Hollywood: More ‘Unreal Life’ at and Near the Lido Building

Thank you for Ron Russell’s wonderful story about the Lido building (“Unreal Life,” Jan. 29) and for sharing some of the rarely expressed richness of Hollywood past and present. To set the record straight, however, the building William Holden’s character refers to as his home in the movie Sunset Boulevard was not the Lido, but the Alto-Nido, which is on nearby Ivar Avenue. Since you appropriately referred to the Lido as a “Nathanael West novel come to life,” it’s also worth noting that West himself lived down the street from the Alto-Nido at the Parva-Sed apartments, at 1817 N. Ivar, in the mid-’30s while writing “The Day of the Locust.”

PAUL ZOLLO

Hollywood

“Unreal Life” by Ron Russell neglected to mention two of the best-known former residents of the Lido Hotel in Hollywood--namely, low-budget filmmaker and subject of Tim Burton’s last films, Edward D. Wood Jr., and 1960s rock singer Sky Saxon of the Seeds. (Wood’s years of residence there are discussed in Rudolph Grey’s rather over-reverential biography of Wood, “Nightmare of Ecstasy.”) Also, even before the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” the Lido had made itself known in the annals of rock lyrics in a song far superior, albeit less well-known: namely, Frank Zappa’s “Willie the Pimp,” from 1970. Russell did not mention this, either, in his article: Unlike the Eagles’ FM radio staple, the Zappa song mentioned the Lido by name.

Undoubtedly, the rather notorious building on one of Hollywood’s most notorious intersections has housed other notables down on their luck over the years, being to contemporary Los Angeles what the Old Brewery was to mid-19th-Century New York City, but I know of no other specific names. Despite the omissions, the article seemed well done and an insightful, multifaceted look at Bukowski’s L.A. so to speak (though I believe the late author/poet never lived at the Lido, although certainly it’s possible).

MICHAEL SNIDER

Los Angeles