The western entrance to the Ambassador Hotel, an H-shaped nineteen-twenties Spanish Revival that occupies a twenty-three-acre parcel on Wilshire Boulevard, is a monumental porte-cochère. Thick columns, banded with green, yellow, and shell-pink tiles, support a crown of flagless flagpoles and a simple rectangular Art Deco clock that is stopped at ten-thirty. Surrounded by dying palms and a few neglected birds-of-paradise, the hotel, at eighty-four, has the look of a governor’s house in an abandoned tropical colony. In some places, the yellow plaster is so worn that you can see the outlines of the clay tiles beneath, like capillaries under fragile skin; in other places the plaster has flaked off altogether. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald used to stay here (they are said to have set fire to their bungalow, and their bill), but now the only residents are fifty feral cats, including Buster, Pinky, and Scabby (a mangy gray with half a tongue), who survive on scraps of catered food left over from movie crews. “The Graduate” was filmed at the hotel; more recently, the six hundred guest rooms, creepy basements, and derelict tunnels have been used as sets for horror movies and “Six Feet Under” episodes. This arrangement, which generates a million dollars a year in location fees, is likely to end soon. The Los Angeles Unified School District owns the building, and has announced that it plans to raze most of it and in its place erect a school for the thirty-eight hundred children, mainly Hispanic and Korean, who are bused out of the neighborhood every day.
Although the Ambassador was designed by Myron Hunt, its fate is intertwined with the peculiar and politicized legacy of an architect named Paul R. Williams, who died in 1980, at the age of eighty-five. Those who know Williams’s work celebrate the houses he built for stars—Tyrone Power, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball—and admire his curvaceous staircases and bars (in the Fountain Coffee Shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel; in the Palm Springs Tennis Club; in Perino’s restaurant, not far from the Ambassador, which is also slated for demolition). He is so closely identified with the L.A. Beaux Arts style that real-estate agents selling such houses often describe them as “style of Paul Williams.” By some counts, he built more than two thousand houses in his career; he once joked that he had built a house on every street in Beverly Hills.
In the late forties, the Ambassador hired Williams to design its Coffee Shop and a couple of bungalows, and to remodel the dining room and the ceiling of the Embassy Ballroom, where weddings and cotillions were held. But his significance, at least in the eyes of those who periodically lift him from obscurity, is due not only to his actual work—which is graceful, conservative, and lastingly attractive—but also to the fact that he was black. Williams would probably have been denied service at the Coffee Shop: the Ambassador wasn’t integrated until the mid-fifties. (As far as anyone can remember, Lena Horne was the first black person to stay at the hotel, when she spent the night there after a performance, rather than going to the Dunbar, on Central Avenue.) For some, in a city with a historical ambivalence about its black citizens, Williams has become a potent symbol of racial injustice. Although he was the first black member of the American Institute of Architects, and later its first black fellow, the story most often told about him is that he had to learn to draw upside down in order to avoid making his white clients uneasy by sitting too close to them. But when Williams wrote about this skill, in an autobiographical essay called “I Am a Negro,” published in American Magazine in 1937, he described it as an artistic sleight of hand. It was about making a dazzling first impression, so that people would think twice about judging him by the color of his skin.
By the time Williams began working on the Ambassador, he had a flourishing practice, and was regularly turning down jobs. The hotel was thriving, too. Margaret Burk, a former publicist and a devoted Ambassador booster, describes the opening-night party, on New Year’s Eve, 1921, as a kind of coming out for Southern California. There were three thousand guests, including Mrs. Doheny and Mrs. Van Nuys. “The splendor of the setting for the affair probably has never been equaled on the Pacific Coast,” a newspaper reporter wrote at the time. Soon the Ambassador was an emblem of L.A. cosmopolitan swank: Rudolph Valentino secured papier-mâché palms from the set of “The Sheik” as decoration for the Cocoanut Grove, the hotel’s night club, and three Oscar ceremonies were held there; Norma Jean took classes at the Emmeline Snively Blue Book Modelling Agency, which had offices on the mezzanine floor; Richard Nixon secluded himself in a suite in 1952 to write his “Checkers” speech. Wilshire Boulevard, established by the presence of the Ambassador as a major thoroughfare, filled with restaurants and department stores. Then things took a turn for the worse: on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was ambushed and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in a pantry off the Embassy Ballroom, where he had just delivered his California Democratic Primary victory speech. Over the next twenty years, the city continued to expand westward, toward the beach, and Wilshire became a seedy business district, populated by the newly arrived and the left-behind. In 1989, the Ambassador was closed, sold to Donald Trump and a group of developers, and then “eminent domained” by the school district, a proceeding that took more than a decade.
Several years ago, the school district took possession of the hotel and began a painstaking deliberation over what kind of school to build. In the spring of 2003, when the district revealed its plans—five options that ran from total demolition to almost total preservation—everyone had something to say about it. A coalition of community groups, led by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wanted a brand-new school as quickly as possible, with nothing spent on preservation which could be going toward textbooks and classrooms. Ambassador nostalgists wanted to hang on to the site of their honeymoons and their senior proms. The Los Angeles Conservancy, which had saved the oldest remaining McDonald’s, in Downey, and St. Vibiana’s Cathedral downtown, advocated “adaptive reuse” of the building, and hoped to reform the city’s image as a “throwaway metropolis.” Karen E. Hudson, Williams’s granddaughter and the author of “Paul R. Williams, Architect: A Legacy of Style,” recognized the need for a school—and the fact that the hotel wasn’t a Williams original—and was inclined to stay out of it, until, as she put it, “Someone went to a meeting and said that I was in favor of tearing the place down. That’s when I got involved.” She sided with the conservancy, on whose board she used to sit. The Kennedy family wanted the assassination site destroyed, and invoked R.F.K.’s commitment to the disadvantaged as a reason not to spend money on conservation. And Lawrence Teeter, the lawyer representing Sirhan, who claims that his client was a hypnotized pawn in a C.I.A. plot, maintained that demolishing the assassination site would be tantamount to the destruction of evidence. (Kennedy’s last meal, Teeter points out, was at the house of John Frankenheimer, the director of “The Manchurian Candidate.”) In October, the school district arrived at what the board thought was an inspired compromise: it promised to save the Williams-designed Coffee Shop, the Embassy Ballroom ceiling (either Williams’s remodelled version or Hunt’s original), the Cocoanut Grove, and the porte-cochère. It also said it would consider saving the pantry, which it regards as the building’s most historically significant site.
The Ambassador is a sad, shadowy, falling-down place, and the pantry, an awkward nook between the dusty kitchen and the backstage of the Embassy Ballroom, is the psychic epicenter of the decay. It is also the only place on the grounds where photography is not allowed. The hulking ice-maker behind which Sirhan lay in wait remains, several feet from where Kennedy fell. On that spot, a panel of linoleum has been removed from the floor, exposing the bare composite floorboard underneath. (There is a rumor that a looter stole it, seeking a drop of Kennedy’s blood.) A treacherous passage—the floor is sinking in, and a recent visitor broke his leg—leads to the Embassy Ballroom, which is bubble-gum pink, with a Grecian-wave motif around the awnings and a frieze of charioteers at either end. Daylight streams in through a large hole in the roof. In another place, Williams’s ceiling—elegant, arched, and covered with square pink panels—has caved in, and the panels are hitting a charioteer in the head. Thirteen rubber garbage bins are placed around the floor to collect leaks.
The Coffee Shop, which the school district plans to turn into a teachers’ lounge, is on the ground floor, along a row of stores with mostly empty display cases and scattered bits of lettering (“Borsalino hats”; “Give Him an Oleg Cassini Tie”). Lanterns suspended from the ceiling form shallow haloes in the gloom. The carpet is tattered, and the stuffing is coming out of one of the banquettes. Two squat columns and the walls are covered with palm-frond wallpaper, which was hung by a production crew to make the restaurant look like the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, also designed by Williams in the late forties. “That wallpaper’s very distinctive, so a lot of people go, ‘Oh, the wallpaper, yeah,’ ” Glenn Gritzner, a representative of the school district, says impatiently. (He regularly contends with what he calls “that’s where Frank Sinatra tripped over me” reminiscences.) “It’s, like, no. That’s a problem we have all over the property. There’s a crest above one of the check-in areas, and one of our board members was, like, ‘That’s so awesome, are we going to be able to keep that and incorporate it?’ What I said to her was, ‘Yeah, we can keep it, but it’s a twenty-seven-cent piece of foam that a film company put up a few years ago and never took down.’ ”
Though shabby, the Coffee Shop feels like an oasis—dark-green and mellow cream colors, deep seats, voluptuous lines. The bar squiggles toward the back wall, a shape echoed in bas-relief on the ceiling directly above. Max Bond, a black architect who worked for Williams as a summer intern in 1956, sees this fluid style, which Williams also brought to the houses he designed, as more than just a formal expression. “It represents an escape from all the terrors of the day, if you will,” Bond said. “It was a way of saying, ‘This is how you should live your life.’ ” Jeh V. Johnson, another black architect who worked for Williams that summer, respectfully disagrees with his friend’s assessment. “I think Williams would have thought of it a little bit differently,” he said. “He would have thought, What is the most graceful, elegant statement I can make on this building? Not necessarily as a way of escaping harshness and hardship. I think he had put that behind him in his own life as thoroughly as he could.”
In the July, 1913, issue of the N.A.A.C.P. magazine The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of a recent trip to Los Angeles, “The air was scented with orange blossoms and the beautiful homes lay low crouching on the earth as though they loved its scents and flowers. Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed, nor the average efficiency and intelligence in the colored population so high.” Between 1900 and 1930, the black population grew from two thousand people to nearly forty thousand. Williams’s parents, Chester and Lila, had come in the early eighteen-nineties from Memphis, where Chester was the headwaiter at the Peabody Hotel. Paul Williams was born in L.A.’s garment district, at 8th and Santee, in 1894; not long ago, a developer of apartment lofts nearby put up a fountain commemorating the birthplace. Chester, who became a fruit seller, died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three, when Williams was two. Lila died of the disease two years later, and Williams was brought up by a family that his parents knew from the First African Methodist Episcopal church. His foster father, Charles Clarkson, was a janitor.
Even as a child, Williams knew that he wanted to be an architect or an artist, and, after graduating from high school, in 1912, he took classes at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. He excelled, and won the Beaux Arts medal. (He later studied architecture at the University of Southern California, and took courses in color harmony and interior design.) In 1914, he got a job with a successful Pasadena architect named Reginald D. Johnson, who built expensive traditional houses; one of his colleagues there was Gordon Kaufmann, who became the architect of Greystone Mansion and a lifelong friend. After Williams started his own office, in 1922, his work often appeared next to Kaufmann’s in Architectural Digest.
In the course of the nineteen-twenties, the population of Los Angeles doubled, in what the historian Carey McWilliams called “one long drunken orgy, one protracted debauch.” The L.A. Beaux Arts style—an eclectic jumble that allowed Regencys, Georgians, and Spanish Colonials to stand side by side in the same development—suited the new Hollywood rich, who imagined themselves in mansions but didn’t trust their own taste. “Paul Williams did exactly what a lot of newcomers to California wanted,” Jeh Johnson says. “When the movie colony began to grow, you had lots of people coming out from wherever in America and certainly earning lots of money. Being able to afford a house for themselves, they wanted to build one that looked like it had been there or had been done by somebody who had some grounding in Southern California.” Williams understood his clients’ wish for grandeur but tempered it with a measure of restraint. He was known as polite and gentlemanly—and conflict-averse. Whenever anything went wrong, he sent out his white office manager to deal with the contractors. Wesley Howard Henderson, an African-American architectural historian and one of the few academics to have studied Williams, thinks that his style was particularly appealing to an arriviste clientele. “Self-made people . . . may have believed that Williams had a special ability to work with them because they perceived Williams as self-made,” he wrote in a 1992 U.C.L.A. dissertation on Williams.
By all accounts, Williams was an excellent showman. “Other people in his office came in wearing shirts and slacks, but he was dressed every day as if he were going to an elegant dinner party,” the widow of the architect Edward Fickett, a former employee, remembers. A 1936 photograph of Williams by Carl Van Vechten shows a light-skinned and soft-looking man, with a hint of a smile and gentle shadows underneath his eyes. He is wearing a suit, as he is in almost every available picture, and his tie and pocket handkerchief are expertly plumped. In “I Am a Negro,” he wrote that in the early days of his practice white clients occasionally turned up at his office and balked upon discovering his race. His strategy was to pretend that he was too busy even to consider taking on their project, and to pique their curiosity by saying that he couldn’t accept jobs for less than ten thousand dollars: “I knew that nothing so impresses the average American as the illusion of financial success, especially if that success is encountered in an unexpected quarter.”
Williams’s first high-profile house was for the automobile magnate E. L. Cord, a former mechanic and race-car driver who became a millionaire car manufacturer (his company made the Duesenberg). The house, which was finished in 1931, had a fifteen-car garage, and bathroom fixtures of fourteen-carat gold. Several years later, Williams built another spectacular house: a twelve-thousand-square-foot white Georgian Colonial on a three-acre plot off Sunset, for Charles Correll, the writer and actor who played Andy on the radio show “Amos ’n’ Andy.” Williams gave it a shapely portico, with narrow two-story streamlined columns, and embellished the staircase, a classic Williams swoosh, with fleurs-de-lis. Everything was spacious and well proportioned—even the servants’ quarters, which faced the gardens. Correll had been a bricklayer in his youth, and he laid out the large radial brick entry plaza in front of the house himself. The writer Sidney Sheldon, who has lived there for thirty years, added ten thousand square feet—scrupulously imitating Williams’s design—and recently put the house on the market for $19.5 million.
During these years, Williams lived with his wife, Della, and their two daughters in a humble, one-story house in South Central—largely because Los Angeles had privately enforced Jim Crow laws, in the form of restrictive covenants drafted by homeowners’ associations to keep non-white people out. In 1951, he built himself a house in a mostly white neighborhood now called Lafayette Square, off Crenshaw. The small neighborhood is full of traditional houses, several of them by Williams, and is distinguished by its wide, planted avenue and fat, healthy palms. Williams’s house—which his family still owns—is sleek and white, with a second-floor porch and a cool lanai, and is surrounded by giant ferns. When he started building the house, the neighbors panicked. “They were putting flyers on every house saying, ‘You better sell because your property values are going down,’ ” Karen Hudson told me. “This was a famous architect, by the nineteen-fifties! It wasn’t like Jack the Ripper was moving in or something.”
After the Second World War, architecture shifted away from the excesses of the L.A. Beaux Arts style and toward a spare, more economical, utilitarian ideal. Williams tried to keep pace. In 1945, responding to the postwar housing shortage, he published a book called “The Small Home of Tomorrow,” and followed it with “New Homes for Today” in 1946. The books advocated open plans, flatter roofs, and a minimum of ornament, and demonstrated a number of low-budget contemporary designs, including the Neutra Home. (Williams and Richard Neutra had collaborated on a government housing project a few years earlier.) The same year that “The Small Home” came out, the editor of Arts & Architecture magazine initiated the Case Study House Program, a project that promoted the new socially progressive aesthetic by sponsoring houses from aggressively modern architects—Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Eero Saarinen, and Pierre Koenig among them—and publishing the results.
Williams’s principal contribution to this movement was indirect and undocumented. The owners of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22, a twenty-three-hundred-square-foot glass box cantilevered over the edge of a cliff in the Hollywood Hills, couldn’t find a bank that would give them a construction loan. “The way it was perched, everybody thought it wasn’t a good, safe financial move,” Hudson told me. But Williams was on the board of Broadway Federal Savings & Loan—founded by Hudson’s other grandfather, H. Claude Hudson, it was specifically intended to serve the black community—and he persuaded the bank to lend the money. Case Study House No. 22, which was completed in 1959, is the defining image of L.A. modernism, and is often referred to as the most photographed house in the world.
But the totem of modernism with which Williams is most often associated is one he had little to do with: the soaring, aerodynamic double parabola of the theme pavilion at Los Angeles International Airport. Despite many articles and books crediting him, Williams was not on the design team for the theme pavilion. (He was a member of the joint-venture office for the entire airport project.) The story, which has annoyed the architects who did work on the drawings—many of them were from William Pereira and Charles Luckman’s firm—originated with a photograph taken by Julius Shulman in 1965, a few years after the dedication. It shows Williams, his hair white and the wrinkles in his forehead deep, standing before the building with a quizzical expression on his face.
Shulman is ninety-four and lives in a 1949 Soriano house in the hills, with tumbling planters of succulents out front. His studio is filled with books of his photography and the files that he keeps on every architect he’s ever worked with. When I went to see him, a packet of Williams articles and photographs was lying on his desk. The famous picture, he said, had been taken on an assignment for the United States Information Agency. As Shulman has recounted elsewhere, when he drove Williams out to the airport and positioned him in front of the building Williams said, “Julius, don’t forget, I was not the architect of this building. This was done by William Pereira and his staff.” According to Shulman, the U.S.I.A. used the photograph internationally to promote the image of America as a racially inclusive democracy. Eventually, the story that Williams was responsible for designing the theme pavilion made it back home and took root. Shulman was amazed that people believed it. He said, “Don’t forget that Paul Williams was not a modernist.”
At the end of November, the conservancy, appalled by the school district’s decision to raze the Ambassador, sued; so did seven other groups, including the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, appalled by the conservancy suit, filed a brief to block it. Even Lawrence Teeter filed a suit, on behalf of Sirhan Sirhan, the Committee to Preserve Assassination Sites, and the Assassination Archives and Research Center. He wants to perform acoustical tests, similar to the ones that were done at Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, and is outraged that nobody will let him anywhere near the pantry.
Meanwhile, across town, in the upscale Westside neighborhood of Holmby Hills—between Beverly Hills and Bel Air—another Williams building was under siege by another school. The building, a lovely 1936 residence commissioned by a South African merchant named Morris Landau, has had many owners over the years—including Bruce McNall, the onetime owner of the L.A. Kings, and Ron Perelman, the financier—and is now owned by a private school called Harvard-Westlake, whose middle-school campus is next door. Harvard-Westlake would like to expand, and that means removing its original 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival administration building and the Morris Landau house.
In the late twenties, close to the time of the neighborhood’s founding, the Holmby Hills Homeowners Association adopted a restrictive covenant. It stipulated that “neither the whole nor any part of said premises shall be sold, rented or leased to any person not of the white or Caucasian race nor shall the same be occupied by any such person, except as the servant or employee of the person using said premises exclusively for residential purpose.” Now the Holmby Hills Homeowners Association is trying to keep Williams in the neighborhood, by keeping the Morris Landau house where it is. Fearing noise and speeding cars and the commercialization of their residential neighborhood, the neighbors oppose the school’s plans. But it is the story of Paul Williams that moves them. “You can’t tear down a Paul Williams house and put a driveway there!” Marcia Selz, the president of the Homeowners Association, says. She admits that she began learning about Williams only recently, but now she is a passionate defender of his legacy. “It shows no respect. It’s a sin to replace it with a driveway and a boxy administration building. We believe it’s not just the house: it’s Paul Williams. His life was such a tribute to what humanity can be. It’s important for us to remember this man.” In the service of their cause, the Homeowners Association has enlisted the retired reverend of Williams’s First A.M.E. Church (which he attended and built), the Los Angeles Urban League, Karen Hudson, and more than four hundred others.
John Amato, the assistant headmaster of Harvard-Westlake, sees things differently, of course. “We’re trying to modernize the school to meet the needs of L.A. city kids, so that they can be leaders in this community,” he says. He needs a new library and bigger classrooms, and he can’t let sentimentality stand in the way. In an unlikely convergence, Harvard-Westlake—a school for which the tuition is some twenty thousand dollars a year—is essentially making the same argument as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. But Amato has what he thinks is a very good solution. He has found a family in La Cañada Flintridge, near Pasadena, who will buy the Morris Landau house for a dollar, and the school will help pay to transport it. Williams built a number of houses in Flintridge in the twenties and thirties; his first commissions were there. Amato is sensitive to the historical importance of the house, not least the fact that its architect would have been forbidden to live there. His solution takes that into account, too. If all goes well, he says brightly, “We can relocate the house to another neighborhood where he also might not have been able to live.” ♦
