Since it was built in 1923, the...

Since it was built in 1923, the Hollywood Athletic Club on Sunset Boulevard has housed a men’s gym--which accounts for its name--a Jewish university, a Russian nightclub and, now, a pool hall.

But it’s not the stereotyped, cigar smoke-filled den of green-felt iniquity.

Three years ago, the club--which began in the Roaring ‘20s as a private playpen for silver-screen luminaries--reopened as an upscale 41-table billiard palace, where string quartets play chamber music as players compete on luxurious green baize-covered tables.

And with the renovation, the old building on Sunset Boulevard has come full circle.

About a century ago, gambling halls, billiard dens and saloons were prohibited in the God-fearing community of Hollywood. In 1905, the Los Angeles Times described Hollywoodland (its original name) as a place where “the saloon and its kindred evils are unknown.”

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Little did the righteous residents know that the movie industry would soon move in, and Hollywood’s conservative churchgoers would find themselves dwelling amid a “troupe of scalawags,” recalled humorist Anita Loos, screenwriter and author of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

But the “scalawags” joined forces with the good citizens of Hollywood--at least the male half--and launched a membership drive to build the Hollywood Athletic Club. A million dollars later, the nine-story club, then Hollywood’s tallest building, opened on New Year’s Eve, 1923.

The gym’s fencing instructor was Cornel Wilde, before he was “discovered” by some of the stars he was hired to teach. Buster Crabbe, the club’s lifeguard, trained in the swimming pool to win a 1932 Olympic gold medal. He later starred as the futuristic sex symbol, Flash Gordon. Crabbe would also share “Tarzan” movie role duties with another club habitue and Olympic gold medalist, actor Johnny Weismuller.

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For more than 30 years, the Hollywood Athletic Club remained the private watering hole, crash pad, game room, gymnasium, lunchroom and retreat for its members, among them such notables as John Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Dick Powell, W.C. Fields, John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Anthony Quinn. Rudolph Valentino kept a permanent bachelor pad there.

During Prohibition, liquor was dispensed in teacups at the club’s formal dances. All-night drinking parties flourished in the penthouse.

At one party, Wayne stood on the penthouse balcony and hurled billiard balls at cars; Barrymore reputedly climbed atop the roof, where the Fire Department had to rescue him.

One local old-timer remembered the night Wayne and a producer took bets on who was better at punching his fist through doors. The next day, the club presented the winner--Wayne--with a bill for $2,000.

Al Jolson recorded “I’m California Dreaming” in the gymnasium. In 1931, Tyrone Power Sr., the great Shakespearean stage actor and silent-screen star, died in his upstairs room in the arms of his 17-year-old son, Tyrone Jr.

The same year, Walt Disney’s plunge into debt drove him to the edge of a breakdown. But after several weeks of recuperating at the club, with vigorous workouts in the gym, Disney bounced back and soon commanded an entertainment empire.

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Women were prohibited above the first floor. Fields was known to have wrapped his mistress, Carlotta Monti, in a rug and smuggled her upstairs. Powell was surprised one evening after breaking a date with his fiancee, Jean Harlow. Legend holds that she appeared in the lobby in a mink coat with nothing on underneath, opened the coat and said to Powell, “Just a reminder of what you’re missing.”

It was a small group of members that pulled off one of Hollywood’s great pranks. In 1942, after spending hours drowning their sorrows over the death of their friend Barrymore, several of the mourners stole Barrymore’s body from the mortuary and took it to Flynn’s house, propping it up in a chair in hopes of giving Flynn a real scare--which they did.

After World War II, the club began to deteriorate. In 1958, it was reborn as the West Coast branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary. It later became the University of Judaism, where high school and college students took evening classes.

In 1979, the institution moved to a campus above Bel-Air, leaving the building empty again. Through the 1980s, it showed only a shadow of its former purpose for merriment. The tower was leased out for offices; the bottom floor briefly housed a Russian nightclub and restaurant.

Then, four years ago, entrepreneur Tom Salter leased the 70-year-old building and put $1.3 million into reviving its glamour days. Its refurbished plush wood and velvet interior and restored Spanish/Mediterranean-style exterior have enticed new stars: tabloid regulars such as Madonna and Kiefer Sutherland, as well as Charlie Sheen, Kathleen Turner, Eric Clapton, Axl Rose and Kevin Costner, often dine and pick up a pool cue on the premises.

But so far no one has punched in a single door.