Flamboyant silent film star Alla Nazimova, acclaimed Russian actress, accomplished violinist, major Broadway luminary, the diva of multiple films as actor, producer, director, editor and costume designer is all but forgotten today, though there was a time when she ruled Hollywood and earned more money than Mary Pickford – $13,000 a week on a five-year contract with Metro Pictures in 1917.

Nazimova was born Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon in 1879 in Czarist Russia to Jewish parents. A rebellious child growing up in a fractured family, she lived in foster homes for a while and studied music and acting, joining Stanislavsky’s theater company at 17 where she assumed her stage name. Her career thrived and she toured Europe with her plays, then moved to New York in 1905 with her boyfriend Pavel Orlenev, abandoning her husband Sergei Golovin in Russia.

She made her Broadway debut in 1906 and achieved fame as a definitive interpreter of Chekhov and Ibsen’s plays. Her screen debut in the silent War Brides came ten years later, and by 1918, Nazimova was an established star for her performances as a prostitute in Revelation (1918), a suicidal woman in Toys of Fate (1918) and as twins in The Red Lantern (1919). Then came Camille opposite Rudolph Valentino in 1921.

Nazimova had moved to Hollywood by 1917, signed the aforementioned contract and set up Nazimova Productions. She wrote screenplays under the name Peter M. Winters and directed movies under the name Charles Bryant.

Bryant was a British actor she called her “husband,” even though she had never divorced Golovin, and the two kept up the pretense for a dozen years until Bryant married someone else and the world discovered their sham. Nazimova was a lesbian and like other gays in Hollywood, managed to keep it a secret.

Eventually, two of her movies, A Doll’s House in 1922 and Salome in 1923, did so badly financially that she was forced to shut down her production company. Salome, in particular, ran afoul of the restrictive Hays Code and was thought subversive and scandalous. The entire cast and crew were gay. (It was added to the National Film Registry in 2000 because it was considered an experimental tour de force.) Nazimova returned to Broadway and had a triumphant comeback there that lasted a few years. She then appeared in some talkies, but as she got older, the jobs got fewer and she returned to Hollywood.

Film scholars also remember Nazimova as the creator of the Garden of Alla, a 3-acre property at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles, then called Hayvenhurst, which she leased in 1918 and bought in 1919 for $65,000. She installed a pool shaped like the Black Sea. The Hollywood A-list turned up to her lavish pool parties and salons, and so did the “sewing circle,” her group of lesbian friends. She is reported to have had relationships with Eva Le Galliene, Valentino’s first wife Jean Acker, director Dorothy Arzner and actress Anna May Wong, all of whom were regular visitors.

When Nazimova’s fortunes waned in 1926, she brought in business partners who turned the property into a resort-type hotel, building 25 bungalows that surrounded the pool and kicking off the opening in 1927 with a party that lasted almost 18 hours, attended by Marlene Dietrich, Francis X. Bushman, John Barrymore and boxer Jack Dempsey, among other celebrities. It was renamed Garden of Allah. A local paper announced the event.

Music is to be furnished in the grounds from noon to midnight by wandering troubadours. Leading personages of the cinema center have been sent invitations to attend the climax of the opening festivities, a formal dinner at which Alla Nazimova, on whose former estate the “Garden of Allah” was constructed, will be guest of honor.

During the transformation of the star’s old home, as much of the natural beauty of the estate was preserved intact as was possible. What is said to be the largest outdoor swimming pool in Hollywood is literally surrounded by many beautiful tropical shrubs and herbage, which the actress had planted at great expense.”

Facing bankruptcy, Nazimova sold her shares in the hotel in 1928 and moved back to New York, but the hotel continued to thrive for another two decades. The stories of boozy parties there at the height of Prohibition, clandestine affairs, fistfights, prostitution and drug-fueled orgies are legion. But what happened at the Garden of Allah stayed secret for a long time, protected by security guards hired to maintain privacy. Actors like Ginger Rogers, Frank Sinatra, Charles Laughton, the Marx brothers, Fanny Brice, Greta Garbo, David Niven and Marlene Dietrich were all residents at some point. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Last Tycoon while he was staying there for a rent of $400 a month. Drunk most of the time, he wrote himself a postcard that said “Dear Scott, how are you? Have been meaning to come in and see you. I have [been] living at the Garden of Allah. Yours, Scott Fitzgerald.”

Other guests were members of the famed Algonquin Club of New York. Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woolcott had come to Los Angeles to write for the movies and preferred staying in temporary quarters rather than move permanently to the despised Hollywood that nevertheless paid them handsomely. Director Orson Welles stayed a few months, as did Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman. (His second wife, Nancy Davis, was Nazimova’s goddaughter.) Tallulah Bankhead is said to have cavorted naked in the pool and carried on affairs with Dolores Del Rio, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford in the hotel. Clara Bow held court pool-side, occasionally diving in in full evening dress holding a martini. Bogart and Bacall began their romance there.

Nazimova returned to the Garden in 1941 and rented Bungalow 24, where she died of coronary thrombosis, alone and practically penniless at age 66, in 1945. Her ashes rest at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. She was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

The Garden started declining in the ‘40s. Once talkies became popular, the stars bought permanent homes in Los Angeles. There was competition from other hotels, especially the Chateau Marmont across the street. The Red Scare was making headlines and movie people were being targeted. The business changed hands multiple times, and in the ‘50s a new generation of actors resided at the place, like Marilyn Monroe, Bing Crosby and Robert Mitchum. But after one last party in August 1959 with over a thousand guests, where Nazimova’s Salome was screened in tribute, the place was torn down, the contents auctioned off, and it is now the location of a strip mall and a bank branch.