CLIQUES

Ronald Reagan and Ethel Kennedy certainly don’t hang out together at the partisan hotspots in our nation’s capital, but they bumped shoulders at Jimmy’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1979. “I asked Ethel if Reagan was joining her party,” says Jimmy Murphy. “She said no, but it was a big joke and they posed for some pictures. Later the Kennedy group started a conga line. Ethel was insisting that we go around the Reagan table, but I directed it down through the bar.”

Jimmy, a native of Ireland, opened his tasteful, sophisticated power restaurant in 1978. The rooms may not be smoke-filled, but the celebrity-sighting leans more to Jerry Brown than Jackson Browne. If you want to know who’s brokering whom and for how much, pull up a table. It is the choice spot for congressmen meeting with key Southern California contributors. Before his troubles started, former Lincoln Savings & Loan owner Charles H. Keating Jr. caught up with Sen. Alan Cranston. And recently, Democratic presidential hopeful Bob Kerrey was spotted schmoozing with potential Hollywood contributors.

Murphy likes to keep in touch with his customers after they’re elected as well. President Bush held a $25,000-a-person lunch at Jimmy’s six months ago for about 40 of his top California backers. “Obviously,” Murphy says, “we didn’t serve broccoli.”