Comeback

When he bought control of Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, Multi-Magnate J. Myer Schine (movie houses, hotels, real estate) thought he had a plush as well as a profitable property. It was profitable, all right: the net matched his investment of $1,600,000 in less than two years. But after Schine invited Designer Norman Bel Geddes to look the place over last summer, he changed his mind about the plushness.

Geddes found the 500-room hotel, with its swimming pool, junior-size golf course and famed Cocoanut Grove cabaret, completely lacking in "coherence and good taste." The hotel's circular marquee looked to him like one of the "30 or 40 hot-dog stands in the immediate area." As for the Cocoanut Grove, "you don't have to have drab palm trees . . . Does the Pump Room have a pump?"

Designer Geddes was so convincing that Schine last week announced plans to spend upwards of $10 million, under Geddes' direction, doing over the hotel and making it more than double its present size. Items: spacious (25-by-21-ft.) rooms with two baths and a balcony, a roof swimming pool with a beach of washable rubber-composition sand. On the six city blocks of empty land that surround the present building, Geddes and Architect Paul Williams, who is collaborating on the plan, will build 500 bungalows connected by a tunnel system to the hotel room service.

High Pressure. These grandiose projects mean much to shmoo-shaped, grandiose Norman Bel Geddes. After two bad years, he is making a comeback.

Geddes spent 30 years building a huge organization (2,200 employees at the peak) that turned out everything from costume designs for circus elephants to General Motors' famed Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair. Geddes also designed more than 200 musical comedies, operas, and straight dramatic productions, and produced some first-rate hits (e.g., Dead End). The overhead ($884,000 a year) and high blood pressure forced him to shut up shop in 1946, and later take to his bed for six months. When he got up, he started again (at 55) with a staff of twelve--and bigger ideas than ever before.

In addition to the Ambassadorship, there is a multi-million-dollar project for Schine's swank Boca Raton Club near Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Geddes, who regards the earth as well as buildings on it as fair game for rearranging, has started bulldozers reshaping the land around Boca Raton. Objective: a gently rolling, foursquare-mile plateau with just about the highest elevation (16 ft.) in the area. On it will be built a community of de luxe "cottages" that will sell at from, $20,000 to $50,000 apiece.

High Life. Also on Geddes' designing boards are new stores for a shoe company, a facade for a Manhattan office building, and some new patterns for a silversmith. Another job, which he is especially interested in, is the $1,125,000 rebuilding of Miami's Copacabana nightclub.

When it reopens as Copa City late this month, patrons will see a massive, flesh-colored, grand-piano-shaped building, with no openings except eight doors and four "blind" doors for fire escapes. The glittering interior is even more startling. Instead of being supported by columns, the ceilings and walls of the rooms are suspended from overhead trusses. The rooms can be made bigger or smaller, depending on the size of the crowd, simply by ra:sing the walls through slits in the ceiling. Geddes hopefully expects that Copa City, "an entirely new idea in buildings," will start a revolution.

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