Bad News for L.A. Press Club: Home Up for Sale

The Greater Los Angeles Press Club started because of an argument--between a reporter and his wife.

The couple were vacationing in Denver in 1947, and the reporter, the late Bevo Means, stalked out and chanced upon that city’s press club, where he found a sympathetic audience.

When Means, then with the old Los Angeles Herald-Express, returned here, he helped establish a similar sanctuary downtown at the old Case Hotel. Early honored guests included President Harry S. Truman, Marilyn Monroe and Army Gen. Omar Bradley.

Now, the once-vibrant institution, host of press conferences and press high jinks in equal parts, is struggling to survive. The club’s board has put the current home at 600 N. Vermont Ave. up for sale for $2 million. A $500,000 bank loan is due in 18 months, and the club’s treasury is in bad shape.

“It could be sold in a year, it could be sold next week,” General Manager William Snyder said. “What happens after that is anyone’s guess.”

The board hopes that the club can relocate, perhaps in a hotel. In the meantime, press conferences will still be booked, but bar and food service will end Friday.

A press club without a bar?

“It used to be packed with people here,” said Liverpool-born bartender Allan Wong. “Now, some nights, I’m the only one.”

The club’s staff will be reduced to two: Snyder and accountant Marie O’Gorman. A home has been found for a third resident, an itinerant duck named Quacker, which someone threw over the back fence a few years ago.

Snyder attributed the club’s decline to the proliferation of ethnic and special-interest press organizations, as well as the gradual extinction of that species of reporter known as the bon vivant. In recent years, media types at the club have been outnumbered by advertising and public relations people.

“We recently had reunions for the (defunct) Hollywood Citizen News and CNS (City News Service),” Snyder said, “and they were more the way I’d remembered newspaper people to be--they laughed, they drank, they swore. The newer generation seems to be more somber. We still have 400 or so members, but many are older ones who just don’t get down here anymore.”

Historically, press clubs have a way of disappearing and reappearing in this town.

During Prohibition, an earlier version flourished at a time when, as the late Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker once wrote, a reporter’s “standard equipment included a police badge and a gun, as well as a pencil and paper (and) reporters clung to the side of police cars riding on hot calls with detectives.”

That club, which was located in various buildings, met for social purposes only, drinking contraband beer and whiskey that had been contributed by police-beat reporters with connections. Legend has it that the Prohibition-era club came to an end when a drunken reporter was refused service and phoned police, insisting that they raid it. They did, albeit reluctantly.

“The first club was called the Los Angeles Press Club, which is why we named ours the Greater Los Angeles Press Club (in 1947),” current club Treasurer Austin Green said. “Our lawyers advised us that we should come up with a new name so we wouldn’t assume the debts of the old one.”

Poker Tables

The modern-era club’s first headquarters, on the fourth floor of the Case Hotel, featured the traditional poker table as well as five slot machines that were reportedly obtained from law-enforcement authorities.

The slots were subsequently seized, however, and the club received an attractive offer from the Ambassador (which boasted a swimming pool, among other attractions). It moved there in 1951, and the club’s golden era began.

Performers appearing in the hotel’s Cocoanut Grove, such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Liberace, would drop into the club and entertain. Membership rose to 2,000.

Along the way, the club established awards competitions, scholarship funds and a foundation to aid retired reporters and their families

Eventually, the club and the Ambassador came to a parting of the ways and, in 1960, it moved out to Vermont Avenue, where it became the principal spot in the city for holding press conferences.

The sad thing about its threatened extinction, Webster said, is that the club, which is available to groups or individuals for $75 per half-hour, “affords people a forum to express their views.”

Building Threatened

Sale of the current location would also threaten the existence of the club’s Spanish-style building, which has a history of its own dating back half a century when it was the Theater Mart playhouse.

A melodrama called “The Drunkard” opened there in 1933 and became one of the hottest shows in town.

“Noel Coward, Tallulah Bankhead, John Barrymore, all the stars, came to see us,” recalled Zan (Joyce) Thompson, who portrayed the heroine for 12 years and is now a Times columnist. “W. C. Fields liked to bring his flask and listen backstage because he said it made him feel closer to ‘real show business.’ ”

“The Drunkard,” and its musical version, “The Wayward Way,” played for 26 years and 9,477 performances.

And, now, its successor seems close to ending a 28-year-run of about 20,000 press conferences . . . and a few parties.