You Must Remember This (31 page)

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.

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:

1. The food was considered quite good.
   
2. 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 nightclubs 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.