By Donald H. Harrison

LA JOLLA, Calif.—Both La Valencia Hotel and the nearby Grande Colonial Hotel of La Jolla like to make a point of mentioning on their websites that Groucho Marx, along with other Hollywood celebrities, stayed in their hotels—particularly in the years when the La Jolla Playhouse, under the tutelage of actor Gregory Peck, offered film stars the chance to hone their stage skills during its summer season. 

The plays were put on  at La Jolla High School from 1947 through 1964. Today, of course, the La Jolla Playhouse offers year-round fare at its home on the UCSD campus. 

It's hard not to wonder about Marx, whose multitudes of quips include two which ought to make the manager of any prestige-conscious hotel blanche:  "Please accept my resignation.  I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member" and perhaps, more to the point, "Room service?  Send up a larger room."

Although it wasn't considered one of their best films, the Marx Brothers starred in 1938 in Room Service, a movie that had the added advantage of including Lucille Ball in the cast.  Its premise was that a Broadway troupe had to convince the hotel where they were staying on credit that their play soon would be produced—even though the producers and everyone else associated with the play were dead broke.

With nightly rates at the 117-room hotel starting
 View from La Valencia terrrace

at $300 and some "ocean villas" renting at a daunting $3,500 a night, the clientele portrayed by the Marx Brothers in that film hardly are the kind the management of the 80-year-old hotel is hoping to attract.

Groucho was born in 1890 as  "Julius" Marx, a name which may have made him grouchy, or blue—certainly, it didn't make him Orange Julius.  A Jew to the end, though hardly an Orthodox one, his ashes are inurned in the San Fernando Valley at Eden Memorial Park in a building within a short distance of the graves of my own parents, Martin B. Harrison and Alice Harrison Walters.  There any semblance of a connection stops.

In that Nancy and I are residents of San Diego County, we don't sleep at either hotel, but La Valencia has been the site of some notable occasions in our family history.  For example, when my son David decided it was time to ask Hui-Wen Chang to marry him, he took her to the fancy 12-table Sky Room atop La Valencia. He then invented some excuse for suggesting that they go out on the balcony, which affords a glorious view of palm-tree studded La Jolla Cove and the Pacific Ocean.  He got to his knees in the night air, and asked her to become his bride. At that height, I'd hate to think of what might have happened if the romantic moment had caused either of them to swoon.  And, thank goodness, she said yes!

Just this last Sunday, Nancy and I attended another La Valencia event, a luncheon in the Mediterranean Room and connecting Tropical Patio  thrown by Herman Slutzky in honor of the 85th birthday of his wife, Hilda Pierce. 

Hilda is an artist and author of an exciting memoir on her escape from Austria after the Anschluss and the life she led subsequently in England and the United States. Among the celebrants were Slutzky's daughter, Marsha Sutton, education writer for the Voice of San Diego, and Marsha's husband, Rocky Smolin, and their two sons, Max and Noah.  Taking advantage of the chocolate fountain that is part of the elaborate buffet offered on the patio, Noah rocked our ark by carefully hand-lettering with a fondue-stick a message for Pierce on the rim of his plate: "Happy Birthday, Grandma."  I teased Hilda that unlike her paintings, Noah had the advantage of being able to eat his!

Another well-known spot in the hotel is the Whaling Bar, which is decorated with scrimshaw, pewter and wood accessories.  According to hotel publicists, Gregory Peck used to have get-togethers with the casts of the La Jolla Playhouse productions there. 

Today the hotel still has its share of glamorous guests.  Over the past six years, San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Diane Bell has logged in a few of them, including Priscilla Presley, who was in La Jolla to attend a friend's wedding in 2001, and  newly elected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had a fundraiser there in 2003 attracting such big givers as Qualcomm co-founder Irwin and Joan Jacobs, Padres owner John & Becky Moores, and hotel developer Doug & Betsy Manchester.

More recently Bell carried items about surfer/ model Veronica Kay having been introduced to her husband Scott Baker, the publisher of 213 Magazine (that's the Los Angeles area code), at La Valencia,  and Rancho Santa Fe financier Ralph Whitworth importing the Motown group The Four Tops to perform at his wedding to Fernanda Lopes at the hotel.

If all this gives you the idea that La Valencia runs a little on the expensive side, perhaps Groucho spoke for La Valencia's guests after all, when he said:  "Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy."  Or, perhaps, he was speaking for the hotel on another occasion when he grumped: "Go, and never darken my towels again!"