You Must Remember This (25 page)

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.

The famous booths at the Brown Derby.

Photofest

On Valentine’s Day in 1929, the restaurant added a second location, on Vine Street, which became even more popular because it was close to Columbia and Paramount. The Vine Street Derby sat two hundred, and its waitstaff was all male, in pressed uniforms. The booths had low backs, so everybody could see everybody else, which made working the room easier.

For years the Vine Street Derby was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and the elite customers—William Powell, Joan Crawford, Kate Hepburn—sat in booths on the north side of the building, underneath caricatures of them that were originally done by an artist named Eddie Vitch. That delightful custom began in 1933, when Vitch stopped in and offered to draw caricatures
in exchange for food. The manager pointed to a couple of celebrities that happened to be dining, and Vitch quickly captured their essence in a few broad strokes.

After Vitch returned to Europe, the job of drawing the caricatures was taken over by a man known only as Zel. Supposedly, nobody knew his full name. Zel would complete his drawing, the subject would autograph it, and it would be hung on the wall. The caricatures became a barometer of status. Agents would try to have their clients’ pictures hung next to legends like Gable and Cooper; occasionally the drawings had to be rearranged because marriages broke up.

The value of those pieces would be staggering today.

I’d say the restaurant got the best of that particular exchange.

The Derby eventually became a central part of Hollywood life. Wallace Beery ate there all the time, usually ordering the corned beef hash, with sponge cake drenched in ketchup (!) for dessert. Joe E. Brown liked the hash, too. Tom Mix always ordered the bouillabaisse.

The Vine Street Derby was also designed by Carl Weyl, who went on to be a success in the movies, too, winning Oscars for art directing
The Adventures of Robin Hood
and
Casablanca
. In fact, in the latter Weyl gave Bogart an office above Rick’s Café that looked a lot like Bob Cobb’s office in the Brown Derby.

Bob Cobb was a presence at the restaurant for what seemed like forever, from the late 1920s to his death in 1970. Cobb was a Montana man who wore cowboy boots when he was in the mood, but the rest of the time was impeccably outfitted. (Bob never lost his affinity for cowboys; one of his closest friends was Tom Mix, and Bob always said that he was the last person to hear from Mix before his fatal car accident in 1940. “Coming home,” cabled Mix. “Meet you at the Derby.”)

That said, informality extended only so far with Bob. Although the Derby was basically a steakhouse, proprieties were observed—not only were the waiters well turned out, but the patrons wore ties. (There were exceptions; I’ve seen a photo of Charlie Chaplin eating at the Derby without a tie, but then he was Charlie Chaplin. I never saw anybody without a tie in the restaurant itself, at least not while Bob was alive.)

In the beginning Bob was just the manager, but when Somborn died in 1934, just a few months after Wilson Mizner passed away, Bob took over the operation and made it an even greater success. He spent his life at the Derby, and he welcomed people of a similar commitment. The maître d’ was Bill Chilias, who reigned at the Hollywood Derby from 1929 to 1955, and a jack of all trades was Benny Massi, who was there on opening day and stayed for the next forty-six years.

A maître d’ at a major Hollywood restaurant has to have the diplomatic skills of a secretary of state; Bill always made sure that everybody had reservations, and he also made sure that the best booths were held for the best customers. Being a maître d’ at a major Hollywood restaurant is also a lucrative business; Bill would make thousands of dollars in tips at Christmastime alone.

In the beginning the Derby served food that could have come out of a lunch wagon: hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, hamburgers, chili. When Bob Cobb took it over, it got better fast, although its menu was never elaborate. The beef came from the East, the lobsters from Maine, the bacon from Canada; the cream in the coffee was heavy, and the Catalina sand dabs you ate at night had usually been harvested that morning. The prices were not cheap for the period, but there were lots of places that were much more
expensive. The Derby charged thirty cents for an average cocktail, and a house specialty, such as the Bamboo, would run forty cents.

But Bob’s greatest invention went far beyond the confines of the Brown Derby. The Cobb salad came about because Bob was hungry, but not for any of the overly familiar—to him, anyway—items on the menu.

Late one night, he threw together a chopped salad of chicken and a variety of other leftover ingredients. Some friends dropped in as Bob was eating and asked what the delicious-looking dish was. They tried it, they liked it . . . and millions of others have tried and liked the Cobb salad since. Yet I’ve tasted versions that would have greatly surprised Bob, who placed the emphasis on avocados, Roquefort cheese, and his own homemade French dressing.

During the Depression, Bob had to be economical; he even figured out a use for his day-old bread, by devising pumpernickel cheese toast. Bob made his own delicious coleslaw, which was served inside the sandwiches, not on the side. Also excellent was his homemade Thousand Island dressing, which had a kick to it—Bob mixed in chili sauce and bell peppers, as well as capers.