Toothpicks and Swizzlesticks

Twelve years ago, short, grey-haired Jay Paley, tired of work at 42, sold his interest in Congress Cigar Co. (La Palina), invested his fortune in prime securities, and set out to view the world. The viewing lasted seven years, and when Mr. Paley finally settled down he hung his hat in the hallway of a mausoleum-like establishment in Beverly Hills, Calif., designed for him by famed Negro Architect Paul Williams. As a permanent resident of the Hollywood area, Jay Paley learned to rumba, played poker for whopping stakes with Joseph M. Schenck and other cinemoguls, took pride in having angeled two Walter Wanger cinemas (The President Vanishes, Private Worlds).

By 1938 these dilettante stabs at keeping busy convinced Jay Paley that it was time to go to work fulltime. Last week he had his new business. It was a spa, Arrowhead Springs Hotel, in the San Bernardino Mountains near Riverside, 70 miles east of Hollywood, built over hot mineral springs and fitted for healthful Hollywood holidays with everything from mud baths to bars, from deck chairs to ski slides, minimum rates $13 a day (American plan). At Arrowhead for the opening were such gentry as Arturo Toscanini, Ernst Lubitsch, Edward G. Robinson, Sam Goldwyn. A few days later Arrowhead opened its "curatory," complete with steam caves in which magnates and stars began tentatively to stew.

Hollywood is more than academically interested in all this, for Arrowhead is financed largely with cinema money. Chief Stockholders Schenck and Paley sold $1,000,000 of the corporation debentures, the 10,000 shares of common stock to Hollywoodians. Among the stockholders are Constance Bennett (one of the smartest of cinema's businesswomen), Claudette Colbert, Darryl Zanuck, Al Jolson, Paley & friends are planning to sell $500,000 more of common stock issue to finish the job of making Arrowhead a glittering combination of Carlsbad and Sun Valley.

No new spa is Arrowhead but an oldtimer. On its site for 34 years stood a creaky, bulbous-Victorian hotel building. Soon after Paley & friends bought the place (including 1,800 acres of ground) for $800,000, a fire destroyed the old building, which they would have had to tear down, left them richer by $277,671 in insurance. To lay out the new buildings Architects Gordon Kaufman and Paul Williams were hired, turned out an imposing, 69-room hunk of hotel (late Californian with a Southern Georgian trace), plunked on a handsome mountainside. To dress it up inside, Decorator Dorothy Draper was brought from Manhattan. She did it complete with drapes of chintz and tweed, turned out uniforms for the help, wound up with small items, toothpicks and swizzlesticks in black and red.

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