Grace Buscher Guslander couldn't exist today.

Virtually every circumstance that made possible the career of this legendary hotelier has vanished from Hawai'i. This flavor of something lost pervades Kaua'ian David P. Penhallow's biography, "The Story of the Coco Palms Hotel: The Grace Buscher Guslander Years, 1953-1985" (Rice Street Press, $29.95). The book is now in a revised second edition, in bookstores throughout Hawai'i.

"There was a spiritual quality about Grace, and I think that's what has been mostly missed by other hotels," said Penhallow, who worked for the Guslanders at one time and was a friend for more than 40 years. "She believed you take care of your land, you take care of your people (employees, guests, the community). That's a huge part of why she was so successful. That's what people could feel."

But the hotel Grace built, Kaua'i's Coco Palms, once famous the world around, is moribund.

Destroyed by Hurricane Iniki in 1992, the frond-topped cottages with their giant clam-shell sinks and the Hawaiian-style high-peaked lobby, peaceful lagoons and open-air dining areas have stood abandoned amid a succession of unsuccessful proposals to revive the hostelry.

Just last month, Coco Palms Ventures, which had been at work on a luxury resort there, announced it would abandon the concept when part of its plan was rejected by local officials.

Grace Buscher Guslander died in 2000 with Penhallow at her bedside. In this book full of hilarious stories and anecdotes that tug at the heart of anyone who can remember "the old Hawai'i," he does justice to a woman he calls "remarkable, generous and a hotel genius."

But the Guslanders — Grace and the man she would first work for and then marry (in 1969), Island Holidays hotel chain founder Lyle "Gus" Guslander — lived in a different world.

It was a world where a guy with ambition could borrow enough to buy a hotel for $150,000 and hire a young woman to run it just because he liked her and thought she was smart, even if she'd never worked in a hotel and was a relative newcomer to Hawai'i, as well. Guslander was in every way his future wife's match in independence of thought and single-minded focus on filling guest rooms.

It was a world where the hospitality industry largely ignored authentic Hawaiian culture and history. Grace Buscher, in contrast, spent hours in the library studying the Islands' native people and made friends with key elders, such as cultural specialist Gladys Brandt and kahuna Sara Kailikea. Her close friendship with Brandt began after Mauian Harry Field, impressed that Grace had sent poi and lomi salmon to his room as an amenity, asked her to adopt "this little haole."

Buscher respected the culture, though she would gild the hibiscus when it suited her purposes.

For example, she invented the torch-lighting ceremony from whole cloth (though it was later copied by many hotels). But she also spent her own money to collect Hawaiian artifacts, then donated them to a museum on the property.

And she revived knowledge of an almost-forgotten but vital figure, Kaua'i's last chiefess, Queen Deborah Kapule, who in the late 1800s ran a hotel on the banks of Wailua River near the site of the Coco Palms.

"Her celebrations of Deborah Kapule's birthdays were always a chicken-skin time," recalled Penhallow, who interviewed dozens of former employees, friends and former guests for the book. "The birthday celebration sticks in most of their minds. It was very simple, a blend of Christianity and native religion. But when those drums beat, and you heard the chanting and you saw the procession of people coming through the palm grove, there wasn't a sound from the crowd."

It was a simpler time, when, instead of expecting hot-and-cold running activities and sophisticated spas, guests (including many of the movie stars who stayed there) were happy to eat simple, often local-style food, participate in one of Guslander's many dreamed-up ceremonies and pageants — from judging employee lei or Easter hat contests to entertainment by the local Mormon or Catholic church choirs. (The Mormons put a wing on their church with the money they earned singing at the hotel, typical of the ways Guslander aided the community, Penhallow said.)

It was a time when employees greeted returning guests by first name, and even felt comfortable gently scolding them, literally treating them like family. Grace hosted a free nightly cocktail party (another practice some Island hotels copied, though most offered the party only weekly or twice-weekly). Entertainment might be kanikapila style, with employees playing music or dancing the hula (and no overtime, either).

Penhallow said the Guslanders spent little on advertising. "She always said, 'You have to create something that when guests go back home, they'll talk about,' " Penhallow recalled. "Grace believed word of mouth was the best advertising."

It was a time when a hotelier could do pretty much what she wanted with a property. Grace put in a zoo, with gibbons named Gus and Lander.

"The other hotels had swimming pools and beaches and views," Penhallow said. "But there was not the ambience with the coconut fronds, the shell basins, a bedspread made of fish net, canoe paddles on the walls, shells dripping all over and some kind of ceremony every night. Grace was a romantic, she was into drama, and people responded to that."

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.