One of the good things about working in Hollywood when I did was that many of the icons of my youth were still alive and I got to meet them, sometimes even to work with them. Aside from Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas and various others already mentioned, I made movies or mini-series with legends like Richard Widmark, Rex Harrison and David Niven.
My first agent in LA, Paul Kohner, was something of a legend himself. Hungarian by birth, and still going strong in his seventies, he had specialised in representing the cream of European talent, starting with Garbo, Dietrich, Lubitsch, Von Stroheim, Ingmar Bergman, and many more. Every Friday afternoon he hosted a poker game in his office. One day he took me through to meet his regulars; I shook hands with John Huston, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, George Burns and Walter Matthau. At least they are the ones I remember. I think Jack Lemmon might have been there too; if not, I certainly met him with Paul on another occasion in a curious little restaurant called Dominick’s.
Dominick’s was one of the most exclusive haunts in Hollywood, and outwardly one of the most unprepossessing. It was a simple cabin set back a couple of yards from the sidewalk on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood, bang opposite the great square mass of the Cedars of Sinai Medical Centre. To anyone walking past, it looked like nothing more than a dingy bar. To the cognoscenti who parked their cars around the back and entered through the kitchen, it was in its heyday the “in” place of all “in” places. It had started life in the Fifties as a hang-out for Sinatra and the Rat Pack and was owned by a family of three. Dominick himself was a burly Italian-American who ran the place from behind the bar as his personal fiefdom. His word was law as to who was allowed in and who not. Jovial enough if he liked you, I was warned he wasn’t a man to get on the wrong side of.
His wife Peggy was mistress of the kitchen. A neat, grey-haired woman with large round glasses that gave her eyes a curious staring quality, she grilled the best chicken and the best steaks and home-made burgers in town. That was it, the whole menu. The wine list was equally short and of equally high quality, with excellent Burgundies and Bordeaux at surprisingly reasonable prices.
Peggy’s sister Addy was the waitress, also wearing glasses and with a goofy manner that reminded me of the actress Jean Stapleton. But underneath that goofiness was a shrewd woman who knew exactly who was who and who they knew.
The drill was you entered through the kitchen, pausing to make an obligatory fuss of Peggy, who would accept the homage of a kiss on the cheek without pausing in her work, and then went through into the restaurant itself. This was small and softly lit by little lamps on the tables and walls. There were hardly more than a dozen tables in all, some of them partitioned into separate waist-high booths that did nothing to lessen the sense of crowded intimacy in the room.
Having been introduced to the place by Kirk Douglas and his son Peter, who was producing a picture we were making, then also by Merrill Heatter, creator of “Hollywood Squares” and other successful game shows, and with whom I was developing a script at the time, I was very quickly persona grata with Dominick and could get a table under my own name whenever I wanted, which made me the envy of many studio executives. I have to admit to being seriously awestruck at dining cheek by jowl with Fred Astaire and Groucho Marx and their wives; with Dean Martin and a couple of friends; and at bumping into Johnny Carson at the bar one night, who was exceedingly gracious about my spilling his drink.
One night when I was dining alone with Peter, a tall figure on his way to a nearby table stopped and leant over us. “Hey,” said the figure, “I hope you guys are going to have some work for an old man one of these days.”
It was Gregory Peck.
Memories of Old Hollywood
David Ambrose
When I was in LA for any length of time, which I increasingly was, my wife would come with me and we would rent a place to live. At different times we had a large house just off Mulholland Drive sandwiched between the mini-estates of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, a house in Malibu Colony, flanked on one side by Larry Hagman (JR from “Dallas”) and on the other by the comedian Don Rickles. Our first place had been an apartment in a fine old West Hollywood building called Colonial House, which had originally been part of the Garden of Allah complex where the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and other east-coasters in town for the money, the booze and the sex had thrown wild parties throughout the thirties and forties. Our neighbour in the apartment below was Bette Davis. My sole encounter with her was short but memorable.
There was a pool behind the building in which I used to swim for half an hour or more every evening around dusk. The reason for the timing was threefold: first, I was working most of the day; secondly, swimming during the day meant getting a tan, and a tan was the sure sign of an out-of-work loser in Hollywood; thirdly, I liked to have the pool to myself, and nobody else used it after sundown.
One evening after I’d finished my laps and was standing in the shallow end, about to climb out, I heard a voice which nobody who had ever been to the movies could fail to recognise.
“How many’s that, then? A hundred?”
I looked up. Silhouetted against the lights in her apartment, was Bette Davis leaning over her balcony with a drink in her hand.
Quick as a flash, though not quite as wittily as I might have wished, I replied, “No, I only managed eighty laps tonight. I’ve got to go out”.
Then she said something that has remained with me ever since, because I can’t believe she said it to many men in her life, if any.
“You scare me,” she said. “Every night, up and down, up and down. You scare me.”
Whereupon she turned and tottered off, the ice clinking in her glass, to get a re-fill.
Another meaningless but memorable encounter took place in the parking lot of the Chateau Marmont, where we sometimes stayed on shorter visits. The Chateau didn’t have a restaurant in those days, but all the suites were comfortably spacious and had their own kitchens, so you could cook your own dinner and have your friends over if you wanted. The parking lot was underneath the building and you turned into it directly off Sunset Boulevard. One late afternoon I had parked my car, taken a large bag of groceries and several bottles of wine from the trunk, and was headed for the elevator to go up to my floor.
On the way was a door that I was having some trouble holding open long enough to get through without dropping everything. Suddenly a gardener appeared, Mexican I thought, if only because of the rather loud red and green herbaceous design on his short-sleeved shirt. With great kindness he held the door open and fixed it back so I could get through safely.
Feeling I should acknowledge his effort with more than mere thanks, I managed to fish a couple of dollars from my pocket and hand it over. I hadn’t taken more than a few steps when a thought hit me like a sledgehammer. That was no Mexican gardener, that was...
I turned, to see Robert De Niro, his face split with a grin from ear to ear, proudly slipping my two bucks into the breast pocket of his colourful shirt.
The only other movie star who ever held a door open for me was Robert Redford on the Columbia lot one day. Mercifully, I recognised him and gave a simple nod of thanks, and received a polite nod of acknowledgment in return. There exists, I had learnt, a certain protocol regarding stars and doors: they always wait for you to go first. If you find yourself in an elevator with one, no matter how major, they will always wait for you to leave before making a move themselves. If you continue to hold back, they will make a courteous little gesture and murmur, “Go ahead, please”.
I don’t know why this is so. It’s tempting to think it’s some atavistic defence against the risk of getting a knife in the back, something that must have happened more than once in their careers. But I suspect that is too fanciful.
Perhaps it’s a kind of false humility. Stars are people with whom no one disagrees. Their every whim is catered for, they are bowed and scraped to from morning till night. So every so often, when finding themselves before an open door with a “civilian” waiting to go through it, they get the chance to play humble. Some kind of compensatory mechanism, perhaps. A ritual to appease the gods who might otherwise punish them for the sin of hubris.
In other words, a superstition.
A Note on the Author:
David Ambrose was educated at Blackburn Grammar School and Merton College, Oxford. Author of seven highly regarded novels and a collection of short stories, his work has also included screenwriting for TV plays and series, stage plays and Hollywood movies; these have led him to collaborate with legends such as Kenneth More, Felicity Kendal, Margaret Lockwood, Alastair Sim, Stanley Holloway, Frank Langella, Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas, Richard Widmark, Rex Harrison, Pierce Brosnan and Sharon Stone.
He also created the TV science-fiction mockumentary ALTERNATIVE 3, regarded as the greatest TV hoax of all time.
David is still working, with a new collection of stories scheduled for next year.