“Life Without Reservations”: Carlyn Frank Benjamin and the Ambassador Hotel

Yes, I remember the Ambassador Hotel, the noble L.A. edifice that dominated 24 acres just off Wilshire Boulevard from 1921 to 1989. I was there at least twice. When I graduated from junior high school, some of the more adventurous fourteen-year-olds took their dates to watch Louie Prima and Keely Smith sing and swing at the world-famous Cocoanut Grove supper-club. Then, in June of 1968, my parents and I thought it would be fun to drop in on Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign headquarters, just after he’d won big in the California presidential primary. The world knows what happened that night. RFK’s assassination has tainted our memories of the Ambassador ever since. It doubtless contributed to the hotel’s demise, and its ultimate replacement by a large public community school dedicated to Kennedy’s memory.

 A young girl named Carlyn Frank was hardly a casual visitor to the hotel. During perhaps its most glorious era, from 1921 to 1938, she lived on the premises while first her grandfather and then her father served as general manager. Her home from babyhood to age 17 was an idyllic bungalow, dubbed Rincon, that stood on the hotel grounds. (Doting hotel staff constructed a child-sized playhouse, so she and her sister could make cocoa in a tiny kitchen.) For 17 years young Carlyn explored every nook and cranny of the glamorous hotel, much as the legendary Eloise roved New York’s Plaza Hotel in the picture books of Kay Thompson.

 Carlyn’s Ambassador years marked the era when Los Angeles came into its own as the home of the American film industry.  The Ambassador was adjacent, after all, to the original Brown Derby restaurant, and located not far from major studios like Paramount. And so the hotel cultivated a glamorous image, one that attracted both Hollywood legends and wannabes. Carlyn’s father, Ben Frank, brought to the Ambassador such innovations as a zoo, a pitch-and-putt golf course, and an actual sand beach next to the swimming pool. Both he and her grandfather, Abe Frank, also loved staging special events that attracted the starstruck. One of Abe’s innovation at the Cocoanut Grove was the weekly Star Night, for which an onsite artisan crafted wax dolls closely modeled on the features of the female celebrity being honored. The beautifully dressed and coiffed dolls adorned every table, and each went home at evening’s end with a lucky guest.

 I know all this because, as an adult, Carlyn Frank Benjamin began writing a memoir, Life Without Reservations, that covered (along with her own growing-up years) the Ambassador and its legendary guests. These included in the early days Marion Davies, who rode a horse through the lobby, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who set her wardrobe on fire after a jealous row with Scott. Carlyn was too young to remember such antics, but did meet Charles Lindbergh, watched Olympic champions train in the hotel pool, and frequently (while eating her own lunch) glimpsed a hungover Bing Crosby munching a turkey sandwich in the hotel coffee shop. The memoir was left behind when Benjamin passed away in 2017; she considered it incomplete, but it also chronicled her adult life as the wife of a famous Hollywood talent agent who brought celebrities like Laurence Olivier into their Brentwood home for casual fun and games. Daughter Lisa Benjamin Gilmour has fulfilled a promise to finish the book, adding scores of vintage photos and her own memories of her vibrant and civic-minded mom. Life Without Reservations: Growing Up at the Famed Ambassador Hotel 1921-1938 is a fascinating record of a time and place that now seem far, far away.

 The book’s photo-rich website is www.lifewithoutreservations.net, and of course it’s available through Amazon.

 

 

Seeing Double: “Cat Ballou”

I loved running across the factoid that Michael B. Jordan’s performance(s) in Sinners marked the second time that a Best Actor Oscar went to someone playing twins. (The  most famous literary work featuring two lookalikes is Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in which Sydney Carton nobly sacrifices himself to the bloodthirsty mob because of his close physical resemblance to French aristocrat Charles Darnay. Several film adaptations have been made, notably the 1935 epic starring Ronald Colman, but I gather no actor has ever played both roles.)

 Once I read that the only previous Oscar-winner playing twins was Lee Marvin in 1965’s Cat Ballou, I felt obliged to check it out. A huge hit, it racked up five Oscar nominations. Several of them related to the film’s rollicking score and to the comic ballad used to narrate the proceedings. (It was sung on-screen by the delightful duo of Stubby Kaye and Nat “King” Cole, the latter of whom died of lung cancer shortly before the film’s release.) There was also recognition for the adapted screenplay and film editing. But the only win on Oscar night belonged to Lee Marvin, who took on the wacky dual roles of Tim Strawn, the tin-nosed hired assassin who threatens Cat and her gang, and Kid Shelleen, the legendary gunslinger who’s only effective when he’s drunk. The two men are eventually revealed to be brothers, though not necessarily twins, and its’ clear that Marvin relished every moment of his time on-screen.

 The film’s story is something of a masterpiece of silliness. The title role is played by Jane Fonda. Though she was still in her twenties back then, it was her ninth film, and she was firmly in the ingenue phase of her career, making movies like Barefoot in the Park and Barbarella in which she showed emotion by opening her eyes very wide. (For me her true acting breakthrough was in 1969’s grim They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?) In Cat Ballou, Fonda starts out as an innocent finishing-school grad traveling west. Through a series of mishaps she discovers love and bad behavior, ending up as the leader of an outlaw gang which of course is a good deal more virtuous than the honchos of the little prairie town in which the action mostly unfolds. Other actors along for the ride include the agreeable Michael Callan and impish Dwayne Hickman (much loved by young folk for his goofy TV role as perennial teenager Dobie Gillis, and here having fun as a pretend preacher). 

 But how did Marvin, whose dual roles are not particularly large or challenging, ever manage to win that Oscar? I can only conjecture. First of all, at the ceremony held in 1966, the big winner was The Sound of Music. The Sixties were difficult years, politically speaking, and I think voters liked supporting something that was musical and upbeat, despite its inclusion of Nazis threatening Austria. (Other Best Picture nominees included Doctor Zhivago, Ship of Fools, Darling, and one wry comedy, A Thousand Clowns.) Among that year’s Best Actor candidates were two Serious Thespians from Britain, Richard Burton (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) and Laurence Olivier (Othello). Also nominated were towering dramatic performances by Oskar Werner (Ship of Fools) and Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker). I think audiences in that era needed a laugh, and only Lee Marvin supplied one. It didn’t hurt that he was in Ship of Fools too, as an over-the-hill baseball player.

 Disappointingly, in Cat Ballou Marvin’s two outrageous characters are never on screen at the same time. Kudos to Sinners for seamlessly accomplishing that feat. 

 

Down the Primrose Path with “That Hamilton Woman”

Frankly, I’m not quite sure why I decided to watch That Hamilton Woman, though I doubtless was curious about seeing Laurence Olivier playing opposite his new wife, Vivien Leigh. The 1941 film turns out to be an enjoyable account of a young woman with a checkered past first agreeing to marry an ageing British diplomat who collects lovely things, and then falling hard for a naval hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson. The implications of their liaison are spelled out in a film that looks sumptuous but is not. The Criterion Collection copy I watched is graced by the presence of an interview with the very articulate Michael Korda, who as a young boy romped amid the fake warships at the Hollywood studio (Fox, if I recall correctly) where the film was being shot. Meanwhile, his father, Vincent, created fabulous sets for the movie, which his uncle, Alexander Korda, produced and directed.

 Sir Alexander Korda and his two brothers began life in Hungary, but the political currents of the early 20^th century (and their lowly status as Jews) soon had them traveling all over Europe in search of film-related careers.  Alexander, in particular, came to consider England home, and Winston Churchill was one of his closest friends. It was in many ways thanks to Churchill that he and the family came to California early in World War II, not only to escape the privations of Britain during that perilous era but also (at Churchill’s urging) to make films that would plead Britain’s case during a period when the U.S. was still officially unaligned. It’s easy to spot that the rapacious Napoleon, determined to take over all of Europe, is intended to be, in the eyes of the audience, a stand-in for Adolf Hitler.  And part of the film’s raison d’être is to remind American of the danger of passivity in the face of real enemies.

 That Hamilton Woman is, of course, a juicy period romance, anchored by a pretty woman who’s no better than she should be and a legendary hero revered for taking on Napoleon in battle. There’s no one better than Leigh at portraying girlish charm, and she gets a few heroic moments too. (Let’s not forget her triumph 2 years earlier in Gone With the Wind.) As Nelson, Olivier is cast in the less showy part, one that requires him mostly to be impressive and unflinching, even as his physical self crumbles. Of course his wife of many years (Gladys Cooper) is depicted as cold and tough-minded, and it’s made clear when first he meets Emma Hamilton that, because of his wartime role keeping Napoleon’s France in check, he has not seen his spouse in seven years, which would certainly had helped their ardor (if there was any) to cool off.  But since Hollywood’s Production Code was still very much in effect, the love affair between Nelson and Emma is not allowed to reveal its own steam. (That baby daughter who’s officially registered by Emma under an assumed last name must have come from somewhere, but there’s precious little canoodling in this movie.) And, of course, Emma eventually has to suffer for her moral transgression: the film is bookended by doubtless apocryphal scenes of her as a haggard and penniless alcoholic. The wages of sin . . .  et cetera et cetera.

 I was astonished to learn That Hamilton Woman was shot in a mere five weeks. It looks lovely, and makes for a nice anti-fascist history lesson, one that it would not hurt all of us to remember.

 

 

 

 

Maggie Smith and Kris Kristofferson: The Lady and the Tramp

Alas, in the past week or so, we’ve lost several of my screen favorites. Dame Maggie Smith (who died September 27 at age 89) can fairly be considered movie royalty. I can’t pretend to have seen all her stage and screen work, but –starting in the late 1950s—she excelled at both comedy and drama, in both new works and well-aged classics. Circa 1970, I was lucky to catch her touring in an arch 18^th century comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem, opposite her then-husband, Robert Stephens, when it touched down at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre. But my first encounter with her talents came earlier, when she played an intelligent and sensitive Desdemona in a film version of Shakespeare’s Othello, with none other than Sir Laurence Olivier in the title role. (His blackface performance of the tragic moor was a dramatic tour de force, though today we’d naturally be uneasy seeing a white actor pretend to be a person of color.)

 Her Desdemona earned Maggie Smith her first Oscar nomination. In all she was nominated six times, winning the golden statuette for her fierce dramatic role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and for her supporting part in a Neil Simon comedy, California Suite (1978). Her two final supporting actress noms were for “corset” roles in A Room with a View (1985, as a prim chaperone) and Gosford Park (2001, as an ageing aristocrat). A whole new generation fell in love with her as the tart-tongued Violet Crawley in a period drama made for television, Downton Abbey (2010-2015). Playing an aristocrat raised in an earlier age, she was totally oblivious of more modern conventions, like weekends, and we adored her for that. But kids also fell under her spell when she played to perfection the sensible (though magical) Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films.

 Maggie Smith did not always play aristocrats and intellectuals. She was capable, as well, of portraying women of the lower classes. In 2011’s charming The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, she is a retired housekeeper worried about finances, one who only slowly adapts to the charms of India. As the title character in Alan Bennett’s semi-autobiographical The Lady in the Van, she’s an eccentric who makes her home for 15 years in Bennett’s driveway, dominating his daily life in ways both aggravating and fascinating. But whatever the roots of the characters Smith played, she always displayed a certain dignity, what you might call a ladylike manner. Yes, there was something proper and British about her, no matter the role.

 By contrast, Kris Kristofferson (who passed away on September 28 at age 88) was as American as April in Arizona. This despite the fact that his upbringing was highly out of the ordinary. An army brat, he was born in Texas, was an honor student (as well as a rugby star) at California’s Pomona College, and traveled to England as a Rhodes Scholar to study literature at Oxford.  Following a stint as a military officer, he angered his family by choosing to  move to Nashville, in search of success as a writer of country music. Eventually such songs as “Me and Bobby McGee” made him successful, and his rugged good looks helped him move into acting, in major films that cast him as outcasts, drifters, and close-to-the-earth types. (See, for instance, Martin Scorsese’s 1974 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and John Sayles’ 1996 Texas border saga, Lone Star). His schmaltziest role was as Barbra Streisand’s rock-‘n’-roller husband in the 1976 iteration of A Star is Born.    

 Both will be sorely missed. 

 

Othello: More Thoughts About the Moor

This past week,  the Varsity Theater in the oh-so-arty town of Ashland, Oregon, played host to the Ashland Independent Film Festival. On Ashland’s main drag, intense-looking film lovers queued up for screenings, or gathered for pints and bites in local cafes. But Ashland is the rare American town where the focus is chiefly on live theatre, performed in repertory.

It all started back in 1935 when a local college professor of drama proposed staging two plays of Shakespeare as part of Ashland’s Independence Day festivities. The city fathers insisted that boxing matches be presented as well. As it turned out, the plays far out-earned the bouts, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was on its way to putting an old timber town on the cultural map. Soon Hollywood too was getting involved. Bing Crosby served as honorary festival director from 1949 to 1951, Charles Laughton volunteered to star in King Lear, and Stacy Keach made several appearances in the early 1960s. 

By 1970, the festival had outgrown the outdoor Shakespearean stage that limited its performances to the summer months. A state-of-the-art indoor proscenium theatre was added in that year, followed by a flexible “black-box” for more experimental stagings. Today, OSF offers eleven plays in a season that stretches from February to November. There are always performances of plays by Shakespeare (including the most obscure of them), but new works are increasingly presented. On Saturday evening, I saw a world premiere of Manhatta, a striking new play that confronts the Native American experience both in the Manhatta of old and in today’s New York City. 

But of course the heart of the OSF lies in its Shakespearean performances. In recent years some have been gimmicky, with more gender-bending than audience members are willing to tolerate. I was lucky to see an Othello that was effectively staged and beautifully played on the indoor Angus Bowmer stage. Yes, there was some toying with contemporary elements. Othello and his men wore modern naval uniforms, communicated at times via cell phone, and played out one long stretch while lifting weights at a health-club. But the play’s tragic jealousy was still front and center, even while our awareness of racism then and now gave this Othello a modern edge. 

I’ve seen Othello on stage before, enacted by James Earl Jones, with Jill Clayburgh as his long-suffering Desdemona. But what really lingers in my mind is a filmed production that came out of England in 1965, starring (would you believe?) Laurence Olivier. In the early 20^th century, it was not unusual for white actors to blacken their faces to play this fascinating role. Orson Welles had done it on screen back in 1951. But by the mid-Sixties, Americans were less comfortable with handing a black man’s role (and one of the best black roles ever written) over to a Caucasian. Olivier had played the part on stage, and the modestly-funded film (which also starred Maggie Smith as Othello’s beautiful young wife) was essentially a filmed play, attracting an audience of intellectual types. I remember the great Olivier as being even more astonishing than usual. He’d clearly put a lot of work into transforming himself, beyond the pigment of his skin. His Othello was barrel-chested, and  he spoke in a resonant voice far deeper than Olivier’s usual timbre. Naturally, many took offense, with some critics likening his performance to an Al Jolson “Mammy” routine.  I accept their point, but could never help cheering for the right of a great performer to try on a great role for size, even if it made him (understandably) uncomfortable in his skin.