Alla Nazimova and The Garden of Allah Hotel

Alla Nazimova

Alla Nazimova was a Russian actress who immigrated to the United States in 1905. On Broadway, she was noted for her work in the classic plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev. After starring in a string of silent movie successes her own efforts at silent film production were less successful, but a few of her key performances still survive on film as a record of her art.

Nazimova conducted relationships with women but could not be fully open about her sexuality in public or within the film industry at that time. Her mansion on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard – The Garden of Alla - was the scene of many wild, outlandish parties and became THE place for Hollywood’s Avant Garde elite to socialize. She is credited with having originated the phrase "the sewing circle" as a discreet code word for a group of lesbian or homosexual actors.

    Nazimova’s Early life

Alla Nazimova

Alla Nazimova was born Marem-Ides Leventon on May 22nd, 1879 in Yalta, Crimea, which was part of the Russian Empire. Her stage name was inspired by the surname of Nadezhda Nazimova, the heroine of the Russian novel Children of the Streets. Alla showed a great aptitude for music and began having violin lessons at the age of seven.

She was the youngest of three children of Jewish parents Yakov Abramovich Leventon, a pharmacist, and Sofia Lvovna Horowitz, who moved to Yalta in 1870 from Kishinev. She grew up in a dysfunctional family and her parents divorced when she was 8. After her parents separated, she went to various boarding schools and foster homes and lived with different relatives. Alla developed a strong penchant for outrageous behaviour helped, in no small part, by her striking violet-coloured eyes.

As a teenager she began to pursue an interest in the theatre. Despite her conservative father’s objections, she began having lessons at age 17 at the Academy of Acting in Moscow. She joined Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre as a pupil of his ‘method style’ using her stage name of Alla Nazimova for the very first time. In 1899, she married Sergei Golovin, a fellow actor; however the marriage was “in name only” and was used as a smokescreen to hide Nazimova’s true sexuality. 

Acting Career

Nazimova

Nazimova's theatre career blossomed early; and by 1903 she was a major star in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. She toured Europe, including London and Berlin, with Pavel Orlenev, a flamboyant actor and producer. In 1905 they moved to New York City and founded a Russian-language theatre on the Lower East Side. The venture was unsuccessful and Orlenev returned to Russia while Nazimova decided to stay in New York.

She was signed up by the American producer Henry Miller and made her Broadway debut in New York City in 1906 to critical and popular success. Nazimova found herself heralded for her definitive interpretations of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. Dorothy Parker described her as the finest Hedda Gabler she had ever seen. She quickly became extremely popular; and a theatre was named after her.

It was during this period that Nazimova met British-born actor Charles Bryant, the man who would become her“second

husband.” Nazimova was still legally married to Segei Golovin but from 1912 to 1925 Nazimova maintained a fake "lavender marriage" with Charles Bryant.

Nazimova had kept her first marriage a secret from the press, her fans and even her closest friends. In 1923, she officially divorced Golovin without traveling to the Soviet Union. Her divorce papers, stated that on May 11, 1923, the marriage of Leventon Alla Alexandrovna and Sergius Arkadyevitch Golovin, consummated between them in the City Church of Boruysk June 20, 1899, had been officially dissolved. 

A little over two years later, on November 16, 1925, Charles Bryant, then 43, surprised the press, Nazimova's fans and Nazimova herself by marrying Marjorie Gilhooley, 23, in Connecticut. When the press uncovered the fact that Charles had listed his current marital status as "single" on his marriage license, the revelation that the marriage between Alla and Charles had been a sham from the beginning embroiled Nazimova in a scandal that went on to damage her successful acting career.

In 1915, with the outbreak of World War I, Nazimova was offered a role in the 35-minute play War Brides. The play and Nasimova’s performance came to the attention of motion picture producer Lewis J. Selznick. He was also from Ukraine and his second son, David O. Selznick, later became a notable Hollywood filmmaker who produced Nazimova’s final film, Since You Went Away, in 1944. 

Lewis Selznick offered Nazimova $30,000 and a $1,000 per day bonus for every day filming went over schedule. A young actor with a bit part in the movie was Richard Barthelmess, whose mother taught Nazimova English. Nazimova had encouraged him to try out for movies and he later became a star. 

Nazimova took on the film role in War Brides on the succession of eroticized femme fatale roles that she had accepted under contract first to New York’s Shubert brothers and then to Charles Frohman’s Theatrical Syndicate. Prior to this performance, Nazimova had a reputation as a moody Bohemian and political subversive. With her role in War Brides, a strident feminist was invented, if only temporarily, for the screen. Nazimova boasted to a reporter for the New York American that her decision to appear as figure of suffrage in War Brides was intended to be a contribution to “the womanhood of the world”.

Though periodic image reinvention now seems de rigueur for Hollywood stars, it wasn’t always; part of Nazimova’s legacy is that she is said to have been among the earliest to exercise control over her own celebrity image. With very few exceptions, the path of Nazimova’s motion picture career is described according to skillful and timely reinventions of her public persona and a feminine will as sharply defined as the emotive theatrical poses for which she became known. Stories repeatedly appeared in the press about the actress being “caught” taking in one of her films along with the movie-going public, suggesting that Nazimova maintained a belief in the primacy of a live appearance, even if she embraced the new medium as an advance over theatre,

In a 1916 interview, Nazimova said about the film industry:

 The pioneer days are now past. This is proved, not in the great mass of moving pictures we see, but the flashes of genius which show what can be done when true artists devote themselves sincerely to creative work. On the speaking stage there have always been more bad plays than good ones, but no one ever argued from this that the drama was a failure. We must always judge an art by its best examples, not by its worst, not even its second best . . . At the present the proportion of fine motion pictures to the total number produced is smaller than the proportion of masterpieces in other art, but if we pause to consider the youth of this field of endeavour, we find our criticisms answered. We must be patient.

In 1917, based on the success of War Brides, Nazimova was offered a 5-year, $13,000 a week contract–$3,000 more than Mary Pickford was earning –with Metro studios working with future MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Her contract awarded her the right to approve director, script, and leading man. Her first film, Revelation (1918) where she starred alongside “husband” Charles Bryant was a huge success. She played a French cabaret singer who finds divine inspiration in a rose bush and joins the Salvation Army as a nurse. Her follow-up film, Toys of Fate also did very well. 

 Nazimova played dual roles as half-sisters during the Boxer Rebellion in The Red Lantern (1919), and then moved to Los Angeles to begin production on her third film, Eye for Eye. 

 NAZIMOVA IN THE RED LANTERN

From 1917 to 1922, Nazimova wielded considerable influence and power in Hollywood. She completed 11 highly successful films for the studio over a three-year period which earned her a considerable amount of money. She was a torrid, stylish and rather outré tragedienne who generally played exotic, liberal women confronted by great personal anguish. 

Nazimova Productions produced nine largely profitable, feature-length films and brought along the writing talent of writer-producer June Mathis. Details regarding the supervisory roles Nazimova played in the production of many of her films remain confusing since not all of Nazimova’s contributions are reflected in the official credits on films. Contemporary sources discuss Nazimova’s work not only for direction, production, titles, editing, and in at least one instance, lighting and design.

Nazimova received a costume design credit on the film Revelation . As a screenwriter she worked under the pseudonym Peter M. Winters, and many film scholars acknowledge her as the director of pictures that gave on-screen credit to Charles Bryant. After her celebrity began to falter, Nazimova began to take aesthetic risks and to embody a gay sensibility beyond the taste of her mainstream audience. For this reason, Metro executives cancelled Nazimova’s  production of Aphrodite, with a screenplay by June Mathis when they read of the film’s planned scenes of lust and violence.

By the end of 1918, with her film career still flourishing, she spent $65,000 on an imposing California Spanish home at 8080 Sunset Boulevard - then still an unpaved dirt track - and proceeded to spend another $65,000 remodelling the interior, building a large swimming pool — designed in the shape of the Black Sea, to remind her of her native Crimea — and one of the first ever to be lit from underwater. She also spent money on landscaping the property’s three and a half acres. She named it the Garden of Alla and it became a popular gathering spot for the

Hollywood intelligentsia who would flock there for the salons in which literature, art, and theatre was discussed at length. It also attracted a lesbian following making it somewhat notorious and there were widespread rumours of outlandish and allegedly debauched parties which were held at her mansion.

Nazimova’s next film, Brat (1919) was not well received. The films which followed in 1920–Heart of a Child, Madame Peacock and Billions–also performed poorly and in Photoplay magazine’s annual popularity poll Alla dropped from #4 to #20.

The set designer on Billions was Natacha Rambova, a friend of Nazimova and the future wife of Rudolph Valentino who co-starred with Nazimova in Camille (1921). With its ultra-modern set and contemporary settings, Camile was way ahead of its time. Critical reaction varied however, and the film was only a moderate success. 

THREE CLIPS FROM CAMILE WHICH SHOW NAZIMOVA'S VERSATILITY

Nazimova & Valentino

Upon meeting the then unknown Rudolph Valentino for the first time Nazimova said:

How dare you bring that gigolo to my table? How dare you introduce that pimp to Nazimova?

After release of Camille, Nazimova and Metro parted ways and she soon felt confident enough in her abilities to begin producing and writing films in which she also starred. Nazimova made film adaptations of works by Oscar Wilde and Ibsen, and developed her own filmmaking techniques, which were considered daring at the time. Her film projects, including Ibsen’s A Doll's House (1922), and Salomé (1923), based on Oscar Wilde's play, were critical and commercial failures and her personal financial losses from the two films were heavy.

Nazimova in Salome

Salome is the excessively stylized 62-minute movie from Nazimova’s silent film career which still has the most enduring cultural significance today. A flamboyant and slightly raunchy Art Nouveau treatment of the Biblical tale with sets and costumes by Rambova in Aubrey Beardsley-esque styling, the film has been hailed as a feminist milestone and is today adored by many as cult object. Kenneth Anger’s claim that Nazimova hired only “homosexual” cast members cannot be verified but as film historian Patricia White says:

“Salome stands today as a unique effort to produce “female movie modernism”. Various edited versions of the film circulated in underground contexts and festivals on 16mm for many years. Salome was added to the National Film Registry in 2000.

                                          SALOME - THE DANCE OF THE SEVEN VEILS

By 1925 Nazimova could no longer afford to invest in films; and financial backers withdrew their support by 1926 when her marriage scandal was uncovered by the press. Nazimova was in financial straits and agreed to allow her mansion to be developed into a hotel which was renamed The Garden of Allah Hotel & Villas and opened on January 9th, 1927 with a party to celebrate. Although the hotel was an instant success, it bankrupted Alla entirely and she was forced to sell her share in the same year that she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. 

Left with few other options, she gave up on the film industry, and returned to perform on the Broadway stage again. She had a starring role as Natalya Petrovna in Rouben Mamoulian's 1930 New York production of Turgenev's A Month in the Country. She also gave an acclaimed performance as Mrs. Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts, which the critic Pauline Kael later described as the greatest performance she had ever seen on the American stage.

  

In 1929 Nazimova was quoted as saying:  I wish I could burn every inch of my films. I'm ashamed of them.

In the early 1940s, Nazimova appeared in a few more films, playing Robert Taylor's mother in Escape (1940) and Tyrone Power's mother in Blood and Sand (1941). She appeared in In Our Time (1944), and her final screen appearance was in the World War II weepie Since You Went Away (1944).

This late return to motion pictures fortunately preserves Nazimova’s later acting on both sound and film.

ALLA NAZIMOVA IN RARE TALIKING ROLE IN "THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY" 

Nazimova’s Relationships with women

Nazimova helped start the careers of both of Rudolph Valentino's wives, Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova. She was very impressed by Rambova's skills as an art director, and hired her to design the innovative sets for the films Camille and Salomé. Although she was involved in an affair with Acker, it is debated as to whether Nazimova’s relationship with Rambova ever developed into a sexual one - but there were rumours.

NAZIMOVA

Of those women Nazimova is confirmed to have been
involved with romantically, the list includes actress Eva Le Gallienne, director Dorothy Arzner, writer Mercedes de Acosta, and Oscar Wilde's niece, Dolly Wilde.

Bridget Bate Tichenor, a Magic Realist artist and Surrealist painter, was also rumoured to be one of Nazimova's favoured lovers in Hollywood during the World War II years of 1940 to 1942. The two had been introduced by the poet and art collector Edward James, and according to Tichenor, their intimate relationship angered Nazimova's long-time companion, Glesca Marshall. However, the fact that Tichenor was pregnant most of 1940, giving birth to her son on Dec. 21, 1940, along with the 40-year age gap between the two women, casts some doubt on this.

Nazimova lived with her lover Glesca Marshall from 1929 until her death.

The Garden of Allah

The Garden of Allah was originally a 2.5 acre estate called Hayvenhurst that was built in 1913 by real estate developer William H. Hay as his private residence. Hay and his wife Katherine personally supervised construction of the estate. The house had twelve rooms and four bathrooms. The finishes were all in Circassian walnut that the Hays had collected on a trip to the Philippines in 1912. The interior walls were covered in canvas and hand-painted. The garage had bays for two cars—a rarity in those days—with rooms upstairs for live-in servants.

Construction and landscaping costs were an estimated $30,000.nThe Hays' stay at Hayvenhurst was short-lived. Within a few years they had built and moved into a new house a few blocks east, at 7920 Sunset Boulevard, the site today of the Directors Guild of America headquarters.

 Nazimova leased Hayvenhurst from William Hay not after she moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1918, and purchased it in 1919. Nazimova jokingly called her new home "The Garden of Alla", which was a reference to her own name and the best-selling 1905 novel The Garden of Allah, by Robert S. Hichens. 

Facing near-bankruptcy in 1926, after her screen career had been derailed, Nazimova put her property to work generating an income by converting the 2.5 acre estate into a hotel and building 25 villas on the property. The hotel opened in January 1927 as the "Garden of Alla Hotel" but Nazimova was ill-equipped to run such a venture. She found her role as a hotel manager unsuitable and discovered that her unscrupulous partners in the enterprise had nearly bankrupted her. In 1928 she sold out her remaining interest in the property, auctioned off

most of her furniture and other household goods, and went back to acting on the Broadway stage.

By 1930, Central Holding Corporation, the new owners had changed the name to the Garden of Allah Hotel. When Nazimova moved back to Hollywood in 1938, she rented Villa 24 at the hotel and ironically lived there as a tenant in the Mansion she had once owned, until she died.

Over the next two decades, the property went through a succession of owners. The hotel went on catering to both short-term and long-term guests, and soon gained a reputation as a place where the famous could enjoy living in a quaint, cozy, village-like setting, conveniently located yet shielded from gawking tourists and

autograph seekers by discreet security patrols, under a management that was not inclined to probe, judge or interfere with the private — and sometimes public — activities of its often unconventional patrons.

The Garden of Allah became home to many celebrities and literary figures. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there for several months in 1937–38 at the beginning of his final stay in Hollywood. The author of The Great Gatsby was trying to stay sober at the time, so he couldn't have chosen a worse new home. An alcoholic since his student days, he was soon back on the bottle and, three years later, died of a heart attack at the nearby home of his girlfriend, Sheilah Graham.

Word was that if you headed to the hotel swimming pool at cocktail hour, you would find most of the stars of Hollywood's golden age socializing and relaxing. If celebrity guests weren't already frolicking naked in the water or sneaking off to each other's red-tiled bungalows for illicit entanglements - they soon would be. Every hour was cocktail hour at the Garden of Allah, where the 20th century's most famous actors and writers indulged for decades in an endless whirl of Martini-soaked hedonism. It was Tinsel Town's secret private playground.

There was only one place to go if you were a movie star looking for the sort of lifestyle that neither your spouse, nor your public, could ever hear about. An array of Golden Age Hollywood stars  such as Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier, and Orson Welles were among the actors who lived there. Silver screen stars Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Pickford were frequent visitors and Rudolph Valentino, would ride over on horseback from the Paramount studios. As a young film star, Ronald Reagan stayed there in between marriages and allegedly seduced a string of women. Nancy Reagan's biographer, Kitty Kelley, claimed the future U.S. president bedded so many women that he later told a friend: 'I woke up one morning and I couldn't remember the name of the gal I was in bed with.'

Humourist and actor Robert Benchley was a long-term resident who became so drunk that a friend used to trundle him between the parties in a wheelbarrow. When F. Scott Fitzgerald, warned Benchley drink was a 'slow death', Benchley shot back: 'That's all right. I'm in no hurry.' 

Other writers who frequented the Villas were W. Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, Peter Benchley's witty, waspish former lover.  Dorothy Parker lived at the Garden while working as a Hollywood screenwriter. Her villa was frequently visited by ambulance crews after Parker who was a manic depressive put her head in the oven or slashed her wrists – although she always, said cynics, warned a friend of her intentions before attempting suicide.

Classical music giant Sergei Rachmaninoff was musically assaulted there by an annoyed Harpo Marx. Harpo recalled being kept awake by Rachmaninov, who would insist on playing the piano at midnight. The comic finally hit back, waking at 5am, opening all his windows, and hammering out on his own piano the first four bars of Rachmaninov's Prelude In C Sharp Minor, over and over for two hours. Rachmaninov reportedly complained bitterly, but agreed to move bungalows. Dance band leaders Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw and vocalist Frank Sinatra were among the other music personalities who stayed there.

The songwriter Cole Porter was just one of the secretly homosexual guests who would smuggle lovers into his villa at night. In later years, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield could be found on the Garden's sunken dancefloor in a haze of cannabis smoke. The Garden was perfectly suited for clandestine night-time activities as it had a string of entrances and exits. 

There were rumours of parties that turned into orgies and revelry that wasn't just immoral, but often illegal. History doesn't record the name of the Broadway actress who answered her bungalow door to a telegram delivery boy while completely naked except for a pet monkey perched on her shoulder. The mortified boy shoved the telegram into the monkey's paw and fled.

The Garden was always a favourite with British actors, coming out to make their name in Hollywood. A group of particularly impoverished Englishmen were quartered in the servants' rooms and — kitted out with Old Etonian ties and Oxbridge blazers, none of which they had a right to wear — earned their keep by entertaining the Hollywood residents with tales of the British Empire.

The Garden's reputation for wanton sexual behaviour really took off with the arrival in 1933 of the actress and notorious libertine bisexual Tallulah Bankhead. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford were among the actresses she reportedly seduced in her Garden villa. As for her male conquests, a young Gary Cooper was glimpsed one night running naked to Bankhead's villa.

So much of the hotel's socializing revolved around the Black Sea-shaped pool. Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller was said to have made Bankhead a 'very satisfied Jane' in the hotel pool. On one occasion, fellow guests were woken one morning by the sound of Bankhead and Weissmuller, evidently back from another party, jumping in off the pool's high diving board. The actress, weighed down in a heavily beaded dress and diamonds, dropped like a stone to the bottom of the pool, where she managed to shed all her clothes, emerging completely naked. 'Everyone's been dying to see my body,' she gasped. 'Now they can.'

A guest recalled a swim suited Grace Kelly sitting and blandly discussing the colour of her lipstick and nail varnish, surrounded by a cluster of smitten young men hanging on her every word. The Australian-born film director John Farrow — father of the actress Mia — loved to lounge on the pool diving board, showing off the tattoo protruding from his tight swimming trunks. It was a snake, tattooed on the inside of his left thigh, and, needless to say, looked as if it was slithering out from his crotch.

Marlene Dietrich liked to swim naked in the pool, while Errol Flynn would pounce on every beauty who so much as dipped her toe in it. The inveterate womanizer  Flynn initially shared a villa with British star David Niven, but liked to return to the Garden in between marriages so he could misbehave freely. Flynn had a particular seduction technique at the Garden — his villa faced the pool and, every morning, his secretary would place a bottle of champagne with two glasses on a table beside the prettiest female sunbather. The actor would later emerge looking immaculate and ask the lucky girl if she would share the bottle with him. Veteran residents liked to bet how long it would take him to lure the woman back to his villa.

There were some guests who didn't always indulge in the hard partying – by day the Garden was also a sanctuary for actors, writers and musicians where they could soak up the creativity and work. If you weren’t nursing a hangover, you could walk around the grounds and hear not only the clack of typewriters, but also jazz music being practiced in one villa and classical music being composed in another. The original hotel brochure, sent out to the studios with the hope they would install their stars there, promised an 'atmosphere of exclusive refinement'. It was certainly exclusive. Only successful, creative people were allowed to stay there, and unwanted intruders were kept out by guards who had a fearsome dog dubbed the 'Hound of the Baskervilles'.

No one stayed at the Garden for the usual hotel perks. Infested by rats which nested in the palm trees, it had a shabby feel to it in later days. The food was dreadful, the service was pretty much non-existent and the bungalow walls were so thin, you could hear your neighbours' conversations but many guests admitted that was sometimes part of the attraction.

'Nothing interrupted the continual tumult that was life at the Garden of Allah,' wrote a columnist guest named Lucius Beebe. 'Now and then, the men in white came with a van and took someone away, or bankruptcy or divorce or even a jail claimed a participant - but no one paid any mind.'

Humphrey Bogart stayed there with various lovers, including Lauren Bacall. He and Bacall were once attacked in their Garden villa by his estranged third wife, the actress Mayo Methot, who could become deranged when drunk. Fellow guests rushed out to watch the fun as bottles flew and furniture was smashed. Bacall escaped out of the back door, while Methot chased Bogart around the villa armed with a kitchen knife.Very occasionally, marriages were made, rather than broken, at the hotel — Frank Sinatra met his future wife, Ava Gardner, when they stayed in adjoining bungalows.

Even World War II didn't dampen the Garden's non-stop party spirit. But after its two guiding lights, Peter Benchley and Nazimova, died in 1945, the world's most riotous hotel went into gradual decline. Drugs replaced drink as the poison of choice, and villas were often robbed, Guests now included Virginia Hill, a notorious gangsters' moll who reportedly blackmailed several Hollywood celebrities she seduced at the Garden.

Although Errol Flynn was still calling it home as late as 1957, by that time the hotel's architectural style was long out of fashion and its environs had become more tacky than glamorous. Land values were rising, historic preservation was still an eccentric notion, and "redevelopment" was a popular civic buzzword. The hotel had always struggled to make much of a profit, and by the end of the Fifties, the bigger stars had gravitated to smarter, more luxurious hotels.

On April 11, 1959, Bart Lytton, president of Lytton Savings and Loan, announced that he had purchased the Garden of Allah Hotel from Beatrice Rosenus and Morris Markowitz for $755,000. Lytton's plans for the property included razing the hotel to make way for a new main branch for his bank.

On August 22, 1959, Lytton hosted a farewell party on the grounds of the hotel and over a thousand people turned up. Among the attendees was silent film star Francis X. Bushman, who had been at the opening party in 1927. Some other guests came costumed as old-time stars. In a nod to the hotel's creator, Nazimova's experimental 1923 silent film Salomé was shown on a large poolside screen. 

VINTAGE FILM FOOTAGE OF THE PUBLIC AUCTION AT GARDEN OF ALLAH

On August 30, an on-site public auction liquidated all the furnishings, fixtures and equipment, along with odds and ends valuable only as souvenirs. Auctioneers did a roaring trade selling off the old beds. Every buyer was quietly assured that theirs had been owned by Errol Flynn. Demolition permits were issued on November 2. Within days, all traces of the hotel were gone and construction of the bank building had begun.

In 1960, the Garden of Allah reappeared on the site in the form of a detailed miniature model of the complex. For many years, this was on display outside Lytton's building, in a small plaza at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights, sheltered from the elements in a sort of shrine with a lofty domed pavilion. It was later moved indoors and eventually disappeared. It resurfaced in private hands in the early 2010s, architecturally intact and with its built-in miniature electric lighting system restored.

Quotes about the Garden of Allah:

It reminds me of Hollywood — George S. Kaufman, on why he liked living at the Garden of Allah.

 I'll be damned if I'll believe anyone lives in a place called the Garden of Allah — Thomas Wolfe, a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, July 26, 1937

There is no place for a light-hearted, unrealistic place like the Garden of Allah that, for one brief moment, was Camelot. It was inevitable that Hollywood as we knew it, and its satellite, Alla's garden, should disappear together — Sheilah Graham, The Garden of Allah

Hollywood's and thus America's most unconventional hotel, actually "notorious" would be a more descriptive word — David Wallace, Lost Hollywood

Nazimova’s Death and Legacy

On July 13, 1945 Nazimova died of a coronary thrombosis, age 66, in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Her ashes were interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. 

Her contributions to the film industry have been recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

Biographies of Nazimova—including Nazimova’s own unfinished and unpublished memoir, now housed in the Springer Opera House’s Glesca Marshall Library in Columbus, Georgia—have a tendency to trace her lesbian self-styling and her public disavowal back to her traumatic childhood and the archetypal immigrant’s instinct for survival through assimilation.

Nazimova became, according to two recent critical career appreciations, “the founding mother of Sapphic Hollywood”, and, for a time, “the most notorious Hollywood lesbian actress of all”. The deceptive act of her “fake” marriage to Charles Bryant becomes, in these scholarly and popular accounts, the ultimate measure of her truly tortured lesbian identity both in Hollywood and among her extended family.

 There is no denying the intriguing power of a biographical narrative that traces connections between Alla Nazimova and almost every prominent lesbian in Hollywood, as well as gay male cultural icons such as Oscar Wilde, Rudolph Valentino, and Montgomery Clift, and ends with a penniless and ill Nazimova a tenant in the Los Angeles hotel she once owned. But the archival materials that have been collected over the years suggest that much more can be made of Nazimova’s life as performer, both on screen and off. The personal correspondence and writings that constitute the Nazimova Papers at the Glesca Marshall Library in Columbus, Georgia, have not as yet been cataloged. The extensive collection of copyrighted publicity stills and family photographs, postcards, letters, and newspaper clippings at the Library of Congress in both the Kling-Lewton Papers and the Harry E. Vinyard, Jr., Papers offers to researchers a fragmented but illuminating documentation of the devoted following Nazimova’s celebrity attracted over the course of her career.

Nazimova has been portrayed in film four times. The first two were biographical films about Rudolph Valentino: 1975's The Legend of Valentino, in which she was portrayed by Alicia Bond; and 1977's Valentino, in which she was portrayed by Leslie Caron. She was featured in two 2013 silent films about Hollywood's silent movie era: Return to Babylon in which she was played by Laura Harring and Silent Life (Vlad Kozlov, Isabella Rossellini et al.) based on the life of Rudolph Valentino, where she was played by Galina Jovovich.

The character of Nazimova appears in Dominick Argento's opera Dream of Valentino, in which she also plays the violin.

Nazimova was featured in make-up artist Kevyn Aucoin's 2004 book Face Forward, in which he made up Isabella Rossellini to resemble her, particularly as posed in a certain photograph.

Actress Romy Nordlinger first portrayed Alla Nazimova in The Society for the Preservation of Theatrical History production of Stage Struck: From Kemble to Kate staged at the Snapple Theater Center in New York City in December 2013. In 2016, PLACES, a multimedia solo show about Alla Nazimova, supported by the League of Professional Theatre Women's Heritage Program, written and performed by Romy Nordlinger debuted at Playhouse Theatre for a limited run. 

Nazimova appears in "Medusa's Web", a novel by fantasy-fiction writer Tim Powers.

Nazimova appears in the “Garden of Allah” series of Novels about Hollywood by Martin Turnbull

LESLIE CARON AS NAZIMOVA IN THE FILM VALENTINO