The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel near the Hollywood Bowl

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel near the Hollywood Bowl

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The first Academy Awards presentation took place at the brand-new Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California, in the Blossom Room on May 16, 1929.

Today that same hotel, albeit with a recent multi-million dollar restoration, is the only historic hotel in Hollywood still serving travelers, and one of only three such properties in the Los Angeles area. This year marks the Roosevelt's 75th Anniversary.

Amenities that those original Hollywood movie celebrities missed are the new nightclub, Feinstein's at the Cinegrill, with state-of-the-art sound and lighting, top entertainment and cuisine. We wonder what Janet Gaynor, Emil Jennings, and Clara Bow would have thought of the Precor elliptical trainers, Star Trac treadmills, and free weights in the multi-gym fitness center?

The Hollywood Roosevelt was the dream of local real estate baron, Charles E. Toberman, who wanted to create a hotel befitting the rapidly growing film world and its attendant social circles. The name of the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, was chosen to convey the buoyant optimism of the Hollywood throng at the time. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were on the committee that formulated the hotel because they, too, wanted a showplace in Hollywood.

Across from Grauman's Chinese Theatre on legendary Hollywood Boulevard, the Hollywood Roosevelt is now on the National Register of Historic Places. One step into the lobby lounge area, with its massive European brass chandelier - originally holding candles - and high, ornately carved and painted ceilings and one can see why. The same intricate ceiling work dominates the Blossom Room, which also has Mexican tile wainscoting and three original seven-foot double entry doors of carved oak. Public area floors combine saltillo and Mexican pottery tiles, stained oak and thick, deco-patterned carpets. The balcony wall features historic black and white Hollywood photography, and soft piano jazz wafts throughout.

Inside the Hollywood Boulevard entrance, with its leaded glass doors, rests a life-size bronze by sculptor Emmanuil Snitkovsky of a seated Charlie Chaplin, who lived to be 100.

The Olympic-sized swimming pool, lined with a design by David Hockney, is surrounded by teak pool furniture and lush landscaping, a perfect setting for you to experience true Hollywood glamour.

That glamour is what the Hollywood Roosevelt is all about. On the Spanish tile steps leading from the lobby to the mezzanine, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson taught child star Shirley Temple to do the staircase dance for her movie, "The Little Colonel". Marilyn Monroe posed for her first print ad on the diving board of the pool. Rudy Vallee made the hotel his home during his first trip to Hollywood. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dali gathered at the Cinegrill to talk shop. Room 928 is where Montgomery Clift stayed during the filming of "From Here to Eternity".

The Hollywood Roosevelt has always been a popular place for TV and movies to shoot "on location." Most recently filmed here were scenes for "Catch Me if You Can", "Charlie's Angeles", "Full Throttle", "Hollywood Homicide", and "Italian Job".

To connect the past to the present, concrete elements adorn each bathroom, and artwork containing celebrity handprints and autographs decorate each guest room to "cement" the Roosevel's relationship with Hollywood.

That relationship is also "alive" in the form of ghostly occurrences reported in the hotel since it was reopened after restoration in 1985. Most notable is a cold spot in the Blossom Room that has never been explained, roughly 30 inches in diameter and 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the room. A maid reported seeing the "ghost" of Marilyn Monroe in a mirror that once belonged to her, and psychics who have "read" the mirror talk of feeling much sadness. According to the Director of Security, who has logged each unusual event, a man in a white suit, seen by three different people on two different days, walked through a door and vanished!

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Carolyn Proctor, Jetsetters Magazine Correspondent