glass glints in the street. A
noisy stream of cars on the Hollywood Freeway, just below,
makes the landmark Alto-Nido seem a chunk of flotsam,
pushed aside by the rush of Los Angeles and forgotten.
OLD HOLLYWOOD
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