Restoring San Diego’s Resort Del Coronado’s Hollywood Glory

Within the fall of 1958, syndicated Hollywood columnist William H. Mooring wanted a trip from the hubbub of Tinseltown. He drove down the coast to the palatial Resort Del Coronado, on the seashore throughout the bay from San Diego. His keep proved far much less peaceable than he’d hoped. “Because the bellboy carried in my luggage,” Mooring wrote, “somebody motioned us apart and Marilyn Monroe got here tripping down the steps.” As he was quickly informed, director Billy Wilder had taken over a lot of the property to shoot a interval comedy known as Some Like It Sizzling. Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, “sporting ludicrous earrings, and Marilyn in quaint, interval costume, attracted neck-craning crowds.” Morrison had sought a reprieve from Hollywood. “As an alternative of escape, I ran proper into it!”

He ought not have been so stunned. The Del Coronado by then already was often called house away from house for the trade’s elite. Capped with pink turrets, the seaside Victorian resort opened its doorways on the peninsula of Coronado in February of 1888, the yr of the primary identified surviving movement image. The Queen Anne-style property then featured 400 visitor rooms, 71 of which got here geared up with the posh of personal loos; charges began at $2.50, inclusive of three meals. Within the spring, the storied lodge will full a greater than five-year, $550 million renovation, restoration and enlargement on its sprawling 28 acres, extending its capability to 938 visitor rooms throughout the unique Victorian constructing and 4 newer developments. Nightly charges begin at round $600 and climb to $1,175 for an oceanfront room within the Victorian (obtainable in February) or $7,720 for a three-bedroom beachfront fireplace cottage at Seashore Village.

The purpose of the renovation was not a lot to replace the edifice as to revive it to its former glory — which meant undoing numerous errors. “One in every of our jobs was to reverse a number of the earlier remodels — particularly within the ’40s by means of the ’70s — that had been detracting from that pure Victorian really feel,” says restoration architect David Marshall of Heritage Structure & Planning in San Diego. Over the previous half decade, Marshall and his workforce have discovered “hidden treasures” behind layers of drywall and cloth, together with frescoes and a wall of home windows that open onto the ballroom. “[Our] objective is to deliver the constructing as shut as doable to the way in which it regarded once they lower the ribbon in 1888.”

In preserving the constructing, Marshall and his workforce hope to deliver again the glamour as effectively. Over the previous 136 years, numerous Hollywood legends have graced the lodge’s grounds, together with Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, W.C. Fields, Mary Pickford, Frank Capra, Hal Roach, Darryl Zanuck and Errol Flynn, in addition to Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Mae West was the primary celeb to admire the Olympic-sized pool, put in in 1934. Repeat visitor Charlie Chaplin performed polo for the Coronado workforce and palled round with future Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson, who lived on the lodge along with her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., first commanding officer of Naval Air Station North Island. The couple later rented close by Windsor Cottage (no relation to the duchy), which was bought by the lodge and moved on website in 1990 and now homes the members-only Ocean Membership.

The Del’s picturesque premises served as a backdrop because the earliest days of movie. In 1897, director James H. White labored with Edison Shifting Image Co. to shoot brief documentaries on the lodge, together with Off for the Rabbit Chase and Canine Enjoying within the Surf. A projection sales space was added within the Thirties so early movies could possibly be screened for company.

Frequent customer L. Frank Baum wrote a number of books in his Wizard of Oz sequence throughout prolonged stays on the lodge. If the Del Coronado left its imprint on Baum — and by extension on movie historical past — Baum left his personal mark on the lodge. “He thought the unique lighting fixtures, quite simple and plain, could possibly be improved,” says the lodge’s heritage supervisor, Gina Petrone. “So he sketched a design with shamrocks on the facet, which is equivalent to the primary illustrations by W.W. Denslow of The Cowardly Lion’s crown in The Fantastic Wizard of Oz. We put in them in 1909 … and the one authentic Baum design nonetheless hangs in our energy plant constructing.”

That there even is such a place on the lodge as “heritage supervisor” is a testomony to its uniquely wealthy historical past. It doesn’t take a lot prompting for Petrone to rattle off one Hollywood anecdote after one other. “Throughout Prohibition, many celebrities used the Del as a stopover on their strategy to Mexico,” says Petrone. “They’d transcend the border to drink and gamble at Agua Caliente on line casino and resort, the place there was additionally a racetrack. Clark Gable, an avid sportsman, would cease on the Del on his searching journeys in Baja.”

The lodge’s authentic 150-foot mahogany bar remains to be in use downstairs. “Groucho Marx spent numerous time right here; he as soon as provided $25,000 to take house a bit of the bar, however they wouldn’t promote it to him,” notes Petrone. “Johnny Weissmuller would sit on the bar and, if somebody purchased him a drink, he would do his well-known Tarzan yell.”

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had been regulars and remained so even after their divorce. “They took a set right here within the early ’50s and introduced in Pepito the Spanish Clown to work on vaudeville skits, attempting to provide you with an concept to pitch to the community a couple of TV present they may do collectively, which turned I Love Lucy,” says Petrone. Based mostly on that timing, it’s conceivable that Lucy and Desi witnessed Liberace’s massive break on a wet night time in 1950, when the then-unknown pianist performed for only a handful of individuals. In that viewers was Don Fedderson, supervisor of KLAC tv station in Los Angeles. Quickly after, he provided Liberace a contract, which led to his star-making syndicated sequence.

The Del Coronado’s final declare to Hollywood fame, nonetheless, stays its function in Some Like It Sizzling, by which the lodge’s old-world aesthetic offered Wilder with a cost-efficient time warp to the Twenties. At one level throughout filming, some members of the well-heeled “neck-craning crowd” Morrison described wandered into the shot. In line with Petrone, Wilder yelled, “Lower! OK, let’s attempt it once more with the pretend millionaires.”

One other movie to utilize the lodge’s stately exterior was Richard Rush’s 1980 darkish comedy The Stunt Man, starring Peter O’Toole and Barbara Hershey. A pretend tower was constructed onto the rooftop and exploded as a part of the motion. “That was fairly dramatic,” says Marshall, the restoration architect who has so diligently undone most of the misguided design choices from the Seventies. “Let’s simply say I’m glad they solely blew up their very own stuff as an alternative of any of the unique items.”

This story appeared within the Dec. 4 concern of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.