Restoring San Diego’s Hotel Del Coronado’s Hollywood Glory

In the fall of 1958, syndicated Hollywood columnist William H. Mooring needed a vacation from the hubbub of Tinseltown. He drove down the coast to the palatial Hotel Del Coronado, on the beach across the bay from San Diego. His stay proved far less peaceful than he’d hoped. “As the bellboy carried in my bags,” Mooring wrote, “someone motioned us aside and Marilyn Monroe came tripping down the steps.” As he was soon told, director Billy Wilder had taken over much of the property to shoot a period comedy called Some Like It Hot. Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, “wearing ludicrous earrings, and Marilyn in quaint, period dress, attracted neck-craning crowds.” Morrison had sought a reprieve from Hollywood. “Instead of escape, I ran right into it!”

He ought not have been so surprised. The Del Coronado by then already was known as home away from home for the industry’s elite. Capped with red turrets, the seaside Victorian resort opened its doors on the peninsula of Coronado in February of 1888, the year of the first known surviving motion picture. The Queen Anne-style property then featured 400 guest rooms, 71 of which came equipped with the luxury of private bathrooms; rates started at $2.50, inclusive of three meals. In the spring, the storied hotel will complete a more than five-year, $550 million renovation, restoration and expansion on its sprawling 28 acres, extending its capacity to 938 guest rooms across the original Victorian building and four newer developments. Nightly rates start at around $600 and climb to $1,175 for an oceanfront room in the Victorian (available in February) or $7,720 for a three-bedroom beachfront fireside cottage at Beach Village.

The point of the renovation was not so much to update the edifice as to restore it to its former glory — which meant undoing a lot of mistakes. “One of our jobs was to reverse some of the previous remodels — especially in the ’40s through the ’70s — that were detracting from that pure Victorian feel,” says restoration architect David Marshall of Heritage Architecture & Planning in San Diego. Over the past half decade, Marshall and his team have found “hidden treasures” behind layers of drywall and fabric, including frescoes and a wall of windows that open onto the ballroom. “[Our] goal is to bring the building as close as possible to the way it looked when they cut the ribbon in 1888.”

In preserving the building, Marshall and his team hope to bring back the glamour as well. Over the past 136 years, countless Hollywood legends have graced the hotel’s grounds, including Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, W.C. Fields, Mary Pickford, Frank Capra, Hal Roach, Darryl Zanuck and Errol Flynn, as well as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Mae West was the first celebrity to admire the Olympic-sized pool, installed in 1934. Repeat guest Charlie Chaplin played polo for the Coronado team and palled around with future Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson, who lived at the hotel with her first husband, Earl Winfield Spencer Jr., first commanding officer of Naval Air Station North Island. The couple later rented nearby Windsor Cottage (no relation to the duchy), which was purchased by the hotel and moved on site in 1990 and now houses the members-only Ocean Club.

The Del’s picturesque premises served as a backdrop since the earliest days of film. In 1897, director James H. White worked with Edison Moving Picture Co. to shoot short documentaries at the hotel, including Off for the Rabbit Chase and Dogs Playing in the Surf. A projection booth was added in the 1930s so early films could be screened for guests.

Frequent visitor L. Frank Baum wrote several books in his Wizard of Oz series during extended stays at the hotel. If the Del Coronado left its imprint on Baum — and by extension on film history — Baum left his own mark on the hotel. “He thought the original light fixtures, very simple and plain, could be improved,” says the hotel’s heritage manager, Gina Petrone. “So he sketched a design with shamrocks on the side, which is identical to the first illustrations by W.W. Denslow of The Cowardly Lion’s crown in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. We installed them in 1909 … and the one original Baum design still hangs in our power plant building.”

That there even is such a position at the hotel as “heritage manager” is a testament to its uniquely rich history. It doesn’t take much prompting for Petrone to rattle off one Hollywood anecdote after another. “During Prohibition, many celebrities used the Del as a stopover on their way to Mexico,” says Petrone. “They’d go beyond the border to drink and gamble at Agua Caliente casino and resort, where there was also a racetrack. Clark Gable, an avid sportsman, would stop at the Del on his hunting trips in Baja.”

The hotel’s original 150-foot mahogany bar is still in use downstairs. “Groucho Marx spent a lot of time here; he once offered $25,000 to take home a section of the bar, but they wouldn’t sell it to him,” notes Petrone. “Johnny Weissmuller would sit at the bar and, if someone bought him a drink, he would do his famous Tarzan yell.”

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were regulars and remained so even after their divorce. “They took a suite here in the early ’50s and brought in Pepito the Spanish Clown to work on vaudeville skits, trying to come up with an idea to pitch to the network about a TV show they could do together, which became I Love Lucy,” says Petrone. Based on that timing, it’s conceivable that Lucy and Desi witnessed Liberace’s big break on a rainy night in 1950, when the then-unknown pianist played for just a handful of people. In that audience was Don Fedderson, manager of KLAC television station in Los Angeles. Soon after, he offered Liberace a contract, which led to his star-making syndicated series.

The Del Coronado’s ultimate claim to Hollywood fame, however, remains its role in Some Like It Hot, in which the hotel’s old-world aesthetic provided Wilder with a cost-efficient time warp to the 1920s. At one point during filming, some members of the well-heeled “neck-craning crowd” Morrison described wandered into the shot. According to Petrone, Wilder yelled, “Cut! OK, let’s try it again with the fake millionaires.”

Another film to make use of the hotel’s stately exterior was Richard Rush’s 1980 dark comedy The Stunt Man, starring Peter O’Toole and Barbara Hershey. A faux tower was built onto the rooftop and exploded as part of the action. “That was quite dramatic,” says Marshall, the restoration architect who has so diligently undone many of the misguided design decisions from the 1970s. “Let’s just say I’m glad they only blew up their own stuff instead of any of the original pieces.”

This story appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.