My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants

by Colman Andrews

  I remember seeing Lana Turner at Chasen’s myself (though never, alas, Marilyn Monroe). I also remember meeting an actor friend of my parents’ named Ronnie Reagan, who would probably have been dining with his then-wife, Jane Wyman, when he stopped by our table to say hello (he later proposed to his second wife, Nancy Davis, in a booth at Chasen’s). I remember Alfred and Alma Hitchcock, who sat at the same table, to the left of the front door as you entered, every Sunday night, and who did not say hello. I remember being introduced to George Burns, complete with cigar, and, on another evening, to Jerry Lewis (he was something of a hero to me at the time, and I turned red when I knocked over my chair standing up to shake his hand).

  One thing famous people seemed to like about Chasen’s was that reporters and photographers were barred, and autograph seekers who had somehow gotten seated were quickly and politely requested to put away their pads. It was understood that Chasen’s was more a refuge than a stage set. It was a clubhouse, open to anyone who had the means, but mostly meant for members, who wanted about as much privacy as they could expect in a public place. You went to Café Trocadero or the Vendôme if you were looking for publicity; you came to Chasen’s to relax and maybe to misbehave a little, in a harmless way.

  Chasen’s was hardly the only Hollywood hangout of the era, but places like the Brown Derby or Musso’s (officially the Musso & Frank Grill)—particularly known as a writers’ refuge, though Charlie Chaplin once had a regular table there—were casual establishments, the kinds of places you’d go for a working (and drinking) lunch or a quick dinner on the way home after a long day at the studio. The more serious dress-up places in town, like LaRue or Victor Hugo’s, were starchier and less hospitable to high jinks. Chasen’s struck the perfect balance: It was a special-occasion kind of place, but one where celebrities could feel comfortable among their own kind, playing more than posing. In that regard, it was sort of the original Spago.

  My parents weren’t celebrities themselves, but they were not unknown in Hollywood, and they were good friends of the Chasens, often entertaining them at home or socializing with them away from the restaurant. I don’t think we had a regular table at Chasen’s, but we almost always sat facing the door in the front dining room, with its booths of firm, high-gloss, tuck-and-roll green leather. The room in back, where the bar was, had a more rakish and tentative feel to it (the booths were red), which of course appealed to me increasingly as I grew older. (I later learned that habitués of the place, always seated up front, called the back room “Fresno”—a Californian version of Siberia.)

  I loved wandering around the restaurant. The walls were crowded with framed photographs—signed portraits, party shots, vacation scenes, family stuff, contributed by regulars—and there always seemed to be new ones to see. Above a booth on the right side of the front room as you entered, for some years, there was a “candid” snapped by my mother, showing two diaper-swaddled baby boys, myself and Peter Ford (son of the actor Glenn Ford and the dancer Eleanor Powell), lying on a towel in the sun, apparently having an intense conversation. (It somehow found its way onto the wire services and was widely published around the world, with a caption suggesting that young Master Ford and I were discussing the atomic bomb.) By the time I was six or seven, the photo had become an embarrassment to me—Mom never failed to point it out when I was introduced to someone at the restaurant—and I was happy when it migrated, one year, to the wall in Dave’s office.

  The men’s room at Chasen’s, past the rakish bar, was hung with racy cartoons, one of them by James Thurber; these confused me at first, but I eventually figured them out. I liked lingering around the bar itself, at a respectful distance, watching the bartenders mix drinks. I was also fascinated by a small two-person booth at one end of the bar, over which hung a brass plaque identifying it as the property of Billy “Square Deal” Grady. I had no idea who Grady was—I learned many years later that he was a legendary MGM casting director, and as such had probably helped many of the restaurant’s famous customers get where they were—but the idea of a table “belonging” to somebody was a novelty to me, and I was attracted to the notion. Someday, when I was older, I always told myself, I’d sit at that table myself, if Mr. Grady didn’t mind.

  I MAY HAVE GROWN UP in restaurants, but we lived in a big house on Beverly Glen Boulevard, in a ritzy neighborhood in West Los Angeles called Holmby Hills. Our place was what my mother called “Cape Cod Colonial” in style, set on two acres of graded, planted hillside. At the top of our driveway were two sixty-foot deodar cedars, which my parents paid crews of UCLA frat boys to garland with colored lights every Christmastime. We had a shuffleboard court, a tennis court, and a long, narrow swimming pool enclosed by a high box hedge on one side and a thicket of oleander bushes on the other. Vincent Price lived next door; Claudette Colbert’s house was just up the hill behind the pool, as was Westlake School, where young ladies went to learn the liberal arts and social graces—among them my sister, Merry, two years my junior (her second-grade classmates included a pretty little blond girl named Candy Bergen, who was the daughter of a famous ventriloquist, and whose real first name was Candice).

  Counting the maid’s quarters, our house had ten bedrooms—Mom and Dad had separate ones, behind a common door—and nine bathrooms; a large but cozy living room lined with bookshelves; and a ninety-foot-long linoleum-tiled grown-ups’ “playroom” equipped with a fireplace, his-and-hers powder rooms, and a full-size semicircular wet bar, behind which rose a mirrored wall hatched with glass shelves filled with a shop’s worth of fancy drinking vessels. In front of the bar were six high, sturdy chrome barstools with round leather seats. I used to love climbing onto one of them, leaning on the bar, and sipping 7Up or root beer while I gazed up at the infinitely varied array of glasses, their numbers doubled by reflection—cobalt blue and ruby red tumblers, handpainted floral-pattern mugs with scroll handles, mile-high pinkish collins glasses with my father’s monogram frosted onto them, jaunty martini coupes whose stems were molded into the form of a top-hatted, monocled dandy’s bust. I still love perching at bars, and infinitely prefer a good barstool to the armchair at that quiet little lounge table in the corner; I believe this is the result of something called “imprinting.”

  On one side of the playroom, behind a locked door, was a storeroom the size of a mogul’s walk-in closet, with oilcloth-lined wooden shelves, floor to ceiling, on both sides. Unused small appliances and Christmas decorations and other seasonal accoutrements were kept here, but the room was primarily a storehouse for canned goods, which my parents bought, cases at a time, from fancy markets like Balzer’s or Jurgensen’s, and which formed a large part of our daily diet. Some of the cans, with dark burgundy-hued labels, contained clam chowder, baked beans, Indian pudding, and other New England specialties from S. S. Pierce, the famous old Boston food company; these seemed exotic to me, beyond my experience (I remember wondering if Indian pudding had anything to do with Indian summer). There were also more prosaic cans of corn, peas, carrots, new potatoes, hollowed-out black olives, button mushrooms, fruit cocktail, mandarin orange segments, pineapple and tomato juice, and such ready-to-eat staples of the family table as Andersen’s pea soup, Mary Kitchen roast beef hash, Dinty Moore beef stew, Franco-American spaghetti with meatballs, and Chef Boyardee beef ravioli.

  Our kitchen was a white, L-shaped room, larger than some apartments I later lived in, with the appliances clustered at one end of the L’s longer leg and a kitchen table probably ten feet long occupying much of the shorter one. My first memory of food, as opposed to restaurants, comes from that kitchen, and it is an unpleasant one: I’m sitting in my high chair, wearing a terry-cloth bib rimmed in blue satin and embroidered with frolicking lambs—and spitting out my scrambled eggs. I have no idea why. Were they cold or oversalted? Did I have an incipient egg allergy? Or did I just plain not like their texture or the way they tasted? All I know is that I had no intention of swallowing them, that I wanted them out of my mouth—and that to this d
ay I can’t stand eggs in any recognizable form.

  EGGS ASIDE, I was a pretty good eater as a youngster, graduating quickly from puréed Gerber’s pears and carrots and whatever else they fed babies in those days to Cream of Wheat, grilled cheese sandwiches, fish sticks, and baked potatoes (skins and all). Food was always ample in our household, if not sophisticated, and I considered the refrigerator a repository of good things, much as I imagine most boys and girls my age would have viewed the toy chest or the cookie jar—not that I was immune to the charms of those containers, either.

  When my parents went out for dinner and didn’t take us with them, my sister and I would eat at the kitchen table, or on TV trays in the living room in front of our little DuMont while we watched The Howdy Doody Show or Captain Midnight. Our meals were often, appropriately enough, Swanson frozen TV dinners, in segmented aluminum trays, or chicken, turkey, or beef pot pies. We also had a lot of Spam. When everyone was home, we’d eat together in our formal dining room, sitting at a long table set with satiny linens, eating off Spode china with Royal Danish silverware and drinking from elaborate cut-glass goblets—usually filled with skim milk, even for my parents. For years, we had a live-in maid, who doubled as a cook. The food, as I recall it, was mostly pretty bland, but this wasn’t the maid’s fault. My mother had an almost primal aversion to onions, garlic, and their kin, and looked on herbs and spices with grave suspicion. My parents had some Lebanese-American friends, the Maloufs, and I remember that once when we visited them at their hillside home in Hollywood, the man of the house gifted us, as we were leaving, with a big clump of wild rosemary he’d been excited to find growing on his property. Mom tossed it out the car window as soon as we were safely down the driveway.

  Our family meals were mostly meat or poultry (fish was a rarity, unless it was those fish sticks), canned or frozen vegetables of some sort, and potatoes—sometimes Tater Tots or frozen French fries (lightly charred under the broiler on a cookie sheet); sometimes mashed (either real or out of a box); sometimes baked, with butter (sour cream was beyond my mother’s comprehension, and chives were considered virtually poisonous). Occasionally, canned sweet potatoes or Minute Rice made an appearance in their place. Once every few months, Mom would cook, preparing one of her culinary specialties—either spaghetti with ground beef and canned corn mixed together or “roast beef,” which was a big hunk of round roast, put into an oval aluminum roasting pan atop a bed of small fresh carrots and canned new potatoes, then seasoned with salt and pepper, covered, and roasted for three or four hours, until the color of the meat resembled that of the vessel it had cooked in. Even then, I knew enough to realize that the beef was lifeless and dry, but the potatoes and carrots got all leathery and salty and meaty and were actually quite delicious.

  An early and comparatively brief presence in our house was Deirdre, my father’s daughter from one of his two earlier marriages, who must have been about a dozen years my senior. Deirdre taught Merry and me how to make cinnamon toast and what she called “hard sauce,” which was just powdered sugar stirred into softened butter, to be spread on sweet rolls or eaten alongside mincemeat or raisin pie. I was already something of a wiseacre by then, and I remember Deirdre once telling me to finish my (frozen) French fries because there were children starving in Europe, to which I responded by getting an envelope, inserting a handful of fries, and saying, “Okay, what’s their address?” On another occasion, I filled a small pot with water and put it on the stove over high heat and stared at it until the water started bubbling. “See?” I announced to Deirdre. “A watched pot does boil.” My mother didn’t like Deirdre much—maybe because she was a living reminder of Dad’s younger life—and on one occasion I actually saw her chasing my half sister around the kitchen brandishing a black cast-iron frying pan. (Happily, she never connected.) I inherited that pan, and still cook in it almost nightly.

  MY FATHER, Charles Robert Hardy Douglas Andrews (he went by Robert Douglas Andrews and later Robert Hardy Andrews professionally), was born in Effingham, Kansas—at the train station, he always said, while his mother was en route to St. Joseph, Missouri—and lived for several years on an Arapaho Indian reservation in southwestern Oklahoma, where his father was a doctor. He was naturally loquacious (the Arapaho kids on the reservation nicknamed him Little Big Mouth), and as a boy, he once told me, he fell in love with the rhythm and sound of words. Not surprisingly, he became a writer, early. When he was ten years old, he mailed a sheaf of poems off to The Kansas City Star. He heard no more about it until a year later, when he was sent to live in Hiawatha, Kansas, with his grandmother. “She had saved a full-page clipping from the paper,” he wrote, “because the names were the same. It was headed IS THIS MAN THE NEW PRAIRIE POET LAUREATE?” He parlayed that success into a job melting hot type, cleaning presses, and correcting galleys for the Brown County [Kansas] World, then worked a series of other newspaper jobs around the Midwest, eventually becoming a reporter for The Minneapolis Journal. A story he wrote there—largely invented, he was quick to admit—caught the eye of his hero, the legendary editor Henry Justin Smith of the Chicago Daily News, and before he was twenty-one he found himself working for that great American newspaper, sharing an office with an older and more accomplished poet, Carl Sandburg.

  My father became quite the young man-about-town in Chicago. He was something of a dandy, wearing a raccoon coat and a homburg and carrying a walking stick, and was well enough known to have been mentioned, as “Bob Andrews, the novelist,” in John Drury’s 1931-vintage restaurant guide, Dining in Chicago, as one of the celebrity customers at a place called Casa de Alex. He was a novelist by virtue of a book called Three Girls Lost, which he wrote in a week, on a bet, while still working for the Daily News, and which he promptly sold to Grosset & Dunlap. He liked to tell the story that Carl Sandburg, growing tired of his gloating about this accomplishment, took him down the street to a huge bookstore one day, led him inside, surveyed the shelves, and said “Turn around,” and then “Keep turning.” He finally got the point: All around him were thousands and thousands of books by other men and women, all of whom had doubtless thought they were pretty special, too. “Now suppose you start trying to learn how to be humble,” said Sandburg, walking out and leaving my father standing there, having perhaps acquired a better sense of scale.

  Three Girls Lost did two things for Bob Andrews the novelist: To begin with, it attracted the attention of the pioneering radio drama producers Frank and Anne Hummert, who hired him to develop some of the earliest radio soap operas, among them Just Plain Bill and The Romance of Helen Trent. His speed and fecundity as a soap writer were legendary. In his 1948 New Yorker series about the medium, James Thurber called my father “the granddaddy of the soap opera” and reported that he produced “a hundred thousand words a week over a period of years, without losing a pound or whitening a hair.”

  The novel also brought my father to Hollywood: Three Girls Lost was bought for “the pictures” by what was then called the Fox Film Corporation. The result starred Loretta Young and, in one of his earliest credited roles, a tall, young romantic lead named John Wayne. By the time I was born, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, Dad had moved to the West Coast and become a contract screenwriter, which meant that he would be employed for various fixed periods of time at one of the major movie studios, where he was paid to adapt novels, expand synopses, rewrite other people’s screenplays, and turn out original scripts of his own.

  My mother, born Irene Charlotte Bressette into a French-Canadian family in Nashua, New Hampshire, but using the stage name of Irene Colman by the time she met my father, was a glamour girl. She’d won a beauty contest at Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933 as “the girl with the most beautiful eyes” and soon found herself in Hollywood, first as a chorus girl (in Gold Diggers of 1937, one of her fellow chorines was a tall, sexy redhead named Lucille Ball) and then as an ingenue—dark-eyed, buxom window-dressing in films like Anthony Adverse with Fredric March (she pla
yed the Empress Josephine) and At the Circus with the Marx Brothers. (She was cut out of the last of these, but I have a production still of her, sitting in a courtroom witness box in a low-cut dress, while Groucho questions her with his trademark arched-eyebrow leer.) She always claimed that she had also had a part in A Tale of Two Cities, starring Ronald Colman, and that she had asked his permission to borrow his last name, later passed on to me, for herself—but there is no record of her having appeared in that film, and in any case, most of her early screen credits spell the name “Coleman.” You never knew with Mom.

  When she gave up her acting career, after marrying my father, the former Irene Colman became an attention-loving Hollywood wife: She wore floral prints, costume jewelry, Persian lamb, and Jungle Gardenia. She made entrances, and seemed to know everybody. She was loud and fearless (outwardly, at least), and always took charge, often to herd people into clusters so that she could take pictures of them with her thirty-five-millimeter Argus camera. She must have taken thousands and thousands of snapshots over the years, very few of them entirely in focus or coherently composed.

  Besides going out to restaurants, Mom and Dad gave countless parties in our massive playroom. Almost every month throughout the late forties and early fifties, with almost any excuse—a friend’s birthday, an out-of-towner visiting L.A., a holiday major or obscure—they’d fill the room with illustrious guests, pouring them good liquor and feeding them canapés. By the age of eight or so, I had become part of the action, greeting people, helping to pass the canapés, and, a bit later, taking cocktail orders from people like Dick Powell, Barbara Stanwyck, Rhonda Fleming, and the songwriter Jimmy McHugh, my sister’s godfather, who was apt to be sitting at our Steinway grand playing “Don’t Blame Me” or one of the other great songs he’d written. I loved the electricity in the room, and the inevitable attention; I loved the way people just sat down at the piano and started playing; I loved being part of the social whirl.