They're tearing down the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. The main dining room, seen above, is rubble by now…an inglorious end to what was once a glorious institution. I never joined but I went there often enough for meals that I felt a certain unofficial sense of belonging.
This Friars Club should not be confused with the original which is on E. 55th Street in New York. That one is still operational, though it has suffered a generational loss as so many members of yore have passed away and gone unreplaced by younger members of the show biz community. I suppose that's the main thing that destroyed the West Coast branch, though there were other factors.
The Beverly Hills branch was founded in 1947 at the instigation of either George Jessel or Milton Berle. Both took credit for the idea that there should be a version of the Friars out there and it was an immediate success. Everyone who was anyone in TV or movies was a member in the fifties and the parties and roasts at its original Rodeo Drive location were legendary. In the early sixties, they relocated to a windowless structure on Santa Monica Boulevard a few blocks east of the offices of Western Printing and Lithography, which readers of this blog know better as Gold Key Comics. At first, the new locale was a huge hit but as the sixties wore on, the Friars Club ceased to be the place to be. It grew old-fashioned and stuffy, and many of the Big Name Star members found better places to hang out. Since belonging to the same club as Frank Sinatra and Jack Benny was the main appeal of membership, the ranks began to thin ever so slightly.
The thinning grew thick when the scandal broke. The card rooms on the third floor of the club building were a not-well-kept secret of Hollywood. Everyone had heard that famous people played poker and gin up there for serious money and that some lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That wasn't the scandal. The scandal was that there were peep holes in the ceiling and that men on the roof would radio their accomplices at the card table what certain players had in their hands. In other words, Major League Cheating. There were men who'd been cleaned out of millions that way. Most of the cheaters eventually became members of a club with bars on the windows but the image of the Friars never quite recovered.
I started going there in the late seventies, I think. I knew a lot of people who were members and we'd sometimes have business lunches there. I remember on one of my first visits, a TV crew came in and began setting up to interview some of the waiters for some sort of news segment or something. (The room, by the way, had the best waiters — funny, efficient, polite and always well-tipped.) As soon as it became apparent that a TV interview was to occur, a figure at a table on the far side of the room jumped up and sprinted over to explain to the reporter that it was essential that he be included in the segment. It was Milton Berle and I don't think he even knew what the interview was for, what it was about, where it was going to air, anything. It's just that there was this camera there and his appearance before it was mandatory. The reporter shrugged and Uncle Miltie was interviewed along with the waiters.
In the late eighties, there was a big membership drive…I guess to try and replenish a membership roster that was aging (and dying) at a brisk clip. I was pestered the way you get pestered by a too-aggressive realtor to buy a house you don't want. I liked dining there but the food was just as good if not better at other places that didn't hit you up for hefty dues. Your odds of dining near Big Name Stars were better in those other places, too. The last time I ate there, the most famous person on the premises was Dick Van Patten…and I think the runner-up may have been me. Or more likely, the valet parking guy.
In 2004, the club was privatized. That is, an outside investor bought it and announced his intention to turn it into a going concern. Whatever it was he was going to do didn't sit well with the original Friars in New York. They sued to wrest the name away from the investor and succeeded. He renamed it Club 9900 (since it was at 9900 Santa Monica Boulevard) but no one wanted to belong to that and the place closed down in 2008. And soon there'll be no building there until the owners decide what will replace it. Presumably, it'll be soon since that's a pretty expensive piece of real estate to lie fallow for long. Sad to see it go, not because it was a great place to eat or socialize but because it was a lingering remnant of an era you don't see much of anymore.