Yes, partially, and also on an historic apartment complex in Hollywood in the 1940s.
What on earth was that? It went by what was considered a whimsical name, The Garden of A—. It was a Mediterranean apartment complex with bungalows and a pool. Sheilah Graham wrote a memoir with the same name about the place, which was inhabited by many famous actors of the 1940s, like Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and Greta Garbo, usually before they attained their fame, and also by the New Yorker crowd of writers, like Dorothy Parker, John O’Hara, and Robert Benchley, who came to Hollywood to write screenplays. Sheilah and her lover, F. Scott Fitzgerald, also spent a great deal of time there.
I loved the idea of an apartment building inhabited not by famous actors and writers, but by all sorts of supernatural people and entities!
As you would expect with a crowd of professional exhibitionists living in close quarters, the denizens of the Hollywood Garden were infamous for their shenanigans. Several scenes from Marx brothers’ movies were based on incidents that took place there: people hiding in closets, people charging through doors into someone’s bedroom. Various scenes in “A Day At the Races” or “Horse Feathers” were inspired by life at the wild and crazy Garden.
So, too, the Garden of Abracadabra is “the biggest, coolest party place in Berkeley.” I take the reader to several of the parties that supernatural entities throw!
The Garden of Abracadabra, Volume 1 of the Abracadabra Series, is on BarnesandNoble, US Kindle, Canada Kindle, UK Kindle, Apple, Kobo, and Smashwords.
The Garden of Abracadabra, Volume 1 of the Abracadabra Series, is also on Amazon.com in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and India.
