Both rare and well done

It is Tuesday night, the place is packed to the gills, and maitre d’ Craig Susser of Dan Tana’s restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood has just told a group of young couples out on the town that he’s sorry but he just doesn’t have a table for a party of six. There must be some mistake, they insist, their name is right there in the reservation book. But Susser instantly sees through the ploy. Not only does he never take reservations in ink, he tells them, it isn’t his handwriting and whoever wrote their name down when he stepped away had made a telltale mistake -- they had reserved a table for the following night.

Susser shows the reservation entry to some visitors and laughs. Can you believe how far some people will go to grab a table in here? But that’s how difficult it is -- even on weeknights -- getting into Dan Tana’s, one of the last of the old Hollywood hangouts that continues to thrive even as other legendary L.A. restaurants like Romanoff’s, Cha- sen’s and Scandia have long vanished.

And the main reason the legend lives on is the man whose restaurant bears his name: Dan Tana.

He is the nearest thing L.A. has to the late Toots Shor, the colorful, boisterous New Yorker whose restaurant on West 52nd Street was a favorite watering hole of Jackie Gleason and Joe DiMaggio in an earlier era.

Dan Tana occupies a unique place in the L.A. social whirl; his restaurant, soon to celebrate its 40th anniversary, has remained a popular spot for Hollywood insiders since the mid-1960s. Fred Astaire ran a tab here; actor John Wayne and blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman ended their famous feud here; comedian John Belushi phoned in his dinner order before OD’ing at the Chateau Marmont; the Eagles penned some of their memorable songs here before and after performing at the Troubadour down the street; and the parents of newborn Drew Barrymore changed their daughter’s diapers on the bar.

There’s a retro-hipness about the place that still attracts today’s biggest celebrities like Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio and supermodel Claudia Schiffer. They come to dine on Dan Tana’s famous Kansas City steaks or his generous portions of moderately priced Italian fare like stuffed calamari or linguini with white clams. An L.A. Times review in 1997, describing patrons marooned three-deep at the bar as looking as if they’d stepped out of a Raymond Chandler novel, went on to describe the steak that night as “so peculiarly tender that it must have been massaged by a bevy of Heidi Fleiss’ girls.”

Tana takes great pains to shelter his celebrity clientele. This isn’t a place for haute cuisine or for tourists to gawk. No photographs are permitted inside the restaurant without permission, and Tana’s people often sneak the stars out the back way to avoid the prying paparazzi perched outside.

“Many [tabloid reporters] call and say, ‘George Clooney was there, who was he with?’ ” Tana said. “We tell them, ‘Yes, he was with a lady, but we don’t know who the lady was.’ Or if a [female star] is here with a man, we do the same thing.”

Inside, the main dining room is small and so cozy that two people navigating the aisles must squeeze past each other, and one can easily converse with someone at the next booth. If you prefer, you can eat while watching a ballgame on the TV over the bar where Miljenko Gotavac has been mixing drinks for 38 years. Mustachioed waiters dressed in tuxedos keep watch over the tables. And the walls are adorned with original artwork by Tana’s ex-wife, Andrea Tana, the niece of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

In a dining room off the main room, maitre d’ Susser points to what he calls the “trading table.”

“I had Wayne Gretzky and several other people sit at this table and, next year, gone,” Susser recalled. “[Former Laker] Vlade Divac sat here. Next year, gone.” Susser said that when Shaquille O’Neal of the Lakers came in one night, he sat him at another table because “I was so scared” he might be traded.

While Toots Shor’s and the Stork Club in New York were high-profile saloons where one went to be seen, Dan Tana’s is more of a hideaway -- relaxed, homey and private.

“We don’t have bodyguards,” Tana explains, “but we try to protect our clientele.”

A name with a familiar ring

Watching Tana circulate among the customers, one can easily understand why the restaurant remains so popular.

There he is, still going from table to table, a Perrier in his hand, swapping stories, patting old friends on the back, inquiring if the veal scaloppine or the New York steak meets with their satisfaction. The atmosphere is collegial, the handshakes worthy of a seasoned politician.

He is 68 now, a distinguished-looking man with a white mustache and a glint of mischief in his eyes. On this night, Tana is nattily attired in a tailored suit, custom-made shirt and custom-made shoes because, as his late friend, the former Los Angeles Kings and Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke once told him, they may cost you more money, “but you’re going to look decent.”

If the name Dan Tana sounds familiar, it should. Remember the old ABC television series “Vega$,” starring the late Robert Urich as a wisecracking private eye cruising the neon canyons of the Las Vegas Strip in his red ’56 T-Bird? Urich’s character was named Dan Tanna (note the slightly different spelling), and it made the real Dan Tana world famous. Most people still instantly recognize the name, even though strangers can’t place the face.

“Now, I’m at the airport or in Europe or anywhere in the world and you say the word ‘Dan Tana,’ and they expect to see Bob Urich, God bless him,” Tana says in Serbian-accented English that is just as much of a trademark to his friends as his name -- he’s a first-generation Serbian immigrant.

Over in a corner booth, seated next to former record executive Jerry Rubinstein, is the man who made Dan Tana a household name. His name is E. Duke Vincent, and back in the late 1970s, he was producer and head writer on “Vega$.” Vincent still relishes recounting how he persuaded Tana to lend his name to the show.

“Dan Tanna was the man whose name we had in the script -- the original ‘Vega$’ pilot,” Vincent explained. “... I became aware of the fact that there was a man in town whose name was Dan Tana who’s in the restaurant business, so I said to my people, ‘Anybody call Dan Tana and say, “By the way, we’re using your name in this pilot, and do you mind?” They said, ‘No, are we supposed to do that?’ And I said, ‘What! Are you nuts! Of course you’re supposed to do that! Get him on the phone!’ ‘”

Vincent managed to locate Tana on a golf course in Britain and crossed his fingers.

“He said, ‘Send me a copy of the pilot,’ and I said, ‘I can’t. I got to deliver it to ABC tomorrow.’ ... He said, ‘What would you do if you were me?’ and I said, ‘Dan, what I would do is say yes, because although you are now famous, I will make you even more famous.’ He said, ‘You know what? I’ll take a chance.’ And over the phone from London, he gave me his permission, and the rest is history.”

Hollywood connections

Vincent and Rubinstein wax nostalgic as they recall what it was like in the early days of the restaurant, back when Dan Tana’s bar was a magnet for major movie stars like Cary Grant and some of the most spectacular-looking women in town.

“Here, you could have a drink at the bar, meet a beautiful girl and have a fabulous dinner,” Vincent recalled as his pal Rubinstein chimed in with a laugh. “However, many a dinner I skipped.”

Many of Tana’s patrons work in the entertainment industry. Three of his closest pals are actors Karl Malden, James Woods and Dabney Coleman. They all have dishes named after them on the menu. Other regulars include producers Mace Neufeld (“The Hunt for Red October”), Arnold Kopelson (“The Fugitive”) and Sidney Beckerman (“Marathon Man”).

Recently, Dan Tana’s became fodder for news stories when record producer Phil Spector left a $500 tip at his regular booth in the hours before his arrest in connection with the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson at Spector’s home. (Although Spector has been identified as a suspect in the case, no charges have been filed.)

“I think the steaks at Dan Tana’s are the best steaks in the United States,” said Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, who began dining at Dan Tana’s long before he acquired his media empire that includes Paramount Pictures, the CBS television network and MTV. Redstone said he reintroduced the restaurant to his top executives Jonathan Dolgen and Sherry Lansing, as well as CBS’ Leslie Moonves. “They had sort of forgotten about the place. Today, when Sherry suggests a restaurant, it’s Dan Tana’s.”

Tana says he owes his restaurant’s success to one man: Mate Mustac, one of only three chefs he has ever employed. Mustac still works in the kitchen one day a week and has now been with Tana for 38 years. The current chef is Neno Mladenovic, who worked as Mustac’s assistant for a decade before his promotion.

Everything about Tana seems larger than life, friends say.

“He’s got something about him that is very charismatic,” 91-year-old Malden said of his friend of nearly 40 years.

Tana loves to regale his friends with stories.

One of his most memorable was the day he went to the Santa Anita Park racetrack, and a stranger walked up and asked if he wanted to get in on a Pick Nine ticket. The cost: $900. Tana took a chance, the man disappeared into the crowd, and Tana kicked himself when the man hadn’t returned by the third race.

“But after the third race, he found me and said, ‘Here is the ticket. You hold it for good luck,’ ” Tana recalled. The Pick Nine combination won, and Tana split $1.25 million.

Impressively eclectic resume

If there is something of an actor about Tana, it’s because he once was one. He made his film debut in “The Enemy Below,” a submarine thriller starring Robert Mitchum. He was born with the name Dobrivoje Tanaskovic until a casting director at Fox suggested he shorten it to Dan Tana. He went on to appear in films like “Imitation General” and TV shows like “The Untouchables.”

Tana says he got into the restaurant business by accident after acting as an interpreter for two men who wanted to buy a hamburger joint on Santa Monica Boulevard. After that fell through, he agreed to purchase the place, but only if the owners accepted $1 down and a promise of $10,000 a year for three years. Although the restaurant burned down in 1980, he was up and running again in seven weeks.

Tana says his life has been blessed, and who can disagree?

The teenager and one-time star soccer player who escaped from Communist Yugoslavia in 1952 has been the guest of Queen Elizabeth II; was part owner for 30 years of Brentford FC, a soccer team in West London, until he sold his interest last year; helped found the first soccer league in the U.S.; and serves as a director of the Red Star Belgrade, the famed soccer franchise in his native Yugoslavia (“Soccer is the love of my life”). He has homes in L.A., London and Belgrade, plays golf regularly and has two grown daughters with successful careers of their own -- Gabriella is a film and television producer in New York, and Katerina is an interior designer in Venice.

His greatest thrill, he said, was the day the people of Yugoslavia overthrew strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who now faces war-crime charges in The Hague. Friends had called Tana in L.A. to tell him the news, and he immediately boarded a flight for Belgrade.

“I was there three nights and three days in front of the parliament screaming, ‘We’ve overthrown Milosevic!’ ” he recalled. “I cried like a little baby, that I could be there to be part of that.”

Of course, Tana has always kept up his ties to his homeland -- in one way or another. Back in the ‘60s, Yugoslavia’s communist leader, Marshal Tito, had his driver pull up outside Dan Tana’s after attending a swank dinner in his honor thrown by President Nixon at the Century Plaza Hotel. Tito asked Tana, who had attended the dinner, where he could see some real hippies before heading back to Belgrade.

“He asked, ‘Why do they have beards?’ ” Tana recalled. “I said, ‘I have no idea.’ He said, ‘Where can we find them?’ I said, ‘If you go to Sunset Boulevard, they are all over the place.’ ”