At some point in any evening, everyone made it to the Bull for dinner or a drink. Cafe Caravelle, a French restaurant on the corner of Channel and the Pacific Coast Highway, turned into a piano bar after 10 p.m. Friendship, a few doors away from The Golden Bull, with the bow of a boat as part of its facade, was a raucous watering hole. There were also brothels and speakeasies, and notorious house parties well into the 1960s and 1970s. Berthold taught screenwriting to Isherwood, who followed his mentor, the gay British philosopher Gerald Heard, to the Canyon. That fact that it bordered Pacific Palisades, founded by Methodists, made it all more salacious in a way.Īccording to the LGBTQ National Archives, the stories go as far back as the 1920s into the late 1930s, when creatives like Austrian screenwriter Salka Viertel, said to be the lover of Greta Garbo, and her husband Berthold settled in the neighborhood.
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Parties raged, people skinny-dipped at Will Rogers State Park and its gay-friendly patch of sand known as Ginger Rogers Beach, and many cocktails were had at bars and restaurants within walking distance.
The beach-adjacent enclave filled with winding roads and steep canyon walls was somewhat secluded from the Hollywood studio machine, and it became a safe haven for the bohemian elite. Long before the Stonewall Riots in New York, or the raids and protests at the Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake, when West Hollywood wasn’t known as Boy’s Town yet, Santa Monica Canyon was one of the few pockets of openly gay life around Los Angeles.