Who Was It Who Sang ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’?

Why can’t we all get along?

As I sat in court the other day pondering the consequences of uncivil unrest, the famous question hit me like a creme brulee right in the kisser.

Why can’t we--or more accurately, they-- all get along? Did the tension between two celebrity couples and the owner of a chi-chi Moorpark restaurant have to end in a criminal trial and the threat of six months behind bars? Or could it have culminated instead with apologies and after-fracas mints all around?

You be the judge--and good luck to you.

To recap: Something happened at the Secret Garden restaurant one evening last October. As I write this, a jury is trying to figure out what.

The few undisputed facts are these: Two old friends--Frankie Avalon and Frankie Valli--drove with their wives to the Secret Garden for dinner.

If you are of a certain age, you will recall Frankie (“Venus”) Avalon and Frankie (“Big Girls Don’t Cry”) Valli. They were singing idols in the Sixties, and still delight fans in Las Vegas and elsewhere. If you can’t remember them, you might ask: How can they both be called Frankie, when almost every boy in my school is named Jason? I can only tell you that it was a different day.

At any rate, Frankie and Kay Avalon, and Frankie and Randy Valli arrived at the Secret Garden, a restaurant they had never before visited. That’s about the only point upon which all agree, besides the potato soup that evening being rather good.

From there, the story gets murky.

On one side, we have the diners’ account, in which restaurant owner Alex Sofsky storms over to the table and berates the party because Avalon had said the meal was overpriced. Enraged, she spews out obscenities, demands that the group leave, and yanks Randy Valli from her chair, breaking her bra strap. Defending herself, Mrs. Valli shoves Mrs. Sofsky away.

She was later charged with misdemeanor battery.

On the other side there’s the account of Mrs. Sofsky and her husband, Bob, the Secret Garden’s co-owner. In their rendition, the Vallis and the Avalons are loud, insulting, arrogant, and “pouring down the wine.” When Alex Sofsky politely asks them to leave, Mrs. Valli stands up, slaps her, and stalks out, cackling with the other three.

With no witnesses to the encounter besides the Avalons, the Vallis and the Sofskys, it would require the wisdom of Solomon to divine the truth. But taking a sword and threatening to split the seared chicken breast Oscar just won’t do it.

Mrs. Valli has been on trial for two weeks in what Municipal Judge Herbert Curtis III bemoaned as “a simple misdemeanor-battery gone astray.” Her broken bra has been on display more than any undergarment outside Frederick’s of Hollywood’s Bra Museum. But this case had so much more subtext than your average slap-and-fall.

There were the profound socio-geographic tensions, best illustrated by the Sofskys’ claim that Frankie Avalon had laid into them for “charging West Side prices in a hick town.”

A hick town? Nobody calls Moorpark a hick town and gets away with it. My editor lives in Moorpark and he, sir, is no hick. He is a sophisticated man of letters who attends monster-truck rallies only for their aesthetic value. And if it weren’t for charging Westside prices, a lot of hick towns would still be just hick towns instead of quaint Americana.

The trial also was colored by our national ambivalence toward celebrities. We love to build them up and love to see them fall. If the two Frankies reached the peak of their fame a generation ago, no matter. That doesn’t exempt them from our insatiable need to knock them down. Playing on that theme, prosecutors likened Mrs. Valli to Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was sentenced to three days in jail for slapping a Beverly Hills police officer. But Zsa Zsa was so much more--how do you say?--Zsa Zsa.

When she won a 1991 small-claims case in Ventura County against a woman who boarded horses at her Somis ranch, she had high praise for the kind of justice we dispense around here. “I have lots of fans up there,” she said. “So many secretaries of the court said how pretty I was, how much they like me, and how I’m much more beautiful in real life.”

So what did I learn from my day in court?

I learned that the wheels of justice sometimes need a good lube job.

I learned that if I ever complain about a restaurant’s prices, I’ll do it at the drive-through window, for a quick getaway.

But I still wondered: Did the crime at the Secret Garden--if there was one--merit the spectacle?

I asked Steve Phillips, the deputy D.A. in charge of filing misdemeanors, whether this high-tone playground dispute--did-didn’t, did-didn’t--was worth the time and money to prosecute.

He said that yes, some cases are too small to file--”de minimus,” in the terms of the trade. But violent actions are hardly ever too small, he said: “It’s always de minimus until it happens to you.” If that’s not the ‘90s version of “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” I don’t know what is.

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.

* FINAL ARGUMENTS: After hearing closing remarks from both sides on restaurant altercation, jurors begin deliberations in Randy Valli case. B3