Show Business: End of the House Party

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Somehow, the party went on and on. Holdup men knocked over the front office from time to time (and once murdered a clerk), a waitress was arrested for peddling narcotics; the switchboard was taken over by a telephone operator who claimed to read character from voices, and who refused to put through calls from types he disliked. Still the guests came, and still they dropped into the pool. "I used to wait for them to come home and fall in," remembers Playwright Arthur Kober. "It was like waiting for a shoe to drop. I'd hear the splashes and then I'd go to sleep."

But in 1941, when Alla herself returned from Broadway to live in one of her own villas as a paying guest, an era was ending. The old faces were fading fast; the place was soon overrun by roaches and call girls. The last big spender was a happy drunk from Kansas City who made his fortune turning out horror pictures for the kiddies. For months last year, all drinks served in the Garden bar were put on his tab, and eventually he broke the record rung up by Benchley and his pals.

The achievement does not seem impressive mainly because it is far from enough to keep the Garden going. "It's all rundown now," mourned one of the maids last week, "but it's still got a lot of what you'd call dignity. The same people keep coming back. Oh, they go away complaining, but they come back because there's nowhere else like this. Now where will they go?"