When the City’s Stars Rode Trails and Told Tales

“I like mine fried good and brown.

I like mine fried upside down.

Ham ‘n’ eggs.

Flip ‘em, flop ‘em, flap ‘em.

Ham ‘n’ eggs.”

--Los Angeles Breakfast Club’s anthem

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Long before golf and tennis became the preferred recreations of Los Angeles’ elite, horseback riding in the forested oasis of Griffith Park was the favorite pastime for a group of fun-loving civic movers and shakers who collectively became known as the Breakfast Club.

The club’s whimsical legacy is a jewel box of a clubhouse in the park, where Will Rogers made President Calvin Coolidge laugh, where Jack Dempsey and Ed “Strangler” Lewis talked sports, where Irving Berlin crooned to one of his latest hits.

It’s where Edgar Rice Burroughs and Michael Arlen talked about everything except books and authors. It’s where rival newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Harry Chandler broke bread together. It’s where cigar-chomping “speed king” Barney Oldfield shared the club’s mascot--a wooden horse--with Dutch airplane designer Anthony Fokker.

The club began in 1925, when Maurice DeMond, a big, jovial transplant from the East, transformed his own passion for horses, big breakfasts and good times into one of the city’s most diverse and influential clubs.

DeMond owned a string of world champion harness horses, stables and Gorton’s retail stores.

Serving up a hearty outdoorsman’s breakfast, Old West yarns and the loan of a saddled, reliable steed on which to greet the sunrise in the urban wilderness, DeMond’s early morning gatherings quickly attracted leading members of L.A.’s business, professional, social and film elite.

Propelling the club into international fame were some of the club’s founding members, drawn from the ranks of the rich, the powerful and the notable--the ones who could afford not to be glued to their desks every Wednesday morning: movie producers Darryl F. Zanuck, Carl Laemmle, Cecil B. De Mille, Jesse L. Lasky, Louis B. Mayer and Joseph M. Schenk. Others taking the reins included Joe E. Brown, Harold Lloyd, Leo Carrillo, Tom Mix, Sid Grauman, Lewis Stone, Burroughs, Marco and Irving Hellman and Edward Doheny.

But the kidney-jolting ride back over the chaparral-covered hills and rutted paths proved to be too much on a full stomach for these city slickers. Aiming to please, DeMond made arrangements for the chuck wagon to greet the gang at the stables after the ride.

DeMond, an ambitious promoter, had purchased five acres of a dairy farm at Riverside and Los Feliz drives--the entrance to Griffith Park--with the members’ $100 entrance fees.

DeMond persuaded colorful USC Chancellor Rufus B. von KleinSmid--whose unsolicited advice to the architect of the school’s Student Union led the designer to memorialize the educator with a 12-inch nose-thumbing monkey on the building’s frieze--to take over as president. Membership soon increased to 1,000 and entrance fees rose to $500.

Such bulging coffers allowed the club to tear down the old farmhouse where it met and build its first breakfast hall, the “Pavilion of Friendship,” along with a riding ring with box seats for horse shows.

Sitting at the outdoor horseshoe-shaped table in Friendship Garden, sharing a love of cowboy heroes and indulging in jokes and a taste for ham and eggs, the trailblazers listened to singer Rudy Vallee, Guy Lombardo and opera star Ernestine Schumann-Heink.

Meetings had some of the sociable paraphernalia of a Midwestern businessmen’s fraternity: a symbolic buried hatchet, a golden ruler and shovel, an oilcan and horseshoe.

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With a penchant for humor and pure, unabashed corn, the club’s chaplain, a Baptist preacher, the Rev. James Whitcomb Brougher Sr., regaled clubbers with a story of when he had Jack Dempsey and Will Rogers in a Bible class.

“One day I announced that I would begin teaching the Epistles next Sunday,” Brougher said. “Turning to Rogers, I asked, ‘Will, do you know what the Epistles are?’

“Rogers replied, ‘You bet your life; they’re the wives of the apostles.’

“Turning on Dempsey, Will said, ‘You don’t need to laugh, Jack. I’ll bet you five dollars you can’t say the Lord’s Prayer.’

“Dempsey said, ‘I’ll bet I can.’

“Rogers said, ‘Let’s hear you.’

“Dempsey said, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.’

“When Jack finished, Will handed him five bucks and said, ‘Jack, I didn’t think you could do it,’ ” Brougher told the laughing crowd.

Rogers, in fact, won a bet with another club member that he could get the somber-looking Coolidge to crack a smile.

“I’m sorry,” Rogers said as he gripped the president’s hand. “I didn’t get your name.”

Enthusiastic club supporters Harry and Jack Warner donated 90 minutes on their radio station--KFWB--to broadcast the club’s “Ham & Eggs” program. Despite the heckling of speakers over laughter and the clanging of knives, forks and spoons against water glasses, the radio program would survive for more than 26 years.

Honorary members such as Mary Pickford, Sophie Tucker, Amelia Earhart and, later, Walter O’Malley, were cajoled into blindfolded initiation rituals that involved mounting “Ham,” the wooden horse, holding his tail with their right hand and placing their left on a plate of ham and eggs.

DeMond’s death in 1931 brought a rumble to paradise. When the club had incorporated three years earlier, more than half the stock was in DeMond’s name, unbeknownst to members. After two years of court battles, the DeMond family held onto the property, clubhouse and worthless stock while members moved to temporary new digs at the Ambassador Hotel, which served 75-cent breakfasts.

Enduring bankruptcy and the Depression, the club reorganized and membership slowly increased. By 1937, clubbers were parking their sturdy steeds--the four-wheeled variety--outside their new clubhouse along the banks of the Los Angeles River, a few blocks away and across the river from the original clubhouse.

Three decades later, after the freeway squeezed between the river and the road and its 4.5-acre oasis began looking like the promised land to a developer, the club moved again.

Hankering for the rustic beauty where the club had originated--now city-owned property--restless club members tore down the ruins of the original clubhouse, built a new ranch-style building, donated it to the city and negotiated a 50-year lease. “Friendship Auditorium” opened in 1965.

In 1981, when the all-male club opened its doors to women, only one man walked out, while the women, along with retirees, breathed new life into the club.

Thundering hooves have disappeared, along with the cowpokes, movie stars and high-cholesterol breakfasts--but the Breakfast Club still is as homespun as a kaffeeklatsch and as predictable as its piano sing-alongs: “Sea, Sea, Sea,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

“The Shrine of Friendship”--as the motto over the door proclaims it--carries on with Breakfast Club descendants who preserve their founding riders’ peculiar mixture of offbeat, intellectual, outlandish, irreverent wit.

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

This story has been edited to reflect the following corrections to the original published text: Rudy Vallee was a singer, but not a cowboy; Joe E. Brown’s name was misspelled Joey Brown; Joseph Schenk’s name was misspelled Schneck.

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