by Mark Bailey
Unconventional as it may have been, this routine had made Sturges one of the richest men in the business. But pressure has a way of making even the most skilled professionals question themselves, and in Sturges’s case, when the pressure mounted on his directorial debut, The Great McGinty, he endeavored to change his ways. Gone were the late nights, the drinking and the smoking. “After I started shooting,” he wrote in his memoir (Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges), “I had a masseur waiting for me every night and I had dinner in bed. I saved my strength. I treated myself like an egg.” And for this newfound discipline he was promptly rewarded, during the second week of shooting, with a nasty case of pneumonia.
Sturges had actually developed pneumonia once before, while living in Paris with his mother at the age of three. Based on his own personal history, Sturges feared he would be laid up for six weeks while the sickness ran its course—a major problem, given the clause in his contract that allowed Paramount to replace him should he be “unable to fulfill his duties.”
Funny thing is, during his first bout with pneumonia in Paris, the one remedy that had pulled him through was booze. Though only a toddler, he was spoonfed champagne, which Preston’s mother credited with bringing down his fever. This in mind, Sturges must have been tempted to start drinking again, just a little. But then fortune smiled on him: Paramount executives, thrilled with what they’d seen of his rushes so far, assured him he could take the time to recover. Ten days later, he was back on set. From then on, he would drink as much as wanted, turning his back on sobriety forever.
APPLEJACK, NICKNAMED “JERSEY LIGHTNING,” is a strong but sweet spirit distilled from apples that tastes not unlike Calvados (a French brandy). Until recently, there was only one brand produced in America—Laird’s. The oldest licensed distillery in the country, Laird’s originated in New Jersey and dates back to the American Revolution. Apparently, George Washington once requested some.
Fancy pedigree aside, Applejack provided Preston Sturges with the necessary energy to get through his workday—which is another way of saying, it helped him nap.
TEA & APPLEJACK
1½ OZ. APPLEJACK
1 CUP OF BLACK TEA
1 TSP. SUGAR
¼ OZ. DRY CURAçAO (OPTIONAL)
Pour Applejack into a steaming cup of tea, then stir in teaspoon of sugar. Add Curaçao if desired.
THE PLAYERS CLUB
8225 SUNSET BLVD.
WHEN WRITER-DIRECTOR PRESTON STURGES opened this three-story complex in 1940, he was one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood. With two films already in release and a third (The Lady Eve) on the way, plus a stake in a promising engineering company specializing in diesel engines, he was flush. Or so it seemed.
From the start, Sturges ran the Players less like a business and more like his own personal clubhouse. Named after the New York theatrical club, it attracted both the East Coast and the Hollywood set. Among the regulars were Humphrey Bogart, Ernst Lubitsch, Orson Welles, Howard Hughes, William Faulkner, and Robert Benchley. According to Billy Wilder, dinners often ended with Sturges offering a complimentary shot of yellow or green Chartreuse (his favorite liqueur) to his guests, while he himself polished off another bourbon Old-Fashioned. Rarely did a night pass when he wasn’t on hand to shut the place down. Sometimes, he even shut down early, closing the doors to the public so he could entertain his pals. This couldn’t be good business, but then money wasn’t Sturges’s principal concern—drinking was.
Half the time, Sturges was happy to run a tab, which more often than not meant he simply picked up the check. And when Sturges did charge, he was so determined to keep prices in line with those at the Brown Derby (despite having way more overhead) that he ended the competition by effecting his own demise. In 1944 the Players grossed more than $650,000; its actual profit was just under $26,000. With such an unconcerned management style, it’s surprising Sturges turned a profit at all. And soon enough he no longer would.
By the early 1950s, the club’s debts and taxes were enormous, and the mounting pressure had sucked so much life out of Sturges that his film career was floundering. Now he was doubly screwed. Sturges’s solution? To add an expensive dinner theater, complete with orchestra pit and a retractable dance floor. He was an artist after all.
Two years later, he sold the property to his main creditor.
WHATEVER THE BENEFITS of Sturges’s Tea & Applejack, they do not compare to those of his Old-Fashioned. Sturges’s cocktail of choice, the Old-Fashioned enabled him to talk late into the night and to write into the early morning.
In making the cocktail, there is a great deal of debate surrounding the fruit—some say to muddle it, others to just add as garnish. It’s unknown how Sturges took his, but hard to believe he would bother to muddle—even if he had a whole staff of bartenders he was paying to do exactly that.
BOURBON OLD-FASHIONED
1 CUBE OF SUGAR
3 DASHES ANGOSTURA BITTERS
2½ OZ. BOURBON
1 ORANGE SLICE
1 MARASCHINO CHERRY
LEMON TWIST
Place a sugar cube at the bottom of an Old-Fashioned glass. Add bitters, and muddle into cube. Pour in bourbon. Fill the glass with ice cubes, and stir well. Garnish with orange slice, cherry and lemon twist. Add a splash of club soda if desired.
Note that others (though apparently not Sturges) might substitute rye or blended whiskey for bourbon.
SPENCER TRACY
1900–1967
ACTOR
“Hell, I used to take two-week lunch hours.”
Known for quiet confidence and effortless presence, Spencer Tracy was one of MGM’s top leading men, and indeed one of the top leading men of all time. Tracy studied drama in New York and spent several years making ends meet in summer stock and repertory productions. His performance in the Broadway crime drama The Last Mile (1930) caught the eye of director John Ford, who cast him opposite Humphrey Bogart in Up the River later that year. Tracy appeared in twenty-five films for Fox between 1930 and 1935, primarily in tough-guy roles. One notable exception was The Power and the Glory, written by Preston Sturges; Tracy’s performance was praised, but it didn’t translate at the box office, and Fox slowly soured on him. He switched to MGM in 1935, and his career took off. He won Best Actor Oscars two years in a row—the first actor ever to do so—for Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938). He was nominated another seven times during his career for such iconic roles as Father of the Bride (1950), Inherit the Wind (1960), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967). (Tracy is tied with Sir Laurence Olivier for the most Best Actor nominations of all time.) While filming Woman of the Year (1942), Tracy began an affair with costar Katharine Hepburn that lasted the rest of their lives, though it was never acknowledged publicly. Tracy suffered from both diabetes and emphysema. He died of a heart attack just seventeen days after completing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
THE PHONE RANG. Not his office phone; the special one. As MGM’s Vice President of Publicity and its resident fixer, Howard Strickling figured that almost any call to his office would be a new mess to clean up, but when this specific phone rang, he knew it was a mess. It was, more or less, a dedicated line. Dedicated to Spencer Tracy.
Strickling picked up and, sure enough, the Trocadero nightclub was calling to say that Strickling “might want to know” Spencer Tracy was at the club. That was it—no shouting, no fisticuffs. Tracy was simply present. Strickling hung up and called MGM’s chief of security, Whitey Hendry. Hendry was the former chief of police of Culver City and his instructions were simple: “Assemble the Tracy Squad.”
Spencer Tracy had been part of MGM’s roster for less than a year. His films at Fox had fared so poorly, and his tendency to go on drinking binges was so troublesome, that the studio had let him go in April 1935. But MGM’s Irving Thalberg knew talent when he saw it, and he signed Tracy the very day Fox severed ties with him. Thalberg’s boss, Louis Mayer, was hesitant; he didn’t need “another drunken Wallace Be
ery.”
Thalberg managed to sway his boss, but in truth, Beery was a model citizen compared to the unique mess that was Spencer Tracy. Tracy wasn’t just a drunk—he was a self-flagellating, self-immolating, utterly filthy drunk. Sure, Tracy understood the value of public image and so yes, his binges were kept very private. Tracy rarely drank in public and, other than a few exceptions, was the consummate professional when working. That said, privacy did nothing to dilute the extremity of his habits.
Tracy’s most common binge technique was locking himself in a room at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn for weeks at a time, downing bottle after bottle of whiskey while sitting naked in the bathtub. It was a peculiar routine. Afraid of airplanes, he would take the train to New York (a four-day ride) just to drink in that tub—rising not even to use the toilet. Maybe Tracy knew that he would sit there forever if he didn’t make it so unfathomably disgusting that he’d rather quit drinking than remain one minute longer. Or maybe he enjoyed it. Nobody knows anything, except that after a few weeks of marinating in his own waste, Tracy would emerge and act like a human again.
Unfortunately, Tracy sometimes slipped in public. Like the night he was hauled off to jail in handcuffs and leg straps for resisting arrest, this when Tracy was still working for Fox. The cops had caught him on Sunset Boulevard driving erratically. (What star didn’t drive drunk on Sunset?) It seemed the Clover Club (an illegal casino) was located next to Lee Francis’s (a brothel the studios used for visiting VIPs). Tracy had been found drunk in a borrowed car trying unsuccessfully to navigate the driveway that separated the two. This would not look good.
Louis B. Mayer was not about to let such a incident happen again. Tracy was what the MGM fixer Strickling called a “multiproblem person,” and multiproblem people needed multiperson solutions. So Strickling had assembled the Tracy Squad: an ambulance driver, a doctor, and four security guards dressed as paramedics, all of whom served no function at MGM other than picking up inebriated stars. As further protection, every drinking establishment within twenty-five miles of the MGM lot had been given the number of that private, direct line to Strickling and instructed to call the moment Tracy walked in. It seemed a good strategy, but it also hadn’t been put to the test until now.
By the time the Tracy Squad pulled up at the Trocadero, there’d already been an incident, apparently with director William Wellman. Wellman had uttered some unflattering remarks about the actress Loretta Young, who he directed in The Call of the Wild and with whom Tracy had been in a much-publicized affair. In defense of Young’s honor, Tracy had taken a swing. Some said the punch hit Wellman in the gut; others said it missed altogether. What no one disputed was that Wellman’s counterpunch landed nicely. Tracy flew over a nearby table. That was when the Squad arrived. They grabbed Tracy, put him in the back of the ambulance, and drove him home, where security stood guard until he sobered up. It could’ve been worse. Still, the Tracy Squad would have to work on their response time.
LANA TURNER
1921–1995
ACTRESS
“My life has been a series of emergencies.”
With a busty figure that earned her the nickname the “Sweater Girl,” Lana Turner was signed by MGM six months after the unexpected death of Jean Harlow. She quickly became the studio’s go-to sexpot. Turner was discovered as a teenager in a diner (not, as legend has it, in Schwab’s Pharmacy), while she was skipping class at Hollywood High, and was given a small role in Mervyn LeRoy’s They Won’t Forget (1937). Her acclaimed performance in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) marked her arrival among critics as a serious actress. But her private life was constant tabloid fodder, alternately fueling and overshadowing her professional success. She was married eight times (beating Rita Hayworth by three), including to musician Artie Shaw and actors Stephen Crane and Lex Barker. Her abusive relationship with mob bodyguard Johnny Stompanato ended when Turner’s teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed him to death (ruled “justifiable homicide” during the subsequent trial). Turner was fired from MGM in the mid-1950s as her box-office numbers headed south, but she bounced back with Peyton Place (1957), for which she received an Oscar nomination, and the Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), the biggest commercial hit of her career. Turner’s final starring role was Madame X (1966), although she appeared on several episodes of the soap opera Falcon Crest during the eighties.
SURE, HE WAS A millionaire, but nobody would ever accuse him of being a gentleman. And certainly not after “the left hook that unhooked Lana Turner from Bob Topping.”
Sometimes called the “nightclub queen,” Lana Turner always seemed to have a different man on her arm. Confidential declared her “the jilted-est girl in Hollywood,” with an “uncontrolled urge for high living, liquor, love, and late hours.” If a relationship failed, they wrote, it wouldn’t be long before her “glands got to working again.” Habitually married, eight times to seven different men, Turner once said, “My goal was to have one husband and seven children, but it turned out to be the other way around.”
Soon enough, even “respectable” publications got in on the act. In 1948 Life ran an article on Turner’s impending wedding to East Coast playboy Henry “Bob” Topping—the headline, LANA TURNER’S FOURTH AND POSITIVELY LAST TIME. The article went on to say Topping was considered a talented man in Hollywood and New York because “he inherited $7 million and plays a fine game of golf.”
Turner was fresh off a breakup with actor Tyrone Power, and Topping had just left his previous wife, actress Arline Judge—who, the press also gleefully noted, had previously been married to Topping’s older brother Dan (owner of the New York Yankees). Supposedly, Topping proposed to Turner by dropping a diamond ring into her martini. There were more to come—both diamonds and martinis—and soon she lost interest in acting. Mostly, Turner just partied. It wasn’t uncommon for the couple to have a hundred people at their house on any given weekend.
So it was that sometime in 1951 that Turner and Topping found themselves on a pub crawl with group of friends from the East Coast. They wound up at the Mocambo, where singer Billy Daniels (best known for his hit recording of “That Old Black Magic”) was performing. Turner ate his performance up, and when the show was over, Topping invited Daniels over to their table for a cocktail. When the Mocambo closed, he invited him back to the couple’s Holmby Hills mansion for a few more. There they sat around the fire drinking, Daniels serenading Turner all the while.
Eventually, Topping grew tired and stumbled off to bed. His friends followed. Apparently, that left Turner and Daniels alone together in the living room for almost enough time to have sex. Because just minutes after he left, Topping wandered back in, wearing his pajamas—and found the pair in a compromised position. Allegedly, Topping belted Turner first, with a left hook to the jaw, and then turned on Daniels. Hearing all the commotion, the friends returned and broke it up.
At least, that’s the story that appeared in Confidential. Turner’s biographers are split in regard to whether it actually happened or not. As for the celebrity gossips who hounded her, to them Turner’s personal life was little more than an ongoing joke anyway. Besides, soon enough they would find gangster Johnny Stompanato, stabbed to death in Turner’s bedroom—and by her daughter no less.
CHASEN’S
9039 BEVERLY BLVD.
LIKE SO MANY STARRY-EYED men and women before him, comedian Dave Chasen took the plunge in 1930: He went all in on an acting career. Relocating from New York to Los Angeles, he was leaving behind a mildly successful career in vaudeville. But there was a difference between Chasen and most other aspiring actors: pragmatic self-awareness. So it only took him five years, as opposed to the requisite twenty, to conclude that it wasn’t really working out, and probably never would.
Chasen threw in the towel on acting, and then took an equally big risk in opening his own restaurant—a move based exclusively on the raves he drew from friends when he’d cook dinner for them. When he mentioned the idea to one of
those friends, New Yorker editor Harold Ross, Ross advised him that 97 percent of restaurant owners went bankrupt. “But three percent didn’t,” Chasen shot back.
With investments from Frank Capra (the director of his first film) and the now-convinced Ross, Chasen opened the Southern Pit Barbecue on Beverly in 1936. Originally limited to six tables and little more than a dozen stools, its menu revolved around chili and ribs. The place proved so popular that within a year he greatly expanded, with a full waitstaff serving thirty-five different items to two dozen tabletops. He also renamed it Chasen’s.
A boisterous saloon-type atmosphere, the food was hearty and the drinks were strong. But what Chasen’s lacked in elegance, it more than made up for with an insider, clubhouse mystique. It was where Jimmy Stewart, at a party celebrating his marriage to Gloria Hatrick, was served a main course of two “midgets” in diapers atop a silver platter. It was where Bob Hope claimed to have showed up for a meal on a horse that he rode straight into the dining room. Sure he did.
Chasen’s was where Ronald Reagan, at his favorite booth, proposed to Nancy Davis, his favorite girlfriend. Elizabeth Taylor craved the chili so badly she had it flown to her on the set of Cleopatra, in Rome. Alfred Hitchcock was such a valued customer that a fish entree was named after him. Little Shirley Temple, out dining with her parents, requested a nonalcoholic cocktail and, voilà, the Shirley Temple was born. At its peak, Chasen’s served three hundred a night, and eventually augmented this with a booming business catering parties and banquets.