Texas Guinan: Cowgirl Actress, Film Producer & Queen of the Nightclubs

Texas Guinan

"Texas" Guinan was an American stage and screen actress, film producer, and entrepreneur who became famous for her tough female roles in the male dominated world of silent Western films. During the prohibition era she ran speakeasy clubs in New York which catered to the rich and famous. After being arrested and indicted during a law enforcement sweep, she was eventually acquitted during her trial.

Early Life and Family

Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan (January 12, 1884 – November 5, 1933) was one of four children born to Irish immigrants Michael and Bessie Guinan, who had met and married in Colorado. They initially operated a wholesale grocery business together but after relocating to Waco, Texas, they ran a horse and cattle ranch.

 As a child Mary was nicknamed "Mamie", and attended parochial school at the Loretta Convent in Waco. Growing up on a ranch provided her with all the basic cowboy skills she needed, and she honed her marksmanship at a local shooting gallery. In 1898, her parents were successful in securing for her a two-year scholarship to the American Conservatory of Music offered by Chicago businessman Marshall Field. After developing her soprano vocal talents, and finishing her studies, she joined a touring acting troupe that featured American "Wild West" entertainment.

In 1904 using the name "Marie Guinan", she married newspaper cartoonist John Moynahan on December 2nd. Two years later, Moybahan took a job in Boston. The couple eventually divorced, and Guinan moved to New York to pursue a career as a singer in the entertainment business. For years, she actually claimed for publicity purposes that she was born with the name Texas, and she never let facts stand in the way of a good narrative. In a full-page 1910 interview in The San Francisco Call, she stated her father "was the first white child seen in Waco", even though he was a adult when he arrived in America, and white settlers had been there since the early to mid-19th century.

Theatre critic and Photoplay editor Julian Johnson was her companion for a decade, and was influential in the creation of her public persona. Many people believed them to be married. Her 1933 obituaries mention Johnson as her second husband, and millionaire George E. Townley as a third husband. Lacking any verification that the latter two marriages took place, Moynahan is now believed to have been her only husband.

Johnson's connection is thought to have led to a poem carrying her byline being printed in Photoplay.  An alleged connection to the US Senator from Texas, Joseph Weldon Bailey, evolved over time from a nonspecific tie to her family, to Guinan's being the senator's niece. The niece relationship seems implausible, since her parents were born and raised in a different country than either Senator Bailey or his wife. Mentions of him coincide with the timeline of her association with Julian Johnson. While he was editor at Photoplay, an article written by then-staff journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns remarked that Guinan, " ... bore a distinct resemblance to her uncle, Senator Joe Bailey of Texas."

Vaudeville and Stage Productions 

 

Initially finding work as a chorus girl, she adopted the stage name of Texas Guinan to give herself an edge in the competitive marketplaces of vaudeville and New York theatre productions. Within a year, she had the female lead in a stage production of Simple Simon Simple, during which she accidentally shot herself on stage with a loaded gun.

In 1908, she received favourable notices for her performance in The Gibson Girl Review. That same year, she placed an advertisement in newspapers offering $1,000 to any songwriter who provided her with a song of equal popularity to the Gus Edwards-penned "That's What The Rose Said To Me" 

She appeared as a soprano vocalist in many productions, including The Gay Musician, The Hoyden, and The Lone Star. 

She had achieved a degree of national stardom on stage by 1910.

John P. Slocum managed her when she appeared in his multiyear touring production of The Kissing Girl. When Ned Wayburn rolled out his production of The Passing Show on a national tour in 1913, Guinan was one of the headliners. 

Coinciding with the publicity for the tour, Guinan licensed her name and image to be used by W. C. Cunningham for a weight-loss plan. The advertisements that appeared in media across the country claimed Guinan had lost 70 pounds on the plan.  Investigative journalism by the Chicago Tribune alleged that Guinan knowingly acted as a shill in perpetuating a fraud upon the public. A subsequent investigation by the postal service revealed it to be a swindle. United States Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson quickly acted to prohibit Guinan from receiving mail through the postal service. 

Although she continued on the stage, the incident damaged her career, and was a motivating factor in her later expanding her repertoire by heading West to work in the California film business.

Guinan appeared as Zaza in the variety show Hop-o'-My-Thumb, based on a French fairytale of the same name. The show opened at the Manhattan Opera House November 26, 1913, and closed January 1, 1914.  She toured the United States with the Whirl of the World musical comedy in 1915. The tour coincided with her unverified account of being casually approached in Berlin by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who engaged her in conversation as she sat alone reading a book.

She appeared in the musical Gay Paree that opened at the Shubert Theatre August 18, 1925 and closed January 30, 1926. Guinan was also a part of the cast of the musical Padlocks of 1927, also at the Shubert.

Film Career 

 

In a film career that began in 1917 and continued through to 1933, Texas was part of the vanguard of women film makers in the United States. Her later claim of being in France in 1917 entertaining the troops, and being decorated with a bronze medal by France field marshall Joseph Joffre, has been proven false by the timeline and California location of her prolific film making. 

Triangle Film Corporation, founded in 1915 by Harry and Roy Aitken, featured Guinan in four two-reel shorts between 1917 and 1918, The Fuel of Life, The Stainless Barrier, The Gun Woman, and The Love Brokers. 

Unlike the musical genre she was known for on stage, she achieved national prominence in the ostensibly masculine domain of the silent film Western genre, and on her dressing room door appeared a map of the state of Texas, rather than her name. 

Triangle began billing her as "the female Bill Hart" in reference to the industry's first male western star who at that time topped fandom popularity polls. 

“Texas Guinan to Typify West” promised an early ad campaign for a series of her films, and, playing a tough “gun woman” rather than a timid schoolmarm in need of rescue, Guinan tailored her defiantly unglamorous image as a rowdy cowgirl who tames men as easily as horses.

Frohman Brothers were Broadway producers. In 1918, brother Daniel Frohman and partner William L. Sherrill formed the Frohman Amusement Corporation for the express purpose of engaging in the motion picture business. They made more than a dozen films with Guinan in 1918, including The Boss of the Rancho and The Heart of Texas.

Her success as a performer allowed her to assume off-screen control of her career too. During her years with Bull's Eye Productions and Reelcraft, she began to expand towards the production end of film making, and worked as a unit department Outwitted, The Lady of the Law, The Girl of the Rancho, The Desert Vulture, and at least five other productions. 

head on the films

She then created her own company - Texas Guinan Productions - in 1921 to produce Code of the West, Spitfire, and Texas of the Mounted. 

After making I Am the Woman and The Stampede for Victor Kremer Film Features, she returned to New York. 

BIOGRAPHY OF TEXAS GUINAN

Some evidence suggests that her company may have produced additional films. According to her biographer Louise Berliner, Guinan was an innovative and energetic producer, choosing to cast each film rather than employ a stock company, helping to inaugurate states-rights distribution of her films, and supervising the publicity campaigns (including staging live skits before screenings) for her new company.

Although the Western is often considered the most masculine of genres, this characterization does not easily apply to the silent period, when women played prominent roles in the production. Such popular movie “cowboy girls” as the early trade press called them, had roots in pre-cinematic media, including dime novels, stage melodramas, and Wild West shows

The prolific Bertha Muzzy Bower, under the gender-obscuring pen name B. M. Bower, published best-selling Western novels between 1904 and 1914 that were often adapted into successful films. 

Louise Lester starred in a dozen “Calamity Anne” films for the American Film Company between 1912 and 1914, and in 1919 Marie Walcamp played Tempest Cody in nine films in Universal’s “Spur and Saddle” series. 

In this context, Texas Guinan was perhaps the most significant woman in early cinema to challenge the assumption that women could only play secondary or conventionally feminine roles in the popular Western. Fond of firing guns and racing on horseback, Guinan established a tomboy presence in the Western that did not fit into the opposed roles of the refined Eastern lady or the Western dance hall prostitute that would delimit women’s roles in “mature” examples of the genre. Perhaps recognizing that she occupied an unconventional position both on screen and in the industry, in Texas of the Mounted, the first film she produced for her own company, Guinan plays male and female twins: when he is killed, she avenges his murder while wearing his clothes.

Guinan was again seen on the screen with two sound pictures. She played a slightly fictionalized version of herself as a speakeasy proprietress in Queen of the Night Clubs (1929). The New Yorker Magazine said that Guinan lacked her famed charm and vitality, and that the camera was “not kind to her looks.”

 

The film in many ways marked the end of Texas Guinan, not so much because it was a bad film but because she had simply run her course and was going out of style. The market crash later that year was the final straw. She took her show on the road, made an unsuccessful attempt at a European tour, then returned to the States.

Her final film was Broadway Thru a Keyhole (1933) written by Walter Winchell. Texas died three days after the film’s release.

 CLIP FROM BROADWAY THRU A KEYHOLE FEATURING TEXAS GUINAN

Constructing an accurate picture of Guinan’s film career, or her private life, for that matter, is difficult. Many of her films were shortened later by Melody Productions and re-released with soundtracks under multiple titles, and perhaps only a half-dozen survive, some as incomplete prints. Most unfortunately, all of the films she produced are lost, although a few of the two-reelers she supervised for Bull’s Eye/Reelcraft are available. 

By a conservative estimate, Texas Guinan starred in approximately 33 silent films made by a handful of production companies, including Mack Sennett’s Triangle Film Corporation (four films in 1917–1918), Frohman Amusement Corporation (thirteen two-reelers in 1919), Bull’s Eye/Reelcraft Film Company (twelve two-reelers in 1920), and Victor Kremer Productions (two features in 1921). These companies may be less familiar to film scholars than some of the notable directors who supervised Guinan: Frank Borzage directed her first major film, The Gun Woman (1918), and Francis Ford, Western film I Am the Woman and The Stampede, both in 1921.

director John Ford’s older brother and mentor, directed her in

Although publicity materials attempted to glamorize Texas Guinan, her stout body, broad face, and insistence on playing heroic leads didn’t allow her to be cast in conventionally “feminine” roles. Working almost exclusively in the genre that would eventually seem the most unwelcoming to women as performers or producers, her evident popularity and success suggest that our own understanding of the early Western genre requires revision in order to properly acknowledge her contribution, but also to begin to ponder the fantasies the boisterous movie cowgirl embodied for cinema’s early audiences.

Queen of the Night Clubs

In the Roaring Twenties, Texas Guinan became the undisputed queen of New York’s boozy, bawdy nightclub and speakeasy scene. The 1920 Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution put Prohibition into effect, making sales or transport of alcoholic beverages illegal. While it ruined legitimate businesses, people kept right on drinking alcohol, with those who transported and sold it known as "bootleggers". Thus began the establishment of the speakeasy private clubs, a cultural phenomenon in which Guinan excelled. 

Her introduction into the business was when speakeasy partners Emil Gervasini and John Levi of the Beaux Arts club hired Guinan in 1923 as a singer, for which she was paid $50,000.

Guinan's give-and-take dialogue with the customers inspired producer Nils Granlund to put together a full floor show with Guinan presiding as MC for Ziegfeld Follies chorus girls. Bootleg huckster Larry Fay struck a deal with them to feature the show at his El Fey Club on West 47th Street in Manhattan. There, she became known for her catchphrase, "Hello, Sucker! Come on in and leave your wallet on the bar." This is the same persona displayed in Incendiary Blonde (1945), the flashy Hollywood biopic about Guinan starring Betty Hutton. 

The El Fey Club, attracted the likes of Mayor Jimmy Walker, Actor George Raft, Actress Peggy Hopkins Joyce, writers Ring Larder and Damon Runyon, and gossip columnists Walter Winchell, Mark Hellinger, and Ed Sullivan who later hosted TV’s most famous variety show. Ruby Keeler and Barbara Stanwyck were discovered by talent scouts while working as dancers at the club.

In return for being the draw to attract wealthy and powerful clientele, Guinan received 50% of the profits. 

 

After the El Fay Club was shut down by the police, she opened the Texas Guinan Club

at 117 West 48th Street, which was also closed by the police. She and Larry Fay later opened the Del-Fey Club in Miami the same year and made over $700,000 in less than 12 months.

When Guinan returned to New York in January 1926, as hostess of the 300 Club at 151 W. 54th Street, the opening night's event was the marriage ceremony for actress Wilda Bennett and Argentine dancer Abraham "Peppy" de Albrew. Other celebrities who visited her club were Al Jolson, Scottish operatic soprano Mary Garden, Jack Dempsey, American operatic soprano Geraldine Farrar, and the Prince of Wales.

 

 It was still months before the big stock market crash, but in the pages of the New Yorker Magazine you could already sense a change in its

voice; it seemed to be growing weary of the party.. As for the queen of nightlife, Texas Guinan, New Yorkers were ready for something different.

In July 1926, the 300 Club was raided by the police, who seized bottles of liquor and arrested two people for "violation of the section of the penal code forbidding suggestive dances". 

The last week of June 1928, Assistant US Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt ordered a raid of speakeasy clubs in New York.

Guinan, Helen Morgan (hostess of Chez Helen Morgan), Nils Granlund, and 104 others were arrested, and indicted by a federal grand jury. Guinan, Morgan, and Granlund faced 2 years in prison, with a $10,000 maximum fine, if convicted. The others indicted were employees and patrons, who faced lesser penalties.

At her April 1929 trial, Guinan was acquitted.

 

She said:. I never take a drink and I never sell a drink. I am paid to put on an act and I put on an act. I once gave US Attorney General Buckner a certified check for $100,000 to give anyone who has ever seen me take a drink or sell a drink. That check is still good, and so is my offer.

 TEXAS GUINAN TOASTING AT A SPEAKEASY 1928

Final years and Death

During the Great Depression, she took her caberet show on the road. She made towards Europe, but Scotland Yard threatened to board her ship if she tried to land in England, where she was on their list of "barred aliens". The show itself was banned from France under labour technicalities. Guinan had a contract with a Paris club, but French employment laws at the time dissuaded non-citizens from working on French soil. She turned this to her advantage when she returned to the states, by launching the satirical revue, Too Hot For Paris.

 PATHE NEWS FOOTAGE OF TEXAS GUINAN ARRIVING BACK IN NEW YORK

While on the road with Too Hot For Paris, she

contracted amoebic dysentery in Chicago, Illinois, during the epidemic in the Congress Hotel.

She fell ill in Vancouver, British Columbia, and died there on November 5, 1933, at the age of 49, exactly one month before Prohibition was repealed; 7,500 people attended her funeral. Bandleader Paul Whiteman was a pallbearer along with two of her former lawyers and writer Heywood Broun.

Guinan is interred in the Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York. Her family donated a tabernacle in her name to St. Patrick's Church in Vancouver in recognition of Father Louis Forget's attentions during her last hours. When the original church was demolished in 2004, the tabernacle was preserved for the new church built on the site. 

She was survived by both of her parents. Her mother died at age 101 in 1959. Her father was 81years old at his death on May 14, 1935. Her brothers Tommy and William, as well as her sister Mrs. George C. Smith, also survived her.

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