An Eternal Hollywood Mystery, Wrapped in Mink and Fog, Survives the Fires

At the end of Sunset Boulevard, where after many twists and turns the road reaches its climactic end at the Pacific Ocean, there is a building that has stood for almost 100 years. It is one of the few structures to have survived the Palisades Fire, which has destroyed approximately 7000 properties in West Los Angeles, including nearly several addresses on the Pacific Palisades Historical Society’s roster of culturally and architecturally significant landmarks. Yet through the sea breeze and silver haze, 17575 Pacific Coast Highway rises like the shadow of a dream, its 1920s Mediterranean arches resembling gateways to a lost world. Millions have driven past its imposing architecture over the decades, but today not everyone knows the story of Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café—or of its namesake, the actor Thelma Todd, who died mysteriously one cold night in 1935 in the foggy streets of Castellammare above. Once one of the most widely covered stories in Los Angeles history, the enigma of Todd’s last night has haunted and confounded for almost a century, as have the staircases and secrets of the building that remain.

On December 16, 1935, 29-year-old Thelma Todd was leaving home for a party with her mother, whom she’d drop off on the way along Sunset. She descended the stairs in a glimmering blue evening gown and blue heels, a mink coat draped around her cold shoulders. Her chocolate brown Lincoln Phaeton convertible was parked in the streets above the restaurant that bore her name, in the garage of her lover and business partner, the filmmaker Roland West. As he put Todd and her mother into the car for the night, West told Todd to be back by 2 a.m. Todd gave him a look, rolled her eyes and demurred, “I’ll be back at 2:05.” The director bristled, and in an attempt at discipline, reminded her that the door would be locked at 2 a.m., whether she was home or not.

The door in question referred to their shared living arrangement, the secret of the true nature of their relationship, which began several years earlier. When Todd and West first worked together on the Catalina set of the pre-Code crime drama Corsair in 1931, the timing could not have been more ideal for two people seeking reinvention. Todd had been a film star since 1925, when she left her previous career path as a schoolteacher in Lowell, Massachusetts, and eventually signed with Paramount Pictures. She was known for her work in comedy, where she played the “straight-woman” with deadpan beauty in a duo with ZaSu Pitts, one of the only female-led comedic acts of the time. She also starred as a foil or love interest with idols Laurel and Hardy at Hal Roach Studios, the Marx Brothers, and Buster Keaton.

Through the 1920s, Todd embodied an emerging kind of modern woman, playing socialites with an elegant knowingness and wit that would later be the hallmark of comedians such as Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. Her beauty was classical as a statue of Venus, as though she had been carved in marble, then melted down to become America’s “Ice Cream Blonde.” She epitomized new society. But despite her success in rowdy comedies, Todd yearned to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor. Twenty years her senior, West had made a name for himself in vaudeville and now represented a new breed in Hollywood: the would-be aristocrat.

Classic Hollywood’s Greatest Female Comedy Team Still Packs a PunchArrow

While West was a success across both theater and film, his passion was in real estate development, and he found the early neighborhoods of the Pacific Palisades to be the perfect locale for his fantasies. An oceanfront enclave known as Castellammare, just west of Malibu, possessed the most dramatic (and unspoiled) views of the Pacific, its few winding streets notched into the rugged hillside evoking the splendor of the Italian coast. In 1927, West had built a seaside castle that he named Castillo del Mar. With fairy-tale stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings, the fortress was a chimera of Italian, Spanish, and Moorish styles. Stairs zigzagged up the grounds to austere turrets, giving the place the ominous romance of a Gothic novel. With so few houses yet in Castellammare, the castle was unique in its isolation. Beneath the moon on a starless night, with the immense darkness of the sea roaring from every window that fluttered open, it must have been ecstasy to be so close to such raw beauty. Yet it was lonely. West needed a queen, as an earlier version of the dream had gone awry. He was estranged from his first wife, the retired silent-film star Jewel Carmen, who still lived with him at Castillo del Mar.

The development of Castellammare had gone from great optimism in the 1920s to an all-but-abandoned project by 1930 due to the crushing economic blows of the Great Depression. Just below Castillo del Mar on the PCH, an early Castellammare community center designed by legendary developer Alphonzo Edward Bell Sr. (for whom Bel Air is named) and originally conceived as a beach club, post office, and retail center for the residents of the hillside, sat vacant. But West refused to let his dream die, and when he met Thelma Todd, he saw his vision come back to life with platinum fire.

In the summer of 1934, West and Todd became business partners in a café they opened on the ground floor of the empty community center. Christening it Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, they hoped the allure of Thelma’s star power would entice Hollywood to make their way down Sunset Blvd., where their restaurant would be the first upscale beach establishment of its kind. Todd herself acted as the hostess of the restaurant, welcoming guests with a warmth they had only glimpsed on the screen. In its 18-month run, the Sidewalk Café became a glowing attraction, a symbol of what was possible following the Depression. Between Castillo del Mar and the café, West hoped to inspire new construction in Castellammare, to form a glamorous and close-knit community in paradise. It was an early vision of everything the Pacific Palisades would eventually represent.

While his first wife, Jewel, stayed in her lonely tower above, West moved to the living quarters above the café so he could better keep an eye on business, or so he said. Thelma Todd moved to her own quarters, also on the second floor. It’s hard to imagine that in such a tight shared space Todd and West were doing anything but living together (“in sin,” by the standards of the 1930s) and dreaming of their future.

Until the night of the party in December 1935.

Driven by her chauffeur, Ernest Peters, Todd arrived at the Trocadero nightclub on Sunset Blvd. for a party thrown by Stanley and Connie Lupino and their 17-year-old daughter, the future actor and director Ida Lupino. For several hours, Todd drifted from table to table, talking with guests such as Sid Grauman and sipping champagne. Yet her mood took a turn when she saw her ex-husband, Pasquale “Pat” Di Ciccio, glowering in the corner with a date. He shouldn’t have been invited.

Di Ciccio was an aspiring actor’s agent and a full-time mob affiliate turned playboy. He’d been cruel to Todd during their marriage, and they had divorced just prior to Todd’s romance with West. Some party guests observed bitterness between the two. Some said Todd merely left. Ida Lupino later testified that she and Todd had a private conversation in the women’s lounge during the party, where Todd had been morose. Meanwhile, the chauffeur waited in the car and watched 1 a.m. turn to 2 a.m., and 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. How much champagne Todd had had would be anybody’s guess. Peters recalled that, when she finally slid into the backseat, she was unusually quiet.

Todd refused the chauffeur’s offer to drop her off at her doorstep, and asked to be let out just past where Sunset Blvd. meets Pacific Coast Highway. No streetlights on the road yet, only the sound of wind through the cypress, the wild waves crashing in the dark. It was a little after 3:45 a.m. In her blue evening gown, Todd began the slow ascent up the flight of stairs through the mist and towards the second floor of her restaurant.

A day later, Todd was found behind the wheel of her Lincoln Phaeton in the garage below Castillo del Mar, still wearing her party dress, the pink camellia pinned to her shoulder now wilted. No violence had been done to her—it looked as if she had fallen asleep—and her death was ruled an accident caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. It was suspected that she had arrived home to find herself locked out, as West had warned. Alone and cold, she might have made the only logical choice to climb the stairs and seek shelter in the unlocked garage. She might have turned on the car to get warm, not thinking about the fumes.

Given the cast of characters and the unlikeliness of suicide, speculations of foul play began to spread—and were even pined for by the scandal-hungry film colony. Rumors spread that West, in a jealous rage, had killed Todd—perhaps in their apartment, or even on his yacht, the Joyita—and brought her to the car to make it look like an accident. In Hollywood Babylon, filmmaker and Hollywood mythologist Kenneth Anger would controversially speculate that West and Jewel Carmen had conspired together, and that Carmen had dressed up as Todd in a staged lover’s quarrel. There was also gossip that Todd was involved with a bad crowd through her previous marriage to Di Ciccio, and that her death had been the mob’s revenge for her declining to open up gambling tables on the second floor where she and West hoped to open a sophisticated dining club.

The ensuing inquest was a spectacle straight from the pages of Agatha Christie, with a cast to rival any film noir: the controlling director-lover, his estranged former-film-star wife, the maid, the chauffeur, the ex-husband with gangster ties. They all took their turn testifying, yet the facts seemed to unravel upon closer inspection. Invariably some small element would throw the investigation into shambles—the drops of blood on the running board outside of the car, the long climb from the PCH to the garage, the lack of physical trauma on Todd. There was even the uncanny testimony from a friend of Todd’s who claimed she had received a phone call from her on Sunday at 4 p.m.—hours after Todd allegedly had died and would have already been lifeless in the Phaeton. The unanswered details made the scene more sinister and inexplicable. Murder, accident, or suicide: Each possibility hinted at an underbelly to the crystalline beauty of both the location and the players.

Roland West reportedly attempted to reopen Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café mere days after the tragedy. Tourists and conspiracy theorists flooded in to steal souvenirs from the restaurant, walk up the fateful stairs, and form their own conclusions. Guests recalled the eeriness of being seated by West himself, haunted and determined to see his restaurant through, as “Lover, Come Back to Me” played on a jukebox. Shelley Winters later remembered that Howard Hughes took her for a date at the café after Todd’s death, and recalled that they were the only ones in the place. The café closed after a few months, never to reopen to the public.

After West’s death in 1952, the café had a second act ironically adjacent to its film-land beginnings, becoming the headquarters of a religious production company in the 1960s, and then being remodeled into offices in 2017. Through these modifications, Thelma Todd was all but erased from its walls, and the glass doors etched with the name Joya’s in cursive—a pentimento of West’s intended nightclub on the second floor—taken off their hinges. It appears the building has returned to its glamorous isolation among the supernatural silence of the hills and the sea.

The Palisades Fire is still burning, consuming history past and present at a devastating rate. The flames moved up the turrets of Castillo del Mar, black smoke stained the ornate walls. But data compiled by LA Country Recovers shows the original building of the Sidewalk Café, Castillo del Mar, and the turquoise blue garage doors—which guard the site of Thelma Todd’s final hours—still standing. As residents now turn their attention to rebuilding what has been lost in 2025, as they begin sifting through memories of the past and imagining the future, there is a feeling of awe for what endures. We have our legends, and we have a castle and the remains of a café that were once the future of the lost world known as the Pacific Palisades.