by Mark Bailey
As with all things, age and the whims of taste eventually shuttered the iconic restaurant, but it didn’t go down without a fight. It managed to stay in business sixty-five years, until 1995—and again as with all things, its greatness was soon reborn as nostalgia: Orhan Arli, a twenty-year veteran of Chasen’s kitchen, has kept many of its signature dishes (including the chili) alive, offering them as options in his own catering business.
SHIRLEY TEMPLE
¼ OZ. GRENADINE
8–10 OZ. GINGER ALE
MARASCHINO CHERRY
Fill a Collins glass with ice cubes. Add grenadine, then fill to top with ginger ale. Stir gently. Garnish with cherry and serve with a straw.
ORSON WELLES
1915–1985
DIRECTOR, ACTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER
“There are three intolerable things in life—cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.”
Orson Welles is considered by many critics and historians to be the greatest director of all time. His first feature, Citizen Kane (1941), is also widely considered the greatest film ever. Still, Welles fell far short of industry expectations. As he would himself admit, “I started at the top and worked my way down.” In 1937, Welles formed the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman, thereby establishing a stable of performers he’d return to again and again in years to come. His Julius Caesar (1937) set in fascist Italy was wildly successful. His sensational Halloween radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds (1938) drew the attention of Hollywood. Welles teamed with writer Herman J. Mankiewicz on the story that would become RKO’s Citizen Kane, which was nominated for nine Oscars and won for Best Original Screenplay. His brilliant second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), was significantly altered while Welles was in South America shooting his third directorial effort, the documentary It’s All True. He directed three movies as a freelancer, with mixed box-office results but great artistry: The Stranger (1946); The Lady from Shanghai (1947), starring his wife at the time, Rita Hayworth; and Macbeth (1948). Welles left for Europe in 1947 and remained there for the majority of the next twenty years, hiring himself out as an actor—most notably in The Third Man (1949)—as a means of financing his own projects. But most of these projects failed to match the director’s vision, either due to editorial interference (Mr. Arkadian, Touch of Evil) or Welles’s self-sabotaging perfectionism (Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind). His last completed work, the cinematic essay F for Fake (1973), turned out to be a final artistic triumph to a newer generation who knew him best as the Paul Masson wine spokesman.
AN EFFECTIVE BIT OF THEATER, that’s all it was. In December 1939 Orson Welles was the toast of Hollywood, a boy genius from New York hard at work on his first masterpiece. John Houseman from Welles’s point of view, was just his producer, along for the ride. For the last hour they’d been at each other’s throats in the private dining room at Chasen’s, surrounded by six members of the Mercury Players who weren’t really sure how to diffuse the situation.
Welles was pretty lit. He’d been drinking since they sat down and getting more and more agitated, but he wasn’t a violent man. He simply wanted nothing more to do with Houseman. And soon enough, Houseman also wanted little to do with Welles. Then, thunk.
A flaming can of Sterno flew past Houseman’s head (wide left), struck the wall, and landed on the carpet. Houseman turned toward Welles. Thunk. Another Sterno, wide right this time—and now the curtains were on fire.
The argument had been concerning some developments earlier in the day: RKO president George Schaefer had informed the Mercury players that, in less than two weeks, they would no longer receive salaries from the studio. The original deal Welles had signed (the famous nobody-ever-gets-this-kind-of-freedom-and-nobody-ever-will-again Citizen Kane deal) stipulated that he complete the first of his three pictures by January 1, 1940. Now it was almost Christmas, 1939, and Welles still didn’t have anything ready to shoot.
Despite such dire straits, Welles assured everyone he would continue paying them with income from the Mercury’s weekly radio show. But Houseman knew the money wasn’t there. And he knew Welles knew it. That’s when things blew up.
The tension between Welles and Houseman had been building for some time. (This would prove to be something of a pattern between Welles and his collaborators.) Though he and Houseman had been successful partners for years—first on the WPA productions, then with the Mercury Theater—their dynamic shifted after War of the Worlds. If you asked Welles, it was a matter of jealousy. Houseman had become more of an employee than a collaborator and he resented it. If you asked Houseman, the problem was ego—Welles’s ego. He’d bought into the hype about his genius, at the cost of his creative integrity. As his cowriter on Citizen Kane Herman Mankiewicz would say of him, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” Welles was also drinking excessively—one or two bottles of either brandy or whiskey a day—and his sexual dalliances were running him even more ragged.
In later years, when asked why he threw the Sterno, Welles claimed it was a calculated move. He couldn’t just fire Houseman—Welles was in a delicate position with the Mercury players as it was, and didn’t want to appear disloyal. Better to make Houseman quit. Which is exactly what happened. Three days after the fight, Houseman sent Welles a letter of resignation and returned to New York. But within a few months, Houseman was back in the fold. Welles needed someone to keep Mankiewicz sober while Mank hammered away on the first draft of Kane. By offering the job to Houseman, Welles could appear both gracious and loyal, while avoiding any substantive contact with his once-trusted producer.
* * *
Welles was also drinking excessively—one or two bottles of either brandy or whiskey a day—and his sexual dalliances were running him even more ragged.
* * *
Houseman had the last laugh, though. He and Mankiewicz spent the next three months together writing, and at some point the Chasen’s incident was mentioned. Of course, Mankiewicz felt he just had to put that into the script; it became Kane’s furniture-smashing fit, the scene after his wife walks out on him. Ironically, many consider it Welles’s finest performance in the film—but he scarcely had to act at all.
ANNA MAY WONG
1905–1961
ACTRESS
“Whatever you’re about to ask, it’s not true.”
The first Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong was a vocal critic of Hollywood’s portrayal of Asian characters. Raised in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles, Wong dropped out of high school to pursue an acting career. Critically praised for her lead role in The Toll of the Sea (1922), she rose to prominence after appearing in Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924). Wong quickly developed a level of craft that Hollywood was unprepared to accommodate. Frustrated by repeated typecasting, Wong left for Europe in 1928. Her performance in Piccadilly (1929)—her last silent picture and a British production—is regarded as one of her finest. But the lure of top billing and more challenging roles led her back to Hollywood to sign with Paramount in 1930. Her high point within the studio system was Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), opposite Marlene Dietrich. (Onscreen chemistry between the two led to rumors of a lesbian relationship.) But institutional racism—MGM considered her “too Chinese to play Chinese”—kept her from moving beyond supporting-player status. Wong’s biggest disappointment came in 1935 when the Chinese lead in The Good Earth—a part she’d longed to play—was given to German actress Luise Rainer. The following year, Wong embarked on an extended tour of China, during which she wrote dispatches for a number of American newspapers. She rarely acted in the years that followed, devoting herself instead to promotion of the Chinese struggle against Japan.
IN EUROPE, THEY HAD a word for Chinese-American Anna May Wong: superstar. In America, specifically her hometown of Los Angeles, they had dozens of words—but most of them had only four letters.
To be fair, these vulgarians were hardly alone. From 1882 to 1943, Federal Law forbade the Chi
nese from emigrating to or entering the United States—ever. In fact, any Chinese-American citizen could be stopped by police just for “looking Chinese” and made to show their passport. In effect, these Chinese-Americans were stuck with either hating the Chinese or hating the Americans—neither of which could have felt very good.
As for Anna May Wong, she started drinking.
A third-generation Chinese-American, her family had been in the United States since the Civil War era. But such a pedigree changed nothing. She was forbidden by law from owning land, from working in the public sector, and even from testifying in court. It was also illegal for her to kiss a white man, much less on screen—a restriction that severely hampered her career.
* * *
Returning home, Wong grew even more outspoken and fearless—and, not surprisingly, began to drink even more. She drifted in and out of film, never losing her elegance and grace.
* * *
Wong was a fairly successful actress in Hollywood but was always passed over, even for female leads written as Chinese (in favor of, say, Myrna Loy). This, because of the kissing issue. Instead, Wong got pigeonholed in stereotypical roles that offended Chinese audiences, most of whom weren’t sure what to make of her modern, Americanized image in the first place—after all, she did the Charleston.
Over time, much of her community would feel Wong had betrayed her roots and pandered to her oppressors by accepting racist film roles. (A few of her character names: China Mary, Lotus Flower, Mongol Slave, and Zahrat.) When she visited China for the first time, she was met at the dock by a protester chanting down with the “stooge who disgraces China.” Others reportedly tried to block her boat from docking.
At this point, Anna May Wong started drinking more.
Hated by many and disallowed by law from doing her job to the best of her ability, she decided to take an extended trip to Germany in 1928; she immediately became a media sensation. This was partially due, no doubt, to her choice of party-circuit companion: Marlene Dietrich, “the busiest and most passionate bisexual in theatrical Berlin.” One particular snapshot of the two, by famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, shows Wong pouring liquor into Dietrich’s mouth, neatly capturing in a single frame everything that made her a beloved European superstar: her beauty, her wit, her fearlessness, not to mention her fashion sense.
Returning home, Wong grew even more outspoken and fearless—and, not surprisingly, began to drink even more. She drifted in and out of the world of film, never losing her elegance and grace. By the 1950s, when she could finally fully display her talents without fear of an FBI raid, Wong could no longer do so—she was already suffering from liver disease. This, the result of too many years doing the only thing U.S. law allowed her to do freely.
DRAGON’S DEN
510 LOS ANGELES ST.
IN 1935, WITH THE Depression crippling his family’s Chinatown antique shop, twenty-nine-year-old Eddy See asked himself a very basic question: What is the one thing people will continue to spend money on, no matter how poor they may be? The answer, he decided, was food. And so, in 1935, See converted the basement of the store, F. Suie One, into one of Los Angeles’s first family-style Chinese restaurants. At a time when all Chinese cuisine was condescendingly called chop suey, Dragon’s Den served up authentic, inexpensive dishes that, though now de rigueur, were considered novel, even exotic: almond duck, sweet-and-sour pork, egg foo yong, fried shrimp. The cost of an entire six-course meal? As little as fifty cents.
Capitalizing on his connections to the Asian American art world (the antique shop had a tiny gallery in its mezzanine), See enlisted Tyrus Wong and Benji Okubo to decorate the space, which was a basement in every sense of the word, complete with exposed beams and pipes. On the inside walls they painted murals of Buddha, the Eight Immortals, and a warrior fighting a dragon; on the outside, the restaurant’s name, in both Chinese and English. With its bohemian aesthetic, Dragon’s Den attracted scores of Hollywood set and costume designers (who already frequented F. Suie One for props and wardrobe), as well as actors Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, the Marx Brothers, Walt Disney, and of course, the Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong.
Though Wong was almost universally despised in Chinatown, See adored her; they discovered they were kindred spirits. Their favorite pastime was telling each other jokes. Decades later, writer Lisa See could still remember her grandfather’s favorite. “One day, a fisherman throws out his line,” Wong began. “He catches a beautiful mermaid with long blonde hair. He reels her in. The fisherman picks her up, examines every detail of her gorgeous face and body, and then unceremoniously tosses her back in to the sea. His friend, having observed all of this silently, looks at the fisherman in shock.”
“Why?” the friend finally asks.
The first fisherman’s response: “How?”
The Dragon’s Den only lasted through World War II, but the influence of its style and menu remain visible in every Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. And the antique shop? It moved to Pasadena, where it remains open; now owned by Lisa See and her cousin Leslee Long.
Part Three
POSTWAR ERA
1946–1959
“If the Hollywood Party was excessive, it was only because Hollywood had always been excessive, a speeded-up, larger-than-life reflection of the American way.”
—BUDD SCHULBERG, screenwriter
HUMPHREY BOGART
1899–1957
ACTOR
“The whole world is about three drinks behind.”
Humphrey Bogart is best known for his onscreen persona—a brooding, cynical, self-reliant antihero; see private detectives Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946) and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) or nightclub owner Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942). Bogart came up through New York theater—first as an office hand, then as a stage manager—before transitioning to acting. He went to Hollywood after the 1929 stock market crash, but initially found film roles bland and dissatisfying. Bogart played murderer Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest on Broadway in 1934 and reprised the role for Warner Brothers in 1936, sparking an early career as a heavy in B-movie gangster pictures. He worked like crazy, appearing in twenty-eight movies over the next four years. He was cast as the lead in High Sierra (1941), written by John Huston, which finally established him as a top-tier star. He went on to appear in six films Huston directed, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947), Key Largo (1948), and The African Queen (1951). Casablanca garnered the first of Bogart’s three Best Actor Oscar nominations. He won for The African Queen and was nominated a final time for The Caine Mutiny (1954). Bogart’s last words, “I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.”
IT WASN’T A JOKE, but it damn well should have been. Certainly it began like one: So Humphrey Bogart walks into a bar with two stuffed pandas. Bogart was, by then—September 1949—the biggest movie star in the world, and he was out in New York with an old drinking buddy named Bill Seeman. They’d been carousing since early, the two of them and Bogey’s wife, Lauren Bacall, but she’d gone back to the hotel hours ago.
After Mrs. Bogart left, the men found themselves in need of a stand-in that might scare off would-be home wreckers and drunks. Somehow it emerged that a nearby delicatessen sold a historically random nonfood item, as delicatessens have a way of doing: stuffed pandas. Not just any stuffed pandas, mind you. Each of these weighed in at more than twenty pounds, and set you back twenty-five bucks a pop. Perfect.
Bogart and Seeman bought a couple and hopped a cab to El Morocco, where they requested a table for four: two seats for them, two for their dates. They were seated, and that was supposed to be the end of it: getting seated with two pandas. Unfortunately for Bogart, the real end would take four days to arrive, and it wouldn’t be over drinks with his friends—it’d be in court.
Here’s the thing: Bogart was a gregarious man with a keen sense of humor, but he was only comfortable among friends—and his
social circle was tight-knit. The Rat Pack, later so closely associated with Frank Sinatra, was in fact Bogart’s creation, with Bogart at the center. The mission of the group, Bogart said, was the “relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence.” Bacall was a member, of course. So was Sinatra. Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, talent agent Irving Lazar, writer Nathaniel Benchley (son of Bogart’s old friend Robert Benchley)—they were all part of the original Holmby Hills Rat Pack. You might see them out at Romanoff’s or on rare occasions in Las Vegas, drinking and carrying on, but if you weren’t part of the Pack, you were an outsider and you weren’t welcome.
* * *
After Mrs. Bogart left, the men found themselves in need of a stand-in that might scare off would-be home wreckers and drunks. Somehow it emerged that a nearby delicatessen sold a historically random non-food item, as delicatessens have a way of doing—stuffed pandas.
* * *
Which brings us back to the pandas. If you were to spy Bogart at a nightclub in the wee hours of the morning, propping up an oversized stuffed animal, you might think that it was a not-so-subtle message about the company he preferred to keep. And if you knew anything about Bogart—which you might, since he was more or less the biggest star in the world—you wouldn’t consider yourself in on the joke. But a young model named Robin Roberts thought she was special—as young models often do. She approached Bogart’s table on her way out, laughed, and picked up one of the pandas. And Bogart, given the number of drinks he had put away by this point, happened to be feeling very protective of this panda. So he naturally pulled the panda close to him and told Ms. Roberts to leave him alone, for he was a married man. And then the woman fell over. She said he shoved her. He said she lost her balance. Four days later, he was in a Manhattan courtroom facing legal action.