You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age

by Wagner, Robert J

  Dave’s forte onstage was silence. He didn’t speak, but became known for something called the “Idiot’s Salute,” which began with the sudden raising of both arms to his chin, as if to fend off a punch. As Frank Capra described it: “Then a sudden expression change from mock fright to the widest-eyed, most open-mouthed gargoylish smile ever seen on any face, followed by the right hand—fingers spread wide and palm toward viewer—crossed in front of his fixed idiot’s smile like a slowly opening fan.”

  Dave was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and came to America when he was still a toddler. He even appeared in a couple of movies in the early days of sound—Rain or Shine and Old Man Rhythm.

  When things slowed up in his acting career, Dave opened Chasen’s in 1936 with the financial backing of Harold Ross of The New Yorker. Ross’s investment was three thousand dollars, and he was going strictly on the fact that he liked Chasen and had fond memories of the meals that Chasen had prepared for friends back in New York.

  Chasen’s started out as a glorified barbecue joint—the original name was Chasen’s Southern Pit Barbecue—located on Beverly Boulevard, near Doheny. At this point Chasen’s had six tables, a counter that seated eight, and a bar that sat six. The chili was twenty-five cents a bowl, the ribs thirty-five cents.

  As soon as word got around, everybody who had known Dave, or eaten his food back east, began beating down the door. Within a year, Chasen’s Southern Pit Barbecue had been transformed into a full-service restaurant. The menu underwent a serious expansion to more than thirty items, and Dave added a room with a couple of dozen tables. The staff grew from a total of three to dozens.

  The mood at Chasen’s was never particularly glamorous, but it was comfortable, clubby. Dave had very specific ways of doing things. For instance, Chasen’s was the first restaurant I knew to have crushed ice in the urinals.

  The regulars included W. C. Fields, Gene Fowler, Frank Capra, Nunnally Johnson, and, somewhat later, yours truly. Chasen’s was my favorite restaurant from the time I was seven years old, when my father took me there shortly after we arrived in town. I loved the environment: dark wood, red leather booths, the pictures of celebrities on the walls. Then there were Pepe the bartender and Pierre the maître d’, who made me feel part of the Chasen’s family.

  But mostly there was Dave and Maude Chasen. Dave was a small man, very energetic, and he had some of the comic’s intrinsic manner—very upbeat, always with a joke—but he wasn’t overbearing about it, as so many comics are.

  Both he and Maude were attentive hosts who would walk around greeting the customers, and not just the celebrities. Their attitude was that if you had the good sense to eat at Chasen’s, then you were as much a celebrity as any of the stars. That said, there were no walk-ins; you had to have a reservation. And Dave absolutely forbade autograph hunters, photographers, and gossip columnists. That’s one of the reasons the patrons felt so relaxed—there was no possibility of saying or doing anything that would get in the papers.

  Sometimes people would get up and do impromptu routines. Ray Bolger might perform one of his glorious eccentric dances, or Jimmy Cagney might sing a song entirely in Yiddish—he was fluent. Dave’s best friend was probably Billy Grady, an old vaudeville chum who became head of casting at MGM, and therefore a very important personage. Grady had a special booth and was there most nights.

  If Dave loved you, the restaurant was yours. When Dorothy Lamour was pregnant, she complained to Dave that she wasn’t comfortable at Table 12 anymore, so he had a portion of the table sawed away to make room for her expanding stomach.

  For Jimmy Stewart’s bachelor party, Dave hired a valet to shadow Jimmy throughout the night. The valet fed him, wiped his chin, escorted him to the bathroom, and, for all I know, raised and lowered his zipper for him. Two midgets dressed in diapers were served on a silver platter. Bob Hope once rode a horse through the restaurant—I’ll bet it was on a dare—and the character actor Charlie Butterworth once drove his Fiat into the place.

  Dave once told me that Chasen’s invented the Shirley Temple. It seems that Shirley and her parents were eating there when the little star got restless because her parents were drinking and she wanted to drink, too. The bartender threw together some grenadine, ginger ale, and some fruit, and served it to Fox’s biggest star. Voilà!

  The good life and good people at Chasen’s. From left, Billy Grady, head of talent at MGM; Gloria Stewart; Jimmy Stewart; and Dave and Maude Chasen.

  Getty Images

  By the time I was going to Chasen’s regularly, Dave had added a sauna and a barber at the rear of the place, and there was also a Ping-Pong table—Clark Gable and Gary Cooper were regular players, as were W. C. Fields and Gregory La Cava. There was also a steam room on the second floor, and the men’s room was furnished with reading lamps so that you could pass the time with the newspapers and magazines while you were answering nature’s call.

  By that time, the barbecue, which had always been Dave’s special passion, had also been relegated to the rear of the building. But the food! Chasen’s became famous for its legendary chili, but there was also Dave’s hobo steak, which was cooked between inch-thick slabs of salt. Dave told me that he had learned the recipe from another comic in his vaudeville days, who had gotten the recipe from an actual hobo, which is why Dave called it the hobo steak. And then there was the cheese toast, and the fresh seafood served on pyramids of ice, and great desserts—strawberry shortcake, wonderful apple pie. And I particularly remember the banana shortcake with chocolate sauce.

  When Dave died in 1973, Jimmy Stewart was on location, but he left the movie and came back to Los Angeles to deliver the eulogy. Frankly, anybody who knew Dave would have done the same. After Dave’s death, Maude kept the restaurant going for a long time, but eventually it got too hard to keep it up. When the place finally closed in 1995, a friend of mine bought the picture of me that Dave had kept in his office, and gave it to me.

  I still have that picture. That, and my memories of Dave, Maude, their wonderful food, and, most important, their friendship.

  Along with Chasen’s, Natalie’s and my favorite restaurant was La Scala, which was run by Jean Leon, who got the seed money from a tip given him by Frank Sinatra. Jean ran a superb eating establishment, but his real passion was wine—his ambition was to have his own vineyard, which he eventually realized. Not surprisingly, Jean’s wine was as good as his food. As with Chasen’s, La Scala was a no-press zone; there were never any stories in the paper about who had eaten there the night before.

  Jean proved his friendship for me a hundred times, not just emotionally, but financially. When jobs were scarce and I was having trouble making ends meet, Jean ran a tab and carried me. Years later, when my life and career had both turned around, Natalie and I invested in a new venture of Jean’s, Au Petit Jean, along with the director George Stevens—a good man, if a trifle remote. Au Petit Jean was successful for a while, and then it wasn’t. Finally, it closed. But as far as I’m concerned, Jean Leon was much more than a great restaurateur; he was a great friend.

  Restaurateurs David Chasen and Mike Romanoff with Humphrey Bogart during a Christmas Eve party at Bogart’s house in Beverly Hills.

  Getty Images

  Another legendary restaurant was in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. The hotel itself opened in 1921, on the site of a dairy farm on top of a small hill. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot else on Wilshire. The hotel’s original purpose was as an all-inclusive winter resort for Eastern and Midwestern families who wanted to escape the cold, much like the Breakers in Palm Beach, which opened a few years later. The resort had more than twenty acres, and featured riding trails, golf courses, and views of the mountains and of the ocean. The Ambassador had a great clientele, because Hollywood didn’t really have another first-class hotel until late in the 1920s. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Winston Churchill all stayed there.

  W
ithin the Ambassador was the famous Cocoanut Grove, which seated a thousand and was decorated with artificial palm trees supposedly recycled from the set of Valentino’s movie The Sheik. The story goes that the Grove had a maître d’ named Jimmy Manos, who was a friend of Valentino’s, which enabled the Grove to get the palms for little more than the cost of trucking them away. Over the years the place added papier-mâché coconuts and toy monkeys whose eyes lit up.

  It sounds like an outlandish urban legend, but it’s tragically true. The first time I went to the Grove, I spent most of the evening craning my neck looking at the monkeys.

  It seemed to be a stylish idea at the time.

  For the generation just before mine, the Grove was a key site—Mack Sennett discovered Bing Crosby while he was performing there, and Joan Crawford won so many of its dance contests that she became the unofficial Charleston champion of Hollywood.

  The chef at the Grove, Henri, was French. He was heavy on local ingredients like avocados, grapefruit, and asparagus, as well as abalone, sand dabs, and little California oysters, which you could order either raw or cooked. The hotel became a familiar setting in the movies; you can glimpse it in the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born, and the Art Deco entrance appears in the Jean Harlow film Bombshell.

  The odd thing is that, for all the fame of the Cocoanut Grove itself, the Ambassador Hotel was never all that financially successful. In the 1950s Paul Williams was hired to do a makeover, and the irony was that Williams, who had designed a lot of fine homes in Beverly Hills and Bel Air—not to mention the Beverly Hills Hotel—would probably not have been able to get a room there because he was African American.

  Virginia Bruce, Cliff Edwards, Clarence Brown, Nancy Dover, and their party ring in the new year at the Cocoanut Grove in LA.

  Bettmann/CORBIS

  The 1964 movie The Best Man, with Henry Fonda, has quite a few scenes photographed at the Ambassador, notably the lobby and other public areas. The good times for the hotel permanently ended when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in its kitchen in 1968. The Ambassador, and the Grove, limped on until the hotel finally closed in 1989. It stood derelict for years, the roof of its ballroom sagging under the weight of leaks and its lush gardens becoming wild. Eventually the place was demolished.

  A hotel that has had a considerably luckier life is the Chateau Marmont, off Sunset Boulevard. The Norman-inspired Chateau opened in 1927 at the height of the era of Hollywood excess, and it’s still there, bearing the slightly worn aura of the place where Jean Harlow honeymooned with cameraman Hal Rosson, where the young Howard Hughes entertained his ladies before moving over to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  For Europeans who had come to Hollywood in the wake of war, the culinary scene was grim. When the Viennese Paul Henreid arrived in 1940, he observed that “there was terrible food, with one or two exceptions”—those being Romanoff’s, Perino’s, and Chasen’s. “That was about it. Those were the three places you could go and get a decent meal.”

  Perino’s, which opened on Wilshire Boulevard, was spawned by people who had worked at Victor Hugo. It was more than just upscale—it was swanky. Alexander Perino was the kind of guy who trained other restaurateurs—he once claimed that eighteen Los Angeles restaurants had been created by his protégés, and it’s certainly possible.

  Perino’s didn’t subscribe to any of the gimmicks that some of the other restaurants did. The mood was conservative and the service was excellent—not by the standards of Hollywood, but by the standards of Paris or London. You wore your best to Perino’s—not just clothes, but jewelry as well—because it wasn’t the sort of place where you ordered a hamburger. Alex imported twenty-four-inch-square linen napkins from Ireland, and had a rigid ratio of one waiter for every eight diners to ensure a high level of service.

  At Perino’s the bill of fare included dishes like salmon in aspic and tangerine soufflé. As Paul Henreid observed: “They would have something that was then unheard of, like a crêpe filled with lobster or with crab.” Perino’s served a lot of Italian dishes—some pretty fancy, such as polenta or gnocchi—and lots of fresh fish, especially Dover sole and sand dabs. Alex insisted on homemade brown stock and fresh tomato puree for even a basic Bolognese sauce. Oddly for an Italian gentleman, Alex wouldn’t cook with garlic, which he detested. And he wouldn’t refrigerate his tomatoes, because he believed it destroyed their flavor.

  The ultra-upscale Perino’s restaurant.

  It was a very chic restaurant, strictly white-glove, and was favored by business types and political movers and shakers—Los Angeles people more than Hollywood people. Frankly, Perino’s was always a bit snobbish for me, but then, it didn’t really cater to the movie crowd the way, for instance, Chasen’s did.

  Alex sold the restaurant in 1969, and it kept going for a number of years before closing in the late 1980s, as so many of the once great LA restaurants did. We shot at least one episode of Hart to Hart there, and I don’t know if we would have been able to do that while Alex was running the place; while he tolerated movie people, whom he probably regarded as nouveau riche, he might not have wanted an actual film crew in his restaurant.

  I don’t know if the Players would be considered a great restaurant, but it was certainly a great experience. The Players was owned and run by Preston Sturges, the great writer-director of such flamboyant farces as The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Opened in 1940, it became very popular during the war years. The Players was an old wedding chapel at 8225 Sunset, slightly west of the Chateau Marmont. Sturges converted the chapel at great expense into a three-level entertainment and dining complex. The idea was that you could have a fine meal, then go downstairs and take in a play. When the play ended, Sturges could push a button and the floor leveled out to become a supper club with an orchestra on a revolving stage.

  A lot of the actors who starred in Sturges’s movies went there, as well as Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Willy and Talli Wyler, and—when he was in Hollywood working on a script for Howard Hawks—William Faulkner. Sturges was there most nights holding court, and sometimes Howard Hughes would join him.

  The exterior facade of The Players restaurant. To the right is the Chateau Marmont.

  Sturges ran the place like an indulgent uncle. There was a barber shop on the mezzanine level, and if he felt like entertaining some of his close friends, he would close the place for a private party without warning.

  The food was excellent. The menu included some French dishes, turkey croquettes, and canapés, and a lot of drinks that Sturges named himself, although he reputedly drank only old-fashioneds.

  Sturges comped his friends, and was always coming up with inventions that were expensive and of dubious worth—like tables that swiveled out to provide easy access. He once made plans to build a helicopter pad in the parking lot so that he could take delivery of fish that were still flopping, but the neighbors protested, and it never happened.

  In his quiet moments Sturges may have silently counted out how much it was costing him every week to run the place, but since he was Preston Sturges—a profligate personality if ever there was one—I doubt it. However brilliant, he was erratic and a terrible businessman. He poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Players until the IRS took it over in 1953.

  As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the Hollywood dining experience on the whole became far more sophisticated. And after the war, as stars began venturing out from Hollywood toward independent production, Europe was no longer just a place for vacations. It followed that Hollywood restaurants began to adopt what their patrons found palatable in countries overseas.

  I remember Scandia with particular affection, because the food was so tasty. Scandia was on Sunset Boulevard from the time it opened in 1946, and it kept going until 1989. Early on Scandia cooked primarily brasserie food, more than slightly Germanic—pot roast, brisket, stuffed cabbage, boil
ed beef with horseradish sauce. Peter Lorre was there every Saturday, and other regulars included Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, and Marilyn Monroe.

  Over the years the menu evolved and began featuring more sophisticated dishes, including a gravlax appetizer that had a spectacular mustard dill sauce. Kenneth Hansen, who was the chef and ran the place, would make occasional trips to Scandinavia and bring back new recipes. He also arranged for seafood from the North Atlantic to be flown in year-round.

  A couple uses binoculars to read a distant wall menu at Scandia restaurant.

  Time + Life Pictures/Getty Images

  Christmas was a special time at Scandia, as Ken would offer authentic Norwegian holiday foods—notably roast goose stuffed with apples and prunes. Actually, it was almost always a special time at Scandia. Ken reserved the bar there, the Viking’s Club, for his favorite customers, or just important ones. And yes, I was there a fair amount of the time. Sometimes at the Viking’s Club people would hit the aquavit just a little too hard and fall off their bar stools. Literally.

  I also frequented a place called the Cock ’n Bull, which was just down the street from Scandia, and where the best customer was probably Jack Webb. The Cock ’n Bull had a terrific Sunday brunch that was a big deal and hard to get into. The Moscow Mule was invented there: ginger beer, vodka, and lime in a copper mug. Terrific restaurant, good drink. Jack Webb was a good man with a bottle, but he wisely steered clear of the Moscow Mule in favor of scotch.