The Life of the Party

Brent Bolthouse, an overlord of the L.A. party scene, came by some of his expertise the hard way. In an earlier life, he was a wastrel youth in Joshua Tree, proprietor of a really ugly addiction to crystal methamphetamine.

“I just partied a little too much,” Bolthouse says. “A lot too much. I partied more than people should have to party or should party. Then I came to L.A. to get sober.”

Go figure.

For a while, happiness was pumping gas at Judy’s Mobil in Sherman Oaks, which turned out to be Life University for Bolthouse, by then an 11th-grade dropout. He was just happy to be alive, and while he reveled in staying on the planet he also learned a very important lesson: Empires stand and fall on how you treat people.

“It’s just unbelievable to see how people treat people, you know, and if you’re cleaning someone’s window and you missed a spot and they’re tapping on the window, it’s like, ‘Are you really serious? Is your life that miserable at your home that you’re bugging me about the spot on your window?’ ”

Conversely, treat people well and the doors of paradise fly open.

That is not a lesson lost on the beneficiaries of Bolthouse’s current largess--not motorists but movie stars who like to cash in on the perks of fame, not the least of which is white-glove treatment by a smooth young club promoter. Their heat has helped Bolthouse vault to the top of the night life pyramid, masterminding myriad clubs, among them Papa Willy’s, regular nights at the Viper Room and the House of Blues as well as the peripatetic Saturday Night Fever, at 4 years old practically Neolithic in club time. And of course, the Bolthouse je ne sais quoi enticed the Madonnas of the world to call Babylon for dinner reservations from their car phones--before the restaurant’s 15 minutes ran out.

“He’s pretty much at the top,” says club promoter Bryan Rabin, who runs Cherry at the Lava Lounge. “I think Brent has a corner on young Hollywood. They’ll get special treatment, but they won’t be fawned over. Brent won’t be brown-nosing them to death. He treats them as an equal. People don’t want the red carpet rolling out and people pawing all over them. It’s so unattractive.”

Oh, yes. The window tappers from Sherman Oaks, especially the pretty ones, are still waiting--on the wrong side of Bolthouse’s velvet ropes.

Indeed, nice may get you there. It doesn’t necessarily keep you there. And some say that at 26, Bolthouse is a shrewd businessman with a strong drive for control.

“The one thing I learned about Brent is he’s very protective of his mailing list,” says Steve Valentine, who briefly handled publicity for Babylon. “That’s really the key to his longevity. At one point I was needing to do a charity event for one of the owners [of Babylon], and he was not very cooperative. I think he really likes to keep control of his lists, which he’s honed over the years. I’ve often found his demeanor a little difficult to deal with.

“I think maybe because his attitude was somewhat arrogant, somewhat not willing to share or not really wanting to do anything but his own vision [that it] probably helped him create that mystique.”

Now the Bolthouse mystique has moved east to Hollywood--not the glamour capital of the mind but the grunge pit at Ivar south of the boulevard. At 1605 1/2 Ivar, on the spot where once thrived a transvestite bar and various incarnations of nightcrawlerdom, a new club springs eternal: Bolthouse’s latest venture, the daily party at the Opium Den.

Not that you should take him for a druggie.

“We’re not selling opium here,” Bolthouse says with all the crispness someone in black leather and six tattoos can muster.

Tell it to the judge.

“Someone from Hollywood vice came by the other day. I don’t know if they just came by for a random [check] because they do that. I didn’t really talk to them, so I don’t know if that’s about the name. . . . I guess you expect to get some slack from it, but we couldn’t think of a better name, and I think this place is like an opium den.”

But only the nicest sort of opium den. The kind, say, girls would like.

“What makes clubs work is women, and if women don’t feel comfortable in a place, it’s not going to ever work, because no guy is going to come to a bar with a bunch of guys. So the girls need to feel comfortable, and if they feel comfortable, then the guys will come. Then if there’s cute guys, cute girls will come. If there’s cute girls, guys will come.”

The old Gaslight has been transformed into a Bolthouse comfort zone with a new 30-foot teak bar trimmed with gold beads and a sound system imported from a Boston club. When live acts perform, a curtain is pulled back and the intimate lounge metamorphoses into a venue for everything from acid jazz to country.

Setting the mood are ornate light fixtures and inlaid furniture that should look suspiciously familiar to Bolthouse minions. They had a prior life at his West Hollywood restaurant Babylon, which he helped operate with Roxbury co-owner Eli Samaha, his brother Dimitre and Eli’s wife, actress Tia Carrere, until Bolthouse pulled out a year and a half later.

“I stole everything I could steal,” he says. “It was part of my deal. I got all the chairs and I got the lights.”

They’re from Morocco, which appeals to the desert creature in Bolthouse, although he’s never been there. When Babylon was being put together, someone was sent to Morocco for lamps, lanterns and chairs, each of which took an elderly artisan more than a week to carve. Bolthouse did research at UCLA, interviewed people who had traveled to Morocco, and furnished his dream antidote to L.A.

“L.A. is so ugly you know, the buildings are so ugly in this city. They don’t have to be so ugly. So I wanted to make a place that was somewhat beautiful.”

*

Club minutes after the oasis opened in May ‘93, word of mouth was filling Babylon’s dining card to the tune of 300 reservations a night, and the restaurant held only 120, Bolthouse says. With all the repeat clientele they needed, Babylon’s owners decided to keep the restaurant unlisted. L.A. sat up at the news.

“I got hounded in the press because of that,” Bolthouse says. “The first thing they would write is, ‘It’s really unlisted. They’re snobby.’ ”

Of course, elitism had its charms, especially for the elite. And Bolthouse enjoyed being the man of the moment to fete them.

“For a 23-year-old kid to have a restaurant that’s successful is crazy anyway. It was insanity. I mean, like U2 just walked in, Wesley Snipes is in a corner, Prince is sitting in a booth with his girlfriend, and Robert De Niro just would stroll in, and Madonna’s calling because there’s too much press outside, she won’t come in and she’s canceled her table. So you’re just, like, I’m going to go kill myself, it was so sick, just out of control. I mean I would sit in my car and laugh about it.”

But true to the nature of the trendy beast, things began to unravel.

“I tried to do the best I could. And then it was almost like a black hole, just things started going bad.”

Bolthouse had cut back on promoting clubs to launch Babylon, and pretty soon, he noticed that he was also cutting back on his income. He started nights at the Viper Room and the House of Blues, which didn’t make his partners happy, figuring people lured to Babylon for the Bolthouse-ness of it would stop coming.

Bolthouse had also started butting heads with a restaurant manager.

“He had never lived a day in Hollywood and couldn’t understand why, when [fashion editor] Elizabeth Saltzman comes in from Vogue in New York and I have to give her a table, he couldn’t understand why, so he would just diss her,” Bolthouse says. “He couldn’t fathom the concept of, well, [producer] Ted Field just called, he wants a table at 9, you’ve got to have a table for him, no, no, that’s not how we’re going to work.

“It’s like, look, the guy can go anywhere in the city or anywhere in the world to get a table, and you’re going to tell me that he can’t get one here now?”

Brent Bolthouse is Brent Bolthouse because he has the impunity to understand one essential fact about this city.

“I don’t care what you say or what you think,” he says matter-of-factly, shrouded in the darkness of the Opium Den’s back patio, “the bottom line, is this is L.A. Let’s-treat-everybody-the-same kind of an attitude works great in New Orleans because everyone is the same, but in Hollywood everyone’s not the same. It’s not how it works. It’s just not. As much as we want to say it’s not, or it’s wrong to think that, or it’s egotistical, the truth is, this is a town unlike any other town in the world.”

That may be part of Bolthouse’s formula for success, but his view of the club universe, the velvet ropes and private rooms, does not appeal to everyone who travels L.A. night streets.

“I came up into the club world through some of his events, and I have some respect for that,” says Michelle Lolli, club editor of Urb magazine. “But his thing has become so much of a different animal, less focused on the music and more about the people. My personal viewpoint is that clubs are outlets for music; mainstream radio doesn’t do a good job of that. And the whole Hollywood scene is vacuous to me. To me, it’s more like who’s who, but we are in L.A., so. . . .”

Still, while some observers say celebrities are going to clubs less in the bedraggled ‘90s--and fewer people care--Lolli acknowledges that Bolthouse will always find an audience. “There’s always going to be a mainstream market that looks to celebrities to see what they’re doing on their off time, and where they think is cool to go is cool. There’s always some brat pack of whatever year it is, some rebel youth acting crew.”

*

Bolthouse was a babe of 19 when he fell into the club life. He had planned to become a hairdresser, but a friend suggested they do a club.

“I always said no and one day we did it and it was hugely successful,” he says. “I don’t know why. I mean, looking back on it, it was a total miracle because the location was perfect. The time was perfect. The invitations were perfect. There was parking. You know, all the things that make a good night were in line but I had no idea of how to put them in line. My partner made a really beautiful flier and we just promoted like a maniac.”

The debut was Opus Lily, a Friday night scene at the Sunset Landmark (now the Hollywood Athletic Club), which they quickly followed up with Papa Willy at the same spot. Their gimmick was a dollar cover, possible because the landlord gave them half the bar proceeds. Papa Willy reigned over the summer of ’89 and launched Bolthouse’s career, granting him the young celeb turf in a world where other ground is ceded to promoters who cater to established Hollywood, and gay and avant-garde crowds (although the Opium Den reserves Thursdays for the Men’s Room). His partners in his latest club include promoters Bruce Perdew, Josh Wells and deejay Mike Messex.

Bolthouse’s clubs have worked partly because they bridge the gap between the dives and the ultra-posh places springing up in the ‘80s, says Urb magazine Editor Todd Roberts.

“He managed to make some of the Sunset Strip clubs a little more cool,” Roberts says. “He’s really made a career out of this in a way I think no other promoter has. He’s been in movies as an actor, he’s been a restaurateur. [His clubs are] a lot like what Studio 54 was, not in decadence terms but in terms of being a place where celebrities feel comfortable showing up and therefore where everyone wants to turn up.”

Now Bolthouse is enjoying the fruits of his nocturnal labor. He rises at the leisurely hour of 10 in his modest two-bedroom home clinging to the West Hollywood hills, with a bit of a view and a yard for his two pit bulls, Daisy and Jake. Parked outside are his Ford Bronco and his 1991 Mercedes 300CE.

He’s finalizing plans to open the Coffee House this summer across Sunset Boulevard from the Chateau Marmont. Soon that little stretch of street will feature not just a mega-size moose, courtesy of the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, but a giant steaming cup of coffee.

Beyond that, there could be hotels in Bolthouse’s future or perhaps even movies. He’s already had bit parts in Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth” and a film for HBO. And besides, young Hollywood’s host of choice has gotten close enough to figure out one essential fact about the movie business--all the world’s a party.

Says Bolthouse: “Being a good producer is just picking the right people to do the right job. You know if I’m producing a party, I’ve got to make sure the food is good. The lights are good. The sound is good. The location is good. That’s what makes a good party.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Brent Bolthouse

Age: 26.

Native?: Yes. Born in Pasadena, now lives in West Hollywood.

Family: Single.

Passions: “To be happy is definitely a goal. I am happy. As long as I can keep creating good times for people, that’s nice. That makes me happy. I play golf, have for 15 years. I go to the gym. I listen to books on tape.”

On being in work mode: “Sometimes I’m preoccupied or I’m aloof or elusive about things. Maybe it’s because I’m like freaking out because the sound system is about to crash and I don’t know what to do. Or we’re out of glasses or, what’s going on over there, is that a fight over there, do I need to do handle that? So everyone else’s fun is my work.”

On his first success: “I started doing nightclubs, and that was really like wow. I had no plan to do nightclubs. It was just like this thing fell into my lap and it worked, so it was, as I say, like a God shot. It was like a miracle of some sort. Just to be so successful the first time out, to have so many people come that the Fire Department closed us down.”

On keeping things in perspective: “I’ve always tried to keep my head really in check because nobody likes an egomaniac and there’s enough of that in this town, I think.”