Balancing the Biltmores

Photo by Tony "the Marine" Santiago, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Biltmore Hotel first piqued my interest while watching Abbott and Costello on TV when I was a kid. In one sketch, once they managed to shut both the hood and the trunk of their car (shutting one made the other open) and stuffed their raft in the back, Bud told Lou to drive them to "the Biltmore Hotel near Phoenix" for their vacation. Lou stopped at the Biltmore next door. A row ensued:

BUD: "I said the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix!"

LOU: "Well, it's the Biltmore Hotel right next to Phoenix Coffee Shop."

BUD: "I meant the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona!"

At that point my father informed me that there was also a Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the city in which Bud and Lou lived (or barely lived; they were perpetually unemployed actors at the mercy of Mr. Fields, their cantankerous landlord) on The Abbott and Costello Show. 

So now that COVID-19 has put the kibosh on our plans to satiate our summertime wanderlusts, I thought I'd let my mind wander a bit and compare the two hotels—totally different in style, but miraculously built in the same decade—to see which might have been the better vacation resort for the legendary comedy team.
 

First of all, neither of the Biltmores looks anything like the one Lou stopped at, which confusedly intermingles the classicism of the Los Angeles Biltmore and the Art Deco of the Arizona Biltmore. (Nor was Phoenix Coffee Shop a real place.)

The Los Angeles Biltmore

L.A.'s "Biltmore Angel"—designed as a symbol of the City of the Angels its patrons were visiting—brought Beaux Arts beauty and Renaissance regalia to the city when it opened to festive fanfare in 1923. Since then it has hosted history in the making, from the Academy Awards to the arrival of the Beatles to the Democratic National Convention that nominated John F. Kennedy for President in 1960. Restored and reopened as the Millennium Biltmore in 2009, it remains the host with the most.

Photos by P.G. Roy Photography, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Leonard Schultze and S. Fullerton Weaver, architects of New York’s Pierre and Waldorf-Astoria hotels, designed the Biltmore in a mélange of Beaux-Arts, Mediterranean and Spanish-Italian Renaissance styles, befitting both L.A.’s Castilian heritage and Roaring '20s fashions.

Murals, frescoes, imported crystal chandeliers, carved marble fountains and columns, massive drapery and other delights embellish the Los Angeles Biltmore's 70,000 square feet of meeting, lounging, dining and club space, often integrating images of the “Biltmore Angel” into its lavish ornamentation.

The Biltmore's original 1,500 guestrooms included a Presidential Suite, where the Beatles stayed during their 1964 U.S. tour, accessing it by landing a helicopter on the hotel roof to avoid the hordes of screaming fans below. Latter-day renovations reduced the room count to 683 but restored the common areas to their ’20s twinkle.

Italian artist Giovanni Smeraldi, who painted murals in the Vatican and
the White House, hand-painted angels, cupids, Greek and Roman gods,
and other mythological figures on the ceilings of the Galleria...

 ...and the Crystal Ballroom, where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences was founded at a luncheon banquet in 1927. Smeraldi's
apprentice, Anthony Heinsbergen, restored the ceilings in the 1980s.

Reliefs of Roman deities Ceres and Neptune and Spanish conquistadors
Balboa and Columbus adorn the Palladian entrance.

The lobby retains the travertine walls, oak paneling and artificial
skylight ceiling from when it was the Music Room, where Kennedy
set up his presidential campaign headquarters.

The Rendezvous Court, the old lobby-turned-tearoom, features a
Moorish cast-plaster beamed ceiling accented in gold paint, Italian
chandeliers, and a Spanish-Baroque bronze doorway with an
astrological clock that still works.

Each ballroom is decorated in remembrance of its original function
or in keeping with the hotel's California heritage. The Emerald
Room, formerly the main dining room, has a food theme: hand-
painted animals and fish along cast-plaster ceiling beams.

The Tiffany Room, originally the Crystal Ballroom’s drop-off
corridor, features exploration-themed reliefs and sculptures of
Queen Isabella, Columbus and other Spanish explorers.

The Gold Room combines an old upper-level supper club and lower-
level palm room in an artful ambiance of hand-oiled wood paneling,
mirrored windows, and concealed liquor cabinets from Prohibition.

A nautical theme dominates the indoor pool and health club. Brass
railings and window/door trim, teakwood deck chairs, and hand-laid
Italian mosaic wall and pool tiles recall 1920s cruiseliners.

The South Galleria’s Roman columns, marble balustrades and vaulted
ceiling are complemented with Pompeii-styled floral friezes.

In the Biltmore Bowl downstairs, eight Academy Award ceremonies
took place between 1931 and 1942, making Best Picture legends of
Cimarron, It Happened One Night, Mutiny on the Bounty, The
Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emile Zola, You Can't Take it With
You, Rebecca, and How Green Was My Valley.

Since Abbott and Costello's 1941 movie Buck Privates got two Oscar nominations (Best Original Song for "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," sung by the Andrews Sisters, and Best Original Music Score for Charles Previn), they might have felt at home at the L.A. Biltmore...had it not been for Lou's tendency to get lost in big spaces, experience supernatural phenomena such as paintings or statues coming alive, and fail to convince Bud of the truth of these tales. Besides, this hotel's sheer size might have made his cries of "HEYYYYY, AAAAABBUHHHHHHHHTT!" go unheard by his buddy.

So let's get to Phoenix...

The Arizona Biltmore

Built in 1929, the Arizona Biltmore was designed by Albert Chase McArthur in the horizontal, earthy, Prairie-School, Mayan temple-based vernacular of his former teacher Frank Lloyd Wright, who was the design consultant. Though Wright was displeased with the final design, McArthur clearly took so much from the master it's easy to mistake it for a Wright original...

All photos by Tony "the Marine" Santiago, aka Marine 69-71 (License: CC BY-SA 4.0).

...especially regarding the use of desert sand-casted concrete blocks to create surface patterns inspired by palm-tree trunks and Native American woven fabrics. Wright preferred square Textile Blocks like those on his Derby, Ennis and Hollyhock houses, but MacArthur stood his ground, and his building blocks became known as the "Biltmore Blocks" for giving the Biltmore a unique geometric pattern recalling the movement of water ripples, fish gills, billowing sails...

...or smoke rising from the fireplaces. In the Mystery Room, the billowy blocks on the mantel suggest the movement of flames in the hearth and smoke up the flue, accented by the upward pointing of the "Indian arrowhead" andirons. I also love the way the cove-lighting gilds the cornice without the application of gold paint common in the LA Biltmore.

The cove-lit cornice also complements and contrasts the Mystery Room's stained-glass ceiling, for the effect of natural light in the day and artificial light in the evening, each adding splashes of color without the need for applied décor, except for the ceiling gilding that blends with both, smoothing the day-to-night transition.

The Biltmore blocks—which do bear a slight resemblance to the ornamentation around Abbott & Costello's "Biltmore"— also contribute to the sense of fluid movement throughout the hotel's lobby, as a counterpoint to the static feel of the more vertically oriented Los Angeles Biltmore. The Arizona Biltmore lobby's spatial continuity would certainly make it easier for Lou to flee from the dangers he couldn't convince Bud of the truth of...or for his "HEYYYYY, AAAAABBUHHHHHHHHTT!" alarm to be more loud and clear along the long, continuous space.

Bud would clearly hear Lou's bawl in the Biltmore's original ballroom, the Aztec Room. A geometric mandala radiates on the carpet while copper beams, slanting gilt ceiling panels and Biltmore-Block filigrees augment the sense of upward and inward motion toward the sun, honoring the artfully domineering temples of Mexico's Aztec Empire.

The Gold Room would be another resonant echo-chamber for Lou's holler of helplessness, with its unobstructed corridor-space and its ceiling slanting to just enough of an apex for acoustic enhancement while maintaining the hotel's low-slung horizontality, helped by low-rise stairs. Geometric sconce stacks and billowy Biltmore Blocks add an Aztec aura.

Here was a place for Bud and Lou to splash their raft and join the nabobs who dipped here: the Catalina Pool. Built in the 1930s by Chicago chewing-gum king William Wrigley Jr., it was reportedly Marilyn Monroe's favorite pool. Irving Berlin wrote many songs while sunning on the deck, including "White Christmas," which opens with a nod to the climate he was in:

The Catalina Pool fountain.

The sun is shining, the grass is green,

The orange and palm trees sway.

There's never been such a day

In Beverly Hills, L.A.

But it's December the twenty-fourth,

And I am longing to be up North.

Though it was the Biltmore's Beaux-Arts bro that was actually in L.A., Berlin nailed the ambiance of the Arizona Bilt to the hilt, with a twist of irony: since winter frigidity makes us miss summer humidity, why the opposite now?

Balancing the Biltmores

 

And speaking of opposites: It's clear which Biltmore Bud and Lou preferred. Which one would best cure your summertime blues?

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!