ROMANOFF’S

In 1945, Time magazine ran a story on restaurateur Mike Romanoff entitled “Life Goes to Mike Romanoff’s restaurant – A Fantastic Ex-Fraud Turned Honest Man Runs a Profitable, Celebrity-Filled Eating Place in Hollywood.”

 

The article began: “The man who was the most wonderful liar of the 20^th-Century US, and certainly its most successful imposter, turned respectable, almost against his will. In that year, “Prince Michael Alexandrovich Dmitry Obelensky Romanoff … opened a Beverly Hills restaurant with $7,500 borrowed from a host of incredulous friends, among them Robert Benchley, Cary Grant, Darryl Zanuck and John Hay Whitney. Today, his eating establishment caters to Hollywood’s great, grosses close to $700,000 a year, and nets Mike Romanoff an honest $75,000 a year.”

 

The article goes on to talk about how Romanoff passed himself off as the son of the late prime minister William Gladstone, as the man who killed Rasputin, as William Rockefeller and William K. Vanderbilt; how he issued worthless checks and ended up in countless jails; how he was thrown out of England for ‘impersonating and marauding;’ how passing more bad checks in France forced him to return to the US. “The people he bilked became very fond of the dauntless imposter and began to consider it almost a privilege to be bilked by him.”

Hollywood has always been a town of reinvention, a place where adventurers leave behind the past and forge new paths. It has always attracted hucksters, confidence men, swindlers, crooks and cheats. And so, the tailor’s son from Vilna became a legendary restaurateur in Tinsel Town by making people believe he was a Russian prince.

Romanoff was actually born Hershel Geguzin in Lithuania and changed his name to Harry F. Gerguson shortly after arriving in the US when he was in and out of a series of orphanages, running away from each, living on the streets, getting arrested, scamming people with his gift for lying.

Dominick Dunne writing in Vanity Fair in April 1999 describes Romanoff. “Unhandsome and small of stature, he was nevertheless a great favorite with the ladies, right up to his past-middle-age marriage … Mike’s perfect grace and style immediately drew attention away from his physical shortcomings. There he stood in the center of things, greeting his patrons in a deep-baritone, English-accented aristocratic voice, addressing his pals as “old boy,” kissing the hands of favored ladies, enjoying himself immensely, as if it were a wonderful party he was perpetually giving, and the famous never tired of wanting to be where he was.

“I never saw him when he wasn’t wonderfully dressed, even for playing croquet on weekends at Samuel Goldwyn’s estate, where he was a regular. There seemed to be no occasion for which he didn’t have the perfect outfit. It was Mike Romanoff who taught Clark Gable how to dress the way a dashing movie star should. When Mike smoked, he made a minor ritual of the process, in the way he took a cigarette from his gold case, tapped it, lit it with a gold lighter, and then curved his finger around it in a unique manner as he inhaled with the utmost satisfaction. His presence and personality were so compelling that the restaurant lost its luster on the rare nights he was not there.”

Sometime in the late 30s, Romanoff decided to get into the restaurant business and opened Romanoff’s on 325 North Rodeo Drive. Dunne writes about how he had no money in the cash register on opening night. Grant saved the day by having his butler bring boxes of cash from his home.

Actor Robert Wagner told Dunne about his memories of the restaurant. “Natalie [Wood, Wagner’s wife] had her 21st-birthday party there, and Sinatra gave it for her …  I was there the night Jayne Mansfield made up her nipples when she was sitting next to Sophia Loren at the Boy on a Dolphin premiere … Someone from the studio took me over to meet Joan Crawford, who was sitting in a booth, and I knelt down to speak to her, and she said, ‘Get up!’ She didn’t like the way her neck looked in photographs when she was looking down.”

Romanoff’s hosted the premiere of Marilyn Monroe’s The Seven Year Itch. An annual after-party for the Academy Awards was held there for years. Grace Kelly celebrated her Oscar award for The Country Girl at Romanoff’s and Myrna Loy and her ex-husband celebrated their divorce there as well.  Humphrey Bogart was a fixture in the restaurant every day he wasn’t working and had his own booth.

 

The original menu featured a caricature of Romanoff and his pet bulldog on the cover. Inside, the items offered included Chateaubriand for 2 at $12 (the most expensive entrée), as well as filet mignon for $5.25, rack of lamb for $9 and dover sole for $4. There was also a gossip column written by Romanoff on the facing page of the menu called “Romanoff’s Round-Up.”

The restaurant moved south of Wilshire to 140 South Rodeo in the 1950s to a larger location. For a while, it continued doing well, but it lost its luster as the original habitues faded away, and Romanoff closed its doors on New Year’s Eve in 1962.

 

MOCAMBO

Another hotspot on the Strip that opened in 1941 was Mocambo at 8588 Sunset Boulevard, a nightclub run by Charlie Morrison and Felix Young, that lasted 17 years.

According to Christy McAvoy writing on hollywoodphotos.com, its interior was “a cross between decadent Imperial Rome, Salvador Dali, and a birdcage. Allusions to a Mexican motif were carried out in a medley of soft blues, terra cotta, and silver. Flaming red columns with harlequin patterns, oversized ball fringe hanging from lacquered trees, walls with huge baroque tin flowers and Jane Berlandina paintings, striped everything, and a dazzling aviary of live birds created its over-the-top interior.

 

The birds, in fact, almost prevented the Mocambo from opening. The twenty-one parakeets, four love birds, four macaws, and a cockatoo were thought to be harmed by exposure to the nighttime noise and local animal lovers wanted them protected. Morrison assured those concerned that the birds were enjoying themselves and kept the drapes pulled during the day to allow them extra rest.”  

The owners lured away the maître d’ from the 21 Club in New York and the chef was August Roche, a celebrity in his own right. A house band was hired and other acts were also booked. Frank Sinatra often performed at Mocambo and so did Edith Piaf, Dinah Shore, Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt, their names in neon lights above the entrance. The story goes that it was Marilyn Monroe who promised to attend every night if the owners booked Ella Fitzgerald, breaking the Black barrier. Talent night was every Sunday.

Again from Hollywoodphotos.com: “The $10 opening night charge hardly slowed the steady procession of people from parading under the outdoor canopy into the flamboyant interior. Each and every evening, big stars flocked to Mocambo, even many of Hollywood’s more reclusive personalities made it their haunt, including such prominent patrons as Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer, Hedy Lamarr, Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Stanwyck, and many more. At one table might be Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart and Burgess Meredith, while at another, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. could be found deep in conversation with Norma Shearer.”

On Westhollywoodhistory.org, a post talks about the celebrity brawls it was famous for. “In 1941, a movie agent named William Burnside cold-cocked restaurateur Michael Romanoff there, for reasons now forgotten. “I wish they had let me go just for a minute and I would have annihilated him,” Romanoff said later. In October that year, Errol Flynn punched Los Angeles Times columnist Jimmy Fidler at Mocambo in retaliation for purported derogatory comments Fidler had made in his column.”

Mocambo closed on June 30, 1958, a year after Morrison died.