Christmastime is for amateurs. This is Labor Day. 1954.
The Texas oil barons have migrated west — bringing their bourbon, their billions, and their demons to La Jolla’s most exclusive hideaway: the Hotel Del Charro. Over one long, sunburned weekend, a rogues' gallery of real-life power brokers descend: J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson, Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon, Joan Crawford, Jimmy Durante, and a coterie of cold-blooded insiders, each nursing their own secrets.

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Beneath the laughter, luxury, and lemon trees, something rancid is blooming. The midterms are coming. The press is circling. The IRS is sniffing. The American Century is choking on its own cigar smoke.

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As martinis spill and reputations burn, Hotel Del Charro becomes the ultimate fever dream of American corruption — a tragicomic autopsy of money, myth, masculinity, and the machinery of power.

 

 

This is not a history lesson.
 

It’s a party you weren’t supposed to survive.