by Mark Bailey
Although the names and faces have changed with the times, the restaurant has remained resolutely the same. Its two large dining rooms and signature red booths are largely unchanged since the last major remodel, in 1937. And while the Vogue Theater did reclaim its space in 1955 and the Back Room closed down, its historic long bar, as well as the chairs and light fixtures, were all moved to the New Room, where they still stand today.
MUSSO & FRANK has long been famous for its bone-dry martini. It’s stirred, not shaken—that makes it stronger (less dilution from the ice). There’s very little Vermouth included—that makes it even stronger. And it contains 2.5 to 3 ounces of gin—which makes it stronger still. Voted Best Martini in America by more than one magazine, the recipe below comes straight from bartender Manny Aguirre, likely the longest-working bartender in Hollywood. Aguirre has fifty-nine years behind the bar, thirty-seven of them spent at Scandia—for decades an upscale Sunset hotspot specializing in (you guessed it) Scandinavian cuisine—and the last twenty-two years at Musso & Frank.
MARTINI
3 OZ. GIN
6 DASHES OF NOILLY PRAT DRY VERMOUTH
2 OLIVES OR A LEMON TWIST
Pour gin and vermouth into a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Stir well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with two olives, each on separate toothpick. (Substitute lemon twist for olives if desired.)
Part Two
THE STUDIO ERA
1930–1945
“The truth is that the coming of sound meant the end of the all-night parties. With talkies, you couldn’t stay out till sunrise anymore. You had to rush back from the studios and start learning your lines, ready for the next day’s shooting at 8 a.m.”
—LOUISE BROOKS, actress
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
1902–1968
STAGE AND SCREEN ACTRESS
“My father warned me about men and alcohol, but he never said anything about women and cocaine.”
Famous for outlandish behavior, Tallulah Bankhead was a proponent of cocaine use as far back as her teenage years. She came from an upper-crust Alabama family; the daughter of former Speaker of the House William Brockman Bankhead. Tallulah’s childhood battles with croup were responsible for the husky voice that became her trademark. Starring in more than fifty theatrical productions, she won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for performances in The Little Foxes (1939) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). Her sporadic Hollywood career hit a high point with the lead in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), during the filming of which she apparently declined to wear underwear. Bankhead married just once, to actor John Emery, who divorced her four years later, citing mental cruelty. She said one of her biggest regrets was not seducing Greta Garbo. Bankhead’s final words are still the gold standard for the famous-to-be-famous crowd: “Codeine! Bourbon!”
PROBABLY, THE BEST PART she ever played was herself. Sure, Tallulah Bankhead occasionally received good notices for her stage and screen performances, but her fame rested almost entirely on the strength of her off-screen self—a hard-drinking, libidinous force of nature. (Bankhead proudly described herself as “pure as the driven slush.”) It’s likely even her peers could only tell you a handful of the twenty film roles she played, but her alcohol-and cocaine-fueled affairs were legendary. There was the time she threw a dinner party at her estate, Windows, and passed out, face-in-soup-bowl, before the champagne was even poured. Or how she bragged of having bedded over 500 men and women—Bankhead often described herself as “ambisextrous.”
And then there was the nudist thing. Bankhead would often answer the door completely naked. This, before the years in which she consumed five packs of cigarettes and two fifths of Old Grand-Dad bourbon a day (she claimed she could drink a bottle in thirty minutes). She took up residence at the Elysée Hotel, nicknamed the “Easy Lay.” In Burgess Meredith’s memoir, So Far, So Good, the actor talks about first meeting Bankhead. He arrived at a party in her suite only to find Bankhead stark naked, passing out cocaine and booze to guests. Having finished her hostess duties, she confided that she was dying of the “Grand Desire” and subsequently pulled Meredith into her bedroom.
Apparently, the moaning and the groaning were “operatic,” but just before consummation, Bankhead pushed him aside, saying “For God’s sake, don’t come inside me! I’m engaged to Jock Whitney!” That would be the son of famed businessman Payne Whitney.
* * *
There was the time she threw a dinner party at her estate and passed out, face-in-soup-bowl, before the champagne was even poured.
* * *
Bankhead would forever maintain, “What I do with my bits and pieces is my business,” and “For every fan that I lose who’s stuffy, two more come along who approve of my lifestyle.” And indeed, Bankhead’s escapades were funnier and more risqué than any film comedy she could have hoped to act in. A legendary such incident occurred the summer of 1933, two years after she returned from a triumphant decade-long stretch in the London theater. In the mood for an extended party, Bankhead did what any in-the-know actress would have done in those days. She showed up, resplendent in a heavily beaded gown and diamonds at the Garden of Allah.
She spent most of that evening making eyes at Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic gold-medal swimmer who had just made his Hollywood debut as Tarzan. But by five in the morning, she had grown tired of simply wondering what lay hidden beneath his loincloth. There are (at least) two different versions of what happened next. One is that Tallulah, having thus far failed in her advances on Weissmuller, decided to pull a damsel-in-distress, fling herself into the pool fully clothed, screaming that she was going to drown if someone didn’t save her. Someone like, perhaps, the Olympic swimmer standing nearby. The other version is that she and Weissmuller drunkenly dove in together.
Whatever the beginning, the stories share their most crucial detail: its ending. Once in the water, Tallulah’s dress and diamonds found their way to the bottom of the pool, and she found her way into Weissmuller’s arms, naked. As he carried her out of the pool, the gathered revelers stared at the spectacle of Tarzan and the Naked Socialite. “Everybody’s been dying to see my body,” Tallulah told the remaining partiers. “Now you can.”
POLO LOUNGE
9641 SUNSET BLVD.
OPEN!
IN 1906 A GROUP of investors led by California businessman Burton Green bought 4,500 acres of land west of Los Angeles in the hopes of striking oil. They drilled and drilled and drilled, but found only water. So they decided to build a city. They formed the Rodeo Land & Water Company and built a new subdivision named Beverly Hills—this because Green had just visited a Massachusetts town with a similar name.
When Green announced that parcels were for sale, he got approximately zero takers. After a few months of similar luck, he was truly desperate. So he built a huge pink hotel on the area’s only thoroughfare (a dirt-road extension of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard), hoping to attract visitors. It was called the Beverly Hills Hotel. He hired Margaret Anderson, the manager of the Hollywood Hotel, to run the place. And there it stood for the next several years, empty—a huge pink monument to failure: remote and ridiculous.
Then, at last, Green got lucky. Movie star Douglas Fairbanks and his bride Mary Pickford built their dream estate nearby. Named Pickfair, the mansion quickly became the heart of the Hollywood party circuit, and soon every star wanted to live in Beverly Hills. The population tripled. And the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Le Jardin bar became their default nightspot. Each booth had a phone, each table a phone jack. Chaplin always got Table Number One. After every polo game, Will Rogers would hang out there with pals Darryl F. Zanuck and Hal Roach, and this inspired a 1937 name-change to the Polo Lounge. It remained a nexus of power for the entire century.
It is rumored that, in 1932, Johnny Weissmuller landed the title role for Tarzan when the director saw him jump into the hotel’s swimming pool to save a drowning girl. (It seems Weissmuller did this with some frequency.) Howard Hughes lived a
t the hotel for almost thirty years. Mia Farrow was supposedly banned from the Polo Lounge for wearing pants. Paramount signed itself over to Gulf + Western on a Polo Lounge table.
In 1972, G. Gordon Liddy called John Mitchell at the Polo Lounge the day after the Watergate break-in; their hotel phone records became crucial evidence against them. That same year, the hotel hosted Chaplin once again, returned from exile to receive an honorary Oscar. Elizabeth Taylor spent an astounding six out of eight honeymoons in the hotel’s bungalows. Neil Simon’s California Suite was filmed there, as was The Way We Were, American Gigolo, Shampoo, and much of the opening of Lauren Bacall and Gregory Peck’s Designing Women.
And let’s not forget—the Eagles used the hotel on the cover of their 1977 album Hotel California.
ROBERT BENCHLEY
1889–1945
WRITER, CRITIC, ACTOR
“A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.”
Robert Benchley cut his teeth at The Harvard Lampoon and cemented his reputation with his contributions to Vanity Fair, Life, and the New Yorker. Along with Dorothy Parker, he was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. His comic routine, “The Treasurer’s Report,” part of the Round Table theatrical revue was adapted as a short film in 1928, launching Benchley’s Hollywood career. He would write and star in nearly fifty shorts over the next fifteen years, including The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928) and How to Sleep (named Best Short Subject at the eighth annual Academy Awards, in 1935). He penned more than two thousand essays and reviews, in addition to film credits. To celebrated peers like James Thurber, Benchley had no equal.
MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE he got a late start? A fervent Prohibitionist and strict teetotaler, Benchley did not have his first drink until he was thirty-one. This was at Tony Soma’s speakeasy, right across from Jack and Charlie’s (later renamed the 21 Club). On a side note, Soma was the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and, in the days before Rockefeller Center (before television, period), his was a literary joint.
Benchley was in the company of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald and his best pal Dorothy Parker that night. The story goes, he turned to Parker and cracked, “Let’s find out what all the fuss is about,” then ordered an Orange Blossom. Benchley would make up for lost time.
Like so many East Coast intellectuals, he was soon lured out to Tinseltown by the promise of easy money and … well, easy money. He holed up with his great friend Charles Butterworth, and by the 1930s no one was more closely associated with the Garden of Allah than Benchley, the hotel’s unofficial master of ceremonies. He once quipped, “Drinking makes such fools of people and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony,” and yet stories of his own exploits would soon pile up. Like the time he bet Errol Flynn a thousand dollars he could swim all the way to Catalina Island, then dragged everyone within earshot down to Long Beach. Benchley paddled all of twelve feet before calling for a rope. Or the time he phoned for his doctor, complaining of side effects from a new prescription. When the doctor arrived, he pulled up his shirt, revealing a mess of feathers he’d glued to his body.
* * *
He once quipped, “Drinking makes such fools of people and people are such fools to begin with, that it’s compounding a felony.”
* * *
But as pianist Oscar Levant famously said, “Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath.” And this was true for Benchley, who came to loathe the town. Respected and beloved by his friends, he considered himself a fundamentally lazy man who had wasted his talents—a hack and a sellout. Arriving at a party once, he spied an old buddy from New York, playwright Robert Sherwood. Benchley pointed at Sherwood and exclaimed, “Those eyes—I can’t stand those eyes looking at me! He’s looking at me, and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer.”
Years later, at his bungalow at the Garden of Allah, Benchley would convey his feelings about life and booze to his dear friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Checking his watch, Benchley saw that it was indeed the cocktail hour and, consequently, time for a pitcher of martinis. At this point, Fitzgerald had moved out to Hollywood himself. He was separated from Zelda, dating columnist Sheilah Graham, and trying his hardest to stay on the wagon. Fitzgerald tried to talk Benchley out of it. “Don’t you know drinking is a slow death?” he said. To this, Benchley just tasted his martini and replied, “So who’s in a hurry?” Apparently, Benchley was lazy even in his despair.
IN A TOWN NOT INCLINED toward self-restraint, maybe hangovers at least provided some measure of control—a temporary dam against the raging river of booze. But it was never pretty. As Robert Benchley once declared, “The only cure for a real hangover is death.” While that may have worked for John Barrymore, one need not be so extreme. Some other popular hangover cures included:
• Crazy Hotel Mineral Water (from Mineral Wells, Texas): D. W. Griffith
• A bath in ice water: Fatty Arbuckle
• Half an hour in a steam room: Errol Flynn
• Swedish Glogg: Greta Garbo
• Three swigs of gin: Louise Brooks
• An eight ball of cocaine: Mabel Normand
• Thin, slightly green draft beer accompanied by the faint smell of urine: Charles Bukowski
As for Benchley, in his less dramatic moments he swore by the Prairie Oyster. It is actually not a bad concoction, so long as you shoot it back, just like an oyster—allowing for some texture and burn, but not much taste. Writer Lillian Hellman, a friend and colleague of Benchley’s, offered her own twist on the recipe—what was more or less just a heavy injection of sherry.
Finally, if you are at all put off by raw egg, try the Bloody Bull. Just use the same recipe as a Bloody Mary (see page 114) and add 1 oz. of beef broth.
PRAIRIE OYSTER
1 RAW EGG
1 TSP. WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE
2 DASHES TABASCO
SALT AND PEPPER
Crack the egg into an Old-Fashioned glass, being careful not to break the yolk (this will give it the appearance of an oyster, sort of). Add Worchestershire and Tabasco, then sprinkle salt and pepper.
Lillian Hellman’s Version
6 OZ. SHERRY
1 RAW EGG
2 TSP. WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE
Pour sherry into a double Old-Fashioned or Collins glass, then make as you would the Prairie Oyster. Be forewarned: The goal of the remedy is to make you vomit but by cocktail hour, you should be fully recovered.
THE LOST WEEKEND (1945)
Easily the studio era’s most frank look at the ravages of alcohol, The Lost Weekend had everyone concerned when the script arrived. Was the story too bleak and repellant? Who would want to see it? So cowriters Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett made a couple of concessions: for one, they added a love interest; for another, they made Ray Milland, one of Paramount’s biggest stars, their first choice, hoping some of his inherent likability would rub off on the film’s lead character—Don Birnam, an alcoholic writer from New York.
When Milland first read the book (which his agent sent along with a note that said “Read it. Study it. You’re going to play it”), he knew the part could be a game changer for him. But still, he had reservations. He wasn’t sure he had the acting chops, for one thing. Mostly, though, the guy just didn’t drink very much. His only previous experience with acting and drinking had been on the set of DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind.
During that picture, Milland’s agent had dragged him to a party where he downed way too much champagne. Early the next morning, Milland’s car was found parked out on his front lawn. With the help of his butler, Milland made it to the set on time, but immediately wardrobe shoved him into a diving suit. He had a scuba scene that day.
In desperation, Milland turned to his fellow cast members and asked for their favorite hangover remedies. John Wayne offered him two enormous green pills he said had to be taken with gin. Ummm,
OK, thanks. An actor named Lynne Overman handed over three black pills that Milland consumed with tomato juice. Finally, Robert Benchley told Milland the only surefire cure was a wine glass full of Worcestershire, mixed with a raw egg. (A Prairie Oyster, to you and me.) And whoa, what do you know, but Benchley happened to have one right there!
The day mercifully ended for Milland around five. When he emerged from the flotation tank, he was mortified to find DeMille waiting for him. The director wanted to give him something. Apparently, in the mid-thirties, DeMille had purchased an entire lot of specially minted half-dollars, which he handed out on rare occasions to anyone he felt had displayed tremendous fortitude or courage in the line of duty. And as wardrobe stripped away Milland’s diving suit, DeMille placed one in Milland’s hand, saying it was one of the best jobs of acting he’d ever seen.
For Milland, it was like being given an Academy Award. But if he had any hope of winning a real Oscar with The Lost Weekend, he knew his research would have to be more methodical. So Milland invited his in-laws to a dinner at his home, explaining that he intended to get very tipsy, then attempt to act out the two scenes in the movie where Don Birnam is at his drunkest. That night they all got ripped on Mammoth Cave whiskey, then convened to Milland’s library, where after twenty hilariously inept minutes of acting, Milland raced to the bathroom. It took six months before he felt ready for another drink.
Then, shortly before filming, Milland had another inspired thought. He checked himself into the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital for a night, just to see what it was like for alcoholics to suffer through withdrawal. The staff at Bellevue accommodated him, issuing him the standard hospital robe and assigning him to a bed. But within a couple hours—once patients started screaming and fighting with attendants—Milland decided he’d had enough. Not bothering to change out of the robe or even put on slippers, he slid out the door of the building and was immediately stopped by a policeman, who noticed the Bellevue Hospital stamp on the robe and tossed him right back into the psych ward. The night nurse spent a half-hour convincing the cop it was okay for Milland to leave the building.