By 1952, most of the lovely Melrose Hotel's 200 occupants were elderly pensioners -- elderly pensioners with exciting, glamorous, Auntie Mame-esque pasts.

First there's the Melrose Hotel's parttime switchboard operator, Anna Pearce, a former singer on the Considine vaudeville circuit around the turn of the century.

The hotel is also home to Juliet de Grazi, a Swahili-speaking Austrian-born soprano who toured with a Belgian opera company through the cities of East Africa. In 1952, de Grazi was simply passing
through the Melrose. She had recently won a large settlement in an automobile accident, and was planning to return to East Africa where her husband was buried.