The world’s highest-paid Zamboni driver: Disney boss...

The world’s highest-paid Zamboni driver: Disney boss Michael Eisner made his debut aboard a Zamboni Model 500 ice resurfacer the other night, smoothing out the playing surface of Anaheim’s Pond. Eisner was playing it just for laughs during a celebrity hockey match. Or is EuroDisney in even worse financial shape than the company says?

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Peanuts on ice: The Zamboni, used in hundreds of ice arenas in more than 30 countries, was developed nearly a half-century ago in the tiny L.A. suburb of Paramount, of all places. It’s the city’s greatest distinction since it shed its pre-World War II claim as Hay Capital of the World.

The contraption with the funny name--the inventor was Frank Zamboni--can be seen rumbling at almost all the National Hockey League sites. One exception: The Forum, home of the L.A. Kings, which is located about 15 miles away in Inglewood. The Kings use a foreign model--from Canada.

The Zamboni attained a kind of folk hero status when it became a running gag in the “Peanuts” comic strip (creator Charles Schulz uses Zambonis at the rink he built in Santa Rosa).

A typical exchange in the comic strip has Charlie Brown asking Snoopy: “Well, how was hockey practice?”

Responds the melancholy hound: “I don’t think the coach likes me. . . . He told me to stand in front of the Zamboni.”

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Taking a 43-year-old drive: With the stage version of “Sunset Boulevard” playing here, it’s a good time to reprise some memorable lines from the 1950 film, a kind of L.A./Hollywood time capsule starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson.

* The girlfriend of screenwriter Joe Gillis (Holden), after he remarks that her nose job looks fine: “It should. . . . It cost $300.”

* An agent, explaining why he’s too broke to make a loan to Gillis: “Last year, someone talked me into buying a ranch in the Valley.”

* Gillis, after hearing onetime silent screen star Norma Desmond (Swanson) describe a scene in her screenplay in which a queen kisses a decapitated head on a platter: “They’ll love it in Pomona.”

* Gillis on a gizmo in Desmond’s ancient car: “The whole thing was upholstered in leopard skin and had one of those car phones, all gold-plated.”

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Sunset stripped: Joe Gillis would hardly recognize the Sunset Boulevard of today. A shopping complex has replaced Schwab’s drugstore, which Gillis (like other fledgling writers and actors) called his “headquarters.”

Of the hot nightclubs, scene of innumerable celebrity scuffles, Ciro’s is now the Comedy Store, while Mocambo and the Trocadero are parking lots.

The Garden of Allah is part parking lot and part Great Western Bank, though the latter at least has the reverence to display a model of the Garden in a glass bubble. The Garden’s swimming pool was shaped like the Black Sea per the wishes of onetime owner Alla Nazimova, a Russian-born actress briefly married to Rudolph Valentino.

It was a fall into that pool that inspired the line credited to writer Robert Benchley: “Get me out of these clothes and into a dry martini.”

As for Desmond’s mansion, it was actually on Wilshire Boulevard. Its pool, from which the movie springs, was built by the studio--a nice present for the real residents. The mansion and pool have since been demolished.

miscelLAny:

The menu of the Cheesecake Factory in Woodland Hills carries an advertisement, complete with a large bull’s-eye illustration, from a company offering classes on firing handguns.