Martinis & Mythology

It happened one night in the parking lot of Musso & Frank in the superficial 1970s, but it seemed like a flashback to the glamorous ‘40s.

An aging Rita Hayworth, wearing a shimmering gown and a glistening fur, looking every inch a legend, flanked by a trio of youngish men in tuxedos, stood fixed for a few slow-moving instants in the headlights of a turning car. Rather than shield herself from the intrusive glare, she smiled into it. She was not, for those 10 seconds, a woman in her late fifties waiting to be driven home from a restaurant but the star of “Gilda,” the wife of Orson Welles, the consort of the Aga Khan, alighting perhaps at a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese, a few blocks west of Musso’s and 30 years before.

Later, when her plight became public, you could appreciate the pathos: Hayworth, evincing early symptoms of a then-unfamiliar ailment (for a while tagged “Rita Hayworth’s disease” before being officially named Alzheimer’s), may have thought she was at some Klieg-lighted event in long-ago L.A.

But if the still-beautiful star’s mind was more often at home in the 1940s, where better for her tuxedoed friends to take her than Musso’s, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, where decades seem to intermingle and overlap and whose mahogany interior is at once a proscenium for the present and a window on the past?

Opened for business at 6667 Hollywood Blvd. in 1919, Musso’s turned 80 last year. Although its facade said Musso-Franks in the early days, it’s always officially been the Musso & Frank Grill and informally Musso’s. The restaurant and bar were an instant hit with motion picture people. It’s said that Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin once raced each other on horseback down the boulevard, with the winner’s prize being dinner at Musso & Frank.

A “New York style” restaurant--with two dining rooms and a long bar, red leather booths and banquettes, generous drinks and good steaks--Musso’s felt especially welcoming to folks from “back East.” The Grill really came into its own, and into Hollywood mythology, in the ‘30s and ‘40s as the favored gathering place for imported and local writers under contract at Warners, MGM, Paramount and other movie lots.

The studios worked a six-day week then, and Saturday afternoon, the end of the work week, was when Musso’s was most full of writers. The regulars included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, William Saroyan, William Faulkner, John Fante, Horace McCoy, Budd Schulberg, James M. Cain, John O’Hara and Nathanael West: “a roll call,” California historian Kevin Starr noted in 1997, “resembling the list of required reading for a sophomore survey of the mid-20th century American novel.” Lillian Hellman, S.N. Behrman, Max Brand, A.I. Bezzerides, Jo Pagano and Frank Fenton also were frequent Musso’s patrons.

During those long Musso Saturdays, Faulkner often mixed his own mint juleps--until, supposedly, he turned blue in the face. And it was after a Saturday dinner at Musso & Frank that Faulkner and Meta Carpenter, a script girl at 20th Century Fox, adjourned to the Knickerbocker Hotel on Ivar Avenue and began their affair, which lasted 18 years.

Two remarkable bookstores within a block or so of Musso’s made the Grill an even more attractive hangout for writers. Faulkner, Chandler and Aldous Huxley often browsed at Louis Epstein’s Pickwick Bookshop (opened in 1938). Stanley Rose’s store, literally next door to Musso’s, was a more social place, where writers drank whiskey and swapped stories with the Texas-born bookseller. Musso’s served as the Rose store’s unofficial banker; patrons of both establishments moved back and forth freely in (as Starr wrote) “a nonorganized movable feast.”

An earlier store in which Rose had been a partner, the Satyr Bookshop on Vine, was busted for pornography; it inspired the salacious Bennett’s Bookshop in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel, “The Big Sleep.” (Rose’s defense lawyer on the porno charge was Carey McWilliams, whose nonfiction work “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land” in 1946 inspired its own L.A. fictions, notably Robert Towne’s script for “Chinatown” in 1974.)

When the screenwriters who went to Musso’s wrote their L.A. novels, they had their characters eat at Musso’s, too--making it maybe the most-mentioned restaurant in West Coast literature.

Scriptwriter George Sims, writing as Paul Cain, had a Musso & Frank scene in his hard-boiled crime novel “Fast One” in 1933.

Tod Hackett, in Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust” (1939), entertains violent fantasies about Faye Greener over a steak and a double scotch at Musso’s.

Radio writers also went to Musso’s. “Well, I stopped by Musso-Franks and had the special, and then I went on home,” Jack Webb, as “Jeff Regan, Investigator,” told listeners of that CBS West network series on the Saturday night of Aug. 28, 1948.

Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, early in his career as a private detective, had dinner at Musso’s in the novel “The Way Some People Die” (1951). “The steak came the way I liked it, medium rare, garnished with mushrooms, with a pile of fried onion rings on the side. I had a pint of Black Horse ale for dessert, and when I was finished I felt good.”

In “The Long Goodbye” (1953), Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe took a sobered-up Terry Lennox for a 5:30 supper at Musso’s: “No drinks. He caught the bus on Cahuenga. . . .”

Musso & Frank didn’t survive on literary history alone, of course. People kept coming through the decades mainly for its food: the very thin crepes called flannel cakes (served with syrup and melted butter), the chicken pot pie (Thursday’s special), the ocean-fresh corbina, the sand dabs, the hot lamb sandwich, the chewy sourdough bread, some of the best coffee in town. But the history was an undeniable lure. And the history kept happening.

After attending a rough-cut screening at Warners of “Harper,” the 1966 film based on the 1949 Ross Macdonald novel “The Moving Target” and a movie that obviously would boost him to a higher plateau of success, Macdonald (real name: Kenneth Millar) went with friend Richard Lid from Burbank to Hollywood for a celebratory supper at Musso’s, the restaurant his character Lew Archer favored on special occasions.

Maybe Jim Thompson was eating there that same night in 1966. Thompson, the pulp-noir master (“The Killer Inside Me,” “The Getaway”), lived four short blocks from Musso’s and used the Grill as a virtual office throughout the ‘60s, according to biographer Robert Polito. The old writer favored the pot roast special and the zucchini Florentine, washing them down with Jack Daniel’s and Heineken chasers. At Musso’s, Thompson played the hard-bitten raconteur, spinning tough yarns to an eager audience of one or two. And in a booth at Musso’s, he made deals and signed papers with sharp young producers, acts he later regretted.

In 1969, in a corner booth near the boulevard entrance--maybe a booth at which Dash Hammett once ate with Lilly Hellman--yours truly had dinner with Eve Babitz and Joseph Heller, who also was a Hollywood writer of sorts: After “Catch-22” was published in 1961, its author did some script work on the TV sitcom “McHale’s Navy.” Heller spoke of a recent meeting in San Francisco with the Jefferson Airplane, who were fans of his and who tried to induce him to take LSD. “But it’ll make you want to write,” the Airplane crew told the author. “I already want to write,” Heller said.

Jonathan Kirsch recalls that when his first novel was published in the 1970s, he proofread the galleys in a booth at Musso & Frank--because he’d read that F. Scott Fitzgerald had once done the same with one of his books.

By the ‘70s, Musso’s was a place where decades and eras seemed to blend, inducing a pleasant vertigo.

You might have had a late breakfast (Musso’s opens at 11) or early lunch of flannels and bacon at the nearly empty counter a few stools away from Jason Robards Jr. (not long after his near-fatal auto accident and at the height of his fame) and overheard the veteran front-register cashier take a dinner reservation by phone from the winner of the Best Actor Academy Award for 1949 (and say, as she hung up, “Sounds like he’s drunk already”).

When rock and pop musicians, young record execs and publicists discovered Musso’s in the ‘70s, the cross-generational possibilities multiplied.

You could have lunch in a booth one day with someone like singer-songwriter Phil Ochs--and the next afternoon find yourself at the counter next to a spry gent of advanced age, nattily dressed and all alone, who is gleefully telling an amiable but uncomprehending busboy: “I’m a songwriter, and do you know what song I wrote? I wrote ‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town’! How’d you like to have that copyright when you’re 87 years old?”

Outside on the boulevard, fashions changed, trends came and went, other restaurants opened and closed. Inside Musso’s, the years passed almost imperceptibly; and the red-coated waiters stayed the same.

Some people--Musso & Frank outsiders, “civilians”--claim the waiters are rude. They are not rude but sweetly courteous, in a way you have to be a regular to appreciate, perhaps. (Except, of course, for that one half-bald waiter in the back room whose theatrically put-upon manner was so consistent that it was entertaining, like some ‘30s character actor’s patented exasperation). What offends those occasional patrons is the waiters’ refusal to defer to inflated egos. Musso’s staff is wonderfully “unintimidated” (in Kevin Starr’s word) and every customer--from a movie star to a press agent to an ex-actor-turned-freelance writer--is accorded the same respect.

In such a democratic place, and in such a time-warp continuum, odd questions of Hollywood etiquette sometimes arise.

When Tony Perkins was seated for dinner a few tables away, should you have gone over and told him that you played him as a child in the opening scene of 1958’s “Desire Under the Elms”? (No, and you were happy you didn’t.)

When Alan Hale Jr. sat near you at the front-room counter for a late lunch and grinned pleasantly, did you remind the “Gilligan’s Island” skipper that you’d acted with him in “All Mine to Give” at Universal in 1957? (No, but you later wished you had.)

When director David Butler (whose half-century career in Hollywood started with D.W. Griffith and ended with Bobby Vee) was having Saturday brunch a few feet away, did you say hello and tell him what good memories you had of working with him on a Revue-TV series in 1958 and ‘59? (Yes, and you were very glad you did.)

Musso’s conversational opportunities in general have a unique charm.

You can sit at the long bar in the back room in the afternoon and get into a literary discussion with a sports columnist about E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” make a $5 bet whether there are quote marks around the dialogue in the novel--and have the bet settled by one of you leaving and returning with a paperback copy.

You can sit on a stool in front of the counter chef and watch him pour the pale batter for your order of flannel cakes on the smoldering grill--and, if he thinks you a right guy, he might (once in your lifetime) make you a gift of some of the strawberry puree he has whipped up as a sauce for his own noontime crepes.

You can cringe through a misbegotten meal with some ill-chosen acquaintance who doesn’t at all “get” Musso’s and complains boorishly about the service, the menu, the wine selection and the bar’s closing five minutes early (“I want my after-dinner brandy!”)--and, fearing you’ve become a pariah-by-association, apologize furtively on the way out for your “friend’s” poor behavior to the maitre d’, who to your great relief might say, “Yes, yes, I know you, you come here all the time, that’s all right.”

As eras overlapped, new Hollywood people (including novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Nicholas Meyer) discovered Musso’s and it became their favorite place to celebrate, ruminate or commiserate.

New L.A. writers found Musso’s and put it in their books. The presence or absence of a Musso’s reference became (for some of us) the final test of whether a Southern California crime fiction writer had the right stuff.

Timothy Harris did, in the books he wrote before becoming a hot scriptwriter (“Trading Places,” “Kindergarten Cop”). And in the 1990s, Michael Connelly does. In 1997’s “Trunk Music,” LAPD Det. Harry Bosch meets two colleagues for lunch at Musso’s, where “the menu hadn’t changed in all the years Bosch had been eating there--this in a town where the hookers out on the boulevard lasted longer than most restaurants.”

“ ‘Three chicken pot pies,’ Bosch said. . . . The waiter came up with a tray and put it down on a folding cart. They watched silently as he prepared the meal. There were three separate chicken pot pies on the tray. The waiter used a fork and spoon to take the top crust off of each and put it on a plate. Next he scooped the contents of each pie out and put it on the crust, served the three cops their dishes and put down fresh glasses of iced tea for Edgar and Rider. He then poured Bosch’s martini from a small glass carafe and floated away without a word.”

Though the Grill retains its timeless allure, even its most ardent fans can be lured away by a change of ZIP Code or a shift in work habits. Before you know it, you may not even remember your last Musso’s meal. “Musso and Frank’s, a place McCaleb loved but hadn’t been back to in two years,” Connelly writes in another novel, “Blood Work.”

I’ve been in love with Musso’s since I was 10. But I haven’t been there since 1996, when I had an early weekday booth lunch with actor-turned-author Henry Z Jones Jr. (“The Palatine Families of New York: A Study of the German Immigrants Who Arrived in Colonial New York in 1710”). Before the restaurant’s 81st year is up, though, I’ll make a point of returning. I’ll sit in one of the small booths in the front room and tell the red-jacketed waiter: “Flannels, bacon and coffee, please.” The waiter will nod and smile--and both of us will be more glad than we can say that yet another prodigal has found the happy way back to that Great Good Place.