In late 1949, Monroe secured a part in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. While she had had small roles at Fox, Monroe would later say that she so needed $50 in 1949 that she agreed to pose for what would become her infamous nude calendar. Even if the HSC suffered negative backlash as a result, house director Florence Williams fondly remembered Monroe. When asked who was the most stunning woman she ever encountered there, Williams answered, “Marilyn Monroe, because she was even beautiful first thing in the morning.”

“Kim Novak would just take off her shirt as she was walking down the hall.”

Williams was also fond of another breathtaking resident, Kim Novak. When Columbia chief Harry Cohn put Novak under contract, he had insisted that she stay at the HSC. Not that there was any love lost between them, but Cohn wanted to totally control her private life, going so far as to hire private security to keep tabs on her.

Yet Cohn wasn’t very successful, according to Novak’s fellow boarder Betty Kelly, a radio and TV staffer at CBS who, for a time, was the house’s official social chair. Later on, says Kelly today, “Cohn ordered her to stay out of Sammy Davis Jr.’s bed, but Kim did whatever she wanted. She stopped traffic. She was a model for a couple of minutes, and then she was a star.”

While many speak of the solidarity found at the HSC, Kelly remembers it as cliquish: “The other girls were mean to Kim because they were jealous of her success.” Kim also stood out for her platinum hair with a purple hue and because “she had great boobs. She’d just take off her shirt as she was walking down the hall.”

“Kim never wore a bra—I was astonished,” confirms the acting and dance legend Rita Moreno, who had left her mother’s home for her own apartment but couldn’t afford the rent. “I heard there was this place for girls in show business who hadn’t made it yet and you got two meals a day for $15 a week,” so she and her friend Louise Martinson moved in. After some initial professional ups and downs “playing a lot of little Indian maidens,” Moreno signed a contract with Fox. Today, Moreno, 87, marvels at how naive she was, even after being raped by her first agent. She also relates some very close calls with a persistent Buddy Adler, then head of production at Fox, and meeting Cohn at a party, where he told her, “ ‘I’d like to fuck you,’ ” in the same “tone you might use to remark on the weather.”

Sparks flashed when Moreno met Marlon Brando on the Fox lot. Soon, she was taking his calls on the hallway phone, grabbing her nail polish on the way because, she says, “he was on the phone for hours at a time.” Curled up on the floor with the receiver on her shoulder and the cord stretched as far as it would go, she gave herself a mani-pedi. “All the girls wanted to know what happened on my dates with him, so Louise said, ‘Let’s write down your whole experience and read it out loud.’ ” One night they did just that, and their bedroom was packed as Moreno recounted accompanying Brando to an Actors Studio party in the Valley—where she met Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and James Dean.

As her romance with Brando intensified, Moreno found living at the HSC restrictive. As soon as she felt secure with her studio contract, “Louise and I poached two other girls from the Club and got our own little house.”

Model and actress Sharon Tate was another nascent star who found shelter at the HSC, as was Barbara Eden, who, despite her innocence (the other girls derisively referred to her as “the Virgin”), took a job as a hostess at Ciro’s nightclub. “I didn’t last long,” she remembers. Her career soon took off, though, boosted by Lucille Ball’s encouragement after Eden was cast in one of the last episodes of I Love Lucy. She kept at it, going on to star in I Dream of Jeannie. “I wouldn’t be here today,” she contends, “if it wasn’t for the Hollywood Studio Club.”