You Must Remember This (32 page)

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.

T
he 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 both 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.

I’ve spent a lot of time here talking about place, about ambience, but I have to be honest—when I think of those days, I think mostly of people.

Bob and Sally Cobb. Mike and Gloria Romanoff. Dave and Maude Chasen. J. Stanley Anderson. Jim Cagney. Jimmy Stewart. Spencer Tracy. Clifton Webb. Laurence Olivier. Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck.

Some of these people were actors, some restaurateurs, some entrepreneurs. But they were all men and women who could warm your hands just by being around them.

There are very few places left in town that have the wonderful charm that attracts a traditionalist like myself. Even the Bel Air Hotel has changed. Today, there are a few places that still maintain the old vibe: L’Ami Louis in Paris, La Grenouille in New York, and the wonderful Charles Masson and his family, whom I love.

But things change. It’s the way of the world. I guess that’s why nobody writes letters anymore.

Ethics have deteriorated in business in general. Start with the government and go down . . . It’s so hard to teach values: looking
someone in the eye, shaking hands, not being litigious, being grateful for the bounty that life so often gives us. Lawyers have taken over the country, as have the insurance companies and lobbyists in general. When I was brought up, a man’s word was his bond. Pensions are disappearing, with a resultant loss of security. An interconnected social system that lasted for close to a hundred years is breaking down.

I grew up in a different time. I don’t mean to imply that it was necessarily perfect. But I think we can all agree that it’s become far more difficult to move through life with some sense of balance, not to mention integrity. Technology has altered values in a way that makes it hard to have any intimacy. And most damaging is the fact that the level of vitriol is off the charts.

Many people my age believe that the films have grown old, lost their power to enchant. Sometimes that happens to people. If you fall in love with the movies when you are young—I think the critical ages are around eight to fifteen or so—by the time a half century has gone by, the movies are bound to have changed a great deal, because it’s their nature to appeal to the young, who attend more frequently than the old.

For example: 1965 is generally thought of as a good year for Hollywood, on the cusp of the great changeover from old to new. Old masters like Ford, Wilder, and Wyler were still in the game, and exciting young talents like Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet, Blake Edwards, and John Frankenheimer were beginning to make waves.

That year, the wonderful old director Raoul Walsh talked to Hedda Hopper about how Hollywood had changed. According to Walsh, it was all for the worse: “Cooper, Gable, Flynn—all gone at once—it’s left a big hole. The Academy Awards are now a joke—a songwriter’s holiday. It’s ‘What song can we get him or her to sing?’
This used to be a place out of the Arabian nights in earlier times—now the so-called stars go around dressed like bums—in old jeans. It’s unbelievable.”

Change the names of the recently deceased, and you could imagine the same speech being given by any number of the unwilling retired actors, directors, or reporters of today pining for the golden age of 1965.

But even amid an occasional complaint, I remain optimistic. The movies have always been about passion, enthusiasm. Those qualities were reflected in all aspects of our lives, both in the movies we made and the lives we led. In most meaningful ways, they still are, and the best films continue to reflect them.
The Artist
was a movie that transcended period and caught the joyous essence of the movies, as well as the emotionally volatile temperament of the people who make them.

It won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director, and it did my heart good.

Films are often compared to dreams—I call them eyelid movies—and watching a movie is a lot like being in a dream state, but, surprisingly, I’ve never dreamed about them. For decades I’ve had one recurring dream that never varies. It’s about Sonny, the good-natured horse with splashes of paint on his shoulder that I worked with when I was a boy.