Also in that neighborhood was a place called Alan Dale’s, which was known for carrying actors on the cuff during thin times, including one named Wagner. Alan was a special man, especially to me.
Ken sold Scandia in 1978, and it closed eleven years later. His timing was excellent, because the great years of Scandia corresponded to the period when the town got more adventurous with its dining. During that time people were open not only to experimentation, but even to gimmicks. That hunger for novelty led to places like Bit of Sweden, which was on Sunset near Doheny and introduced the smorgasbord to Southern California, and Don the Beachcomber’s, founded by a guy whose name wasn’t Don and who wasn’t a beachcomber.
Ernest Raymond Beaumont-Gantt liked to serve rum drinks at a bar in a Hollywood hotel and somehow became known as Don the Beachcomber. He opened the first glorified tiki bar/restaurant in 1937, on McCadden Place in the heart of Hollywood. He actually changed his name legally to Don the Beachcomber.
Don’s was a totally stage-managed environment, a bunch of cozy little rooms united by concept and by craft. Regularly scheduled artificial rainstorms would make an appropriately romantic sound on the corrugated iron roof. The artificiality extended to the outside. Don’s was surrounded by a lush stand of bamboo and was accordingly hard to find, unless you knew to look for a miniature bamboo forest; even the signage was tough to read.
The place was a riot of Polynesian kitsch—palm trees, coconuts, shells, carved wooden gods, sharks’ teeth. There was also a shop that sold rum and leis. The tables were made out of varnished woods and were arranged in such a way that you felt you were on a secluded little island. The rooms meandered and had names such as the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Cannibal Room.
Every so often there would be a bunch of bananas hanging off a pole, and if you wanted one you could simply pluck it and eat it. Needless to say, the illumination was dim, mostly by candles, which made—in the worst case—every woman look mysterious or—in the best case—beautiful.
Don had been a bartender, and a bartender he remained, devising rum drinks that would knock you on your ass. The most lethal concoction I remember was something called the Zombie, invented for a customer who was nursing a vicious hangover and who’d begged Don for some hair of the dog. Don took one ounce apiece from six different rums, combined them with what he claimed were secret ingredients, and poured it all into a tall, slender glass.
The next time the customer came in, Don inquired as to the effectiveness of the drink, and the man said he had no idea—“It made a zombie of me.” From then on, any customer requesting the Zombie was limited to two, and I have no idea how anyone could drink that many.
Other drinks that Don invented were the Vicious Virgin, the Never Say Die, the Cobra’s Fang, the Shark’s Tooth, and the Pi Yi, which was served in a miniature pineapple. The food that Don served was a variation on Chinese, exotically so, a far cry from what was offered by the chop suey joints that constituted Chinese food at the time. Don used ingredients like oyster sauce and water chestnuts, and the first time I had Mandarin duck was at his restaurant.
Don’s desserts were in line with his entrées. He became famous for something he called a Snow Cake, which I recall being a mound of shaved ice covered with pieces of fresh pineapple and candied kumquats.
Don the Beachcomber’s broadened the palate of the movie colony considerably, and it was such a hit that it became a small chain. The maître d’ in the Hollywood restaurant, Roy Bradley, later ran the Palm Springs Don’s, and the chain expanded as far east as Chicago. The original place was torn down in 1987, long after the vogue for Polynesian-themed restaurants had vanished.
I have a very special connection to Don the Beachcomber’s, one that probably only another actor could appreciate. In 1949 I made my first film, The Happy Years, which was directed by William Wellman. Despite his terrible reputation around town—they didn’t call him “Wild Bill” for nothing—he was very kind to an extremely green kid.
When I got the check for my performance—it was for seventy-six dollars—I cashed it and took my parents to dinner at Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood. For my mother, who had always believed in me and my ambitions to be an actor, that dinner was a confirmation of her instincts about her only son; for my father, who thought my aspirations were crazy, the dinner was a marker that maybe he had been wrong, and that maybe his kid’s instincts deserved some respect.
So, you see, there are very good reasons why I still remember the Mandarin duck. And, God help me, the Zombie.
I had that check framed and mounted on Natalie’s and my boat. After the tragedy, I put everything from the boat into storage, until the Northridge earthquake destroyed the storage facility. Gone, all gone.
Several long-lasting restaurants started out at about the same time as the Players, including La Rue, which had several reasons for its popularity:
The food was considered quite good.
If you showed up there, you’d probably get a mention in the Hollywood Reporter.
The reason was that Billy Wilkerson owned the restaurant, and was usually found at Table 1. Billy plugged the place relentlessly in the pages of his not exactly objective trade paper.
I’ve mentioned earlier that Billy owned both Ciro’s and the Trocadero. Deeply self-destructive, he had a habit of selling out successful enterprises for no good reason other than that he was bored with them. The gamble was in designing and opening the operation; once it was successful, Billy would lose interest and move on to another high-stakes risk.
One of his earliest projects had been the Vendôme, at 6666 Sunset, just across the street from the Reporter’s offices. He opened the place in May 1933, which took some courage—the Depression was at its worst. The Vendôme was supposed to be a gourmet grocery and specialty store—supplies from Fortnum & Mason for the English colony, Westphalian hams, caviar, that sort of thing. But in order to maximize the number of customers who came through the door, Wilkerson decided to serve lunch as well, and the Vendôme quickly became nearly as important a spot as the Brown Derby. The lunch crowd at Vendôme might feature Mae West, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, perhaps Marlene Dietrich. It was at Vendôme that Louella Parsons nabbed what she always regarded as the greatest scoop of her career—when Mary Pickford told her she was divorcing Douglas Fairbanks.
After the Trocadero opened in 1934, Billy had the wind at his back. He opened Ciro’s in 1940 and then, in 1945, La Rue, with a chef who had run the Italian Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Despite the provenance of its head chef, La Rue was mostly French, or at least French in style—one of La Rue’s specialties was spaghetti served in a large silver tureen. It was especially popular for its Tournedos La Rue, made with white truffles, which I remember with some affection.
Bogart liked La Rue, and the first booth was informally called Bogart’s Booth; the booths were golden leather. There were two huge chandeliers hanging over the dining room. Supposedly, cleaning their crystals was such a difficult task that it had to be performed by specialists from San Francisco.
For all of Billy’s love of suave surroundings, he himself was a workaholic, and in such constant motion that he rarely had time for a good meal. Left to his own devices, he would eat canned sardines on toast or deviled egg sandwiches. Women were possessions, and I was told he preferred his French poodles to any of his five wives—by no means an unusual conclusion for men who have five wives.
Billy was a moving target—the only property he ever really held on to was the Hollywood Reporter—and he sold off La Rue only five years after opening it. The place kept going until 1969.
Billy had two reasons for going into the nightclub business. One was his firm belief that most Hollywood dining places were “pedestrian.” They lacked glamour, and they lacked sophistication. (Billy was a habitué of Paris and its pleasures.)
And the other reason was that restaurants and nightcl
ubs deal mostly in cash, and Billy needed a lot of cash, for Billy was a gambler. All of his activities, from running the Hollywood Reporter to his restaurants, were essentially sideshows compared to his gambling.
Typically, he’d cram all of his work into the mornings and head for the racetrack in the afternoon. Most days, he’d gamble at Hollywood Park, but there were also regular visits to Santa Anita. He carried a pair of dice in his pocket, and a deck of cards was always nearby. If Billy was at a restaurant, he’d roll the dice to determine who picked up the check, and on Fridays he would take the company payroll and stake it all at the track.
Billy was a regular at the private poker games that were held weekly at either Sam Goldwyn’s or Joe Schenck’s house, where only very high rollers were allowed, for the simple reason that the chips cost twenty thousand dollars apiece. (Other players were Jack Warner, Carl Laemmle Jr., and David Selznick.)
How bad was Billy? In 1936, he borrowed seventy-five thousand dollars from Joe Schenck to convert a small hotel on the French Riviera into a casino. Two weeks later, he phoned Schenck and told him he had blown all the money at the casino at Monte Carlo within days of his arrival.
Most years, his gambling losses would average around a hundred fifty thousand dollars, but in the first six months of 1944, he hit a cold streak during which he lost almost a million dollars. Business bills went unpaid, and vendors began shipping material to Billy COD. During one particularly dicey period, Billy wasn’t able to pay his losses at the poker games at Schenck’s or Goldwyn’s. His response was to barter advertising for his gambling debts.
Billy survived only because of the generosity of his friends, and the cash flow provided by his restaurants. Between Ciro’s, The Trocadero, La Rue, and the Hollywood Reporter, Billy grossed about a million dollars a year. After expenses, he was left with about a quarter million dollars. A normal human being could have lived quite nicely within that, even allowing for bad runs at the track or the casinos, but Billy was not a normal human being.
Finally Joe Schenck told him that if he was going to gamble that kind of money, he had to own the casino. Joe Schenck’s words struck a chord, and Billy began planning the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. He eventually get euchred out of it by Bugsy Siegel and the mob, but the original impetus behind the Flamingo was Billy’s.
At one time or another, Billy also owned the Sunset House and L’Aiglon. He also supposedly installed illegal gambling at Arrowhead Springs. They were all landmarks of their time, yet Billy Wilkerson, one of the great characters who circled the movie business for forty years, is almost forgotten today.
All these restaurants were famous to one degree or another, but I also think with fondness about a couple of places that haven’t been much written about—the Tam O’Shanter, for instance, which is still in the Los Feliz district, where it was built in 1922 by the great art director Harry Oliver (who designed the original Seventh Heaven) as a fairy-tale Norman inn. The interior is a series of fairly small rooms, some with roaring fireplaces and walls decorated with tartans and family crests. It’s another example of the restaurant as movie set, and all the better for it.
The Tam was one of Walt Disney’s favorite restaurants, probably because it was close to his studio, and Disney was too much of a workaholic to travel long distances for a good meal. The Tam has always served good food, and it’s now the oldest restaurant in Los Angeles in its original location.
Then there’s the Smoke House, built across the street from Warner Bros. in 1946. It’s Tudor Revival in style, but the interior is all red leather and heavy timbers—a very masculine atmosphere. Because of its proximity to Warner, the Smoke House has always been popular within the industry and has been the site of wrap parties for several generations. Today George Clooney has a plaque on his favorite booth, just as Bogart did at Romanoff’s.
The Café Swiss on North Rodeo Drive was a pleasant and mostly casual place, popular with the émigré community because it had a European feel—the proprietors were Fred and Laura Hug, both Swiss—as well as a strong musical orientation. It became one of the hangouts for the town’s composers and arrangers.
Joe Marino, a pianist who worked at both Paramount and MGM and was Kay Thompson’s accompanist, played the piano most nights, and a lot of his pals were regulars. Said pals included Johnny Mercer, Harry Warren, Ned Washington, Conrad Salinger, Sammy Cahn, Kay Thompson herself, and Jimmy Van Heusen. Joe was a good friend for a lot of years.
I always enjoyed eating on the patio there, especially for lunch. In the 1950s Gable went there a lot, usually alone, eating a corned beef sandwich while reading the paper. Walter Winchell liked the place as well. In later years, Jack Lemmon, the great German director Fritz Lang, and Natalie and I were all there a fair amount of the time.
The food at the Café Swiss had a foot in both Continental and American camps. You could get a great veal cordon bleu there, or just a solid sandwich. Fred Hug ran the kitchen for more than thirty years, until he died; Laura kept the place going for a few more years, but the Café Swiss finally closed in 1985.
There were other Mitteleuropa places—the Hofbrau Gardens on Sunset near Vine for years featured a ceiling covered with tree branches and birdhouses and strung with lights, so you could imagine you were in a Bavarian beer garden.
A little further down the scale was the Tick Tock, which was located on North Cahuenga for more than fifty years. Technically, it was called the Tick Tock Tea Room, and it was well known for serving big portions at modest prices. If money was tight, you could have lunch at the Tick Tock and you would be able to skip dinner.
The Tick Tock was so named because, when it opened in 1930, owner Arthur Johnson installed an old wall clock. One clock gradually led to others, and by the time the place closed in the late 1980s there were clocks everyplace you looked—dozens and dozens of them.
Another place for the average Joe was Schwab’s Pharmacy, on Sunset Boulevard, right on the edge of the Strip. (Actually, there were six Schwab’s around town, but when people referred to it, they meant the one on Sunset.) You didn’t have to be an out-of-work actor to eat at Schwab’s, although it helped.
Schwab’s served eggs and onions, lox and bagels, as well as steaks. If the Schwab brothers (Leon, Martin, Bernard, and Jack) liked you, you could run a tab. If they really liked you, they’d cash your checks at midnight or make a delivery to Malibu. There was a sign near the counter that read “Coffee 40 cents per cup. Maximum 30 minutes.” Nobody paid any attention to the second half of the sign; people hung around for hours.
Then there was—and is—Nate ’n Al’s, a classic deli that has catered a lot of parties, including a lot of mine. Frank Sinatra would be there occasionally, but mostly the clientele were great Jewish entertainers of an earlier generation: Groucho Marx, George Burns, George Jessel.
Nice people, nice place. But then, you could say that about the town itself.
The 1950s are usually regarded with nostalgia, but for Hollywood it was far from the best of times. There was the Red Scare, which began in the late 1940s and lasted for ten years. There was the competition from television, which helped drop weekly movie attendance from ninety million in 1946 to forty-six million in 1952, with a commensurate drop in profits. At my studio, 20th Century Fox, the profits dropped from $22 million in 1946 to $4.2 million in 1951.
Then there was the order from the Justice Department that forced the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, depriving them of what amounted to a financial floor for their films. The Justice Department wanted to put an end to what it saw as a monopoly and bring about a more open system of production and exhibition. It achieved that goal, as independent producers like the Mirisch brothers and small studios like American International achieved far more success in the 1950s and 1960s than they ever could have before. But this was accompanied by unintended consequences as well—stars turned producers, and the results could be mixed bo
th artistically and financially.
More crucially, the newly spawned independent producers made more and more of their pictures in Europe in order to save money in the face of unionized Hollywood wages. Studio space and personnel in Italian studios were quite inexpensive compared to Hollywood, and the favorable exchange rate made them even more attractive.
If it hadn’t been for television, Hollywood would have become a ghost town by 1960.
All this meant that the studios dropped older, expensive stars in favor of younger, inexpensive ones. Gable left MGM; Ty Power left Fox. Production plummeted. By 1959, the studios that had made forty, fifty, or even sixty pictures each year in the 1930s were now making twenty-three (MGM), eighteen (Warner Bros.), or a bottom-of-the barrel eleven (Universal).
Because there were fewer and fewer pictures being made, there was less and less work. And there was a changing of the guard. Clark Gable died in 1960, Gary Cooper a year later. The great stars who remained, such as Jimmy Stewart and Fred Astaire, went where the work was, so Hollywood gradually began to feel depopulated.
Lots of actors slowly migrated to television as a matter of survival, as did writers and actors and crew. If you hooked on to a successful TV show, you were guaranteed thirty-nine weeks of work a year, which by then was something only top stars could hope to have in the movies.
All this began to have a distinct effect on Hollywood. If the 1930s had been a slow turning away from the vast mansions that the stars and producers of the 1920s had built, that process became even more advanced by the 1950s. Blue jeans replaced tuxedos. James Dean rented a little house in Hollywood to go along with his apartment in New York, and he would have laughed in your face if you had suggested he buy a house in Bel Air.
As the business began shifting, became less about Hollywood and more about other centers of production, I got out of my Fox contract. What ended it for me was when the studio asked me to accept second billing to Elvis Presley in Flaming Star. Colonel Tom Parker made sure that no other actor in a Presley picture got any attention at all, because they had no lines at all. I decided to head for Rome, where a lot of interesting movies were being made.
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age Page 19