Ciro’s was less of a spectacular dining experience than it was a place to be seen, and it remained that way for the duration of its existence. Billy Wilkerson wasn’t there very long; he had a low threshold of boredom and bailed out after a couple of years, but Ciro’s lived on. It was at Ciro’s that I saw Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers—the best nightclub act I have ever seen in my life. Andy Williams was more than good by himself, but with his brothers, Dick, Bob, and Don, he was great. I miss Andy—he was a good friend.
Abbe Lane outside of Ciro’s nightclub.
Michael Ochs Archives/CORBIS
In that era most nightclub acts were basically static; the performer stood at the microphone or sat at the piano, and that was that. But Kay and the Williams Brothers were in constant motion, which was made possible by a series of overhead microphones. Their chemistry was palpable, and the act was precisely staged and choreographed by Robert Alton, who had worked with Thompson at MGM.
Then there was the Mocambo, which was a few doors down from the Trocadero on the Sunset Strip. The Trocadero had a great view of the low-lying area south of the Strip, but the Mocambo, which opened at 8588 Sunset on January 3, 1941, had that and a little bit extra besides. Its décor was commonly described as a cross between a somewhat decadent Imperial Rome, Salvador Dalí, and a birdcage.
The swanky Mocambo nightclub on the Sunset Strip in June 1951. The table in the center hosts a dinner party thrown by gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
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The color scheme was soft blue, terra-cotta, and silver, and along the walls were paintings by Jane Berlandina, as well as huge tin flowers. The columns were a flaming red—that sounds like Dalí—covered with paintings of harlequins. As for the birdcage, that referred to a long glass aviary that was alive with dozens of brilliantly colored parrots and macaws. To my knowledge, it was the only public aviary in Los Angeles, and it attracted a lot of attention, although initially local animal lovers petitioned to have the birds protected from all the nightclub noise. Charlie Morrison, one of the owners, agreed to install thick curtains around the aviary during the day so the birds could get some rest. The Mocambo, along with Ciro’s, was one of the premier nightspots for twenty years—a very long run in a transient business.
A pretty girl excited for a fun night at the Mocambo.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In all the first-class Sunset Boulevard nightclubs, jackets and ties were required for the men, and slacks weren’t allowed for women. Likewise, unescorted men and women were discouraged, probably to minimize the presence of hustlers. Which is not to say that nothing untoward went on. A lot of women would arrive with a bevy of male escorts, and often one man would enter with several women. They would then split up, and it was every man and woman for him- or herself.
The Mocambo had a bandleader named Emil, who would always strike up “That Old Black Magic” whenever Bogart and Bacall walked in. Interestingly these clubs were integrated long before the rest of America, at least as far as the entertainment went. Hazel Scott played the Mocambo for years, as did the Nat King Cole Trio.
The heyday of the Trocadero—at 8610 Sunset or, as Billy Wilkerson’s ads had it, “Boulevard de Sunset”—was in the thirties and forties. When I started going there in the 1950s, it was still a special place, as were all of the fabled clubs on that part of the strip.
Certainly, it was full of special people. Everybody went to the Troc, from moguls like Sam Goldwyn and his wife, to the invariably unattached Joe Schenck, to directors like William Wellman and stars like Bing Crosby and William Powell. Marlene Dietrich was a regular, as was Louis B. Mayer, who liked to go dancing there in the interim between divorcing his first wife—a pleasant, slightly dull woman he had married in Boston decades before—and marrying his second—the glamorous widow of a William Morris agent.
The Troc was one of the few clubs where Fred Astaire would be seen. Fred didn’t go out much, because his wife Phyllis was shy and didn’t like what Satchel Paige referred to as “the social ramble.” Since Fred adored Phyllis, he was perfectly happy to stay close to home. Avoiding nightclubs was also a good way of avoiding the women who would beg Fred to dance with them. Just as mail carriers aren’t enthusiastic about taking walks on their days off, Fred didn’t particularly care for social dancing.
The Trocadero certainly didn’t look like much from the outside, but Harold Grieve successfully converted the interior into a stylish French café, and in keeping with the décor, the menu was French as well.
The walls were painted cream, and there was a touch of gold in the molding and the striped silk chairs. Many people in the industry believed that the Troc kicked off Hollywood’s great period of off-screen glamour.
A rare shot of Mr. and Mrs. Astaire, photographed along with Robert Montgomery, during an evening meal at the Trocadero.
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I remember that one of the highlights of the place was a wall-size mural of Paris as glimpsed from the Sacré-Coeur. In front of the mural there was a real railing on which rested a pot of fresh flowers. The illusion, especially in dim light, was quite lovely.
The Trocadero was expensive—drinks began at sixty cents and went all the way up to a dollar fifty for something called the French 75 (which sounds like a condom). The house special was the Trocadero Cooler, which cost seventy-five cents. (For context, two filet mignons at the Cocoanut Grove would set you back $14.50 in 1937 dollars, or not much less than the average weekly paycheck.)
Billy Wilkerson had a showman’s knack for innovation. Sundays were traditionally a dead night in the nightclub business in Hollywood, because people had to be at work early on Monday morning. So Billy started what amounted to an open-mike night, where young talent could perform. The result was that Sunday night at the Troc ultimately became nearly as popular as Saturday, as movers and shakers began to feel obliged to attend, lest some other studio sign a brilliant young comic or dancer.
The Trocadero was enormously influential, and other clubs tried to get in on its success by opening on or around Sunset Boulevard. At the height of the Sunset Strip—just before, during, and after World War II—Mocambo, the Trocadero, La Rue, and the Crillon were all within a few blocks of one another; if you went to one, chances are you’d go to a couple of others for a drink or a nightcap.
Although they presented some of the same acts, these clubs were not really analogous to the nightclub culture of New York City. They had a different clientele, and I found them more personalized than the clubs of New York. Mainly, they seemed less formal. On the Strip you could just drop in after dinner to catch a wonderful act; most of the places had a cover charge, but it was often waived for celebrities.
There were, of course, clubs that offered more than a meal and conventional entertainment. On Harold Way was a place called Club Mont-Aire, which offered pleasures of the fleshly variety. Several doors away from the Mont-Aire was a house run by one of Hollywood’s legendary madams, a lady—I have been assured by several of her loyal customers that she was, in fact, a lady—named Brenda Allen, whose outfit was finally closed down by the vice squad in 1948.
Radio had become increasingly important to the local economy in the early 1930s, and both NBC and CBS built large radio studios within a few hundred yards of each other. NBC was at the intersection of Sunset and Vine, and CBS was on Sunset east of Vine.
The hundreds of people who worked for the two companies meant that there was a surge of restaurants around the area. The Brown Derby was already there, but it wasn’t long before it was joined by Sardi’s, the Coco Tree Café, Mike Lyman’s, La Conga, and a couple of fast-food drive-ins.
Of all the restaurants that opened around World War II, I remember Romanoff’s most fondly. It was run, of course, by the man who called himself Prince Michael Romanoff. Everybody knew that he wasn’t really “a cousin of the late Czar,” as he
liked to proclaim (though not too insistently), but nobody seemed too sure about who he really was. Apparently Mike Romanoff was actually Harry Gerguson, the son of a Cincinnati tailor, although the mystery of his origins persists to this day. In any other town but Hollywood, that sort of impersonation would be considered reprehensible, if not actionable, but in Hollywood it’s called . . . acting.
Mike was such a charismatic man! The story went that he enlisted Harry Crocker, a very well-connected friend of Charlie Chaplin’s and a columnist for the Hearst papers, to finagle seventy-five hundred dollars each from a bunch of movie people as seed money for a restaurant. Among the investors were Robert Benchley, Cary Grant, Darryl Zanuck, and John Hay Whitney, the latter of whom had also bankrolled Selznick International. Supposedly, Jack Warner also put up some money, and Jack and Darryl were not exactly bosom buddies.
By the time I met Mike in the late 1940s, he was a prince of the realm—impeccably trimmed mustache, with spats and a cane. He lived in hotels, he borrowed money from everybody, usually paid it back, and was incredibly charming. Despite his name, he didn’t attempt a fake Russian accent but actually spoke in a vague mid-Atlantic one that might have been an attempt at stage British. As a nobleman, Mike was a total fraud, but he acted as if he believed it. We all played along.
Mike Romanoff in front of his eponymous restaurant.
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Mike opened Romanoff’s in 1941, at North Rodeo Drive, and by 1945 Life magazine had called him “the most wonderful liar in 20th-century U.S.” Someone else would have sued, but Mike just smiled, and the customers kept coming, so much so that in 1951 he had to move to larger quarters at 240 South Rodeo Drive.
For Romanoff’s décor Mike put on the imperial pretensions befitting a man known to his friends as “The Emperor.” The place had a roof garden, a ballroom, a small private dining room, and the large dining room, which held twenty-four booths. The wallpaper was orange, green, and yellow. There were no secluded corners, and the entry had a short flight of stairs, situated so that everybody in the dining room could see who was coming in. Or, to put it another way, everybody coming into the dining room could make an entrance.
As you walked in, the first seven booths on the left were reserved. One was for the proprietor, who also favored his own food but seemed to prefer to eat alone, accompanied only by his two large dogs, Socrates and Confucius, whom I recall as being large bulldogs.
If Mike liked you, or if you were a regular, you could hang around as long as you wanted. You could play gin rummy, some backgammon, or just talk. Mike put a premium on familiar faces, and if he didn’t like you or if you were unfamiliar, you didn’t have to do much to get kicked out. The place of honor was usually occupied by Humphrey Bogart—second booth on the left, as marked by a plaque, which also carried the names of Robert Benchley, Herbert Marshall, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and a few others who were allowed to use it. Other Romanoff regulars were Jack Benny, Frank Sinatra, and Gary Cooper. Dinner regulars were Louis B. Mayer, Darryl Zanuck, and Harry Cohn.
Frank Sinatra was one of Romanoff’s biggest fans—Frank liked to eat, and he had very good taste in food. The problem was that all those years of singing in nightclubs meant that Frank liked to eat at odd hours. He couldn’t sing on a full stomach, so he got used to dining after his shows, very late at night. This would have been awkward for other people, except that other people tended to calibrate their clocks around Frank. When he was in the mood, Frank was also an excellent cook—mostly Italian. Frank would cook fine meals for special friends, and I had a lot of meals at his house with Spencer Tracy.
Another Romanoff’s regular was Charles Feldman. Hollywood was the home of great characters, and I don’t mean great character actors. I mean people who really made the town work but who were not public in any sense—people who preferred to work quietly, out of the eye of publicity.
Dean Martin, Prince Mike Romanoff, and Frank Sinatra having a good time.
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Agents, for example.
The cliché image of agents as cigar-chomping clods has an element of truth to it, but the broader truth was considerably more varied. Charles Feldman, known as the Jewish Clark Gable because he had the same hairstyle and mustache as Clark, happened to be my own agent. He was an elegant, dapper, unruffled man who always gave the impression that he had the upper hand in whatever negotiation he was engaged in—because he always did have the upper hand. He was also a gentleman who was reputed to have never won a game of gin yet never complained when he lost. A lot of Charlie’s business was done over a table at Romanoff’s. That way, even if the deal didn’t work out, he was at least assured of a good meal.
The legendary Hollywood agent Charles Feldman.
Courtesy of Cathy Phillips
Feldman was a hugely influential man in the history of Hollywood, but also one who has been underappreciated, because he preferred to work behind the scenes. I believe that Charlie invented what came to be known as the package deal. In the mid-thirties he realized that the problem with agenting was that you were effectively like a child raising its hand hoping that the teacher—the studio head—would call on you and hire your client. The balance of power was tipped entirely to the side of the studio head.
Feldman reasoned that the agents had to create some leverage for themselves, which he did by creating jobs for clients. He would take one of his own writers and have him develop either an original or adapted screenplay, for which Charlie would front the money himself. He would then cast the project with a couple of his own actors and finish off the package with one of his own directors. He would present the entire package to a studio, which could buy it at a hefty profit for Charlie but for less than it would have cost the studio to produce it themselves if it had to hire all the talents individually.
Because this took most of the work off the backs of the studios and the resulting picture would represent something of a bargain, a lot of studios went for the deal. And since Charlie had a premier group of clients—including John Wayne, Howard Hawks, Irene Dunne, Marlene Dietrich, and so forth—he could mix and match them in various enticing combinations. It was Charlie who put together Red River with Hawks and Wayne, for instance, although his name never appeared on the screen. The screenwriters for that independently made picture were also his clients, and Charlie even helped round up the money for it. Ditto A Streetcar Named Desire, although he took a producer’s credit on that one.
By the time Charlie sold his agency in 1962, he was grossing around twelve million dollars a year. He produced a few more pictures and died, far too young, in 1968.
Charlie and the rest of the town liked Romanoff’s because the food was special, often excellent. Mike flew in sole, and I remember an excellent charcoal-broiled steak for two, which was sliced and came with a very fine mustard sauce.
Mike specialized in French cuisine—he prepared a wonderful bouillabaisse, and a saddle of lamb as well. I also remember the steak tartare, the cracked crab, and the wonderful vegetables. Dessert was not for the faint of heart, or for anybody whose belt was on its first hole: cherries jubilee, crêpes suzette, and the house specialty: individual chocolate soufflés. Mike’s banana shortcake was famous, and it deserved to be.
Mike was a great bon vivant. He always called me “The Cad,” which has kept me laughing for more than sixty years. Mike’s only real problem was that the expansion to South Rodeo became a challenge. The restaurant was simply too big—a lot of the time it looked underpopulated. Another problem was that Hollywood was, and is, always in flux—new people are always displacing the old, and those new folks want places of their own.
Romanoff’s began to seem slightly old and musty, and Mike only made things worse by allowing his politics a place in the restaurant, actually distributing Republican campaign literature to his patrons. I don’t care what your politics are, no one wants to be harangued over a meal.
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The final nail in the coffin came when Mike opened a satellite restaurant in Palm Springs, ominously called Romanoff’s on the Rocks. I was there for the opening of the new venture, along with Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Van Heusen, the songwriter whose real name was Chester Babcock and who was Frank’s role model. Jimmy was a total original and an extremely funny man. He once called a bunch of apartments in a New York skyscraper and asked them to all put their lights on at an appointed hour. When they did, the name “JIMMY” was spelled out. Like I said, an original.
The restaurant was called Romanoff’s on the Rocks because it was literally built into the rocks by Highway 111, just before you got to La Quinta. Mike gave the new place a lavish publicity send-off, but it failed. And that wasn’t the worst of it: on New Year’s Day 1962, he closed his signature restaurant on Rodeo Drive.
A day or so later Billy Wilder called Kurt, Romanoff’s longtime maître d’, and offered to support him in building his own restaurant, backed up by a group of other regulars—Jack Benny, Otto Preminger, and Jack Warner. Kurt opened the Bistro on Canon Drive, which thrived for years, and where he also served the individual chocolate soufflés.
So Romanoff’s lived on, after a fashion. Unfortunately, Mike didn’t. When his time came, Mike was in the hospital, being attended by his wife Gloria. Some doctors entered his room, looked at his charts, felt his pulse, mumbled something vague, and left. After they were gone, Mike said, “Chicken fuckers, all of them.” He turned to Gloria and said, “Not you, my darling.” And then he died.
Great last words.
I loved Romanoff’s, and I loved Mike, but for me, judged strictly by the food, Chasen’s was the best.
Why? Because Dave Chasen and his wife ran that place like a Swiss clock. Dave Chasen had been a vaudevillian, a dancer, a show business professional. His high point had probably been working as second banana to Joe Cook in Fine and Dandy in 1930, the first Broadway musical hit to have a score written by a woman, Kay Swift.
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