“I wanted a drink so badly, but I was afraid to get up and get it. So I just waited until it was daylight and got two.”
Mary Pickford was the biggest star (by far) of the silent era. The first actress dubbed “America’s Sweetheart,” she was also known as the “Girl with the Golden Curls” and “Little Mary.” Hired by D. W. Griffith at Biograph in 1909, Pickford appeared in fifty-one films in the first year alone. By 1919 she had helped create the star system and was the highest-paid film actress ever, eventually earning $1 million per year. Her films Tess of the Storm Country (1914) and Sparrows (1926) are routinely mentioned as being among the best silent films in history. Pickford married swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks, and the couple built a fifty-six-acre Beverly Hills estate christened Pickfair, the first movie star mansion in Beverly Hills and an epicenter of Hollywood high society. A founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as United Artists, Pickford won an Oscar for her first sound film, Coquette (1929) but retired in 1933. Most of her fans would not see her again until her acceptance speech for an honorary Oscar in 1976, at the age of eighty-four.
IN 1917 PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE SAID of Mary Pickford, “If everybody were as pure minded as she, there would be no sin in the world.” Pure minded? How about pure nonsense?
The truth was, Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” just wouldn’t drink in public (or hold any object that could be taken for a cigarette). Having almost single-handedly launched the culture of celebrity, she was probably the first actor with a public image—and consequently, an image to protect.
But with Mary’s siblings, on the other hand, it was a different story. Her younger brother Jack was a B-list actor, but an A-list lush. A womanizer who was loaded most all the time, the women around town called him Mr. Syphilis—this, because he had it. Rumored a heroin addict, too, Jack would marry three times—each wife a Ziegfeld chorus girl. And then there was Mary’s younger sister Lottie, a step behind on the drink but a step ahead on the marrying. Lottie was married four times, including once to a bootlegger who posed as an undertaker so as to smuggle hootch in his hearse. She also liked to party naked.
As for Mary—Mary was the teetotaler, right? Wrong. Director Eddie Sutherland, one-time husband of Louise Brooks and not averse to drink himself, recalls an evening out on the town with Mary’s brother, Jack. The pair had been hopping from speakeasy to speakeasy, but now they desperately needed more liquor. Jack suggested a pitstop at Mary’s Beverly Hills mansion, Pickfair. Nonsense, thought Sutherland. Everyone knew that Mary and her equally famous husband, Douglas Fairbanks, abstained. They constantly hosted parties at their palatial estate, but Mary didn’t even drink then. And now that alcohol was illegal, there wouldn’t be a drop within shouting distance of the home.
“Having almost singlehandedly launched the culture of celebrity, she was probably first actor with a public image—and consequently, an image to protect.”
So why the hell are we going there? Sutherland remembers wondering. But Jack assured him that it wouldn’t take long. Pulling up to the fabled mansion, Sutherland was shocked to see Jack stride right through the unlocked front door—no knock, no doorbell. Why this was the home of America’s sweetheart! Well, the sweetheart was out. And so Jack walked upstairs, through her bedroom and into her bathroom. Sutherland followed sheepishly, knowing that getting caught in Mary Pickford’s bathroom, uninvited and bombed, would not place him atop the studios’ hiring lists.
Jack pulled out two medicinal items: hydrogen peroxide and Listerine. “Gin or whiskey?” he asked Sutherland. Sutherland didn’t want either. Whatever Jack wanted to jokingly call this stuff, Sutherland didn’t have the stomach for a prohibition-era adventure in swallowing poison. Jack took a swig from one bottle, and handed the other to Sutherland. After some prodding, Sutherland cautiously smelled it, then took a taste. Wow. Okay. It was real liquor. Only then did Sutherland understand. Mary was a closet boozer—or perhaps more accurately, a bathroom boozer. As Buddy Rogers, her third husband would later admit, “The little dickens, she gets to drinking and she just can’t stop.”
Sutherland and Jack sat down on the tile and began to down the bottles. Did it feel glamorous getting hammered in the bathroom of the world’s most famous teetotaler? Did it matter?
Scripts as we know them did not emerge until the sound era; silent films were shot using prose treatments, or even just an idea or a title. The treatment below, the entire shooting script for the two-reel short The Deadly Glass of Beer, provides a neat encapsulation of how much and how little Hollywood filmmaking has changed in the past 100 years. (Certainly, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that this was perhaps the synopsis for a new Judd Apatow vehicle.)
This scenario (as it was then called) was written by Anita Loos, who wrote several hundred early films. She was paid $25 for this one (about $500 today). Loos later became a star herself with the book and film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which began as an angry letter to her lifelong crush and “friend” H. L. Mencken.
Henry and Frank are cousins who meet at a lawyer’s office to hear their uncle’s will read. The will states: “I leave one million dollars to my nephew Frank if by his twenty-first birthday he has remained a strict teetotaler. But if Frank should drink even a single glass of beer, my entire fortune is to go to Henry.” Henry, smothering his fury, plots Frank’s downfall.
Disguised by false whiskers, Henry trails Frank about town in the hope of catching him taking a drink. One day Frank passes a saloon, hesitates, looks furtively up and down the street, and ducks in. Henry follows him into the saloon, grabs off his false whiskers, raps Frank on the back, and says, “Aha! I’ve caught you!” At which Frank turns around and shows his glass to be full of buttermilk.
The day before Frank’s twenty-first Birthday, Henry becomes desperate. Aided by cohorts, he kidnaps Frank and takes him to a den on the waterfront. There he is strapped to a table; his mouth is propped open and Henry is about to pour a bottle of beer into Frank when, just as the clock strikes twelve, police break in to arrest Henry for serving liquor without a license.
A FEW BLOCKS EAST OF the Montmartre sits an early-Hollywood institution that not only remains open to this day, but continues to thrive. The Musso & Frank Grill, a no-frills steakhouse and bar was opened in 1919, and has been owned and operated by the same two families since 1927.
Very likely the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, celebrities were originally drawn to its Italian authenticity, New York feel, and no-nonsense menu. Since the Writers Guild was located just opposite and the Stanley Rose Bookshop next door, the place became a lifeboat for writers adrift in the celluloid sea. In 1934 Musso’s expanded into a small space behind the neighboring Vogue Theater. A door was punched through the wall of the dining room, and thus the famed “Back Room” was created, expressly for the literary set. Just to mention a few: William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, William Saroyan, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, and Ernest Hemingway.
Whether, to paraphrase Irish playwright Brendan Behan, they were writers with drinking problems or drinkers with writing problems, these men and women knew how to bend an elbow. It is widely said that Chandler penned The Big Sleep in one of the booths. But, even though he mentions the restaurant in the novel, that seems unlikely. And that F. Scott Fitzgerald proofread his work there is even less likely. More plausible is Jim Thompson, broke and out of print, wandering down late in the afternoon after working on Kubrick’s The Killing (the director would later cheat him out of his credit). The Back Room after all was not a place to write, but a place to drink, to talk, to miss New York from. As Charles Bukowski put it, “I never actually ate. I just looked at the menu and told them ‘Not yet,’ and kept ordering drinks.”
Of course, Musso’s wasn’t only for writers; actors loved it, too. Chaplin naturally had a special booth (did the man ever sleep?). He liked their martinis. And Tom Mix sat by the window so his fans could see him. There is the likely apocryphal tale of Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks racing each other on horseback down Hollywood Boulevard to Musso’s. But the list moves forward in time, as virtual roll call of Hollywood cultural history: Arthur Miller, R. W. Schindler, Orson Welles, the Rat Pack, on to Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, and Keith Richards. From John Barrymore to Drew Barrymore, over the last ninety years everyone who was anyone has graced its entrance and sung its praises.
Although the names and faces have changed with the times, the restaurant has remained resolutely the same. Its two large dining rooms and signature red booths are largely unchanged since the last major remodel, in 1937. And while the Vogue Theater did reclaim its space in 1955 and the Back Room closed down, its historic long bar, as well as the chairs and light fixtures, were all moved to the New Room, where they still stand today.
MUSSO & FRANK has long been famous for its bone-dry martini. It’s stirred, not shaken—that makes it stronger (less dilution from the ice). There’s very little Vermouth included—that makes it even stronger. And it contains 2.5 to 3 ounces of gin—which makes it stronger still. Voted Best Martini in America by more than one magazine, the recipe below comes straight from bartender Manny Aguirre, likely the longest-working bartender in Hollywood. Aguirre has fifty-nine years behind the bar, thirty-seven of them spent at Scandia—for decades an upscale Sunset hotspot specializing in (you guessed it) Scandinavian cuisine—and the last twenty-two years at Musso & Frank.
