INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

If you could only drink one more cocktail for the rest of your days…

Gin martinis, of course. Manhattan is a close second.

Are there any other bars that really impress you in Los Angeles?

Oh yeah, lots.

Right here in Santa Monica…Vincenzo [Marianella]’s place. I like that. I like Edison. I like Comme Ca. I like Varnish, Cole’s, the place across the street…

Las Perlas?

I like the Magic Castle. I love the Magic Castle. I like the Hotel Bel-Air, but it’s closed for renovation. I can’t believe it. It shocks me…That place never closed. Even when they added 30 rooms, they never closed. I worked there. I like going out to Malibu to those places on the beach, like Gladstones. If you go way out to Malibu there’s a place right in the sand, it’s really fun to be there. Lots of different bars for lots of different reasons. There’s another English pub I like over here on Santa Monica Boulevard that I like, right by the beach.

Ye Olde King’s Head?

Yeah, it’s just a fun place. You can have a pint of Guinness and watch a game or have some fish and chips. It’s a great place. So there’s lot of different kinds of places for different reasons. I’ve found this place, Caña, the sugar cane place, downtown, which I really love, because they’ve got great music. And I went to First & Hope to hear a singer friend of mine and there were really good drinks. There’s a friend of mine behind the bar, decent food, and I saw a show when I was here. A New York singer was in there. I saw her and took her out to dinner. Then we followed her musicians, a vibe player named Mancini, we followed him to his next gig, which happened to be Caña. Then we went to Varnish, so it was a really nice evening. You can bar hop again. It’s great.

Downtown especially.

Yeah, it’s great. You can bar hop in Hollywood, even in the Valley. I haven’t been over there in awhile.

Do you feel like there’s anything missing from the Los Angeles bar scene?

I miss some of the classic places, which I’m sorry were unable to survive. One of my favorite stops was always the Cock and Bull. The Tail ‘O the Cock I used to like also. Those places haven’t survived, unfortunately. They were from another era. They had great service and great drinks and a lot of old time bartenders are gone now. Chasen’s, I wish had survived. It was a great place, a great place. I like to go to the Polio Lounge once in a while, just check out who’s there. It’s a great place. I like Dan Tana’s is a cool hang. I used to hang there all the time. I love that place.

What do you love about it?

Just sitting at the bar with that wacky bartender…he’s such a character. It’s just got such a Hollywood feeling about it. You’re always going to see some celebrity in the corner getting drunk. It’s just a great place. The food is decent, the drinks are well made and the bartender’s totally irreverent.

What was it like to bartend at the Hotel Bel-Air?

It was fabulous. It was one of the great jobs I’ve had. That, Charlie O’s and The Rainbow Room – and I tended bar for Milt and Bill Larsen downtown at the old Variety Arts Club, which was closed before you were born, probably. It was in ’78 that I went to work for them down there, and I would moonlight sometimes at the Castle, but the Variety Arts Club was in an old building that’s still there, and it had a ballroom on the top floor, which is still there; they probably use it for events now, and I worked at the W.C. Fields bar, which had all the family had donated a lot of material to Milt and Bill. They had a show business museum down on the lower floors – Bill is long dead, but Milt is still alive – when I was with Manny the other night, he said he had just had lunch and Milt had come to join him at the table, because he used to be the brunch bartender at the Magic Castle, Manny did; he worked one day a week there for 31 years, and I said, “Goddamit, I wish I had known that, Manny, because I hadn’t seen Milt in years.” I worked for him for years; it was one of my moonlighting jobs, I did for a couple days a week, and I loved Milt and I loved Bill. They were just such characters. They were Vaudvillians. Their mom and dad had been Vaudvillians, which is how they got into this whole thing. That’s old Hollywood. You can’t reproduce that. The Variety Arts Club, I’m so sorry it didn’t make a go of it. It was so great. It was open for maybe 10 years, I guess, but it was a fabulous place. It certainly had a wonderful, interesting clientele. Jazz, lots of musicians went through there, lots of people got their start there. Screw magazine used to take it over and have their porno awards there.

You bartended that event?

Yeah. The guy who owned Screw magazine, every time he came in, he came in from a building across the way and came in on a wire dressed as Superman. It was just hilarious.