Credit: Dangerous Minds / Martin Turnbull / The Garden of Allah

The Garden of Allah doesn’t sound like a spot that you’d find in 1920s California, or even a place you’d find in 1920s America as a whole. Much less would you imagine that it was arguably the defining place of sin and immorality at a time when Hollywood was arguably even sleazier than it is now.

Because it’s true, modern Hollywood is something of a cesspit. People run around doing precisely what they want with only the barest risk of a genuine consequence to be scared of. However, that’s an improvement on what it once was. Old Hollywood was the wild west in ways that many people romanticise today, but as with most things people romanticise, the moment that you look a little closer, become something truly fucked.

One can only imagine how much of that decadent chaos happened at 8152 Sunset Boulevard. Originally a gargantuan, 40-room mansion under the ownership of real estate tycoon WH May called Hayvenhurst, in 1919, it was leased to the Russian acting legend Madame Allah Nazimova, one of the most fascinating figures in the history of old Hollywood. An openly bisexual box office draw who also branched out into screenwriting, directing and producing her own daring work.

None of this was a con or a gimmick either. Nazimova was really as daring and libidinous as her reputation suggested, and thus, the mansion became a meeting point for seemingly anyone in Hollywood with an interest in getting laid. I didn’t want to blow your mind or anything, but that accounted for quite a few people in 1920s Hollywood. At the height of the mansion’s notoriety, she renamed the house the Garden of Alla (yes, without the H for the time being), and for a few years, it was a non-stop frat house for the rich and famous.

Particularly those whose inclinations didn’t chime with mainstream society of the time. Nazimova may have been bisexual, but she leaned towards women. So much so that it was she who coined the famous term “sewing circle” for the sapphics of Hollywood that kept their sexuality a closely guarded secret. The Garden of Alla, however, was somewhere clandestine affairs could be conducted without anyone outside of it being the wiser. Principly because its owner intimately knew the risks of being outed by the press.

However, Nazimova’s time at the top of Hollywood was short, and the colossal mansion wasn’t cheap to run. When her career began truly stuttering, she turned her last remaining asset into her main source of income, building 25 rental villas around the original house, turning it into a hotel and adding the h to its name. Just because now you could pay to stay there, though, didn’t mean that the guestlist became any less exclusive. Or, for that matter, any less debauched.

The best example of this was reported by drama critic Whitney Bolton, who spent a period of time living at the Garden and wrote once, “If a stark-naked lady of acting fame, her head crowned by a chattering monkey, chose to open the door to Western Union, no one was abashed, least of all the lady and the monkey.” 

Pretty much everyone who’s anyone from that era of Hollywood spent time raising hell at the Garden, from the Marx Brothers and Orson Welles to Frank Sinatra and F Scott Fitzgerald, who painted the town red there.

The Garden of Allah stayed open until it was purchased for redevelopment by Lytton Savings and Lon in 1959. By then, Nazimova herself had been dead for over a decade, passing away in 1945 and spending the last few years of her live living in villa 24 of the very complex she’s made famous. What had begun as a clandestine meeting point for Bollywood’s vulnerable icons had grown into little more than Animal House with a transatlantic accent and a bigger bank account.

However, when it comes to Old Hollywood debauchery, nowhere has more history within its walls than the Garden of Allah.