By Laura Medina
Watch this rare Aqualillies performance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akJ5DHkR4OM&feature=youtu.be
This past weekend, the last Saturday and Sunday of April, the Aqualillies cheer the Annenberg Community Beach House, their training home and headquarters.
Built on prime Santa Monica Beach real estate and on the former site of Marion Davies' and William Randolph Hearst's "Love Nest," a mansion that is now the current home of the Annenberg Beach House, the Annenberg Beach House celebrated it's Fifth Anniversary by honoring and celebrating its history, the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Roaring Twenties, and the naughty wink-wink history of its site.
Stilt-walkers dressed up as a Flapper and Charlie Chaplin greeted and entertained visitors of all sorts.
While the Aqualillies rehearsed as a Nylon Magazine fashion photographer and writer jumped in the pool with them. The underwater photographer got some good shots of the magazine writer posing with them in the pool.
Once the ceremony commenced, the Aqualillies jumped right in and thrilled the all-ages audiences with aquatic acrobatics and back-flips.
Having the Aqualillies headquartered at the Annenberg Community Beach House is of importance. They hearkened back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, musical (out of water or underwater) spectacles, and a media mogul and his sweetheart starlet and their swinging Hollywood neighborhoods. The Aqualillies Synchronized Swim Troupe upholds what was a dying art form.
The Aqualillies may be the gem of the crown but that weekend was jam-packed with dance classes that teach dances popular in the Twenties, the Fox Trot and such.
The Annenberg Family were kind enough to rebuilt and refurbish the only surviving remnant of the infamous Marion Davies/William Randolph Hearst 100-room mansion of a "Love Nest," the two-story " a white Georgian Revival guest house."
Now a days, their idea of a "modest" two-story guest house will fetch millions in Santa Monica's Montana Avenue among today's Hollywood's elite but back in the days of the Roaring Twenties millionaires, the white Georgian Revival guest house was modest but comfortable and cute.
The main "party house" was a 100-room mansion with a marble pool where Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearts canoodled when she wasn't starring and earning her own income in Mr. Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures on the MGM lot, they were entertaining the neighbors on Santa Monica's "Gold Coast" or what the locals call "Party Central," Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Mae West, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel
and Francis Goldwyn, Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, Anita Loos, Bebe
Daniels, Jack Warner, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Doris Duke, and Paulette Goddard.
The Anneberg Beach House docents will delightfully inform you that Cary Grant and Doris Duke had a menage a trois with a writer until they got married then they forced him out.
The parties thrown by Marion Davies at the "Beach House" were legendary and outlandish, wild, naughty, and fun. All sorts of relationships, from all variety of angles, were formed at her mansion on the beach.
Until William Randolph Hearst's fortune dwindled in the Thirties' Great Depression then continued to slide down-hill through the Forties, as did Marion Davies' acting career.
By the seventies, the beach front property had grown into disrepair. A broken-down dump of what the Roaring Twenties used to be. The 1994 Northridge Earthquake made it a safety hazard until Wallis Annenberg took it upon herself to restore the Marion Davies Beach House back to its former glory.
The Annenberg Foundation lovingly restored the only surviving member of the infamous Marion Davies Beach House, the Guest House where local Santa Monica docents recite tales of parties and loves past to visitors.
Only if these walls can talk.
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