Roosevelt Hotel

The Roosevelt Hotel was opened on May 15, 1927, by a group of Hollywood titans that included Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Sid Grauman. The Roosevelt went on to host the first Academy Awards ceremony on May 16, 1929. In addition to hosting hundreds of thousands of guests over the years, the hotel has also been a long-term residence of stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Carole Lombard. The lore of the Roosevelt also includes more than one late-night reveler who has reported seeing the ghosts of Hollywood past walking the hotel’s floors.

When the iconic, 12-story Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel opened in 1927, the film business was about to undergo the historic shift from silent cinema to sound. The resulting boom would create a new industry elite, and the Roosevelt Hotel would soon become one of their key stomping grounds. 

Named after President Theodore Roosevelt and designed by Fisher, Lake and Traver Architects, the hotel solidified its place in Hollywood history on May 16, 1929, when 270 guests gathered in its Blossom Ballroom to attend the first Academy Awards ceremony. That historic first was witnessed by members of the new Academy, although some non-members attended as well, paying a $5 admission fee. Douglas Fairbanks presented 12 awards in 15 minutes during the dinner event, making it the quickest ceremony in Academy history. World War I drama Wings (USA, 1929) took home the first award for Best Picture, the only silent film to ever do so, and a poster for the film hangs to this day in the Roosevelt Hotel’s lower level. The hotel’s two private event spaces are still named after the ceremony—Oscar and Academy, respectively—and the latter was also used as an Academy office space for many years.

Over the years, the Roosevelt has been home to some of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars. In addition to shooting her first print ad at the hotel, Marilyn Monroe lived in a second-floor cabana overlooking the pool for two years. There’s also the Gable & Lombard penthouse, where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard engaged in a secret affair while Gable was still married. Hollywood legend also has it that Shirley Temple got her first tap dance lesson from Bill “Bojangles” Robinson on the hotel’s Spanish-tiled staircase.

Much like Hollywood Boulevard on which it sits, the Roosevelt has gone through successive cycles of decline and revitalization. The hotel continues to play an outsized role in contemporary imaginings of old Hollywood, however, including guests’ spectral sightings of yesteryear’s stars haunting the hotel grounds. Monroe has been said to appear in a full-length mirror in her former cabana, while some have spotted Lombard on the upper floors near her suite, still carefully making her way to meet Gable. A recurring bugle call has been reported coming from the room Montgomery Clift occupied for three months while filming From Here to Eternity (USA, 1953), in which he played a horn on screen. The Blossom Room, the site of the first Oscars ceremony, is also said to be favored by a pair of well-dressed ghosts, a tuxedoed man and another man in a dapper white suit, each perhaps still hoping to hear their names called.