Army says goodbye to a legion of fans

The Friday lunchtime scene on the patio at Spago in Beverly Hills is tailor-made for a Hollywood columnist, especially one from the old school. The same industry people are here every week. They walk in like they live here, and make a beeline for their tables without bothering to stop at the hostess desk.

Robert Stack’s widow, Rosemary, in a necklace made of turquoise chunks as big as a baby’s fist, is at her table with three age-defying girlfriends. The Improv’s Budd Friedman and his wife, Alex, are one table over. Spago impresario Wolfgang Puck, in chef’s whites, is table hopping. And though their schmoozing spheres don’t seem to intersect, Puck’s business partner and ex-wife, Barbara Lazaroff, is here too, chatting and laughing with her regulars on the patio.

And then there’s Army Archerd, the longtime Daily Variety columnist who has undoubtedly written a line or two about nearly every customer in the joint. In a career that has spanned more than half a century, Archerd has been Hollywood’s town crier and cheerleader, chronicling its denizens’ deals, divorces, diseases, death, their marriages, remarriages and births.

For decades, reading Archerd was the first order of business for a town that thrives on knowing everyone else’s business. Although the gossip trade has been taken over in recent years by the Internet, cable TV and magazines such as Us Weekly, a mention in his column could boost careers.

But now he’s done. After years of eating lunch at his desk, Army Archerd has the luxury of a long lunch at Spago because he penned his final “Just for Variety” column last week.

“Mazel tov!” Lazaroff says as she embraces Archerd. She tells him about her recent trip to Shanghai to look at hotels and restaurants (at this rate, the sun may never set on the Spago empire), and at the end of the conversation, Archerd, who will continue to contribute stories to Daily Variety, says: “Well, call me and let me know.”

Lazaroff laughs. “In all the years, and all the columns you’ve written, how many times have you uttered the words, ‘Give me a call?’ Can you even imagine?’ ”

Archerd, 83, just smiles and shakes his head. Not an easy calculation for a man who has written more than 10,000 columns over 52 years in the same job. “Fifty-two years,” he says. “That’s not chopped liver.”

Nor was the space that was devoted by Daily Variety last Thursday to Archerd’s career. Full-page tributes were taken out by DreamWorks, CBS, Universal Studios, Warner Bros. Studios, Sony Pictures, the Walt Disney Co., 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, the Directors Guild of America, Mel Brooks, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who wrote, “You are a true mensch.”

In this day of celebrity tabloid journalism, which loves to put the embarrassing off-screen foibles of the famous front and center, Archerd has always been a straight shooter, reporting what he knows to be the facts in workmanlike prose. He cringes at the term “gossip columnist” and has always called himself a “news columnist.” He never trafficked in rumor or printed blind items.

A fixture at the Oscars

Occasionally, Archerd has been criticized for accepting freebies such as junkets or meals. And many of his subjects have become his friends, which would not be acceptable in most newsrooms today. But Archerd says he “never felt any conflicts,” and adds: “I always told people, ‘Look, tell me the story and give it to me truthfully. If you don’t, the story will leak out and it will be erroneous and you’ll be sorry.’ ”

He has also earned money from the industry, by emceeing premieres and Oscar arrivals, for instance. But his bosses were always willing to cut him that slack, because, as Daily Variety editor Peter Bart once put it in an interview with The Times: “Post-Army, there will never be anyone remotely like him again. He’s an institution that no one will ever replace.... One part community bulletin board, one part community conscience and one part kind of a cheering section. And all those functions are vital.”

Which is why so many movers and shakers have turned to him to chronicle their lives. He was first to report that Warren Beatty had secretly married Annette Bening, that Julia Roberts had jilted Kiefer Sutherland, and as Paul Newman once said, “He was first to report that my salad dressing was outgrossing my movies.”

Archerd wasn’t afraid of bad news, either. In 1985, in a delicately worded item, he broke the news that Rock Hudson was suffering from AIDS, a watershed moment in the history of the disease, and described a few years later by the AP’s Bob Thomas, Archerd’s longtime friend and mentor, as “a thunder strike.”

He has taken on stars whose political positions he finds odious -- Charlton Heston on gun ownership, Michael Jackson for anti-Semitic slurs in his song “They Don’t Care About Us.” (Jackson apologized and changed the lyrics.) In 1999, he had strong words about director Elia Kazan, who was given an honorary Oscar. Many in the entertainment community objected because of Kazan’s 1952 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I, for one, will not be giving him a standing ovation,” Archerd wrote.

Though a well-known Democrat, “so many of my best friends were Republicans,” says Archerd, “John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart.” At this point, he launches into a very good impersonation of Stewart. “I once asked him, ‘Who does the best imitation of you? And he said, ‘Sammy Davis.’ ”

Outside the industry, Archerd is best known for his decades on the red carpet as the official greeter at the Academy Awards and for hosting the “People’s Choice Awards.” Next year, he says, he and Selma, his wife of 35 years, will walk the red carpet together, stop for a chat with the new greeter (he doesn’t know who), then take their seats among the nominees in the first rows of the Kodak Theatre.

Although it seemed to some that Archerd was a creature of Old Hollywood, more comfortable with the old guard than the new, he positively bridles at that idea. At lunch, he brought two of the many kind notes he’d received in the last week. The first is a fax from the screenwriter Mel Shavelson, who is 88. “Dear Army,” it says. “Unpack.” (The Archerds are in the process of an arduous move from their house of 35 years to a Wilshire Boulevard condo.) The second, on pink stationery, arrived with a box of candy. Each “i” was dotted with a heart. “Dear Mr. Archard [sic], I wanted to write to tell you that I am thinking about you during this special week! Thank you for being so encouraging to me! I appreciate it more than you will ever know!” It is from 11-year-old actress Dakota Fanning.

Working the phones

Nearly every “Just for Variety” column started with “Good Morning.” However, on the occasion of sad news -- the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Sept. 11 attacks -- the column would begin “It’s not a good morning.” For decades, Archerd produced five information-packed columns a week, in the three dot style of yore, working the phones with an intensity that is known only by those who have a deadline bearing down on them like a bully and nothing yet on the page. His phone files are legendary -- four drawers of current numbers. And it is widely known that the one person in the Hollywood press whose calls are reliably returned is Archerd.

On Thursday, in one of Daily Variety’s tributes, staffer Jon Burlingame wrote that when Johnny Carson celebrated his 25th year with NBC in 1987, the “Tonight Show” host left a message for his publicist: “I’m not doing any interviews, because if I do one, I’ll have to do them all. But if Army calls, I’ll speak to him.” And veteran Hollywood publicist Lee Solters told Burlingame, “If I plant something that is not true, he knows. He is a first-class reporter.”

In 1998, he cut back to four columns a week “so I could have some time to go the doctor or dentist.” In the last year, he wrote twice a week, and then for the last month, only once a week. “I thought it was a gentle, easy way of preparing everybody,” he says. Now, he hopes to write his memoirs and fulfill two dreams with his wife -- snorkeling Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and taking an African safari.

But he refuses to use the word “retired.” His “Just for Variety” column is history, he concedes, but he’s already thinking about a new one. It would run periodically and be full of news about Hollywood people -- who’s getting married, who’s having a baby, whose been lunching with whom. Nobody else does a column like that, he says. Maybe he’ll call it “Kudos.”

The patio at Spago is starting to empty. Lunch is over. Archerd sighs. “I once said I don’t want to drop dead over my typewriter. And my doctor said, ‘Why not?’ ”