Musso & Frank Grill

Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

Los Angeles has a fascinating and colorful history, from the original Native American inhabitants who eked out a living along the seasonal L.A. River to the Spanish missionaries to the Americans of the 20^th century led by William Mulholland who brought water to the arid basin as was famously depicted in the movie Chinatown: “She’s my sister, she’s my daughter, my sister, my daughter.” The sordid past of the City of Angels makes it the perfect setting for the writers of some of the best hard-boiled detective novels such as James Ellroy, Ross McDonald, and the father of them all, Raymond Chandler.

I am captivated, transfixed, mesmerized (an unkind person may say obsessed) with this past.  I once spent an afternoon on a murder site tour of Los Angeles:  10050 Cielo Dr. in the hills above Benedict Canyon where the pregnant Sharon Tate spent her last evening, the LaBianca home at 3301 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz where the Manson family continued their rampage, the “Nightmare on Elm Drive” Menendez home in Beverly Hills and of course the corner of 39^th and Norton, the site of the Black Dahlia murder.   I originally intended to show the police photo of the murder scene in the then empty lot but an image of the body bisected at the waist may be too much for my delicate readership.   Instead I will show a photo of the beautiful victim, aspiring actress Elizabeth Short.

A few years ago, my thoughtful wife treated me for my birthday to a guided bus tour through locations used in Raymond Chandler’s novels.  We started in downtown at such locations as the ornate lobby of the art deco Oviatt Building on Olive St., featured in the opening passage of “The Lady in the Lake.”   The first floor space, which was once a haberdashery, is now the home of Cicada restaurant. 

We continued on to the Hotel Barclay, where in “The Little Sister,” Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe, found a man in room 332 dead with an icepick in his head.  When it opened in 1897 as the Van Nuys Hotel it was the premier luxury hotel in Los Angeles.  By the time Marlowe was walking the halls in 1949, Chandler described “the smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives.”  Located at the corner of 4^th and Main, the best days of the hotel are long in the past; it is now Skid Row adjacent.

The tour ended at Larry Edmunds Bookshop on Hollywood Blvd, the model for Geiger’s Bookstore in “The Big Sleep.”  In the movie version, Humphrey Bogart seduced the lovely but innocent young clerk, played by Dorothy Malone.  

Where is your rambling reviewer heading you may ask.  Larry Edmunds Bookshop is directly across the street from the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, Musso & Frank Grill.

When one is planning to spend an evening at Musso and Frank’s, it is a must to pregame at the art deco Frolic Room just a few blocks down Hollywood Blvd. 

The Frolic Room, in addition to being known for the type of sophisticated patrons shown in the photo above, is renowned for an entire wall covered by a mural of Hollywood stars of yesteryear by The New Yorker magazine caricature artist Al Hirschfeld.  Here is a panel of the leading comedians of the 1920s and 1930s.

Musso & Frank Grill opened in 1919 occupying what is the current Grill Room.  There was an adjacent “back room,” otherwise known as the Writer’s Room, which opened in the 1930s.  The Writer’s Room was the preferred drinking spot for novelists such as William Faulkner (who coincidentally wrote the screenplay for “The Big Sleep”), F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who were lured to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that was Hollywood. 

Although the Writer’s Room closed in the 1940s, the restaurant’s New Room holds the original famous bar, light fixtures and furniture from 1934.

The New Room remains a Hollywood fixture.  It has been a favorite dining spot over the years for Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, and John Travolta.  More recently, it was used as the location where agent Al Pacino made his deals with Leonardo DiCaprio in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and where Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin would nosh in “The Kominsky Method.”  Most of the waiters, in their signature red server jacket with black shawl lapel, black bow tie and napkin lying across the wrist, date back to the silent movie era.

As this is reputedly a restaurant review blog, one may ask “What about the food at Musso and Frank’s?”  The food is irrelevant to the Musso and Frank’s experience.  It is good enough, that is all you need to know.