The Eloise of L.A. Revels in a Grand Past

“I am a city child. I live at The Plaza.... I spend an awful lot of time in the lobby. For instance every day I have to go to the Desk Clerk and see what’s happening there...” --From Kay Thompson’s “Eloise”

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Almost 50 years ago, a fictional 6-year-old imp named Eloise first captivated children with her fanciful life at The Plaza in New York. Over the decades, little girls read of her escapades and imagined the excitement and adventure of living in a grand hotel. But one little girl didn’t have to dream about it. She lived it.

As the daughter and granddaughter of the first general managers of the famed Ambassador in Los Angeles, Carlyn Frank Benjamin grew up in the once-luxurious hotel. And like Eloise, she knew every nook and cranny, every bell captain and desk clerk. Room service? A way of life.

Now “80 going on 39,” widowed and living in Brentwood, Benjamin is working on a memoir about her days at the Ambassador--tentatively titled “Life With Reservations.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District closed escrow on the hotel in December, and now its future is uncertain. While conservationists fight to save the building, which was designed by Myron Hunt, the architect of the Rose Bowl and Huntington Library, the school district is deciding on the best use of the site. Benjamin hopes that somehow the hotel will be saved. “It’s part of Los Angeles history and ... my family’s history,” the place where she spent her childhood, from infancy to age 17.

Eloise lived on the top floor of The Plaza. Carlyn Frank, her parents and younger sister, Jackie, lived on the top floor of Rincon, a tile-roofed cottage on the grounds of the hotel, which was managed first by her grandfather Abe, later by her father, Ben, both of whom were hired in 1921 for the hotel’s opening. It was Abe Frank who created the Cocoanut Grove, the hotel’s fabled gathering place of the rich and famous.

On a recent day, Benjamin makes a bittersweet visit to the decaying 500-room hotel, which closed in 1989. Walking up the cracked concrete steps leading to Rincon, she recalls, “This is where I had my third birthday party. We sat on these steps and blew bubbles.” The walkway in front is where silent screen star Pola Negri used to exercise her pet cheetah. Next door lived gossip king Walter Winchell and his family.

The Rincon, fallen into disrepair--with the added insult of having been once used by the Los Angeles Police Department SWAT team to practice raids on crack houses--is a forlorn sight with its tattered screens, punched-out walls, peeling paint and plaster. It is hard to imagine the living room as Benjamin remembers it, with a baby grand piano in one corner.

Entering the master bedroom, where a window is boarded up and a vine has pushed its way inside, it is apparent Benjamin is a bit shaken. For her, every room holds a memory. There was the sun-filled den--”This is where I was sitting during the 1933 earthquake.” Surveying the state of the room, she adds, “It looks like it just happened.” And there was her bedroom and her sister’s, both with porches overlooking the hotel. Once, there were striped awnings, a swing and a caged myna bird. “From here you could see the neon sign on the Cocoanut Grove.”

She peers through dirty windows to the bungalow’s overgrown backyard. “I had a three-room playhouse down there, with running water, electricity, a little baby grand piano,” built for her by the hotel’s groundskeeper.

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“Ooooooooo I absolutely love Room Service... Rene always says, ‘Bonjour, Eloise, voici votre petit de’jeuner’ ... and I always say, ‘Bonjour, Rene,’ merci and charge it please.” --”Eloise”

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For little Carlyn, room service was just the way people ate. No big deal. Indeed, her mother at one point tired of it and converted one of Rincon’s baths into a tiny kitchen.

“When I was little,” Benjamin remembers, “I’d sign checks in the coffee shop. I didn’t know you paid money for food.” Later, she and her friends would “all go to the Fountain Room and order chocolate sodas ... and turkey sandwiches with Russian dressing, made with real caviar, not lumpfish. I learned to love caviar when I was very young.”

When a hotel is your home, there are other perks. For one, a housekeeper makes your bed. “I had three clean sheets every day,” one just to cover the blanket. “That’s the thing I missed most when we moved.”

She had the run of the hotel, and she made the most of it, often hanging out with the doormen at the auto entrance “to see who was checking in and checking out.” A who’s who of old-time Hollywood were hotel guests or residents. Marion Davies and newspaper scion William Randolph Hearst lived there for a year. (It’s said that Davies once rode a white horse through the hotel’s vast lobby en route to a costume party. Lore also has it that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald made a bonfire of the furniture in their room. Benjamin knows of neither account firsthand.)

Guest Howard Hughes loved to rumba in the Cocoanut Grove. Charlie Chaplin was a regular guest, as was Jean Harlow. Eastern society--Vanderbilts, Du Ponts--wintered there. Presidents and royalty checked in. But today it is perhaps best known as the place where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on the night he triumphed over Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the California presidential primary on June 5, 1968.

The Casino shopping arcade stands abandoned, but Benjamin can point out where every shop once stood when the Ambassador, often referred to in print as “The World Famous Ambassador,” was a miniature city. Attending to guests’ whims and wishes were chic boutiques, a post office, a travel agent, a psychic, a dentist, a surgeon, a portrait painter, a piano teacher, a tailor and Professor Miggle, a hair rejuvenator.

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“My day is rawther full. I have to call the Valet and tell him to get up here and pick up my sneakers to be cleaned and pressed. ... Then I have to go down to help the switchboard operator. ... “ --”Eloise”

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The Ambassador’s head switchboard operator was Goldie, who worked out of a small windowless room. Young Carlyn came by often. “She knew everything that was going on in the hotel. And on weekends she’d connect me with my girlfriends on conference calls.”

The Ambassador’s rather grand movie theater, which on a recent day was set up as a nightclub for a film shoot, was another of young Carlyn’s regular haunts. “I knew how to turn the Wurlitzer on,” which never failed to impress her friends. Top movies of the day were 25 cents for hotel guests--and included a singalong with a bouncing ball--10 cents for children, and free for Carlyn, whose father succeeded his father as general manager in the late 1920s.

The big outdoor pool was Carlyn’s favorite summer place. There, Fred Cady, who coached several U.S. Olympic teams, taught her to swim, holding a long pole to which she was attached with a leather belt. She was fascinated by the house portrait artist, Josef Segall. When he moved in, he sneaked his pet lion up to his room in the service elevator. Benjamin recalls, “When the scent started coming out into the hall, my father became aware of it. He built him a cage in back of the tennis courts. That was the start of a zoo. We ended up with bears, two fawns, an anteater, a swan and two parrots. Segall sat in the cage every afternoon reading, with the lion lying at his feet. I don’t think it had any teeth.”

Off the lobby was the “doll room,” where she’d often watch the staff of women whose job was to make the celebrity look-alike dolls as centerpieces for Tuesday’s star nights at the Grove, when it was reserved for A-list stars.

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“Then I scamper to the Terrace Room, where those debutantes are prancing around. ... “ --”Eloise”

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Carlyn Frank’s Terrace Room was the Cocoanut Grove, with its fake palms, said to have been rescued from an Oxnard beach where they had been used in filming Rudolph Valentino’s “The Sheik.”

The place to be seen from its opening in 1921, the Grove had lost its luster by the ‘60s and in the ‘70s suffered the insult of a Las Vegas-like make-over under the direction of Sammy Davis Jr. It never was the same and closed in 1988.

But, for Benjamin, memories of the original Grove are fresh. Guests would enter through etched-glass, down red-carpeted stairs. “There was a waterfall in the center of the back wall, and there was a moon.” Pointing at some windows near the ceiling, she said, “See up there? That was the engineers’ booth, where I used to hang out to see what was going on.”

John Barrymore brought a real monkey to the Grove, where fake monkeys with electric eyes hung from the fake palms. Marlene Dietrich was sighted at a table one night wearing an orange suit with black monkey fur epaulets. One of the early acts was Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys. Benjamin says, “My father took Bing out of the Rhythm Boys and put him up as a solo act. The trio was making $300 a week.”

In the former Zinnia Room off the lobby, Carlyn attended Miss Klarkquist’s cotillions. In those days, young ladies bought their gowns on the fourth floor of nearby Bullock’s Wilshire and, Benjamin remembers, “One night we all showed up in the same dress in different colors.”

To Benjamin, the French Room, later renamed the Royal Ambassador Restaurant, will always be “where I met [Charles] Lindbergh. He came walking down the hall, this tall blond hero. My father introduced me, and he shook my hand.” It was 1927, after Lindbergh’s Paris flight.

The lobby was always abuzz with activity. On the night of the 1933 quake, Benjamin says, “The guests and all the people from the surrounding area came and spent the night there. Everyone stayed up all night, listening to the music of the house orchestra. There was a buffet set out in the lobby.” The hotel suffered very little damage.

Nothing remains of the Lido Gardens, once located near the swimming pool. There, Ben Frank installed a dance floor and bandstand.

“When it wasn’t being used,” Benjamin says, “I could use the dance floor for roller skating.”

West of the pool stood a huge auditorium--now a parking lot--where horse shows were held. There was an indoor tennis court, where she played on rainy days.

And there were always children around. Her classmates from Third Street School, then John Burroughs Middle School and later Los Angeles High, came to eat and swim and play in her private clubhouse.

When she was 17, her father and the hotel parted ways and the family moved to a real home on Highland Avenue. Carlyn Frank was no longer “queen of the hill.” Ben Frank went on to other enterprises--including Ben Frank’s toasters-on-every-table coffee shops, and died in 1953.

When she was 19, she met Ben Benjamin, then manager of the Roos Bros. sportswear store in Hollywood. They married five years later and had two children. Benjamin, who died in 1991, became a top Hollywood talent agent.

There are those who trace the hotel’s demise to the Kennedy assassination, but several factors led to its decline, including the general downward spiral of the neighborhood and the migration of the Beautiful People to the Westside. Gradually, the Ambassador fell into disrepair. Today, it is a botch of Band-Aid renovations. A mustiness permeates the rooms. Cheap furniture dots the lobby. Gone are the white sand beach and cabanas.

Once, says Carlyn Frank Benjamin, “It was caviar.”

A community meeting will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday at Virgil Middle School, 152 N. Vermont Ave., on the best use of the property.