by Mark Bailey
THE TROUBADOUR
9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD.
OPEN!
THE PREMIERE SHOWCASE for singer-songwriters of Southern California and beyond during the 1960s and 1970s, the Troubadour has occupied its current three-hundred-capacity theater just south of the Sunset Strip since 1961. Founded by Doug Weston, a towering longhair with Ben Franklin glasses who’d previously worked as a stage manager at the Apollo Theater, it began four years earlier as a humble sixty-five-seat coffeehouse on La Cienega, but with Weston’s stewardship and keen eye for talent, it became a crucial performance space that helped make stars of Bonnie Raitt, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Carole King, the Eagles, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, and Tom Waits (to name but a few).
Elton John, who made his U.S. debut with a six-night stand at the Troubadour (during which he was introduced by Neil Diamond), still considers that engagement the turning point of his career. Comedians, too, have played a pivotal role in the club’s history. Lenny Bruce was first arrested for obscenity at the Troubadour. Richard Pryor recorded his first album there. It’s where Steve Martin and Cheech & Chong were discovered, and where the Smothers Brothers launched their 1974 comeback. (That performance is best remembered for two famous hecklers in the crowd, Harry Nilsson and John Lennon, both of whom were thrown out by security.)
Yet despite the sentimental attachment performers had to the Troubadour, Weston’s allegedly avaricious business practices caused no small degree of resentment. “The Troubadour is a gold mine that’s been mined by everyone else,” Weston once said. And as the club’s international reputation grew—aided in part by the release of live albums by Diamond and Van Morrison—he wanted his cut. The most egregious of his demands was a “return engagement” contract that required acts to continue performing at the Troubadour no matter how popular they’d become—for the same fees they’d always been paid.
Capitalizing on the festering bad blood, a group that included producer Lou Adler and David Geffen opened the Roxy Theatre in 1973, a larger room that targeted the exact shows that had been the Troubadour’s bread and butter. Weston failed to meet the competition head on. By the early 1980s he’d abandoned his previous booking principles—that he would only present artists who had “something to say”—and started catering to the burgeoning heavy-metal scene on the Sunset Strip. (Metallica played their first headlining gig in L.A. at the Troubadour in 1982; four years later, a gig by Guns N’ Roses convinced Geffen to sign the band.)
It was only after Weston partnered with businessman Ed Karayan, who reorganized operations, that the Troubadour started to reclaim some of its previous luster. These days, the club concentrates primarily on emerging artists and established independent acts, though the old guard continues to pop in from time to time. (James Taylor and Carole King, for instance, reenacted their Troubadour debut for a fiftieth-anniversary celebration in 2007.) And though Doug Weston passed away in 1999, a controversial figure to the end, his name still appears on the sign above the door.
ROCK HUDSON
1925–1985
ACTOR
“I love to drink and I hate to exercise. I built a gym in my house and I don’t even like to walk through it.”
Cast on the strength of his looks, Rock Hudson had just one line in his first picture, Fighter Squadron (1948), and needed thirty-eight takes to get it right. But years of extensive training in acting, dancing, singing, fencing, and horseback riding finally paid off with an Oscar nomination in 1956, for Giant. He became a bankable lead in romantic comedies, especially when cast opposite Doris Day: Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964). He would make nine films with Danish-German director—and something of a father figure—Douglas Sirk, melodramas that included Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and The Tarnished Angels (1958). Hudson transitioned into television in the 1970s, starring in the long-running NBC series McMillan & Wife with Susan Saint James. In 1985 Hudson publicly announced he had contracted AIDS—the first major celebrity to do so. Despite residual scandals, his disclosure made the disease a mainstream health issue and had a substantial positive effect on funding for research and treatment.
ROCK HUDSON WAS NERVOUS. Understandably so: the relationship had to be believable. Though he was one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars, he was also considered one of its worst actors, and this role, in George Stevens’s Giant, was his chance to prove everyone wrong. Adding to the pressure, his onscreen rival, James Dean, was a product of the Actor’s Studio in New York, the same school that had produced Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
Fortunately, Hudson’s onscreen wife, Elizabeth Taylor, was a close friend of Clift’s and had some advice for her anxious costar: just add a little Method. If Hudson and Taylor were going to behave like a married couple in front of the camera, they should hang out as much as possible behind it. And in Marfa, Texas, the tiny cattle town in the desert where Giant was being shot, that meant one thing: they’d be drinking together—drinking a lot.
The bulk of the cast and crew were put up at Marfa’s one large hotel, the Paisano (which even today is covered in Giant memorabilia). Apart from the hotel, the town consisted of mostly a half dozen cafés and bars, a grocery store, and a boarded-up movie theater the production was using to screen rushes. Still, Hudson and Taylor found their fun.
One night, when a crazy storm rolled through, they rushed outside with buckets, collecting the falling hail to use in Bloody Marys. Another night, on a whim, they decided to add chocolate liqueur and chocolate syrup to a vodka martini, thus creating—so the legend goes—what both considered the finest cocktail they’d ever tasted, the chocolate martini. Even after the production returned to Los Angeles, they were two peas in a pod. They capped off one drinking session by sampling nachos at a string of Mexican restaurants, then challenged one another to a belching and farting contest. (Taylor won.)
Naturally, all this carrying-on sparked rumors that Taylor and Hudson were an item, which were fueled even further by Taylor’s on-set fights with her visiting husband, Michael Wilding. But Hudson was facing other romantic problems. Publicly, he was dating Phyllis Gates, the secretary of his agent, Henry Willson, and was being pressured on all sides to propose, not the least by Willson himself. Willson had received word that Confidential magazine was wise to Hudson’s homosexuality, even offering $10,000 to two former lovers if they’d be willing to come forward, and knew it was only a matter of time before his top client was outed. To placate the tabloid, Willson had given up the goods on Tab Hunter, who’d recently fired him, but still, when this Giant business was over, he knew the next role Hudson had to sign up for: husband.
On October 3, 1955—days after Jimmy Dean’s death near the end of production on Giant—Life ran a cover story on Hudson entitled “The Simple Life of a Busy Bachelor: Rock Hudson Gets Rich Alone.” In the opening paragraph was this sentence: “Fans are urging twenty-nine-year-old Hudson to get married—or explain why not.” That was it. Willson told Hudson he had one month to marry Gates. They did so on November 9. Giant was released the following year. For his performance as husband (Taylor’s that is), Hudson was nominated as Best Actor.
LEAVE TWO HARD-DRINKING international movie stars, in this case Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, stranded on location (Giant) in far west Texas for weeks on end and here is what you get: pure American kitsch, right down to the Hershey’s chocolate syrup. Over the years, the original recipe (like so many others) has been unnecessarily spruced up, somewhat diluting its unique high desert meets high-society charm. But the truth is, when you mix chocolate in with anything, it’s hard to miss.
CHOCOLATE MARTINI
1 OZ. VODKA
1 OZ. KAHLUA
½ OZ. HERSHEY’S CHOCOLATE SYRUP
½ OZ. HALF AND HALF
1 BAR OF DARK CHOCOLATE
Pour liquid ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake, then strain into a cocktail glass. Garni
sh across the top with shavings from chocolate bar.
Spruced-up Godiva Version:
1½ OZ. VANILLA VODKA
½ OZ. GODIVA DARK CHOCOLATE LIQUEUR
½ OZ. GODIVA WHITE CHOCOLATE LIQUEUR
SPLASH OF HALF AND HALF
1 BAR OF DARK CHOCOLATE
Pour liquid ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake, then strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish across the top with shavings from chocolate bar.
DEAN MARTIN
1917–1995
ACTOR, SINGER, AND COMEDIAN
“You’re not too drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.”
Best known as the straight man in the Martin and Lewis comedy team and a core member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack. A former boxer, steel-mill worker, and croupier, Dean Martin came up as a nightclub singer on the East Coast before teaming with comedian Jerry Lewis in 1946. Their act, with Martin as a straight man whose performances are continually undermined by Lewis, became one of the biggest draws in the country, lasting ten years and earning both men millions. As a solo performer, he won acclaim for his roles in The Young Lions (1958), Some Came Running (1958), and Rio Bravo (1959), the last of which was a wonderful turn as the archetypal drunken cowboy. As a member of the Rat Pack, along with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., he established himself as one of the giants of the Las Vegas casino circuit. He brought his wisecracking drunk persona into millions of homes on a weekly basis with two long-running NBC series, The Dean Martin Show (1965–1974) and The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast (1974–1984). To the end, Martin remained one of the most bankable and beloved stars in show business.
WITH DEAN MARTIN, YOU could never tell. His family and friends held firm that the actor’s public persona—the jovial, unapologetic tippler—was exactly that, a persona. The truth was, they said, that while he liked a drink, it wasn’t a way of life. New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane later observed the same thing: “Martin’s trick was to appear drunk even when he was not, and to look even when he was drunk as if he were only pretending to be drunk and were fully in control of the situation—as, of course, he was, even though drunk.” Sounds like maybe Lane was drunk. The most Martin would admit to was four or five cocktails in a given evening, plus wine. You be the judge.
Still, if the quantity of Martin’s consumption was something of a mystery, the quality of his drinking buddies was not. They were the Rat Pack, probably the most storied collection of debauchers in the history of Hollywood, and Vegas, too—and that’s no small feat. With Sinatra or Davis or Bishop or Lawford at his side, Martin suddenly became the town drunk.
One friend of the Rat Pack who seems to have made a hobby out of testing various pals’ capacity for booze was the indomitable Jackie Gleason. In his autobiography, Jerry Lewis, who considered Gleason “the greatest party animal alive,” describes a contest that took place in 1950 at Manhattan’s legendary Toots Shor’s restaurant. It seems that Gleason had been teasing Martin endlessly about his “wussy drinking,” and on this night Martin had had enough. The two stars decided to go drink for drink, last man standing wins. Immediately, a crowd gathered around. Gleason quickly ordered two Boilermakers. After which, Martin ordered two Pink Ladies—it was meant as a joke, but they drank them. With round one over, the actors decided to raise the stakes to a thousand dollars, which in 1950 was roughly equivalent to ten thousand dollars. The crowd grew even bigger, with gamblers and drunks eager to watch this historic battle unfold. But within minutes, it was over. Who had won?
Nobody. They’d each downed exactly two drinks when retired Major League shortstop Leo Durocher walked into the restaurant with the most beautiful woman on earth. Lewis describes her as having “breasts far out enough to ring her own doorbell.” Immediately, the contest was forgotten.
At night’s end, however, it would be Lewis (not Martin or Gleason) who wound up taking the woman back to his hotel suite. At 4:15 a.m., there was a knock on his door, followed by this exchange:
Martin: “I want sharesies!”
Lewis: “We share sandwiches, makeup, towels, tux ties, but we never share ladies.”
Martin (burp): “Did you ever hear of an amendment?”
Hmm, sounds pretty damn drunk.
NOT AN EASY COCKTAIL to approximate for the simple reason that it is totally absurd. But since the Alaskan Polar Bear Heater belongs to Dean Martin’s one-time comedy partner Jerry Lewis, it’s the best kind of absurdity. As Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor, Lewis’s order is as follows, “Pay attention. Two shots of vodka, a little rum, some bitters, and a smidgen of vinegar … a shot of vermouth, a shot of gin, a little brandy, lemon peel, orange peel, cherry, some more scotch. Now mix it nice, and pour it into a tall glass.”
If the vinegar doesn’t give pause, how about being asked to add more scotch, when there’s no scotch to begin with? What is easier to imagine is the hangover. As a matter of fact, The Nutty Professor goes on to depict one of the best hangover scenes ever portrayed on film. Buddy Love (back as his alter ego, Professor Kelp) arrives to teach a science class. With the sound heightened, his briefcase hits the floor like bricks, a book strikes a desk like a gong. All this, while the professor’s tongue pushes sand around in his mouth. It is painful just watching.
ALASKAN POLAR BEAR HEATER
2 MARASCHINO CHERRIES
2 OZ. VODKA
½ OZ. LIGHT RUM
3 DASHES ANGOSTURA BITTERS
⅛ OZ. WHITE VINEGAR
1 OZ. VERMOUTH
1 OZ. GIN
¼ OZ. BRANDY
LEMON PEEL
ORANGE PEEL
Muddle cherries in the bottom of a mixing glass. Add other ingredients and stir. Pour into a Collins glass filled with ice cubes. Garnish with lemon peel and orange peel.
Though not for the Polar Bear purist, add 1 oz. of orange juice if desired.
LEE MARVIN
1924–1987
ACTOR
“Tequila. Straight. There’s a real polite drink. You keep drinking until you finally take one more and it just won’t go down. Then you know you’ve reached your limit.”
Known for stone-cold badass characters in films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Big Red One (1980), Lee Marvin was named after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, a first cousin (four times removed). He received a Purple Heart as a Scout Sniper in the Marines during World War II and turned to acting when he was no longer able to continue in the military. (And even then, largely by chance: while working as a plumber’s apprentice near a summer-stock playhouse, he asked for an audition on a lark). Marvin would earn a spot in a Broadway production of Billy Budd in 1951 and make his movie debut later that year with You’re in the Navy Now. He landed numerous supporting roles over the next several years, carving out a niche as cinema’s definitive villain. Terrorizing everyone from kids to old ladies, one critic would comment that Marvin was “rapidly becoming the Number 1 sadist of the screen.” It wasn’t until NBC’s M Squad (1957–1960) that he began to broaden his range. After a series of costarring roles with John Wayne (including Liberty Valance), he received top billing for the first time in the 1964 remake of The Killers, and won a Best Actor Oscar the following year for his dual role in Cat Ballou with Jane Fonda. After The Dirty Dozen (1967), he briefly became one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, but his career started to fade in the 1970s as Westerns and World War II pictures proved less profitable.
JUST START DRIVING, he’ll come down. At least, that was the logic. Director John Boorman and his wife, Christel, had just finished dinner with Lee Marvin at Jack’s at the Beach in Santa Monica. Well, that’s not entirely true. It had started as a dinner, but the hour was now 2 a.m.—and Marvin was ripped on martinis. They’d all arrived together in Marvin’s car, which he now insisted on driving, even though Boorman was trying to take away his keys. “Fuck you,” Marvin had said, rearing back, gesturing with an imaginary samurai sword. This was a man who had made twenty-one beach landings in
the South Pacific during WWII. Still, the imaginary sword didn’t prevent anyone from getting into the car. And so Marvin persisted. He felt he was completely capable of driving, and to demonstrate this, he climbed up onto the top of the vehicle like an orangutan and crouched on the luggage rack.
Pity John Boorman, the British filmmaker who was directing his first American feature, Point Blank, with Marvin as the lead. Boorman was as yet untested. He was also rewriting the script on the fly, since Marvin had thrown the original shooting draft, based on the pulp novel The Hunter by Richard Stark, out the window. Locations were being scouted, sets were being designed, and still no one knew exactly what they were filming. Boorman would regularly meet with Marvin at his Malibu beach house to apprise him of his progress. The meetings typically went well—unless Marvin had too much to drink. “Beyond a certain level of vodka,” Boorman would write, “he sailed out on his own into deeper waters where no mortal could follow.”
* * *
Boorman would regularly meet with Marvin at his Malibu beach house to apprise him of his progress. The meetings typically went well—unless Marvin had too much to drink. “Beyond a certain level of vodka,” Boorman said, “he sailed out on his own into deeper waters where no mortal could follow.”
* * *
Indeed, when drunk, Marvin left everyone behind—often even himself. One morning, he arrived home from an all-nighter without his house keys. After ringing the bell, he was greeted at the door by an unfamiliar woman. When he asked what she was doing in his house, she replied, “You sold it to me three months ago.” He had to buy a Star Map to figure out where he currently lived. Prior to Point Blank, Marvin had been in Vegas for production of The Professionals. One night, returning to his hotel after a long day’s shooting in Death Valley, he’d put quarter after quarter into a slot machine he couldn’t get to work—not realizing it was actually a parking meter.