The Lady Vanishes

My parents came of age during the Depression years in Los Angeles. It was the Swing Era, and, like most young people of that time and place, they loved to dance. They were good at it, too, and never lost the knack. I remember watching them once at a wedding when they were both past 70, and thinking how graceful they were. It was as if they had traveled back through time together and were young again, swirling across the dance floor to “In the Mood.”

My mother’s family lived in a house on Commonwealth Avenue. My father grew up in Lafayette Square, near Crenshaw and Venice. Wilshire Boulevard was their playground. At the heart of it was the Ambassador Hotel. Built as a luxury resort in 1921, it reigned as the preeminent hostelry in Los Angeles in the period between the two World Wars. The Ambassador’s crown jewel was the Cocoanut Grove, the most famous nightclub in Los Angeles history.

Any day now, the Ambassador and the Grove will be just that – history. After 85 years as a Wilshire Boulevard landmark, a wrecking crew is dismantling the once-grand structure floor-by-floor. It will have vanished completely by New Year’s Day, according to reports.

My mother (who is now 86) came down from Santa Barbara to spend Thanksgiving Day with us and I drove her out to Wilshire and Alexandria. Demolition was already well under way. She shook her head. “Well, there’s a sad sight,” she said.

My father passed away in 1999, but I’m sure he would have reacted with sadness, too. Whenever you asked him to name the favorite haunts from his youth, the Cocoanut Grove always led the list. He seemed to enjoy remembering his life as a young man. It always made him smile. And no wonder -- his young adult years coincided with the most glamorous period in Los Angeles history.

Glamour is what I have always associated with the late 1930s, although – since I wasn’t there -- I’m forced to rely on imagination and old movies for the pictures in my head. When I think of the 1930s, I see a series of images -- white dinner jackets, bias-cut gowns in black silk, silver nitrate photography, sleek Packard coupes, buildings shaped like Cunard liners, frosted martini glasses on tall stems, Carole Lombard’s blonde allure and level gaze.

I can imagine my mother and father strolling through the Ambassador lobby arm-in-arm and dancing cheek-to-cheek under the stars painted on the Grove ceiling.

My actual memories of the Ambassador are pretty fragmentary. When I was a small child, I attended a children’s party on the hotel lawn every Easter. Egg rolling and a visit from the Easter Bunny were the highlights. I remember being served finger sandwiches and wondering why I couldn’t have peanut butter.

My mother’s photo album includes pictures of my brother and me at one of the Ambassador Easter lawn parties. I’m not certain of the year, but would guess 1954 or 1955. My brother and I are both dressed in lightweight pincord suits with short pants and animal cracker figures sewn onto the breast pockets. Elegant in champagne-colored silk, my mother wore the narrow-waisted, wide-skirted Dior look then fashionable, her Irish face and black hair crowned by a hat with an expansive brim.

In one of the pictures, she looks pretty cross. My brother, 11 months my junior, had just wandered off without saying boo to anyone. My father and mother had to scramble to find him, while I stayed with my grandmother on the Ambassador lawn. I was wondering if I would ever see my brother again and pondering what became of lost children, when my father triumphantly returned with my brother in tow. In the picture, my mother is holding on to his hand as if never to let go again.

I don’t specifically recall visiting the Ambassador again until 1968, for an academic awards banquet for high school students in Los Angeles. By that time, the hotel was well past its prime. Age and decrepitude had begun to show – the largely empty lobby looked a little worn and glum.

My darkest Ambassador memory, of course, is connected to something that happened there just a few weeks later. I recall watching the television broadcast of Bobby Kennedy, standing at a podium in an Ambassador ballroom to claim his victory in the California primary, delighting a passionate crowd with the ringing declaration “On to Chicago -- and victory!”

I turned off the set and went to bed, pleased with the outcome of the first political campaign I had ever paid any real attention to. In the morning, my father woke me with the news that Kennedy had been gunned down in the hotel kitchen.

Bobby Kennedy’s assassination seemed to accelerate the Ambassador’s decline. From that moment, the hotel seem to just hang on, haunted by glamorous ghosts, until it closed its doors for good in 1989. With the guests departed, the hotel and its twenty-four acres of grounds stood empty, except when used by Hollywood as a movie set.

Still, it remained a presence, a hulking structure on a swath of green, an island of eerie quiet in the hustle and flow in that portion of the Wilshire District that morphed into Koreatown.

Koreatown, of course, became a battleground in the spring of 1992, in the rioting that erupted after the Rodney King verdicts. A pall hung over the Wilshire District even after the smoke from the fires dissipated. The ghosts of glamour had long fled, leaving the Ambassador an empty shell in an urban no-man’s land.

It is better now. In the intervening years, the city has experienced considerable healing. Koreatown is more vibrant than ever. Vitality and an optimistic view of the future are palpable forces in the neighborhoods surrounding the old hotel where immigrant families from Mexico and Central America live. The old Wilshire District has a future once again – but one that is sure to be different from its silver nitrate past.

I still live in the greater Wilshire District community and I believe in that future. I accept that it will be a very different place from the place my parents knew, or the place of my childhood, but that is the way of the world. The world is changing all the time. Cities are constantly changing. I share the optimism of immigrant Los Angeles for this city’s future.

In the end, the Ambassador property – the hotel and its grounds – were acquired by the Los Angeles Unified School District, which drew up plans to raze the hotel and build a high-school on the site. A long struggle ensued with the region’s powerful preservationist lobby, the Los Angeles Conservancy.

For my part, I declined to embrace the preservationist side of the dispute. I don’t think the Conservancy ever made the kind of architectural case that has to be made in these matters and preserving the hotel as a monument to vanished glamour seems all too sterile an exercise. Certainly it would do little to meet the current needs of the neighborhood, while a high school will help the surrounding community build its future.

In the end, the school district won and the Conservancy bowed out. Intellectually, at any rate, I think that’s the best outcome.

But I will acknowledge feeling a tug from nostalgia that’s hard to resist completely. Watching the building’s slow demolition has proven more painful than I expected. It occurs to me that the world of my parents is rapidly disappearing.

As I watch the Ambassador come down, I’m reminded of a scene in an old Astaire-Rogers movie -- Top Hat, I think, from 1935. Astaire is in white tie and tails, Rogers in a feathered dress. They are in a night club, sleek and brilliantly lit, with white walls and a polished black floor.

They dance. In the beginning, they are suspicious and reluctant. The next phase is a suave seduction, followed by rapid, joyful movements and brilliant leaps. In the last phase, the mood is downbeat again – the lady separates from her partner and vanishes off-stage. The lights dim, leaving the partner disconsolate in the shadows.