Kinder and Gentler

I’ve heard a million stories at the Circle Bar. Unfortunately, I can’t remember any of them. I drank away the early ‘90s at the Circle. I wrote my first play about it. Tons of poetry. I even fell in love there with a mad writer whom I thought would be Dash Hammett to my Lillian Hellman.

Long after Santa Monica’s Main Street went foo-foo, the Circle remained the divest dive on the Westside. A person could sit holding a glass filled with yesterday’s promises and flirt shamelessly across the racetrack-shaped bar.

Established on the southern end of Main Street, close to Venice, in the early ‘40s by hard-drinkin’ Jack Hayes, the Circle attracted a motley crew of writers, actors, poets and drunks. Charlie the coke dealer held court at one end of the huge dark-wood bar. Film director Penelope Spheeris’ mother, Gypsy, a busty, raunchy woman in her 70s, tended bar and nursed egos. The jukebox played Patsy Cline and AC/DC so loudly that the dog paintings and oil portraits shook on the smoke-stained walls. You could count on a great fight outside almost every night, usually over some chain-smoking dame who couldn’t have cared less.

Hayes’ daughter Patty inherited the place. I used to sit and talk to Patty, a pretty blond woman who lived nowhere near Venice and who seemed hard-pressed to continue the same day-to-day contact with the bar that her father had enjoyed. She simply wasn’t the Circle type. She bathed too often. She was one of the few people at the bar who smelled better than the room. About a year and a half ago, Patty sold it.

The first thing to go when Will Kargas took over was that bar smell that used to drift out the front door and hit casual afternoon bystanders in the face like a moldy rag. The cleanup must have been monumental. According to general manager/actor Toby Slezak (grandson of legendary character actor Walter Slezak), the former Circle employees were unhappy with the new ownership (besides Kargas, partner Howard Alpert has 20%) and trashed the place on their last night at the bar. “They drank a lot of the liquor and then smashed bottles,” claims Slezak. “The place was a total mess. There was glass and broken stuff everywhere.” Hey, some of the staff had been there for 25 years. No one in the new management seems to hold a grudge, though. No use crying over spilled bourbon.

I was hesitant to revisit the place. It represented the Los Angeles I fled, I thought for the last time. Maybe I didn’t want to remember a period when my entire social life revolved around that bar. Then again, I wrote some of my best stuff there.

I went back.

Yeah, it’s different. But it’s a good kind of different. I like the new Circle Bar a lot. The crowd outside the door is a big departure from the old days. Young. Hip. Orderly. The type of guys that might fight after an NBA playoff, but never over a broad. The great circle of a bar is still there, refinished and solid, unchanging as Gibraltar. Supermodel bartenders have replaced the ones who looked like they could fix a truck, and that’s a little sad. Only 94 people are allowed in, so you always feel like you’re at a private party.

Black-and-white photos have replaced the funky old paintings, and they hang on black velvet walls. Beet-red light sconces and tuck-and-roll booths keep the atmosphere pleasurably dark. Gone is the pool table, which always seemed to be in the way anyway. The bathrooms are covered with pinups appropriate for each sex. “They’re decidedly hetero,” says Slezak. The new jukebox is stocked with Chet Baker, as well as techno and hip-hop. A small smoking patio is available in the back of the bar. Cameron Diaz and Chris Penn have all been in to check out the digs.

The joint is packed on weekends with a boisterous but civil crowd. Chances are you won’t get punched out anymore if you accidentally take someone’s seat. Drink prices, which used to be the lowest on the Westside, have risen to the market standard, eliminating the possibility of meeting a “cheap” drunk at the Circle.

Funny, I left L.A. for other towns that all have their versions of the old Circle Bar. Except that none of those ever had an elderly woman who sat and drank her scotch straight up and claimed to have acted in with the Little Rascals in the 1930s Our Gang movies. None collected such a wild group of beats and beat-ups. Most did have that smell, though.

So here’s a toast to the old Circle Bar with its hard tales and badness and skank and bluster that stuck in your head like cheap whiskey. And, a raise of the glass to the refurbished Circle Bar too, because it represents an L.A. that is about new beginnings and second chances and reinvention. I’m telling you, mister, I’m never, ever leaving this crazy town again.

BE THERE

Circle Bar, 2926 Main St., Santa Monica. Open daily 6 p.m.-2 a.m. No food service. (310) 450-0508.