NONFICTION - July 9, 1995

NAME DROPPING: Tales From My Barbary Coast Saloon by Barnaby Conrad (HarperCollinsWest: $18; 212 pp.) The glory of saloons--as opposed, say, to churches or blood banks--is that anyone might drop in. Add an affable host and an enchanted city, and it’s guaranteed. Such was Barnaby Conrad’s El Matador in 1950s San Francisco, whose guest book sloshed over with convivial celebrity. (The Reagans made their X’s therein, and Judy Garland, and Mickey Cohen, fresh out of Alcatraz. Charles Addams drew a triumphant bull brandishing a human’s ear. Noel Coward, Henry Fonda and Casey Tibbs, champion bronc-buster, registered on the same night. Dropping names is a chancy craft, risking boredom, pretension or both; if you’re going to do it, do it right, writes Herb Caen in a celebratory foreword. Conrad knows when to hold ‘em and knows when to fold ‘em. He ought to. Author and artist of note, bullfighter of a more languorous but no less demanding era, founder of the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference, he knows everybody. Like an old friend catching up on old times, Conrad has a yarn for each, most of them funny, some twice-told, some unprintable, some poignant: Why John Steinbeck wanted to be reincarnated as a chocolate-flavored bug; when David Niven, skiing, got frostbite you-know-where and what he did about it; Capote’s feud with Brando; the time Orson Welles fought a bull accidentally and the time Gary Cooper fought one on purpose; the all-time-classic stage spoonerism of Michael Redgrave, who meant to say, “Bring me a pint of port and a pistol!” There is tragedy here--a whole chapter on the great Manolete, how he lived and how he died; the last days of William Saroyan--but in the main there are the sorts of gilded vignettes that Tallulah Bankhead told on Alfred Hitchcock, who was directing “Lifeboat,” set entirely at sea. Balking at a soundtrack, Hitchcock asks the producer: “Where’s the damn music coming from?” Producer: “I’ll tell you if you tell me where the damn camera’s coming from.” Ole!