Tears for an Icon That Was Home

She couldn’t believe her eyes when she went back to the place she grew up.

“My childhood is gone -- it just disappeared. I’m seeing the whole first 17 years of my life pass in front of me,” Carlyn Frank Benjamin said.

Benjamin was peering through a fence at rubble from the Ambassador Hotel, which has been demolished to make room for a school.

Benjamin lived at the Ambassador between 1921, when it opened, and 1938. Her father, Ben Frank, managed the hotel and her grandfather, Abe Frank, was the hotel company’s vice president and the person she credits with creating the palm-decorated Cocoanut Grove. She likes to point out that she and the hotel were born five months apart.

“The Ambassador and I are the same age. Except I’m still here,” the 84-year-old Brentwood resident said Tuesday as she gazed sadly at the remains of what many consider the symbol of Los Angeles’ golden era.

Tonight, Benjamin will be among hundreds who are expected to gather across Wilshire Boulevard from the hotel site for a wake that will commemorate its role in defining Los Angeles’ popular culture.

But when the stories are swapped, none are likely to be as vivid as Benjamin’s.

As a young child, she roamed the grounds, building castles in the hotel golf course’s sand traps.

The pastry chefs whipped up a giant chocolate cake for her third birthday and Josephine, the hotel organ grinder’s trained monkey, showed up to entertain her and her friends.

As she grew older, Benjamin learned to swim in the hotel’s pool, practiced marksmanship on its rifle range and explored every nook and cranny of the 500-room resort.

She cajoled staff members into saving so many hotel newspapers for 3rd Street Elementary School’s annual paper drive that her class won the collection contest every year. After school each day, she had snacks in the Ambassador’s Fountain Room cafe. In the lobby, she regularly encountered royalty and celebrities.

She met pilot Charles Lindbergh there shortly after his pioneering 1927 transatlantic flight. She considered Hollywood movie impresario Sid Grauman, who was a hotel resident, an unofficial uncle.

Gossip columnist Walter Winchell lived next door and his young daughter was a friend of Benjamin and her younger sister, Jackie Schwartz, now a Santa Ana resident.

“The elevator operator would let me practice running it when no guests were in it. I’d go from the basement to the sixth floor -- we’d bounce around until I got it level at each floor,” Benjamin said.

Phil Harris, Bing Crosby

Benjamin’s teenage years at the hotel were the best, she said.

From the Cocoanut Grove’s hatcheck girl, she soaked up the latest Hollywood gossip about who was seeing whom. She sometimes hung out in the hotel drugstore, reading movie magazines and watching for Hollywood starlets who regularly popped in.

One magazine had reported that starlet Lupe Velez, the “Mexican Spitfire,” never wore underwear. So Benjamin was there watching the next time Velez came into the drugstore -- one of many shops that lined the Casino arcade beneath the Cocoanut Grove.

“You couldn’t see any lines under her clothes. So I knew it was true,” she said.

Some afternoons she would sit in the Fountain Room with Bing Crosby while he recovered from the previous night’s performance and after-show partying by eating a late breakfast.

Others were spent in the Cocoanut Grove, watching and listening as America’s best big bands rehearsed for evening shows.

“Phil Harris. Eddie Duchin -- he took me to a USC football game one time when I was 16. Harriet and Ozzie Nelson. They were so nice. I’d sit and talk with Ozzie while Harriet was rehearsing,” she said.

She was there when Guy Lombardo and his orchestra made its Los Angeles debut and so many people tried to cram themselves into the Cocoanut Grove that maitre d’ Jimmy Manos was trampled and suffered a broken arm.

“I was in the 11th grade at L.A. High when Hal Kemp and his orchestra came to play at the Cocoanut Grove. I thought it would be great if they came and played at a school assembly. So they got on a bus and performed at two assemblies because the school was so big. Skinny Ennis was the singer and girls were swooning over him. He saw me in the second assembly and reminded everybody I’d cut class to come to it. I was sure I was going to get in trouble, but I didn’t.”

There was no shortage of strange moments at the hotel.

Portrait artist Joseph Segal was a long-term resident. Benjamin recalled the reaction of other guests when they noticed an odd odor coming from Segal’s room. When the housekeeping staff investigated, they found a lion living with Segal.

“He’d sneaked it up the service elevator. Naturally, he couldn’t keep it there. So my father built a cage for it outside on the grounds. That’s how the Ambassador’s zoo got started. It eventually had a fawn and two bears” along with the lion, she said.

Benjamin and her family lived on the second floor of one of the hotel’s bungalows. Theirs, named the Rincon, was located on the east side of the 24-acre site, near Wilshire Boulevard. Daily maid and room service was a way of life.

All of that came to a sudden end when she was 17 and her father lost free use of the Rincon bungalow in a hotel company shake-up after the Great Depression. The Frank family moved to a rented a home in Hancock Park.

“One day I’m queen of the hill and the next day I’m walking home from L.A. High School. It was a tremendous shock, not having turn-down service and three fresh sheets every day,” she said.

Benjamin returned to the hotel when she was dating her late husband, Ben Benjamin, a talent agent. The couple frequently visited the Cocoanut Grove “and had a great time,” she said.

The shell of the Cocoanut Grove was all that was standing when Benjamin returned Tuesday.

Kennedy Assassination

Remnants of it are being saved by Los Angeles school planners who intend to convert that site into an auditorium for a high school to be built there. Except for a portion of the hotel kitchen pantry -- now in storage -- where Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in 1968, it’s the only part of the Ambassador that was spared by wrecking crews.

“It was a horrible tragedy that Kennedy was shot there. But so many great things happened at the Ambassador,” Benjamin said.

Those planning tonight’s Ambassador memorial said the free event will begin at 7 p.m. at the HMS Bounty at 3355 Wilshire Blvd. Reservations are required and may be made at (310) 858-2224.

“It’s not going to be an opportunity to rehash the preservation issue,” said Ken Bernstein, director of preservation issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy -- a group that went to court in an attempt to prevent the hotel’s demolition. “We view it as a moment of remembrance and reflection and celebration of the rich life of the Ambassador.”

Also involved is Michael Schneider, a 32-year-old Variety writer who chronicled the Ambassador’s final days on a website that attracted worldwide attention. “The hotel symbolizes the glamorous old Hollywood and Los Angeles that my generation never got to experience firsthand,” Schneider said.

Benjamin said she plans to bring some vintage hotel pictures to the memorial. She said she is hoping she will find a writer in tonight’s crowd willing to help her polish and publish a memoir about growing up at the Ambassador.

Its title: “Living With Reservations.”