The first time I visited Hollywood was in the spring of 2014. Working as a freelance writer, I had traveled fairly extensively but had always been intimidated by Tinseltown. It was probably because I held the city to a romanticized ideal. In my mind, Hollywood was the land of Bogart, Gable, Harlow, and Mitchum. Stars who acted like stars, and dressed like stars, and drank and slept around like stars. Larger-than-life characters who embraced their fame. To me, the city also possessed an alluring seediness. It seemed to be a place where you inhabited either the gutter or theheavens, and sometimes both simultaneously. This was the Hollywood I wanted to see.
My bubble burst as soon as I stepped foot onto Hollywood Boulevard.
In front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a legendary movie house once owned in part by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, people dressed as Elmo and Batman, and Minions posed for photos while trampling over the cement handprints of William Powell, Myrna Loy, Cary Grant, and Ava Gardner. The theater was flanked by a T-shirt shop and a CVS on one side and a Forever 21 and a vape store on the other.
It seemed old Hollywood was not only lost, but forgotten, replaced by a West Coast Times Square.
Deflated and depressed, I started walking east. I was looking for Musso & Frank, the oldest restaurant in the city, and what I hoped would be a portal to the past. I’d read that only tourists enter Musso’s from the street, so I walked around the side of the building to the rear parking lot, where it’s rumored Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman ended their first date with a back-seat romp.
It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, and I was the only customer at the bar.
The bartender, a senior citizen in a red tuxedo jacket and black bow tie, took my order for a martini. As I nursed my drink, I stared at the dark paneling and the nearly one-hundred-year-old pastoral wallpaper and thought of all of the heavyweights who’d sat at that very bar.
Icons like Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rita Hayworth, Gary Cooper, and Groucho Marx. I drank a second martini and dreamed of owning a time machine, while the bored bartender busied himself wiping bottles and organizing receipts.
A couple of years later, I searched the Internet for Musso & Frank for a magazine piece I was writing. One of the first results that popped up was an L.A. Times article about a man named Ruben Rueda who had recently passed away after tending bar at Musso’s for 52 years. I stared at the picture accompanying the article and saw the old man who’d served me two martinis. Apparently, Ruben had mixed drinks for everyone from Orson Wells to Sean Connery to Steve McQueen, who Ruben once kicked out for being drunk and rude. He was on a first-name basis with Rock Hudson and Bing Crosby and, believe it or not, Keith Richards, who once gave him a guitar. I finished the article and thought about my quiet afternoon at Musso’s, where I’d been so fixated on the past, I’d barely said more than a couple of words to the bartender. I’d gone to Hollywood in search of legends and had come face to face with one without even knowing it.
Steven Tingle is the author of Graveyard Fields and is the monthly contributor to this column. Find more at steventingle.com.
