Beyond the silver screen: Vintage hotels are pieces of art that tell Los Angeles' history

Los Angeles celebrates a lot of big birthdays this year: the Hollywood sign, Warner Bros. Studios and the Walt Disney Company are all 100 years old — and all still going strong, just like so many of the city’s gloriously designed 1920s boom-era buildings.

As the business that is Hollywood boomed in the 1920s, morphing from silents to talkies, and shaping not only American culture but the world’s, too, the business was ruled by the first Hollywood power couple — its first king, Douglas Fairbanks, and a no-less-famous queen, his wife, Mary Pickford.

As well as being truly great actors, the couple were business people and invested in both the industry, forming United Artists studios with Charlie Chaplin and director D.W. Griffith in 1919, and joining Sid Grauman, who built the legendary Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard (where it still stands in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, sadly unused as a regular movie theater), and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio co-founder Louis B. Mayer, to build the grand Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel at Hollywood Boulevard and North Orange Drive, opposite the theater.

The Spanish Colonial Revival Hollywood Roosevelt opened in 1927, named in honor of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. It is meticulously preserved, albeit with the 1950s addition, where Marilyn Monroe once lived overlooking the Tropicana Pool, which is lined with David Hockney’s million-dollar swirls of paint. (The Monroe Suite is a coveted place to sleep.)

Lounge poolside surrounded by 230 towering palm trees; check out the vintage bowling alley turned cocktail bar, The Spare Room; catch a cabaret show or vintage movies in the intimate CineGrill Theatre; grab a bite at 25 Degrees, a classic casual diner and bar, but with Murano glass chandeliers — yep, only in Hollywood (room rates from $279 per night. thehollywoodroosevelt.com).

In 1923, the Hollywood sign was simply a promotional tool for a development called Hollywoodland — the redundant last four letters were removed during the sign’s renovation in the 1940s. The original 13 letters purpose was to lure people in downtown LA to move to the hills.

As the sign was going up, so was the Biltmore Hotel, the so-called Host on the Coast, which opened its doors that October and also turns 100 years old this year.

Built in an Italian palazzo meets Spanish castle style, at the time it was the grandest luxury hotel west of Chicago and its voluptuous décor is still hard to beat. Its 11,000 rooms are now toned down to 600 larger rooms and suites. When it comes to large, the Presidential Suite is a bilevel three-bedroom expanse connected by a spiral staircase. JFK is one of many luminaries to have stayed here.

The impressively grand original lobby, opposite Pershing Square, the newly renovated park at downtown’s center, has an extravagantly decorated ceiling of carvings and etchings — a mix of Greek myth and conquistadors, and Old World emblems. It is now the Rendezvous Court, where guests eat breakfast and weekend afternoon tea is served. Adjacent, Bernard’s restaurant hosts magic shows — Biltmore’s once-bustling bars and eateries have not yet swung back since the pandemic.

From the Rendezvous Court, a double staircase leads to the main level and current lobby, and ballrooms where Shirley Temple, Bette Davis, Walt Disney and many more celebrated. A gallery of photographs tells a remarkable Hollywood history and movies — from "Ghostbusters" to "Chinatown" — were filmed in these grand halls. The Gallery Bar and adjacent Cognac Room, which has splendid gilded Art Deco murals, are a sophisticated stop for drinks (room rates from $169 per night. millenniumhotels.com).

Veritably crouched in the shadow of the new big-brand shiny glass tower hotels populating the area around the two big downtown sports/concert arenas at the LALive entertainment complex, the petite, pretty Hotel Figueroa is draped top to bottom in a fetching flower mural.

It opened as a YWCA in 1926 as a safe haven for solo female travelers and became a center for the women’s movement in Los Angeles. Now part of The Unbound Collection by Hyatt, a femme-forward vibe still runs throughout its superbly designed ground floor social spaces, where an annually changing exhibit from local female artists joins the hotels considerable permanent collection, also helmed by female aritsts.

The bright, street-side Café Fig leads through to the adjacent Bar Magnolia, where velvet couches set around a fireplace are coveted seats, especially during the popular happy hour … or two …

The coffin-shaped pool (added in the 1950s) is overlooked by La Casita, a bilevel Baja-styled clubby bar, and by the signature restaurant, Sparrow Italia, which morphs from bright resortlike seating looking on to the pool area to a romantic, softly lit room to the back. Either way, the coastal Italian meets SoCal dinner and weekend brunch menus, led by executive chef Joana Cruz, are one of the tastiest tickets in downtown (room rates from $249. hotelfigueroa.com).

Beverly Hills is home to the legendary Beverly Wilshire, part of the luxury Four Seasons group since 1992. Pull through the filigreed wrought iron gates inspired by those at Buckingham Palace and into the cobblestone courtyard connecting the Wilshire Wing and the Beverly Wing, — the courtyard has 38 gas lanterns imported from a castle in Edinburgh.

It was built in 1928 on the former Beverly Hills Speedway racing track and by the 1940s, as Beverly Hills was becoming the glam spot it is known as now, and the hotel kept up, adding a pool, ballrooms and ever more elegant dining. In 2006, Spago’s owner chef Wolfgang Puck opened his new steakhouse, CUT, at the hotel, with its clean, simple interior design the work of architect Richard Meier, who designed the Getty Center museum nearby. Opposite CUT is CUT Lounge, a smoky-atmosphered bar where a more intimate dinner might be had. There’s also The Blvd., a wonderful brasserie overlooking Rodeo Drive. Whether primping or not, the spa is worth visiting to see California’s largest amethyst geode, and bask in its magnificence.

A just-completed renovation coated this grand old dame in a sleek, calm coat of understated grays, but many of its iconic old features caught so fabulously in the 1990 film "Pretty Women" remain, including the gilded elevator doors and those seats in the elevators that impressed Julia Roberts’ character, Vivian (room rates from $850 per night. fourseasons.com/beverlywilshire).

At the point where Sunset Boulevard switches from Hollywood to West Hollywood, Chateau Marmont towers above the winding road, a beacon to an idea that is Hollywood, the business: glamorous, exclusive and artful. And a bit naughty.

This dreamy white-turreted chateau, designed by architects Arnold A. Weitzman and William Douglas Lee, was completed in 1929 at Sunset and narrow Marmont Lane, an exclusive apartment hotel. In 1931, Albert E. Smith, co-founder of Vitagraph Studios, converted the building into a hotel proper. Under another owner, Erwin Brettauer, a German banker and film producer, dropped segregation, allowing all guests.

The thriving hotspot added nine Spanish-styled cottages, as well as a swimming pool in the 1940s, and then its legendary bungalows. But, during the 1960s when it fell into disrepair, it only escaped the wrecking ball by the kindness of strangers and retained much of the original design when it was added to the Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument list in 1976.

In 1990, its current owner, Boston-bred hotel impresario André Balazs, bought Marmont and magically restored it whilst preserving an old Hollywood vibe that has built on a mythology, adding an air of exclusivity, necessary or not. After some pandemic-era ballyhoo about becoming a members-only club (it did not), the hotel is back and its terrace restaurant open to all, even nonguests.

There’s no doubt it has its stories, though: Chateau Marmont is both a real-life stage and a Hollywood movie one, drawing the colorful likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Hunter S. Thompson. Director Sofia Coppola shot her film "Somewhere" at the hotel in 2010 and is a regular for dinner, and the hotel appears in the Academy Award-winning films "La La Land" and "A Star Is Born."

More tragically, in 1982, comedic great John Belushi died of a drug overdose in Bungalow 3, and in 2004 photographer Helmut Newton suffered a heart attack while pulling out of the driveway. A plaque marks the spot where he crashed and died (room rates from $595. chateaumarmont.com).

As the ‘20s drew to a close, another lasting monument to this wild fanciful boom era was built nearby: in 1929, construction began on what is now the Sunset Tower Hotel, which also originally opened as an apartment building — and what a list of tenants: from Monroe to Garbo, the It List is long.

Saved from demolition in the 1970s, the hotel’s most recent renovation, in true Hollywood fantasy realm, sought to create an “original” as-was feel — even though it never was.

Thus, the all-day dining on the Terrace lounge, which leads to the original salt-water lap pool, feels iconic. Drinks at the new Terrace Bar feel like following in Errol Flynn’s wild footsteps. The Tower Bar restaurant, which is open for dinner, feels like Jean Harlow dined here, yet it was mobster Bugsy Siegel’s apartment. Hardly a disappointment in the historic stakes.

And the illusion of being on a rooftop lounge is merely because of the hotel’s perch on Sunset dropping down to De Longpre Avenue below.

Look up: The incredible white and baby pink “fondant” Art Deco detailing of the exterior is no illusion. The 81 rooms and suites' beautiful views from delightfully curving original French windows is also cinema vérité (room rates from $425 per night. sunsettowerhotel.com).

Of all the hotel’s legends, this might take the cake: Sunset Tower’s Mansion gym, one of the most stylish exercise suites, spills out onto the terrace of what was John Wayne’s apartment, where he kept a cow for fresh milk. That, dear reader, is both Hollywood legend and Hollywood fact!

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Stay in Roaring ‘Twenties American Splendor in Los Angeles