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A bank, a post office, a library, thirty-five shops and a cinema inside; a pool with white sand beaches and an eighteen-hole miniature golf course outside. A federal writers' guide listed all that in the 1930s. The hotel opened at midnight on New Year's Day 1921, on a former dairy farm, when Wilshire Boulevard was a dirt road.
One ballroom became the Cocoanut Grove, hung with papier-mache palms that the hotel's publicist, Margaret Tante Burk, said came off the set of Valentino's The Sheik, stuffed monkeys with lit amber eyes in the fronds.
Robert Kennedy won the California primary on 5 June 1968, spoke in the Embassy Ballroom and was shot in the pantry behind it. Guests stopped coming in 1989, crews kept arriving until the machines did, and a school campus named for Kennedy covers the block now.
In The Graduate it plays the Taft Hotel. Domino shot here in 2004. Pat O'Neill spent eight years filming the derelict rooms for The Decay of Fiction, the one film about the hotel rather than shot in it. Bobby came last: by then, Chris Nichols wrote in Los Angeles Magazine, a school bus was parked across from the entrance to hold off demolition equipment. Longer lists circulate, and most lead back to one private location site.
The pantry left in twenty-nine pieces: chandelier lights, wainscoting, the ice machine the gunman may have stood behind. They went into two unmarked bins in a garment-district lot while preservationists wanted the room rebuilt in the school, historians a museum, and the Kennedy family the pieces destroyed. The last published word on them is from 2009.