Ambassador Hotel (3400 Wilshire Blvd.)

I am the night watchman
I stand by the door
Some fifteen thousand nights
I have stood here for

For all of you actuaries
That’s forty-six years
They’ll be closing up the hotel
When the morning Sun appears

Wilshire was a wilderness
When they thought to build this place
But soon the starlets were arriving
Like they were runners to a race

Now twenty-one summers
On a steep descending slope
Since that midnight in the pantry
When the country lost its hope

Cut the lights off in the nightclub
Strip the linens from the bed
Tell the busboys and the bellmen
Better get it through their head

That they won’t be back tomorrow
And it grieves me to tell you why
The Ambassador’s been bleeding out
And now they’ve let her die

A saturnalia every Saturday
In the salad days long gone
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford
Would be wrestling on the lawn

I shook hands with seven presidents
I may have flirted with their wives
But my heart is in the hotel
When the wrecking ball arrives

Cut the lights off in the nightclub
Strip the linens from the bed
Tell the busboys and the bellmen
Better get it through their head

That they won’t be back tomorrow
And it grieves me to tell you why
The Ambassador’s been bleeding out
And now they’ve let her die

Nineteen-sixty-eight
I won’t mention for the hurt
Except to quote the one who wrote
That doom was woven on his shirt

I am a statue in the doorway
There are no guests; there is no sound
But for the rasp of plastic palm trees
And a seagull on the ground

If they could bury me in the ballroom
I’d be content to fade away
With the ghosts as my companions
Right beyond my dying day

Cut the lights off in the nightclub
Hear the walls begin to sing
Of olden days and golden days
When Valentino was the King

No I won’t be back tomorrow
And it grieves me to tell you why
The Ambassador’s been bleeding out
And now they’ve let her die

The Ambassador’s been bleeding out
And now they’ve let her die

The Ambassador’s been bleeding out
And now they’ve let her die