A Yank and His Pub in Very British Town

This village is one of those near-mythic British places laden with so much tradition that you would expect the venerable buildings to crumble under the weight of responsibility.

Woodstock is overloaded, possessing not only Blenheim Palace and its elegantly lush grounds, but the town’s clean, sloping streets are lined with wool shops and teahouses and pubs and Englishness.

Even though Woodstock has taken pains to preserve its 18th-Century feel, it is not a movie set, and this is why its good citizens were not exactly dancing in its cobbled streets when they found out that one of its oldest pubs had been bought by an American. Not a silent investment-type American, either, but one who--unthinkably--intended to pump the beer himself.

The fact that precedent had been set did not count, as the locals drew a line between the American-born Lady Randolph Churchill’s partnership in the operation of Blenheim Palace (as well as in the creation of Winston), and the plans Larry O’Brien had for the Black Prince pub when he bought it in 1983.

Curious Visitors

“People streamed into the pub out of curiosity, all of them wondering, ‘What’s this Yank going to do to our pub?’ ” The St. Louis-born O’Brien laughed as he recalled the “there-goes-the-neighborhood” fear of the locals. “They thought I was going to put up neon signs and hire topless waitresses.”

What O’Brien did instead was to reclaim the pub’s interior from the accumulation of 500 years worth of decorating fads and restore it to the building it once may have been. Sitting in the hazy sunlight beside the River Lime, which feeds Blenheim Palace lake, the Black Prince looks the most solidly British of pubs.

“The locals loved what we had done. They saw that the Yank had no plans to tart up their pub, and word traveled that we were all right.”

Word also traveled that O’Brien and his wife, Gabrielle, in their mid-50s, were not exactly ordinary Yanks, and their purchase of the pub is really only a beginning to this story.

In the first place, Gabrielle was born in England but left home at 18 to pursue a dancing career with the famed Madame Bluebelle in Paris. She wound up in Las Vegas, where Larry O’Brien was a trumpeter playing as side and session man for the likes of Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey, Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra, a career O’Brien modestly dismisses by saying: “I played the trumpet for 34 years, and in Las Vegas you eventually work with everyone.”

Or everyone except Gabrielle, who although she was his Las Vegas neighbor, he did not meet and marry until a working holiday put them both in the Bahamas and tropical romance took its cue.

‘A Fantasy Existence’

Together the O’Briens enjoyed the American dream: glamorous careers, a lavish house with a swimming pool and three cars in the garage, predictably clement weather and freely flowing cash. It was, says O’Brien, “a fantasy existence,” the kind Las Vegas both giveth and eventually taketh away.

“Las Vegas is a very competitive place if you’re a musician or a dancer. There was the age factor for us both, and I started having serious chop problems.”

“Chop problems” meant that the idea of playing the trumpet became a form of psychological warfare for O’Brien, a war he fought and lost. “It beat me. I tried everything. I went for professional coaching and I worked out with the trumpet. It got so bad that I got scared just looking at the trumpet case.”

So with Gabrielle then working as a croupier, O’Brien became secretary-treasurer of the Las Vegas Musician’s Union for a long seven years.

‘Not a Politician’

“I detested every minute of it. I was a musician, not a politician.” And this is apparent as he leaps up to flip the background jazz tape, excusing himself with, “I can’t talk unless I have music around me.”

One day in 1982 O’Brien walked into a musician’s union meeting, read the minutes, and then fulfilled the Disgruntled Employee’s Dream by telling the board, politely, what they could do with his job. They listened, he walked.

Having no post-retirement plans, O’Brien and Gabrielle took a trip to Europe, his first, and one that inspired in him another type of fantasy existence: pub landlord in England.

“My wife didn’t want to come back to England. She liked the life and the weather in Las Vegas. My friends all thought I had lost my mind.”

It must have seemed that the odds were with O’Brien’s skeptical friends, as neither Larry nor Gabrielle had ever run a pub or knew the first thing about buying one. Even so, they sold everything except “our clothes, a few oil paintings and a 15-year-old Siamese cat” and bought one-way tickets to London.

England does not suffer from a lack of pubs for sale, and this afforded the O’Briens the wearying privilege of scouting many available properties. Armed only with a hired car and a real estate agent’s list, they went on a 5 1/2-month, 22,000-mile pub crawl around southern England looking at much countryside and more than 300 pubs.

The discretion surrounding the sale of British pubs aided O’Brien, as he could walk in and play the role of chatty American tourist without tipping his hand. Thus he “got the knowledge” of the pub business and acquainted himself with complex brewing procedures by standing at hundreds of bars and picking the landlords’ brains, something no Englishman could do without giving off the scent of a prospective buyer and perhaps encouraging the landlord to be a little optimistic about the pub’s prospects.

Still, O’Brien found nothing that appealed. “We were very discouraged. We got to the point where we gave ourselves four weeks to find something, and if we didn’t, then we were going to go back to California and buy a cocktail lounge.”

Comes the Black Prince

Enter onto the market the Black Prince, a pub whose namesake was the eldest son of 14th-Century King Edward III, a tenacious character (O’Brien in a past life?) who, according to legend, earned his sobriquet through fierceness and cunning in battle.

“The pub was in a mess, but it was perfectly situated, and it had a lot of potential.” So for $150,000 Larry O’Brien became landlord of the Black Prince.

His first act was to call in an automatic hammer operator and begin the search through three layers of walls to find the pub he wanted. As the pub is a “listed building,” O’Brien should not have touched it until he had received written permission from the building preservation authority.

“I didn’t know that. But when I found out, the walls were already down and what could I do? Put them back up?”

O’Brien’s illegal renovation revealed great stone fireplaces and hefty wood beams, a suit of armor, regimental memorabilia and paintings of Paris. The constant jazz sound track gives the place a cozy, gently sophisticated feel.

Tex-Mex Cuisine

To make sure his clientele of Woodstockers, Oxford students and academics, airmen from the nearby U.S. Air Force base and tourists from everywhere received the fully cosmopolite treatment, O’Brien added a few items to the conventional pub food menu of sausages, pies and chips: items culled from O’Brien’s favorite cuisine, Tex-Mex.

“My wife and I love Tex-Mex, and as other pubs were going for continental menus, we thought we might try Tex-Mex. To the best of our knowledge, no one else was doing it, and when Americans living around Woodstock heard we were doing it, they went bananas.”

The British did not, but neither did they riot. Instead, they sniffed around for a while, then plunged in to discover the joys of enchiladas, burritos, tacos, nachos and refried beans. O’Brien calculates that 80% of his Tex-Mex fare is swallowed by British customers, although some insist on washing down this foreign cuisine with a pint or two of traditional bitter when imported lager would be more in the spirit of the cuisine.

As several other pubs and London restaurants have followed suit, the once scarce ingredients are more easily obtained and O’Brien only needs to import chili peppers from Texas and pinto beans from Denver. The burritos he can get in Liverpool.

Business Is Good

Business for the enterprising Yank is good, so good that O’Brien has become the affluent immigrant and now has his eye on other projects, ones that will not demand 16-hour days. “Maybe I’ll buy a country house in a few years and do bed and breakfast,” he says.

Which means that the United States will not see Larry O’Brien for a while, if indeed ever. “I haven’t been back since I left and I have no intention of going back. The Home Office gave me permanent residency here, so I can do everything except vote. And I don’t want to get too far away from my doctors and the excellent medical facilities here.”

O’Brien’s last remark refers to the cancer he beat two years ago, an achievement of which he is intensely proud. Then again, he has much to be proud of. After taking on the British pub and adding to it a little bit of America, O’Brien might decide to open a cafe in Paris or a trattoria in Florence.

Or even sell coals to Newcastle. At least he has re-established the American touch in Woodstock, and though not quite inside Blenheim Palace, fantasy has bred fantasy and taken O’Brien a long, long way from Caesars Palace.

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Buses serve Woodstock from Oxford and their schedules are posted in front of Ratner’s Jewellers on central Cornmarket Street. The trip takes 20 minutes, and will drop you in Woodstock across the street from the Marlborough Arms pub. The Black Prince is about 300 meters to your right as you descend from the bus.