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The Ambassador, and the attached Coconut Grove Nightclub, were the haunts of early Hollywood Royalty. It hosted the six different Academy Awards and seven Presidents. Much like the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, except it didn't make it to the renaissance of later years.
As I get old, I find the memories of a Los Angeles I hardly (or never) knew call to me with a plaintive, but resigned voice. Places that will never again reach their history and potential. The age of innocence lost. Oddly enough, in the headed days of vice and sin, innocence is probably the last thing it would have been called. But they had an exuberance and life that is hard to replicate today. The glamour of the Coconut Grove looks positively elegant against the drunk ravings of the latest celebrity brat at Chateau Marmont.
.It probably wasn't like that in reality, but reality right now - with screaming news anchors and a 24 hour entertainment cycle that find introspection a sin is something I am choosing less and less.
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The hotel never really recovered from Robert Kennedy's assassination there in 1968, but I think it was more the time rather than the event that brought ruin to the hotel.
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It has been memorialized a few times, and a recent one is why it comes to my brain.
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First, the movie The Thirteenth Floor is filmed almost entirely in the hotel, dressed up in it's 1930's finest. Despite the title, there is no horror side to this movie, and I recommend it.
The second, and more immediate trigger is that of a performance.
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This past month, BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music) hosted a performance based on The Ambassador - an album with each track written about a building in Los Angeles, but composer Gabriel Kahane. I purchased the album, which is very slow and kind of experimental - but I do love the track The Ambassador.
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Here is a trailer for that performance - it is evocative of me. Which means there are at least two of us (Mr. Kahane was also born in LA, and now lives in New York....)