The Girl in the Blue Dress: Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 21, 2026 · How we verify

Across Hollywood Boulevard from the TCL Chinese Theatre, with its own stretch of the Walk of Fame running past the front door, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel has spent close to a century collecting the residue of the film business in California: studio money, first Oscars, long residencies by actors between pictures, and at least one death inside its walls. The ghost stories attached to it are among the best known in Los Angeles. They are also, almost without exception, undocumented. What survives in the record is the history, and the history is unusually good.

Quick Facts About the Roosevelt on Hollywood Boulevard

• Address: 7000 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood district, Los Angeles
• Built: 1926, opened on 15 May 1927
• Named for: Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States
• Size: 12 storeys, 300 guest rooms including 63 suites
• Protected status: Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 545, declared on 13 August 1991
• Access: a working hotel, open to guests and to anyone walking into the lobby bars

Studio Money Built It: Mayer, Pickford, Fairbanks and Grauman

This was not a hotel that happened to attract film people. It was financed by them. The backing group included Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Sid Grauman, whose theatre stood directly across the boulevard. Construction began in 1926, during what is often called the Golden Era of Los Angeles architecture, and the finished building cost $2.5 million, a figure equivalent to roughly $46.3 million in 2025 money. It opened on 15 May 1927.

The architecture firm Fisher, Lake & Traver, also credited with the Westward Ho Hotel in Phoenix and The Willmore Building in Long Beach, gave the place a Spanish Colonial Revival interior: leather sofas, wrought-iron chandeliers, tiled fountains, a coffered lobby ceiling. Two of the hotel’s best known accommodations are named for the people who used them. The Gable-Lombard penthouse, a 3,200 square-foot duplex with a deck looking out at the Hollywood Hills and the Hollywood sign, takes its name from Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who stayed in the room for five dollars a night. The Marilyn Monroe suite is named for the actress who lived at the hotel for two years early in her career.

270 People in the Blossom Ballroom, 16 May 1929

The first Academy Awards ceremony was held here on 16 May 1929, in the Blossom Ballroom. It bore almost no resemblance to the broadcast spectacle it became. The event was private, open only to Academy members, hosted by Academy president Douglas Fairbanks, and attended by 270 people. The winners had already been announced three months earlier, so there was no suspense in the room at all. The nickname “Oscar” had not yet been invented and would not surface for another four years.

The hotel has kept a foot in awards season since, hosting the Golden Raspberry Awards, the ceremony for the year’s worst in film, on numerous occasions. There is a smaller and more moving Oscar story too. In 1986, facing heavy debt, five-time Academy Award winner Lyle Wheeler sold boxes of his possessions including all five of his statuettes. His award for art direction on The Diary of Anne Frank went at auction for $21,250 to William Kaiser, who returned it to Wheeler at a ceremony held at the Hollywood Roosevelt in 1989.

Seafoam Green: The Years Nobody Puts on the Postcards

The hotel went into decline in the 1950s, and the damage done in that period is worth knowing about, because it explains why so little of the original interior is original. An owner around that time demolished the archways, covered up the elaborately painted ceilings, and painted the entire hotel seafoam green.

Recovery came slowly and expensively. Radisson Hotels bought the building in 1985 and used original blueprints and historic photographs to guide a $35 million restoration, bringing back the lobby’s coffered ceiling and adding a three-tiered fountain. David Hockney painted the mural on the bottom of the Tropicana Pool in 1987. Also in 1985, the Hollywood Boulevard Commercial and Entertainment District was added to the National Register of Historic Places with the hotel listed as a contributing property, and on 13 August 1991 the City of Los Angeles declared the building Historic-Cultural Monument No. 545.

Goodwin Gaw bought the hotel from Clarion Hotels in 1995, with David Chang later joining as co-owner. Thompson Hotel Group took over management in 2005, the year of a $30 million renovation by the Dodd Mitchell Design Group and David Siguaw. Since 2015 the hotel has run independently under its own management company, following a further $25 million renovation with rooms designed by Yabu Pushelberg. It was inducted into Historic Hotels of America, a programme of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in 2016.

Who Actually Lived Here

The guest list is the foundation the ghost stories are built on, so it is worth being precise about it. Marilyn Monroe lived at the hotel for two years early in her career and posed for her first commercial photography shoot beside the pool. She and Arthur Miller were said to have met at the hotel’s Cinegrill nightclub. Montgomery Clift stayed for three months in 1952 while filming From Here to Eternity. Shirley Temple learned her famous stairstep dance routine on the hotel stairs. Errol Flynn is rumoured, and rumoured is the correct word, to have mixed his own bootleg gin in a tub in the hotel barbershop. The astrologer and writer Linda Goodman wrote several of her books in a suite here, and the character actress Elizabeth Patterson, Mrs Trumbull on I Love Lucy, lived in the hotel across a 35-year screen career. Frances Farmer was honoured at a party here in 1958, on the night she appeared on Ralph Edwards’ This Is Your Life.

One death in the building is a matter of record rather than legend. The character actress Clara Blandick, Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz, died by suicide in the hotel in 1962.

Caroline, Cold Spots and Calls to the Hotel Operator

Rumours of hauntings have followed the hotel for decades. The accounts that turn up most often name the celebrities who stayed here: Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Errol Flynn. Separate from those is the figure guests describe most consistently, a little girl in a blue dress known as Caroline. Alongside the apparitions, reports gathered over the years describe cold spots, so-called orbs appearing in photographs, and mysterious phone calls placed to the hotel operator from rooms and lines that should not have been in use.

Around these claims sits a thicker layer of tour-guide detail: that Monroe’s reflection appears in a mirror once kept in her former suite, and that Clift’s presence lingers in a particular upper-floor room where a horn can be heard practising. Those specifics circulate widely and are repeated by staff and visitors, but they are not supported by any documentary record. Nothing about the hotel’s history requires a haunting to explain it, and no verified incident anchors any of the stories to a place or a date. What can be said honestly is that a great many people have reported strange experiences in a building where a great many people have lived, worked and, in at least one case, died.

Staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt

This is a functioning luxury hotel, not a heritage site with an admission desk, so visiting means either booking a room or walking in and buying a drink. The Marilyn Monroe suite and the Gable-Lombard penthouse can both be reserved, at prices considerably above the five dollars a night Gable and Lombard were paying. There are eight restaurants, bars and lounges in total, among them Public Kitchen & Bar in an Old Hollywood-style dining room, the burger restaurant 25 Degrees just off the lobby, the Spare Room gaming parlour and cocktail lounge, the Library Bar, and the Tropicana Bar overlooking the Hockney-painted pool. The lobby itself, with its restored coffered ceiling and three-tiered fountain, is the easiest part of the history to see for the price of a coffee.

Anyone hoping to be shown the haunted rooms should set expectations accordingly. The hotel trades on its Hollywood past rather than its ghosts, guest rooms are private, and the Blossom Ballroom is an event space rather than a museum. Come for the building and the record of what happened in it, and treat the rest as the folklore it is.

Sources

• Historic, Cultural Monuments (HCM) Listing: City Declared Monuments
• The glory that was Hollywood before it became Hollyweird returns to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
• The Hollywood Roosevelt hotel gets a makeover
• Old star, blazing scene
• Hollywood Boulevard Commercial and Entertainment District (National Park Service)
• Wikipedia: Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

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