Famous Friends, Average Folk Remember Lucy’s Late Owner

Lucy Casado was trying. Her smile was forced, her eyes were sad. She looked, for a moment, all alone in the crowded restaurant that bears her name.

How are you? she was asked.

“I’m faking it,” she admitted.

She tried harder.

“No, don’t say that. . . . I am among the most loving, biggest family that Frank and I ever had. It was just wonderful today.”

After 42 years of marriage, Lucy Casado had every right to her sadness, but Frank wouldn’t have wanted it that way.

Frank Casado, who died at 66 last Thursday after an eight-month battle with lung cancer, was the proprietor of the storied Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe on Melrose Avenue, hangout of the famous and powerful. He was, as one friend called him, “a Mexican Toots Shor,” and his wake Tuesday was to be a celebration.

Lucy’s El Adobe, after all, “was more than a place to eat,” former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. had explained in a eulogy during a Mass earlier in the day at St. Vibiana’s Roman Catholic Cathedral downtown. “It was a place to be, to meet friends, to be seen and to see.”

Even with Casado absent from his usual table, Lucy’s was all that Tuesday.

Brown, who usually orders the “Jerry Brown Special,” was noshing on sushi. His ex-sweetheart, Linda Ronstadt, was relaxing by the piano after singing “Ave Maria” at the Mass. Actor John Candy, who was a pallbearer, left early, but songwriter Jimmy Webb played the piano and sang.

Friends said Casado, who was buried at Calvary Cemetery, would have been pleased--except that the caterer brought sushi.

The non-famous were there too. Over by the fountain, Hollywood Division Homicide Detective Bruce Wilson remembered how when he was on uniform patrol and it was time for a meal break, Casado knew officers got only 45 minutes. If there was a line out front, Wilson and other officers knew to go around to the back.

“He’d sit me down and feed me--he treated all of us that way,” Wilson said. “It was a neighborhood, palsy, backdoor kind of deal. . . . And when I brought my family in, he treated us like royalty. . . . I loved Frank Casado.”

What made Lucy’s El Adobe so special?

Many people, such as state Controller Gray Davis and political commentator Bill Press, described it as a second home. Songwriter J. D. Souther described Frank and Lucy as “my other parents.”

“The family just exudes warmth,” Davis said. “And either you’ve got that or you don’t. You can’t bottle and sell that.”

At the wake, Casado’s brothers, Raymond and Juan, told stories of the old days growing up in Boyle Heights; how Frank used to play tennis with future great Pancho Gonzalez. One time Frank went to Beverly Hills and won a junior tournament. A newspaper photographer took a picture of the runner-up, because Frank, in his Eastside clothes, didn’t look like a tennis champ.

Casado worked as a shoeshine boy as a teen-ager, as a cab driver and joined the Navy, rising to the rank of chief petty officer during World War II. He later drove a truck for the Seven-Up Bottling Co. and then, Lucy said, became the first Mexican-American given the job of salesman by the company. He quickly became their best.

He was a founder of the Mexican-American Political Assn. and helped Rep. Edward Roybal (D-Los Angeles) get elected to the City Council in 1949.

Casado and his wife opened their restaurant in 1964 across from Paramount Studios. It was an instant success, a haven for people of politics and Hollywood.

The future Gov. Brown was a mere trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District when he started hanging out at Lucy’s, and the cafe’s fortunes rose with Brown’s. Lucy Casado smiled remembering the night she played matchmaker. At Frank’s suggestion, she introduced the governor to Ronstadt, sparking a romance that, according to Lucy, survives as friendship.

Casado’s generosity was legion. If someone asked him for a loan, one friend recalled, Casado might say, “See that bank over there? They promised they won’t make tacos and I promised I won’t make loans.”

But in the up-and-down world of politics and entertainment, Casado often helped friends through lean times. Webb, for one, ran up two years of meal tabs before hitting it big with songs such as “MacArthur Park” and “Up, Up and Away.”

And now Lucy approached the man at the piano with a request.

“Sing my song.”

“They’re all your songs,” Webb said.

Then, beneath the din of conversation, Webb softly sang a new ballad that had indeed been dedicated to Lucy. One line recalled how they’d “drink margaritas all night long in an old cantina.” Ronstadt has recorded the tune; soon, it will be released as a single.

“You see,” Lucy Casado said, “you give and you receive.”

The song is titled “Adios.”