Hollywood Haunt Makes a Comeback

In the early 1950s, when Ronald Reagan needed a place to come home to after a tough day on the set with such co-stars as Bonzo, he chose the Montecito Apartments in Hollywood.

Today, Reagan would still fit right in at the Montecito. It was rededicated Wednesday as a residence for senior citizens.

Once the temporary diggings of such Broadway luminaries as Julie Harris and Geraldine Page and the stopover Hollywood haunt for the likes of George C. Scott, Gene Hackman and Mickey Rooney--who evidently nursed sick animals back to health in his rooms--the 56-year-old Art Deco landmark is, like many of the stars who stayed there, making a comeback.

“Seeing it vacant was so depressing,” said Gene Hinson, who managed the Montecito for 20 years with the kind of aplomb that kept him serene when a moonstruck actress strolled nude across the lobby and played matador with the traffic out front, or when seven FBI agents showed up to arrest a producer for robbing six banks--one of them while he drove the hotel porter’s car.

Hinson, who found the renovation “wonderful,” explained why actors liked the old Montecito so much. “We gave them a homelike atmosphere,” he said. “Also, we gave them credit.”

“It was a fun place to live in and work in, and I’m glad it didn’t die out,” said Jeanne Florian, a writer who worked the switchboard for years, making sure that studio calls got through to the poolside phone if an actor had gone to swim off post-audition jitters.

The Montecito is then-and-now Hollywood, the first promise kept in the city’s pledge of $900 million in redevelopment work on 1,100 acres of Hollywood. It is “a very significant step,” Mayor Tom Bradley promised when he cut the ribbon, slung rather puzzlingly across the entrance to the nondescript parking lot.

Actor Albert Popwell, who played a bad guy in the “Dirty Harry” movies--”I’m always a bad guy”--stayed here years ago. “I liked the homelike atmosphere,” so much so that now his mother, Odette, is one of the first new tenants.

The 10-story apartment-hotel at 6650 Franklin Ave., which cost $275,000 to build in 1931, took $8 million to renovate, $3.26 million of that from a Community Redevelopment Agency loan. The 118 revamped low- and moderate-rent apartments rent from $250 to $470, and many of the low-priced ones are already taken. It is privately run by Montecito Apts. Ltd.

But on Wednesday, the restyled mauve and pearl-grey lobby, its ceiling dotted with Halloween-in-spring orange, black and silver balloons, felt almost like old times for veteran housekeeper Hattie Mangram and for Hinson, who is even thinking of coming back to live.

There are things to mourn: The Italian black marble facings on the front of the building, to match the carved chimney piece inside, had been hacked to shards by street kids. The mantel mirror had disappeared, too; Hinson remembers the two young producers of the 1970s hippie musical “Hair” standing before it to mess up their hair.

Through it all, Hinson always backed them up, Florian said. “You have 150 guests, all temperamental, all want to be waited on first,” like the “egotistical” actor who got tired of waiting his turn and raced downstairs, wearing a loincloth and carrying a spear, to pound on her desk. Guests like Rip Torn, who once tossed a $20 bill on her desk and said, “Go get yourself a drink,” made up for the spear-carriers.

In its more sedate incarnation, the Montecito is “so quiet and calming,” said tenant and leasing agent Marion Fredlund, stroking the upholstery of a chair. “They expect old people to live in dark little” places.

“This is splendor.”