THE MERRY MAYOR OF TINSEL TOWN

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the most famous boulevard in the world!” Johnny Grant’s warm Southern baritone pours down upon the forsaken intersection of Hollywood and Wilcox, lapping against the boarded-up theaters, the greasy spoons and threadbare boutiques advertising such necessities as “exotic shoes for dancers.” Hollywood’s Honorary Mayor for Life grins at the incongruous throng on the sidewalk beneath his Lucite podium, as buttoned-down and bookish as an open-air meeting of Phi Beta Kappa. “We are gathered this morning to pay tribute to one of the most familiar faces on TV,” Johnny booms, his own face a study of red jowls and jubilant blue eyes. “A man whose quick wit and congenial personality have made him a favorite with fans around the world. Today, the Walk of Fame adds another name to the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. That name is . . . Alex Trebek.”

Why are you out there beating a dead horse? He heard that a million times during the lean years, when anyone could see that the street was awash in pushers, hippies and pimps. Then, as today, he’d climb the crimson dais to sell the castoff commodity that had become Hollywood. For more than two decades, fists pumping, rubbing his soft palms conspiratorially, Hollywood’s ceremonial mayor has boosted and cheer-led and roared above the decay. He has bellowed the small-town verities of patriotism, hard work and talent, and cracked time-tested jokes, as he enshrined legions of show-business lights into the terrazzo.

But folks! After so many moribund seasons, Johnny is cooking, and so is Hollywood! “Are we back?” he hollers. “Hollywood is back!”

Last month, Grant launched a crusade for a Hollywood postmark. In February, he was the first to sign a petition to explore Hollywood secession. Though cityhood might bring in a real mayor and put him out of a job, Grant’s excited about restoring to Hollywood the independence it surrendered in 1910 in its thirst for William Mulholland’s water. From the balcony of his penthouse in the Hollywood Roosevelt, the hotel that was the Academy Awards’ first home, he can see the girders rising from the enormous crater across the street at Hollywood and Highland, the beginnings of a $430-million entertainment and retail complex conceived by the TrizecHahn Development Corp., a Toronto conglomerate. The Hollywood-Highland development promises to return the Academy Awards to Hollywood permanently, in a 3,300-seat theater. What’s more, despite its enormous size, TrizecHahn’s development is but a prelude to what the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce predicts will become a billion-dollar neighborhood economic boom of big-box retailers, mammoth outdoor malls, thousands of parking spaces and dozens of movie screens that may make Hollywood an eerily unfamiliar place even to Grant, its chief citizen.

But back to today’s Hollywood, a small-town place so frozen in time that it looks as if it could still fall prey to the destruction envisioned by Nathanael West in his 1939 novel “The Day of the Locust.” In bewildering succession over recent months, Grant has planted stars for the likes of Johnny Depp and Kevin Spacey, “Star Wars” special effects doyen Dennis Muren, mellowing rockers KISS, crooner Phil Collins and half the cast of “All in the Family.” This sweltering morning, dapper “Jeopardy!” host Trebek materializes in a dark, finely tailored suit, lemon tie and matching hankie. Grant sings the Canadian’s praises--a former broadcast newsman, Trebek “maintained his poise and composure even in the most nerve-racking situations”--then cedes the dais to Alan Thicke, “a seven-time Emmy-nominated actor and writer! A Golden Globe nominee for his role in the memorable TV series ‘Growing Pains’! “

Thicke smiles. “What a load of crap!” he says of Grant’s Trebek intro. “When I met Alex, he was doing a music show. . . . He was not the Dan Rather of Canada. He was the Dick Clark of Canada!”

“HAAAHHH, HAHHHH!” Grant is the first to roar. Then, spotting a face in the crowd, he reclaims the microphone: “We originally had only two speakers, but when I see this lady who just walked in, the first lady of comedy and laughter in probably the world. . . . I like to break the rules, and I’m going to do it! Ladies and gentlemen, Phyllis Diller!”

Beneath an explosion of teased blond split ends, Diller has a nasal observation: “I can’t understand why Alex is getting his star, because he has never been written up in the Enquirer, the Globe or the Star; he’s never two-timed his wife, and he’s never beaten her or kicked her. And he isn’t on coke. I mean, what right does this man have to be a star on the Walk of Fame?” Grant picks up the riff: “Somebody asked me this morning, ‘What’s Alex Trebek’s hobby?’ I said, ‘I think he sits at home looking for mistakes in the dictionary!’ ”

*

In the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel restaurant, where the angel-hair pasta dish has been renamed “Pasta Johnny Grant” and a Chaplin impersonator can be seen picking at a salad, Grant holds forth at the Mayor’s Table. There, at a whisper’s distance from the maitre d’, he anticipates a lunch as predictable as the flock of tourists soon to be whisked by to take a gander at him.

“You couldn’t have ordered a better job!” he proclaims while awaiting his chicken sandwich. “You couldn’t have asked for better than this!” Honorary mayor is the role of a lifetime, bigger than the modest parts Grant played in “White Christmas” and “The Babe Ruth Story,” bigger than his brief turns as a game show host or his more significant run as the roving radio personality who cornered celebrities during broadcasts from Ciro’s supper club. Since inducting his first celebrity in 1978--”I could tell you the first one we did,” he says. “Jimmy Caan! James Caan!”--Grant has presided over 488 star dedications, and in his penthouse 13 floors above this restaurant, he can be seen in framed photos with every one of them. (The Walk of Fame agreement specifies that, in addition to securing a $15,000 sponsorship fee to the Hollywood Historic Trust, the celebrity must actually show up for the ceremony.)

At least two honorary mayors preceded Grant: bandleader Lawrence Welk and game show host Monty Hall. But neither tackled the voluntary post fulltime, and certainly neither came close to attaining Grant’s curriculum vitae: Ceremonial Mayor For Life, Chairman of the Walk of Fame Selection Committee, Chairman of the Hollywood Historic Trust and permanent fixture on the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’s board.

Like any showman, he brims over with apparent spontaneity, but in the hundreds of celebrity hobnob shots that crowd his office, his smile is almost always the same, with his mouth wide open, revealing a full row of neat upper teeth and a slightly curled tongue, as if he’d just been tickled. For a magazine portrait, he’ll shed his oval spectacles for a pair of lenseless frames. Hey, you wouldn’t want to confuse the fans, the millions who’ve seen you on TV or along the boulevard and never once without your glasses. But then you don’t want the camera flash to carom off your lenses, either.

“Being honorary mayor of Hollywood is a passport to the world,” Grant says. “In Europe or those Asiatic countries, they’re not real sure where L.A. is. But when you say you’re from Hollywood, people think you had breakfast with some famous star the day you left.” Nevertheless, Grant has as little use for today’s entertainment industry--numbingly corporate, geographically dispersed, unpatriotic and socially circumspect--as that industry has for Hollywood. Although he lives across the street from Mann’s Chinese, he never got around to seeing “Titanic.” The 1990s movies he thoroughly enjoyed were “Grumpy Old Men” and “Grumpier Old Men.” Likewise, he has bucked modern marketing realities, keeping his Walk of Fame ceremonies largely free of commercial detritus. There’s a lot about the honorary mayor that’s old school.

“God’s greatest creations,” he is fond of saying, “are women, Haagen-Dazs and peanut butter.” In his time, he has squired some beautiful ladies, also known in the Johnny Grant vernacular as “chickeepoos”--Mamie Van Doren, Jayne Mansfield and, oh, too many starlets to mention. Over Armed Forces Radio, he could verbally undress an in-studio chickeepoo with the best of them. “Here she is,” he’d tell his GI audience. “She’s 5-foot-6, beautiful blond hair, blue eyes, luscious lips. 38-22-35. . . . Crazy wheels!”

Perhaps the honorary mayor can no longer put together the vast parades of celebrity pulchritude that were his “Operation Starlift” shows in Vietnam. But Grant--who will make his 53rd USO tour in August to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Korean War--is buoyed by his last few goodwill missions to the Balkans. “Just say you’re from Hollywood. My God, if you were around to see Humphrey Bogart, you don’t need an act.” *

Together they waddled down the dusty streets of Goldsboro, N. C.: the produce vendor’s son in his clown get-up, with “Ducky,” his trained duck, at his side. The sandwich board slung across the adolescent’s shoulders touted the merits of the Candy Kitchen ice cream parlor and Gurley’s barbershop. John Grant Jr. didn’t have much of an act; he just bowed and bellowed “Hello, kids,” which mostly ended up scaring them. And then he went away on a weekend trip and left his partner in the fatal care of his four sisters. “They let him freeze to death,” Grant sighs. “Yep, Ducky was gone.”

It was “Boys’ Town,” the Mickey Rooney/Spencer Tracy heart-plucker, that started pulling him toward Hollywood. Cherubic, chubby-cheeked and a few inches shorter than Grant, Rooney was the top box-office draw in the world--bigger than Tyrone Power or Clark Gable. “Mickey! Mickey!” Grant exclaims, still excited despite the passage of six decades. “If that little squirt could do it, then I could do it, too.”

In the show business Siberia that was Goldsboro, Johnny Grant seized center stage. When the Musgrave Feed Store sponsored a “man on the street” radio show, Grant operated the broadcasting equipment. One cold afternoon, moments before air time, the show’s veteran host fainted. “I just reached into his overcoat pocket and grabbed his questions,” Grant says. “I set all the dials and went out on the street. ‘Hellooo everybodeeee! This is Johnny Grant with the Musgrave Man on the Street program.’ ” The host somehow scraped himself off the sidewalk and left town. Grant wound up with the show.

Grant’s biggest break came during Goldsboro’s very own trial of the century in 1939. A gas station owner had been murdered by his wife and a part-time preacher. Hot damn! As luck would have it, Musgrave’s newest radio personality had worked at the hot dog stand next door to that filling station. Now if he could only charm his way into doing play-by-play at the murder trial.

“The old judge, what was his name?--I went and talked with him,” Grant recalls, “and he said, ‘Johnny, that’s never been done before, but I’ll let you stand by the door.’ ” When the judge refused to hear the preacher-murderer’s sermon in open court, Grant read a copy of it over the radio. True Detective magazine ran the broadcaster’s picture, and Grant was no longer alone in sensing his show-business arrival. “The other kids thought that was hot stuff!” Grant says. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Heeeeee!” You might get to Hollywood yet! they told him. You might get there!

*

Grant didn’t so much stroll into Hollywood as barge. As an Army sergeant in March of 1944, he hitchhiked to Schwab’s, gawked at the Chinese Theatre forecourt, then proceeded to the legendary Hollywood Canteen set up to entertain GIs. There he confabbed with Bette Davis and watched Orson Welles saw Rita Hayworth in half in a magic act.

“Hollywood,” he says, “was the most hospitable place in the world for a serviceman.” Grant leveraged that hospitality for all it was worth. When the Army flew him back a year later in a B-25 for what he calls “the world’s largest scavenger hunt”--a scheme he’d cooked up back on the base in Texas--he ransacked the town for celebrity memorabilia to be auctioned off for war bonds. Bob Hope gave him the shirt off his back. Jack Benny signed some shorts. Dorothy Lamour gave him her sarong.

How could the star-struck sergeant have anticipated that in 1978, little more than 30 years after he’d absconded with Jack Benny’s shorts, Hollywood would find itself in such desperate need of a produce vendor’s son? How remarkable that Grant, who had graduated from bit movie parts and radio shows to become VP of community relations at KTLA, would see how pathetic the Hollywood Christmas parade had become and would coax his boss, Gene Autry, to pour money into it. How could he anticipate that Hollywood would be pining for his Rolodex, fat with the phone numbers of celebrities who had fled the boulevard? “You couldn’t get stars to come to the neighborhood,” Grant says. “I’ve got to tell you, it was lonely out there for a long time. I’d go to parties and people would say, ‘What are you beating a dead horse for? That thing’s dead! It’s never coming back!’ ”

As honorary mayor, Grant applied vigorous CPR to the old mare. “Hellooo everybodeeee!” he bellowed to the Walk of Fame crowds with as much zest and enthusiasm as when he’d been Musgrave’s man on the street. His baritone alone could turn Hollywood into a town as sweet-faced and friendly as hayseed Goldsboro.

Grant’s grandest Hollywood production, the Welcome Home Desert Storm parade in 1991, summoned up the lost patriotism of the Hollywood Canteen. He seized upon Persian Gulf War euphoria to honor the spurned veterans of Vietnam and Korea. A year later, Grant embarked on the shortest goodwill tour of his USO tenure: A Humvee dropped him off at the Hollywood Bowl to cheer up National Guardsmen quelling the 1992 riots. He rode a rickshaw to his own hand-and-footprint ceremony at the Chinese Theatre in 1997. In a suspect spelling error, he scrawled ‘Johny Grant’ in the concrete. “That was just me being dumb,” he says, “or shrewd. Instead of getting two inches in The Times, I got six inches. And the next night, Vanna White sent me an ‘n.’ ” For the Christmas parade one year, when an open convertible seemed too old hat, Grant commandeered an elephant. “Hollywood Boulevard,” he says, “is my Palace Theatre.”

If only today’s Hollywood stars had such flair, such round-the-clock commitment to sizzle and spectacle. “In the old days, if you saw a star, they were dressed up. They were a star 24 hours a day. Today, they’ve got a pair of jeans on with their fanny showing.”

*

“Rock and roll, Johnny!”

“I can rock and roll with ‘em,” Grant roars back, grinning.

Here outside the Hollywood Roosevelt, on Grant’s own doorstep, Tom Petty’s thin, dour face stares at him from a bustle of concert T-shirts and album covers. The Walk of Fame loudspeakers blurt out “(You Don’t Have to Live Like a) Refugee.”

You might assume that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ significance escapes Grant, but the honorary mayor bounds across the generation gap. “I used to see Tom quite a bit at the Roosevelt Hotel,” he says, “because he played in the Cinegrill. I’d see him during the day in the lobby or in his car, you know, before he hit it big. I think he still comes in once in a while to play there. This is the best job in the world to meet people!”

Petty and his band emerge from the Roosevelt fashionably late, and Grant goes into high gear with a paean warm as summer weather. “The critics took note of how they kicked the musical doldrums of the ‘70s,” he intones. “Inspired by the Beatles, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Bob Dylan, with whom they toured the world, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have strived to maintain the high standards of those icons, and in the process, my friends, they’ve become icons themselves!”

After the ceremony, Petty’s publicist makes the rocker available to share a few brief thoughts. Now that his star has been set outside the Roosevelt, perhaps Petty might consider a return engagement at the Cinegrill? “We never played the Cinegrill,” Petty says.

But Grant said you used to play the Cinegrill.

“Johnny,” Petty says, “is on acid.”

*

At the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce Economic Summit last year, Johnny Grant was seated several rows back in the audience. He listened while executives from TrizecHahn, the CIM Group, Pacific Theatres and Regent Properties touted what could be called “Hollywood: the coming entertainment complex.” There were no bold proclamations, no feisty winks or booming baritones; only pie-charts and PowerPoint presentations. Via video, Edward James Olmos joked about taking over Grant’s job.

After the summit, one of the players walked up to the honorary mayor and hailed him as “Johnny Grant, the spirit of the Hollywood revitalization.”

“That was the greatest thing anybody could have said to me,” Grant says. “It made me feel very good.” But while he has been asked to show his support at municipal hearings, Hollywood’s greatest booster has not been brought in to boost this latest wave of development--not even the Hollywood-Highland project that will bring the Academy Awards back to the boulevard.

“The people who are coming in, they want to do things their way,” Grant says. “And you know, there’s not many places where a 76-year-old person is really appreciated. I’m not saying I’m not appreciated. Maybe I should use a better word than that--’included.’ ”

As the real estate giants bring their corporate weight to bear, and as chains such as Borders Books & Music and the Good Guys may be getting ready for their Hollywood debuts, Grant finds himself exhorting the new titans to show some small consideration for the neighborhood’s vanishing past.

From his rent-controlled penthouse, a shrine that displays Douglas MacArthur’s saddle, Jack Dempsey’s boxing gloves, Bob Hope’s golf clubs and the roulette table from Pickfair, he’ll continue to live off his KTLA pension and have one of the most convenient vantages from which to enjoy the new Hollywood.

Which doesn’t mean he’ll be much of a presence. Any of the new shopping plazas presented by the developers interest him? “Let me think about that,” he says. “Those presentations, as happy as they made me, they were put together by bottom-line people, not showmen.”

“Hello,” Angie Dickinson purrs in a voice like velvet. She has arrived at the Roosevelt’s restaurant in a sequined T-shirt. As the star of “Dressed to Kill” and “Police Woman” begins sipping her soup, she casts her shades aside.

Grant has rebounded miraculously from a pacemaker procedure some days before. Now he is telling Dickinson about a media attack just as traumatic--and not the first to cast aspersions on his Walk of Fame stewardship in recent years. CNN, for so long the dependable broadcaster of his dedications, raked him over the coals, blaming him for the boulevard’s dilapidated state and for awarding stars to the likes of Siegfried and Roy.

“Their big thing,” Grant tells Dickinson, “was that Gene Autry was the only one with five stars, and that I worked for him, and why didn’t Bob Hope have five? Well, Bob Hope never had a career in records. . . .”

“That’s right!” Dickinson commiserates.

“And so he only gets four stars,” Grant says.

They bonded in 1959, these two, when the future mayor and the minx flew to Korea on a USO tour. “I was the star of the show,” Dickinson says. “And the only people who knew me were my mother and my agent. But I had just done ‘Rio Bravo.’ ”

“They loved you!” Grant interjects.

“I was sexy in it and all,” Dickinson allows.

“Angie and I used to go to baseball games. And I know some major league players who blew their signals looking up at her.”

“I doubt that, Johnny,” she laughs.

“Oh no, I could tell you who they were. . . . We had fun, yeah. It’s a little different today, when everybody is so uptight.”

Angie agrees. “We knew all their wives, but we still flirted.”

“Then we’d go to my house and we had the best parties in town.”

“He paid for all of it. KFC up the kazoo.”

“Whiskey and beer!” Grant roars. “And all the chickeepoos in town came.”

A stranger approaches the mayor’s lunch table to stump for a Walk of Fame star for the woman who gave Rocky the Flying Squirrel his voice.

“It’s been all taken care of,” Grant beams. “I got it approved!”

“See what he does?” Dickinson says. “It’s what he does.” Not that the actress has always had similar success with the mayor. “I can’t get my friend Burt Kennedy a star,” she says. “And I’ve slept with him and everything else,” she adds, nodding toward Grant.

“Please put that out,” Grant laughs, spreading his hands across the table as if stifling a fire. “Will you please put that out?”

Dickinson tries to nail down the honorary mayor’s sex appeal. “The first thing that comes to mind, aside from a rather lustful nature--he’s a Taurus, and Tauruses are very sexual and sensual--is that he was fun. I know a lot of men who are either handsome or rich or funny or intellectual. . . .”

“I’m none of those,” Grant booms.

”. . . . or powerful, but not many of them are fun.”

The two drift into the warmth of their past and then into Hollywood’s future. Johnny draws an analogy from a trip he took some years back. People had told him not to bother visiting the Holy Land, saying, “It’s nothing but a tourist trap.”

But in Bethlehem, under the watchful eye of guards, Grant took a peek at a replica of the Nativity. “There’s the cradle and the whole thing, and I looked at it and said, ‘Hey, that’s great!’ And I think people do the same thing here. They just want to come here and see where it started.”

“It’s a fabulous comparison,” Dickinson enthuses. “I never heard it said so well.”

“Just a thrill to look in there and see the little baby in the manger--you know, well, a doll.”

“Would you mind if I snapped a picture?” a bold tourist blurts out. Daughters in tow, she has appeared from nowhere and stands gazing at Police Woman. “No,” Dickinson smiles, “I don’t mind. . . . And this is your family? Why don’t you have them come on and sit here?”

Grant rises from his chair, gleefully steering the girls to the triumph of their photo-op. “Go ahead,” Hollywood’s honorary mayor booms, urging them on as as their bashful faces gather slowly around Dickinson’s luminous profile. “You all go in there. Get right on in there.”