Maude Chasen, 97; Fed Legends of Hollywood

“Dave told me a restaurant must have a soul. Dave has gone, and now I am the soul. I just feel that is what is wrong with a lot of places. No soul there.”

--Maude Chasen, 1985

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That tiny blond, blue-eyed, gorgeous, gracious and ever-so-savvy soul tired as she neared 90 and reluctantly retired from the restaurant. Without her, the venerable Chasen’s, museum and memory of a Hollywood gone by, closed its doors on April 1, 1995.

Maude Chasen, doyenne of gustatory and social taste of the entertainment industry and politics for nearly half a century, died Saturday at 97.

Chasen died at Century City Hospital of pneumonia, said her only child, Kay MacKay, who added: “She was a grande dame who leaves many, many memories of good times and good camaraderie.”

Chasen the matriarch, who liked to say the restaurant had hosted “every president since 1936 except Roosevelt. And Mrs. Roosevelt came,” was so intertwined with Chasen’s the restaurant that it is hard to grasp that she was not there at its humble beginnings.

Dave Chasen, who died in 1973, was a vaudevillian and comic from New York who opened Chasen’s Southern Pit Barbecue on Dec. 13, 1936, in a cornfield at Beverly Boulevard and Doheny Drive. First-nighters included director Frank Capra, who had once directed Chasen in a film, and actors James Cagney and Pat O’Brien. They were only the vanguard of celebrities to come and to contribute autographed photos for the walls.

Among the historic habitues were Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, Alan Ladd, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, David Niven, James Stewart, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Ethel Barrymore, Howard Hughes, Charlton Heston, Presidents John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and especially Ronald Reagan, who proposed to future wife Nancy there.

Dave Chasen had appeared in “Earl Carroll’s Vanities” on Broadway and had other successes, but during lean times he also started cooking chili and ribs for such talents as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Harold Ross.

It was Ross, editor of New Yorker magazine, who suggested that Chasen might be a better cook than comic and lent him $3,500 to open the future dining room of the stars.

Meanwhile, Maude Martin was oblivious to her future as a restaurateur and was busy managing her own difficult life.

Born in Louisville, Ky., she lost her mother at an early age and was reared by two aunts in Albany, Ga. Precocious and determined, she was teaching Sunday school at 12 and, college educated, teaching school by 18.

“I always knew I had to be independent and, in Georgia, teaching was the only proper work for a lady,” she told The Times in 1985.

But business was in her blood, and later, back home in Louisville, she suggested that a department store add a book section. She became its manager.

She married, gave birth to Kay, was widowed, and at the suggestion of her hairdresser decided to go into cosmetics.

Soon she was head of beauty salons in all Saks Fifth Avenue stores, traveling the country and spending two months a year in France. Along the way, she did some photographic modeling and was on the radio in Chicago.

“Sometimes you think, ‘I don’t know how that happened, but it took a long time happening,’ ” she said in 1985. “You just go from one thing to another.”

While she was in Los Angeles on business, actor Don Ameche and his wife introduced her to Dave Chasen. She was not impressed.

“Dave is a quiet man and, frankly, the Ameches had oversold him,” she told The Times years later.

But she liked Southern California, moved here and bought a home. Dave Chasen persisted, and she married him Sept. 13, 1942.

Maude Chasen immediately immersed herself in the restaurant. After driving through the night following their Las Vegas wedding, they went to Chasen’s for brunch. She suggested that a certain wall be taken down.

Dave excused himself to get more coffee, and she soon heard crashing and banging. The wall came down.

After a late night drive back from Tijuana, where they catered during a wartime blackout, the tired Chasens stopped at the restaurant to find that the garbage had not been put out.

“ ‘I married a Southern belle,’ Dave said, ‘and Southern belles don’t roll out the garbage,’ ” she recalled decades later. “ ‘It’s our garbage,’ I said. ‘It belongs to me as much as it belongs to you.’ And we rolled out the garbage.

“We were partners, doing things together, loving what we did, loving the people, and being happily married. . . . We were a great team.”

Greeting customers--all friends--in her Adolfo suits and other designer ensembles, the peach-skinned Maude Chasen was frequently asked for her “recipes”--but women were as apt to mean her formulas for skin and hair care as for the restaurant’s version of Cobb salad called Maude’s salad.

Clearly, she did not maintain her petite, 120-pound figure by overly indulging in her restaurant’s signature dishes: hobo steak, banana shortcake, chicken pot pie, spareribs and chili.

As the tiny restaurant expanded, room by room, with a special entrance for celebrities, Maude Chasen made sure that it retained the intimate, clubby atmosphere of the original. She was so admired for her decorating taste and expertise that the Chasens sold half a dozen successive homes to friends, furnished and accessorized down to the last ashtray.

The Chasen’s menu also expanded in variety and price to meet the rising awareness and fortunes of its clientele. Dave Chasen flew to New York regularly to select the caviar he served, but he still shipped his chili to Elizabeth Taylor wherever she was.

“We never got too fancy for chili,” he once said.

Today, Chasen’s Chili, sold through such upscale markets as Gelson’s and Bristol Farms and via mail order by grandson Scott MacKay, is all that is left of the barbecue pit that Dave and Maude Chasen built into a Hollywood legend.

Two years ago, the family auctioned the carefully collected memorabilia, including a silver tray used at Jimmy Stewart’s bachelor party. The booth where Reagan proposed to the future first lady was donated to the Reagan Presidential Library.

Maude Chasen is survived by her daughter, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

A spokesman for Pierce Brothers Mortuary in Westwood said services will be private.