Quote:
Originally Posted by HossC
On a side note, the building in the background, which is now the Piazza Del Sol, has been covered before on NLA. During the '40s and '50s it was called the Coronet Apartments, but, if the picture above is 1939, we're looking at the Hacienda Arms Apartments, once descibed as the "classiest brothel on the Sunset Strip" - read a little more on Wikipedia.
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Hacienda Arms/Apartments aka Coronet Apartments aka Piazza del Sol.
Hacienda Noir
Cast:
Paul Ivar Wharton
Mrs. W. A. Wharton
William McCauley Howard
N. C. McDermott
Henry E. Bolte
Virginia Bolte
If I can get a handle on this--as correctly as possible, in some kind of a story format,
because, as one source put it: "the facts of the case were vague."
Known professionally as Paul Ivar, Paul lived at the Hacienda Park Apartments with Mrs. W. A. (Ada) Wharton,
his invalid adopted mother. Mrs. Wharton told police that Paul was adopted originally by Charles Dorsett of Billings,
Montana, but he came to Los Angeles alone in 1926. (Paul was 25 in 1935, so he'd have been 16 then.) He became
an attendant at Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple and that's where she first met him. Later she adopted
him and brought him to her home to live, hence Paul Ivar Wharton.
Paul designed the robes for Aimee Semple McPherson’s choir along with a few of Sister Aimee’s costumes, in
addition to designing dresses for actresses Jean Harlow, Aileen Pringle, and Constance Bennett among others.
He may have been Chinese.
On April 25, 1935, according to Ada, Paul had a small dinner party entertaining two-or possibly three-male
acquaintances at a supper in his part of their quarters. Shortly after 10 p.m., Mrs. Wharton said she heard
several shots and, crawling into the room, she discovered Paul succumbing to his three gunshot wounds.
As she knelt over Paul another man she never saw before appeared, gave one look, and ran out.
The police, questioning Wharton's foster mother, a bedridden paralysis victim, said she heard Paul and his
dinner guests chatting after they had dined. Then she said she heard them quarrel and a moment later several
shots rang out. She said the voice of one of the fleeing guests who scrambled through a window, sounded like
that of a man she knew only as "Billy."
During the meal, her adopted son, Paul, looked into her room and she told him that earlier a woman tenant in the
building had tried to call on her, but that "a blond man" answered the door and tried to keep her out. "Who is that
blond man," she asked Paul and he replied, "Oh, he's just a friend of Billy's."
As they were questioning Mrs. Wharton, the police were called away to another shooting. Across town at 1 a.m.,
UCLA sociology professor and law instructor Henry E. Bolte, 38, who told his wife, Virginia, he was attending a
law banquet. He was walking through his apartment door when William M. Howard, shot him twice in the back
as Virginia watched. Then Howard turned the gun on himself.
What's happening?
https://news.google.com/newspapers?n...,3938546&hl=en
The best the police could piece together, Paul Ivar had a dinner party and invited William McCauley Howard to supper, a man
he used mostly as an unpaid chauffeur, and Howard, around 35 years old, brought a 21 year-old blond sailor with him named
McDermott. The police eventually found McDermott and questioned him aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania. [Wonder if he was
still a sailor on the Pennsylvania when it was in Pearl Harbor six years later?]
McDermott said he didn’t know either Ivar or Howard until they picked him up a few days before the dinner when he was on his
way from San Pedro to Los Angeles, but he was soon staying at Howard’s apartment. At the dinner, Howard asked McDermott
to wait downstairs so he could speak to Ivar. McDermott was then surprised to see Howard speeding away shortly afterward,
and ran upstairs to borrow money from Ivar to get back to San Pedro. That’s when he found Ada Wharton holding the bloody Ivar.
So McDermott jumped out a kitchen window and hitched back to his battleship. [Jumped out the window? What?]
Howard went over to Bolte's place, waited for him and shot him before shooting himself. Bolte was in the hospital for
several days before succumbing to the wounds. Henry Bolte told the officers on the scene that he’d never seen Howard before,
but his wife Virginia identified him from a photograph as “a friend of the family” who was a frequent visitor as recently as five months
previously. Later she testified that Howard had worked as a chauffeur for her husband the previous year and had padded some bills that
Howard refused to pay. She called Howard a psychopathic type and denied there was anything more than a business relationship between
the two. The police attributed the entire murder, attempted murder and suicide to financial differences between the two men. [Yeah, what
else could have prompted all this besides "debt madness!"]
Henry G. Bolte in the hospital with his wife Virginia Bolte. Inset: Paul Ivar Wharton.
Ivar used his apartment as a work studio and the officers said they hoped to interview two seamstresses who worked for him to get some
information about his acquaintances and habits. Later on it developed that Ivar was involved a few months earlier in the disappearance of
a diamond ring and was put on probation. They interviewed actress Aileen Pringle who testified that Ivar had charged hundreds of dollars
of cosmetics to her account, telling her he used them. Investigators also interviewed a woman “dressed as a man” and uncovered a possible
underworld connection when friends of Ivar’s remembered him bragging that New York gangster Arnold Rothstein entrusted him with a million
dollars and then was shot and killed before he learned that Ivar had spent some of it. [?] By the way, actress Aileen Pringle had been aboard
William Randolph Hearst’s yacht, the Oneida, the weekend that director Thomas Ince was mysteriously shot, served as illustrator Ralph Barton’s
inspiration for Lorelei Lee’s friend Dorothy Shaw when he illustrated Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and, in 1944, she married James M. Cain.
How the police summed things up:
“They were strange men who led strange lives,” a police officer told reporters.