Sunset Tower - Hollywood Landmark

Hollywood Landmark

Marketing the building to Hollywood celebrities, an advertisement in the February 1938 issue of the Screen Actors Guild magazine read: "Faultless in Appointment-The Ultimate in Privacy . . . Hollywood's Most Distinguished Address." In 1933, the Los Angeles Times ran an article about the trend toward luxurious penthouse apartments in the city and noted that Sunset Tower boasted the city's highest penthouse: "It is the highest in the city and due to the location of the fifteen-story structure that supports it, its tenants live on a level with the tower of the Los Angeles City Hall. Imagine the view!" John Wayne, Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Buss and novelist James Wohl lived in the penthouse at different times, and Hughes reportedly also rented some of the lower apartments for his girlfriends or mistresses. John Wayne reportedly once brought a cow up to his penthouse apartment at 3 a.m. telling his party guests who were gathering for coffee that they would have to go directly to the source if they wanted cream. Other former residents include Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Caine, Quincy Jones, Roger Moore, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Billie Burke, Joseph Schenck, Paulette Goddard, Zasu Pitts, George Stevens, Preston Sturges, and Carol Kane.

In 1944, resident Bugsy Siegel, described by the Los Angeles Times as a "Hollywood sportsman", was charged with running a bookmaking operations from his apartment at Sunset Tower. Siegel called it "a bum rap," and witnesses testified that Siegel and his friends were only playing "a friendly game of gin rummy." Siegel later pleaded guilty, paid a $250 fine, and was "asked" by management to leave his apartment at Sunset Tower.

The building was also the site of a publicized "Battle of the Balcony" involving bandleader Tommy Dorsey in 1944. Dorsey became involved in a fistfight with actor Jon Hall after the actor "paid undue attention to (Dorsey's) actress-wife Pat Dane" at a party held in Dorsey's apartment. The Los Angeles Times reported that actor Eddie Norris "darn near got killed . . . during the celebrity-infested brawl . . . when he tried to act as peacemaker" between Dorsey and Hall, who "came out of the fracas with his classic nose almost severed from his suntanned face."

In 1947, Truman Capote wrote in a letter: " I am living in a very posh establishment, the Sunset Tower, which, or so the local gentry tell me, is where every scandal that ever happened happened." Others report that the Sunset Tower was "notorious for having the best-kept call girls in Hollywood."

The hotel has also appeared in several feature films, including "The Italian Job", "Get Shorty", "The Player" and "Strange Days."