Bittersweet ‘Garage Sale’ Is Held at the Ambassador

Although its final guest departed 2 1/2 years ago, there was another long line Thursday at the checkout desk at the venerable Ambassador Hotel.

It was filled with the curious and the nostalgic, who flocked to the 70-year-old Wilshire Boulevard landmark to snap up its historic furnishings before the hotel is demolished to possibly make way for a new high school campus.

Items ranging from engraved silver serving platters and tiki-style soup bowls from the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub to beds and night stands from the hotel’s 500 guest rooms were placed on sale in a liquidation ordered by developer Donald Trump.

Like a garage sale gone mad, the display of goods filled sagging banquet tables and aging room service carts. They spilled out of once-grand ballrooms that in bygone years attracted the city’s bluebloods and Hollywood’s stars.

The sale was a bittersweet moment for those who remember the Ambassador as a place that welcomed celebrities and commoners alike.

“I met my husband here,” said Jean Robinson of Hollywood, who came to buy a $50 silver champagne bucket as a way of toasting that day 39 years ago. There was no better place in the 1940s and ‘50s to see and be seen than at Cocoanut Grove dances, she said.

Billie Warner of Wrightwood said the same was true in the 1960s. “When I first moved here from Tennessee, I’d never seen anything like this. I loved dancing here with my boyfriend of the moment,” she said as she selected a souvenir water pitcher, plate and fork.

Mildred Frieborn of the Mid-Wilshire area was hunting for dinnerware marked with the Ambassador’s eagle-and-lions emblem and for a flag that had flown in front of the hotel.

It was common to bump into celebrities at the Ambassador, said Frieborn, who worked at the hotel’s front desk for 13 years. She said her favorite encounter was with Richard M. Nixon.

Standing guard over the treasures was retired Los Angeles Police Officer Chuck Teague of La Mirada. As a cop, he had patrolled the Ambassador’s neighborhood. He pointed out where he regularly sat next to gossip columnist Walter Winchell on morning visits to the hotel’s sunny coffee shop.

Teague recalled the Ambassador’s darkest day, too. He was sent there June 5, 1968, after Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated as he walked through a kitchen after addressing an election night crowd in a nearby ballroom.

After the shooting, Teague helped round up witnesses, including a woman who said she had seen assassin Sirhan Sirhan get out of a car outside the hotel.

The aging, banquet-sized ice-making machine that Sirhan is said to have hidden behind before gunning down Kennedy is among the items being sold. It is listed at $165. The stainless steel serving table that Sirhan was thrown onto when onlookers subdued and disarmed him is for sale for $95.

Liquidator Frank S. Long of Dayton, Ohio, said the assassination aspect is not being mentioned to potential buyers. But he is not being shy about the significance of other items on the block for the next 44 days--or until everything is sold.

The beat-up baby grand piano that such entertainers as Sammy Davis Jr. played in the Cocoanut Grove is displayed with a $2,250 price tag pasted on its side. There are boxes of $50 silver goblets that probably were once hoisted by the likes of Clark Gable, he said.

“This is the public’s last chance to see this building,” he said. But a $2 admission fee is being charged because “we’re really after shoppers, not lookers.”

The sale of all chairs, mirrors, beds, night stands, television sets and kitchen equipment is expected to raise about $350,000 for the hotel site’s owner, Trump Wilshire Associates, he said.

Hotel fixtures such as crystal chandeliers and its wooden front desk will be sold next year after film crews finish using the hotel as a production location, said Stephen F. Lawler, project manager for the Trump Organization in New York. He said some kitchen equipment is being donated to a new family housing shelter in North Hollywood.

Nostalgia had nothing to do with some of the buying taking place Thursday.

Culver City catering company owner John E. Little was stocking up on serving trays and cooking pans. Mid-Wilshire property manager Gerald McCarthy was purchasing 15 rooms worth of beds, tables, chairs and lamps. They will be used at the recently renovated circa-1922 Gaylord Apartments building across from the hotel on Wilshire.

“We’re very sad to see a landmark like this go,” McCarthy said. “But we got some very nice deals.”