Ambassador of L.A. Closes Its Grand Doors

It is melancholy news that the Ambassador Hotel will be closed on Jan. 3.

I have never spent one night in the Ambassador, but it has always been a symbol of my feelings about Los Angeles, my yearnings, my pretensions, my fantasies.

As a reporter, I was sent to the Ambassador many times to interview visiting dignitaries. I remember attending a champagne reception for the King of Denmark. We reporters were standing about among the elite, on our best behavior, sipping champagne from elegant glasses, when a photographer asked the hotel’s press relations person for a milkshake. She was an Englishwoman, a woman of grace and style, and ordinarily unflappable. She left the room and 10 minutes later returned with a waiter at her side. He held a silver tray on which stood a tall vanilla milkshake.

The photographer eyed it, turned to the press relations woman and said: “Do you have chocolate?”

When I was a senior at Belmont High School, I lived with my sister in a flat at 8th Street and Berendo, only a block or two from the hotel. At that time there was a movie theater in the basement of the hotel. It cost only 25 cents, which I periodically saved from my streetcar fare allowance by walking home from school. It was in that theater that I came under the spell of Jeanette MacDonald.

I often strolled through the lobby and looked in the windows of the London Shop, pretending it was my world. Sometimes on Saturdays, when I had a quarter, I played golf on the pitch and putt course at the rear of the hotel. Though I never dreamed of being able to stay there, or to attend the gala evenings at the Cocoanut Grove, I thought of the Ambassador as my turf.

When I met my wife-to-be we both lived in Bakersfield. We were married in my sister’s home in the Hollywood Hills. We left during the reception. We were going to spend our wedding night in Laguna. I had $100 for the honeymoon. We were halfway to Laguna when my wife realized that she had left her purse behind. We drove back to my sister’s house to get it.

By then it was too late to drive to Laguna. “Let’s go to the Ambassador,” I said to my wife. “We can’t afford to stay there, can we?” she said. “No,” I said. “But we can walk through it.”

We found a hotel on 8th Street near the Ambassador. We spent a good part of the next day at the Ambassador--window shopping, playing golf and sitting in the lobby. That evening we walked to Perino’s, on Wilshire, for dinner. Today we wouldn’t dare to go into Perino’s if all we had was $100; but I believe our bill came to about $6, including my martini, plus 25 cents each for two demitasses. I had never paid that much for coffee in my life, and as long as the Depression lasted I considered it the height of extravagance.

I was also in the hotel, on assignment, on that dreadful night when Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I was in the senator’s fifth floor suite to do a story on his victory celebration. He had won the California primary that day, and his family and friends and his entourage of staffers and reporters were in a festive mood. I talked to the senator in the corridor just before he went downstairs to greet the waiting crowd in the Embassy Room.

He had a small cut on his forehead. He said he had been hit by a surfboard that afternoon at Malibu. How ironic that small wound seems in the light of what was about to happen to him. He quoted the Canadian statesman, John Bucan, as having said, “Politics is a great adventure.” Then he got in the elevator and went downstairs to his last adventure.

Margaret Burk, the hotel’s present press relations person, has invited my wife and me to stay in the bridal suite for a night, but I doubt we’ll do it.

I’m not sure I want to wake up amid all that elegance and luxury, and be carried off by fantasies of what might have been.