A Special Ambassador From L.A.’s Golden Past

The Ambassador Hotel is 69 years old and closed. The school district wants to tear it down and build a high school. Donald Trump wants to tear it down and build the nation’s tallest skyscraper. Preservationists want to keep it as a historic landmark.

Meanwhile, the unflappable Jean Stinchfield, now 92, undoubtedly regards this sordid squabbling with the same gracious disdain in which for years she handled intrusive boors as the hotel’s mistress of public relations.

Miss Stinchfield’s daughter, Berta S. Hees, writes that she visited her mother the other day, and they spent an hour looking at old snapshots from the ‘40s, ‘50s and part of the ‘60s, when her mother reigned.

Most were of celebrities--young, beautiful and vibrant--disporting themselves at the Cocoanut Grove: Gary Cooper and Lupe Velez, Crown Prince Akihito, Queen Juliana, Indira Gandhi. “The rich, the famous and the powerful all passed through her office.”

Widowed, and with two young children to support, Miss Stinchfield had no standard skills when she applied for the job. She couldn’t even type. But she knew people, she knew manners, she could serve a proper tea, and she was indomitable. Perhaps her stiff-upper-lip British accent helped. She got the job.

As a young reporter I often attended functions or interviewed celebrities or royalty while Stinchfield hovered with the poise of a queen’s lady-in-waiting. No visitor was too lofty to humble her, no member of the press too grubby to receive her noblesse oblige.

I saw her discomfited only once. It was at a reception for the King of Denmark. Coffee and champagne were served on silver trays. The king was resplendent in his tan uniform with a blaze of medals on his breast. Offered champagne, a press photographer near me asked Miss Stinchfield if he might have a milkshake instead.

Miss Stinchfield was momentarily taken aback. But she recovered her aplomb, as usual, and sent a waiter to the coffee shop for a milkshake. In time, the waiter reappeared with a milkshake on a silver tray. The photographer regarded it with distaste. “Don’t you have chocolate?” he asked.

Miss Stinchfield stiffened, dismissed the waiter and turned her back on her gross guest. I secretly applauded her.

The Ambassador was completed on Jan. 1, 1921, just as Los Angeles was entering its golden age of architecture. Its famous Cocoanut Grove, with papier-mache palm trees and ersatz monkeys whose eyes were lighted amber, opened the following April 21. For decades it was the showplace for Hollywood’s stars and the world’s rich and famous.

I was sent to the Ambassador many times to pursue some celebrity or piece of news. I knocked on Lena Horne’s door the morning after she had thrown a drink in the face of a man who had used a racial epithet in her presence. She wouldn’t let me in.

Through the door I pleaded that I was on her side. She relented. She was wearing pants and a white turtleneck sweater. She made a gorgeous picture.

When Miss Stinchfield retired, Margaret Burk took over, bringing no less energy and command to the job. Her 1980 book, “Are the Stars Out Tonight?” pictures almost every star of the mid-century. Gable and Lombard danced at the hotel’s Grove; Bill Tilden played tennis on its courts; Buster Crabbe swam in its pool. In the 1920s, Charles Lindbergh was guest of honor at a tea dansant .

Presidents, kings and generals visited the Ambassador: Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower (as a young officer), Kennedy and Johnson (who is said to have patted female reporters and maids on their derrieres).

I once tried to get to Nixon’s room when he was vice president and was ordered out of the corridor by a Secret Service man. When I protested, he blocked my way and said, “Move it!” I moved it.

And I was there the night of June 5, 1968, when a little man in the kitchen ambushed and murdered Robert Kennedy. I had talked with Kennedy in the corridor outside his suite only a few minutes earlier.

He had said, “Politics is a great adventure,” and then had taken a rear elevator downstairs to his last adventure.

I don’t make predictions--only counterpredictions. But if the Ambassador Hotel is torn down, a lot of memories are going to be buried in its debris.