Catering to the Stars

If the eras of a city can be marked by the closing of its restaurants--as Jack Lemmon observes in a new documentary--then the closing of Chasen’s, an L.A. landmark from 1936 until 1995, marked the last coffin nail in Hollywood’s Golden Age.

In Chasen’s heyday, Alfred Hitchcock--a regular every Thursday--left $200 tips for the coat-check girl Val. Jimmy Stewart held his bachelor party at the Beverly Boulevard eatery (midgets, not strippers, popped from under the serving tray). Elizabeth Taylor ordered its legendary chili to go--shipped to Rome as she filmed “Cleopatra.” Orson Welles fired his business partner John Houseman at Chasen’s by hurling a flaming Sterno at his head.

Fortunately, the restaurant, whose clientele ran from Clark Gable to Quentin Tarantino, hasn’t vanished without a tasty epitaph: the award-winning documentary “Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s” made by two New York filmmakers in their 30s who’d never been inside the eatery when they decided to chronicle its final hours. (The film opens Friday at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills.)

In January 1995, the filmmaking couple of Robert Pulcini, 34, and Shari Springer Berman, 33, made their first trip to Los Angeles to pitch a Grisham-esque script around town. Their travels led them to the Secret Garden, a West Hollywood bed-and-breakfast run by Raymond Bilbool, Chasen’s flamboyant, Burma-born banquet captain.

Recalls Pulcini: “We spent the week pitching our story, then we’d come home at night and Raymond would tell us Chasen’s stories: ‘George Burns was in last night. . . . There was a food fight. . . .’ ”

The pair also became fascinated by tales of Chasen’s loyal staff, who would become the documentary’s emotional focus. “Raymond would tell us, ‘Tommy Gallagher is very ill; he’s worked here 50 years, but he’ll come in and drag his oxygen tank around the restaurant,’ ” says Berman. “Everyone had worked there for a lifetime. In our generation, being a waiter is a step to being an actor. I don’t know anyone who’s done that as their life’s profession.”

Berman says she and her husband knew they were witnessing “the end of an era--so in between our studio meetings we realized we’ve got to make this movie.” With less than four months before the restaurant’s April closing, the pair headed back to New York, raised enough money to return with a crew, and moved into Chasen’s to document its star-studded last two weeks.

“The first time we saw the restaurant,” says Pulcini, “we were shooting it.”

Chasen’s demise was the result of aging clientele, perceived un-hipness and arterially incorrect food. But its death notice briefly made it the hottest spot in town, giving Pulcini and Berman the starriest cast list since “The Player.” This is probably your only chance to see John Travolta, Courtney Love and Sharon Stone rub shoulders cinematically with Rod Steiger, Jane Wyman and Fay Wray.

But photographing those stars was another matter. Although the team won permission to shoot inside a restaurant famous for guarding its diners’ privacy, “it was so dark inside, our cinematographer was ready to commit suicide,” Pulcini says with a sigh.

Extra lighting was forbidden; at one point, the team smuggled in higher-wattage lightbulbs, which they surreptitiously screwed in; but the staff could detect the slightest change and quickly removed them.

That unwillingness to adapt becomes an affecting theme in “Off the Menu,” which celebrates the restaurant’s traditions and its echoes of Hollywood glamour while subtly illuminating the reasons for Chasen’s demise.

“There was a ‘Sunset Boulevard’ element to the place,” says Pulcini. “It was a safe haven for celebrities who wouldn’t be recognized in public anymore. It was as if nothing had changed; the red carpet was out to them.

“Everyone on the staff knew their domain and played it to the hilt. It was performance art; we’d say, ‘This is a Preston Sturges character; Raymond is straight out of Lubitsch.’ You saw how much fun Hollywood must have been in its heyday.”

Pulcini and Berman found a living metaphor for that era in Tommy Gallagher, the toothy, motor-mouth waiter of half a century’s standing who called Sinatra “Frank,” palled with presidents, and used Lew Wasserman’s opera tickets. Gallagher barely outlived Chasen’s closing; his funeral procession frames the film.

Staff like Gallagher spent their lives “understanding every celebrity’s neurotic desire,” Pulcini observes. They even became their muses--as in the case of Onetta Johnson, the ladies’ room attendant who told a patron one long night, “I work hard for my money.” The patron was Donna Summer, who scribbled the phrase on toilet paper, penned the hit song “She Works Hard for the Money” and put Onetta on the album cover.

Bilbool, who spent 17 years as banquet captain, admits some Chasen’s employees initially found the idea of a documentary “invasive, but on the whole everyone cooperated brilliantly. And the film is extremely well-done; it captures the spirit of Chasen’s, the gaiety, some of the anger. Even now when you talk to some of [the staff] there’s anger. They feel that Chasen’s let them down.”

Bilbool now devotes his energies to the bed-and-breakfast where he met the filmmakers; he also organizes dining events with former Chasen’s customers like Ernest and Tovah Borgnine, who used the old restaurant--still standing at 9039 Beverly and open for special occasions--for a Valentine’s Day party this year. “I still feel that I’m representing Chasen’s,” he says.

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Pulcini and Berman point out that Chasen’s Restaurant--which served its last hobo steak, bowl of chili and Flame of Love cocktail on April 1, 1995--closed just months before its style of excess came back in fashion.

“Bob and I have always loved going to hotel bars where the waiters are over 70, and our friends thought we were crazy,” Berman says with a laugh. “Now it’s the hottest, hippest thing to go to cigar bars and drink martinis.”

So hip that Pulcini and Berman have signed with Fox Searchlight to make a feature bio-pic about Juan Garcia Esquivel, king of Space Age bachelor pad music; John Leguizamo reportedly will star. And despite the air of mortality that hovers over Chasen’s last days, Berman says she was most impressed by the brio of her octogenarian subjects: “At 3 o’clock in the morning, the staff would be drinking and standing around the piano, singing ‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’ They knew how to live. They really had more fun than anyone I know our age.”