And the reality is that celebrities have to take it. Suing only gives the vipers the publicity they want and further incites the hungry hordes. As far as the celebrities are concerned, what starts out as suspicion can easily turn into hostility. In the twenty-first century, you are guilty until proven innocent, and for a lot of people you can never be proven innocent.
Let me illustrate: In May 1946, David Niven and his wife Primmie went to a party at Tyrone Power’s house. Among the other guests were Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer, Patricia Medina, and Richard Greene. After dinner they all took part in a hide-and-seek game called Sardines, which was played in the dark.
There was the sound of a door opening, and then a terrible, descending thud. Ty Power turned the lights on. Primmie Niven had mistaken the basement door for the bathroom door and taken a terrible fall down steps she hadn’t realized were there. The fall was twenty feet, and she took it headfirst. She died two days later.
David and Primmie were a beloved part of Hollywood’s English colony. The tragedy wasn’t hushed up, but it didn’t become common currency, either. David was devastated, but eventually remarried, a woman named Hjördis. The successes or failures of that marriage are irrelevant to the point I’m making, but let me say that I don’t believe David was ever happy after that. He covered up his grief as gracefully as any man could have, but he was, deep down, broken-hearted.
Now, imagine that same accident happening in 2013. The gossip Web sites would go into overdrive. The tabloids would imply all manner of illicit goings-on at the party, and make inferences of an unhappy marriage leading to . . . murder—despite the fact that David was such a gentle soul that he would rescue bugs that had flown into his swimming pool.
But none of that would matter. The suspicions would be on page one, and the case being closed would be on page forty-eight—if it was printed at all. David and his sons would be hunted by video paparazzi every time they stepped out of their house. Proper grieving would be impossible. A terrible tragedy would be made even more traumatic. And it would never go away. Not really.
I shudder when I think about what David had to go through, but at least he had the small consolation of not having had his personal tragedy used for cheap media heroin.
From the time I was a young man about town and through my marriage to Natalie, I went to the store like a normal person. I mostly did my own shopping and bought my own groceries. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I think about it now, when I see videos of stores opening up after hours so an actress can buy some clothes. I don’t remember any of the stars I knew having to do things like that back then.
Well, maybe one. When Natalie was seeing Elvis Presley, he would rent out an entire theater in Memphis to watch a movie. I always resisted affectations like that, because I wanted my kids to have as normal an environment as possible, and I think that kind of isolation can easily have very bad consequences.
I can honestly say that the only time going out in public became a problem was when we would take the kids to Disneyland. Then things could get pretty claustrophobic.
Today going to Disneyland would simply be impossible. Even going to the store like a normal person is something that’s been taken away. Cameras and cell phones are ubiquitous.
Even when they’re in New Orleans, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have to bring security with them wherever they go. That strikes me as a very heavy price to pay for the benefits of celebrity. Among other things, you can no longer watch people, because they’re all watching you. I think that can smother a young actor.
Of course, these days, that’s the least of an actor’s concerns.
The nightlife of Hollywood was slow to blossom for two reasons. First, the town was created as a haven for teetotalers. If that wasn’t bad enough, along came Prohibition. It didn’t stop movie people from drinking, but it did put a crimp in the ancillary businesses.
What happened in the early days of the movies was that nightclubs and bars simply opened outside the city limits of Hollywood in small towns like Vernon, Venice, or Culver City. Venice offered a place called the Three O’Clock Ballroom—named after closing time—that offered public dancing.
If you’ve ever seen Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, you might remember that the first musical number in the film takes place at a dive called Coffee Dan’s. This was a huge in-joke, because there actually was a Coffee Dan’s in downtown Los Angeles. It was in an alley on Hill, between Seventh and Eighth, and you entered the place by sliding down a chute into the subterranean recesses of a place that was designed to look like a Paris boîte, complete with Apache dancers. There was jazz, and I can’t imagine there wasn’t booze, too.
A lot of these places were run by a man named Baron Long—a great name for a bootlegger—who was the same man who’d dreamed up Agua Caliente. Long was originally a boxing promoter who put on matches in Vernon, which also had a bar owned by a promoter, Jack Doyle. It wasn’t long before Vernon became the go-to place for people in the movie colony who wanted to eat, drink, and make merry—or Mary.
The legend goes that Southern California first heard jazz at the Vernon Country Club, where Paul Whiteman played the violin. “Vernon Country Club” sounds lofty, but it was nothing but a glorified roadhouse situated among beet fields.
From the alcohol intake around Hollywood, you never would have known it was Prohibition during those years. In downtown Los Angeles there were a couple of fashionable places serving what I was told was excellent-quality bootleg alcohol. Among them were Al Levy’s Café and Mike Lyman’s Sunset Inn, the latter of which was near the ocean in Pacific Palisades, right around the corner from where I lived for twenty-five years.
There were about twenty speakeasies within the bounds of Hollywood proper in the twenties, which doesn’t even take into account the independent operators who ran around the studios procuring a bottle or two for certain actors, writers, and directors. Louis B. Mayer’s favorite bootlegger was Frankie Orsatti, who was the brother of the baseball player Ernie Orsatti. Frank became a major agent around town long after his bootlegging days were over. (The movie industry was a blue-collar trade for several generations, and I leave it up to you to decide who made better movies—the tough guys who talked out of the side of their mouths, or the college boys.)
I heard tell of a Frenchman named Maurice who was a caterer by profession but who offered a lot more than pigs in a blanket. Along Hollywood Boulevard were two bookstores catty-corner across from each other: Stanley Rose and Larry Edmunds. The writers patronized them en masse, so Rose and Edmunds kept them supplied with booze. (Larry Edmunds’s shop is still there, a block or so away from where it used to be, the last bookstore of what used to be a thriving ten or so around Hollywood Boulevard. But don’t get your hopes up—all they sell now is books and movie stills.) The major bootlegger of this period is said to have been one Tony Cornero, who could supply gin, bourbon, and grappa. For scotch and rum, the pickings were slimmer, because they’re harder to make.
Baron Long also owned the Sunset Inn, which was just below the bluffs of Santa Monica and was hugely popular for its dancing contests. Abe Lyman played there; Harold Lloyd and Bebe Daniels, his costar and girlfriend, were always winning the dancing trophies.
Baron Long also introduced what would become a primary building block of Hollywood restaurants: art direction. He built the Ship Café in Venice, a floating Spanish galleon that also served as a hotel. The waiters were outfitted as sixteenth-century naval officers. If you could afford a drink, they’d pour you one, Prohibition be damned.
The Ship Café underwent several name and management changes over the years, but it hung on until shortly after World War II. By that time Prohibition was long gone, and the novelty restaurants had shifted much closer to Hollywood.
However much Hollywood had to offer in terms of entertainment, it had only a handful of really good restaurants. With few exceptions Los Angeles didn’t b
ecome a great restaurant town until after World War II. A great restaurant, which is to say a restaurant where the experience is equal to the food, is a lot like theater: you have to establish a mood, and you hope to attract some players who will set off the experience with a certain dramatic power.
When Hollywood was being settled, the people who were living in the Spanish Revival houses generally kept to simple fare when dining out. Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks favored Musso & Frank on Hollywood Boulevard, which was founded in 1919. By the 1930s Musso’s had become the unofficial headquarters for the writers in town, and you’d find William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nathanael West there when they were in town trying to make some money so they could afford to write their novels. Amazingly, it is still in business, a block or two from its original site, but with much the same menu that it had ninety years ago—steak and fish, superbly prepared.
Chaplin financed a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard a block or two from Musso’s called Henry’s, where he was a regular customer. It was run by Henry Bergman, a bald, round member of the Chaplin stock company who served as a sort of court jester for the comedian. Henry’s was long gone by the time I got into the business—for that matter, so was Henry Bergman, who had died a few years earlier—but a surviving copy of its menu shows that Chaplin’s culinary taste was basic. That wasn’t unusual—even a place as well known as the Brown Derby could be classified as home style, specializing in comfort foods like meat loaf and corned beef hash.
Another interesting restaurant—a minor legend, in fact—was Victor Hugo, which was originally on Hill Street downtown but later moved to Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. Victor Hugo was an all-you-can-eat place and, like all such establishments, was heavy on carbohydrates. For a dollar fifty your lunch consisted of a selection drawn from enchiladas, goulash, spaghetti, glazed tongue, salads, rolls, eggs, chicken à la king, or ravioli. Dessert consisted of French pastries and strawberry cakes. Dinner would run as much as five dollars—a lot of money for a meal in those days, and enough to keep the tourists out.
In 1937 Lucius Beebe, who wrote sniffy stories for the slick magazines, published a piece for Scribner’s Magazine in which he described the restaurant manners of Hollywood folk as appalling. He took particular exception to the habit of placing telephones at the tables, which was the height of chic for about twenty years. He found it ostentatious, which it was. On the other hand, decisions regarding the expenditure of millions of dollars couldn’t always wait. These days, kids think nothing of answering their cell phones at dinner to talk about nothing at all.
And that will be one of the few you-kids-get-off-my-lawn remarks that I will make in this book.
Another thing Beebe objected to was serving each member of a party individually, for the convenience of late arrivals. Serving a late arrival his appetizer while another member of the party might already be working on his entrée seems to me a commonsense arrangement for a working town where very few people punched a nine-to-five clock.
But Beebe was right about one thing: service was predicated on your social standing. The more important you were, or the better friend you were of the proprietor, the better your table and the more attentive the service. Although I suspect that that was also a way to keep tourists out.
Most of the restaurants of that era were centered on Hollywood Boulevard, because that’s where most of the studios were. Famous Players–Lasky, soon to change its name to Paramount, was on Vine Street; Warner Bros. was down on Sunset. Of the large studios, only Goldwyn was an outlier, far away in Culver City.
But there was more to the Hollywood dining experience than the meal itself; part of it was simply being seen, and usually on the studio’s dime. Most of the Hollywood restaurants allowed a handful of photographers to snap shots of the elite dining. It was good for the restaurant and it was thought to be good for the stars, although having flashbulbs pop in your face when you’d really rather be eating was the sort of minor irritant that was part of the job.
One of the forgotten names of Old Hollywood is Eddie Brandstatter, who ran several nightclubs around town. In 1922 he opened the Café Montmartre on Hollywood Boulevard. The Montmartre was on the second floor of a building down the street from Musso & Frank and held 350 patrons in a luxurious environment that was unusual for that period. Brandstatter had outfitted it with chandeliers from Czechoslovakia, Belgian carpets, and what was advertised as 2,400 pounds of sterling silver.
During the silent days, it was the place to go; Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, and Marion Davies all ate there regularly. When luminaries such as Winston Churchill and Prince George of England came to Hollywood, they were taken to the Montmartre as a matter of course.
It was at the Montmartre where the practice of people hovering outside the front door for autographs first became popular—a practice that still goes on today at popular nightspots around town. The Montmartre closed in 1929, reopened, then closed again. Those years in the 1920s were its height.
Eddie Brandstatter moved on and opened several new places, one right next door to the Montmartre. This was the Embassy Club, which opened in 1930 and was a private establishment limited to three hundred members who were meant to be, and apparently were, the crème de la crème of Hollywood society.
The Embassy’s board of directors included Marion Davies, Norma Talmadge, Constance Talmadge, John Gilbert, King Vidor, and Sid Grauman. A blend of Byzantine and Spanish styles, the club was designed by Carl Jules Weyl, who became an art director at Warner Bros. The main feature was a glass-enclosed rooftop lounge that offered a great view of the Hollywood Hills.
The only problem was that the Embassy Club was so exclusive that it couldn’t make any money and went bankrupt. A few years later Brandstatter opened another club, this time on Hollywood right near Vine. It was called Sardi’s, not to be confused with the famous theatrical Sardi’s in New York.
The Hollywood Sardi’s was designed by Rudolph Schindler in a stylish Moderne. Schindler first came to Los Angeles to supervise the construction of the Hollyhock House for Frank Lloyd Wright. After that commission was completed, he stayed and became a leading architectural modernist, probably most famous for his own house on Kings Road.
As at the Montmartre, dinner was served at Sardi’s, but the emphasis was on lunch—noiseless wagons full of hors d’oeuvres were pushed around the tables, the way dim sum is today.
For a time restaurants in Hollywood had a way of looking like movie sets, in the spirit of Baron Long’s Ship Café. The Brown Derby was shaped like a huge hat. Its cofounder Wilson Mizner was a wit and occasional screenwriter. His brother, Addison, was the architect who brought the Mediterranean Revival style, so popular in Southern California, to the East Coast, specifically Florida. Both of the Mizner brothers were rogues, and supposedly Addison had to get out of Florida after being implicated in a land swindle. It was only a short hop from there to writing scripts in Hollywood.
The story goes that one night at the Ambassador Hotel, Herbert Somborn, who had just divorced Gloria Swanson and was flush with alimony, was sitting with Mizner and Sid Grauman. Mizner casually observed that the area was not exactly filled to the brim with fine eating establishments, and ventured that if someone actually managed to provide good food, “people would probably come to eat it out of a hat.” Another version says that Mizner modeled the place after the headgear worn by the two men he most admired: Bat Masterson and Alfred E. Smith.
Maybe.
What everybody does agree on was Jack Warner’s accurate assessment of the problem: there was no “really first-class restaurant where actors of lofty eminence could dine in relative privacy.”
Actually, Jack Warner didn’t talk like that—he never used a phrase like “lofty eminence” in his life. Jack Warner’s press agents talked like that. Whoever said it, the opinion behind the sentence was true.
The land for the Derby came from Somborn,
who had invested some of his Swanson settlement on property across from the Ambassador Hotel. Wilson Mizner supplied the decorating, while the atmosphere, and the money, I believe, came from Jack Warner.
The original Brown Derby, at 3427 Wilshire Boulevard, was a hit from the day it opened in 1926—partly because the food was good, and partly because it stayed open till four a.m. Drunks, insomniacs, and night owls could always find somebody to talk to there, even if it was only a bartender. Somborn had an eye for the ladies and made sure to hire very attractive waitresses—I was told that some of the girls who waited tables early on came from the Ziegfeld Follies.
The Derby held only a hundred people and wasn’t really much to look at. Booths ran along the walls, and above each one hung a light fixture in the shape of a brown derby.
The exterior facade of the Brown Derby on Wilshire.
Superstock/Everett Collection
Wilson Mizner hung out in Booth 50 for the next seven years, until his death. He became legendary for insulting the people who hired him. “You were sixty years old before you knew what a bathtub was,” was one bomb he dropped on a producer. Once, when Douglas Fairbanks complained that his table was tilted, Mizner retorted, “How can you expect anything in Hollywood to be on the level?”
The regulars at Mizner’s booth included Darryl Zanuck, W. C. Fields, John Barrymore, Anita Loos, and a phalanx of lesser screenwriters. Mizner thought anybody who hired him had to be a sucker, and the fact that they kept hiring him only proved it.
The Derby became such a touchstone for the town’s fashionable that Darryl Zanuck once said, “If you make a bad picture it’s very doubtful that you’ll get a good table at the Brown Derby.” But everybody makes a bad picture now and then, and in any case the front booth at the Hollywood Derby was always reserved for studio heads: Harry Cohn, Jack or Harry Warner, and, yes, Zanuck.
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age Page 15