Hallowed Walls of Hollywood

Fame is fleeting. Power wanes. Except at the Palm in West Hollywood.

Walk into this cavernous steakhouse and feel the eyes of moguls and movie stars upon you. There’s Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey and Steven Spielberg, whose painted likenesses occupy a wall not far from bright-hued caricatures of Mike Myers, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman.

Since it opened its doors on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1975, the Palm has been one of the entertainment industry’s favorite haunts. Its fabled, face-covered walls are part of the reason. Like a totem pole that tells the story of a tribe, the walls of the Palm have become an insider’s directory to three decades of movers, shakers and lotus eaters.

“It’s like a club,” said Bernie Brillstein, a veteran Hollywood talent manager. The day his caricature showed up on the wall, “it was sort of recognition that you had made some kind of imprint in your life.”

Here, the mighty intermingle with the fallen, “it” girls nudge up against has-beens. Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS Corp., snuggles with Shirley MacLaine and the late John Belushi. DreamWorks SKG’s David Geffen and William Morris Agency head Jim Wiatt are across from Andrew Dice Clay and the late Eva Gabor.

If you were famous once, you’re still famous at the Palm. Which is why a lot of people around town will be relieved to hear that when the Palm moves to a new location, just 75 feet west of its current address, its owners will take the walls -- the closest thing Hollywood has to a fossil record -- with them.

“We are going to spend a lot of money,” said co-owner Wally Ganzi, who estimates that the restaurant, which is relocating to have more space, has 2,300 caricatures. “It will be like a giant jigsaw puzzle. A tremendous amount will go into preserving the original artwork.”

There are many Palms across the country -- 30 to be exact --and each has its caricatures. The walls of the Palm in Washington are crammed with politicos and presidents. Atlanta’s Palm has the likes of Ted Turner, the founder of the city’s homegrown CNN. And the Los Angeles Palm, located near the Staples Center downtown, boasts such luminaries as Kobe Bryant and Sheriff Lee Baca.

But the West Hollywood Palm stands apart because it serves an industry in which success has the shortest of shelf lives. “Hollywood is an extraordinary kind of temporary place,” the late movie director John Schlesinger once said. Not so at this restaurant, whose walls preserve the past like prehistoric amber. Here, time stands still.

“The people who go to the Palm change,” said barrel-chested character actor Brian Dennehy, who has had a place on the wall for years. “But when I go into a Palm, it is always the same for me. It certainly is as immortalized as I need to be.”

Connie Stevens, who may be best known for her guest spots on the ‘80s TV series “The Love Boat,” agreed. When her caricature went up, “it didn’t feel important.” But now, it does. “It’s your history,” she said.

The mythology of the place can be traced to the East Side of Manhattan, where two Italian immigrants opened the original Palm restaurant in 1926. The story goes that without the money to decorate their fledgling steakhouse, partners Pio Bozzi and John Ganzi traded repasts of chops and pasta for drawings on the wall by local artists and cartoonists. The restaurant became a fixture in New York, up there with Sardi’s and the 21 Club.

In the early 1970s, the management decided it was time to set up a western beachhead. Wally Ganzi, the founder’s grandson, was sent to L.A. to run the business. He looked for a location in Beverly Hills, but ended up a block outside the city limits, just east of Doheny Drive.

“It was like going to another planet,” said Ganzi, who works alongside partner Bruce Bozzi, the other founder’s grandson. “I was awestruck. I couldn’t believe Farrah Fawcett was coming in my restaurant with Lee Majors, and that they came in like three times a week.”

With its clubby elitism, sawdust-covered floors and brusque waiters known for casually tossing expensive entrees at grateful diners, the Palm became irresistible for many East Coast transplants.

By the early 1980s, the Palm was a whirlwind of see-and-be-seen. An aging Fred Astaire unleashed a tap dance on the bar while waiting for a table. Sammy Davis Jr. belted a spontaneous a capella to his guests. Michael Jackson took a private room each year to celebrate Father’s Day with his entire clan. Frank Sinatra was a regular.

“Frankie ate there every Sunday with his mom. She was a nice lady -- very skinny,” recalled Rino Ungaro, who has served food at the restaurant since 1978. “They made you feel like you weren’t a waiter.”

For a certain cadre of executives, agents and actors, eating at the Palm meant you mattered. And everyone else who mattered knew it.

“It became a meeting ground,” said actor Leslie Nielsen, who frequented the restaurant even before his reputation as a star was cemented by the movie “Airplane!” in 1980. “Actors aren’t dummies, and they know a lot of influential people also like influential steaks and big chunks of lobster and hot butter.”

For years, the chief curator of the status chaos was flamboyant maitre d’ Louis “Gigi” Delmaestro, who died of cancer in 2002 after working at the restaurant for 27 years. Delmaestro, a tiny man with a big mustache and an even bigger memory, was beloved by many in the industry for his ability to remember the names of wives, husbands, lovers and partners. Today, he is celebrated with a salad of shrimp, avocado and egg that everyone refers to as the Gigi.

“Gigi was always the same. It was like going to his house,” said Michael Ovitz, the onetime superagent who co-founded Creative Artists Agency in 1975. Soon after, Ovitz ascended to the wall along with his fledgling agency’s logo. “It was like a giant party all the time. The booths were filled with people from all walks of the entertainment business.”

That heady era is still visible -- if not always at the tables, at least on the walls. There, current Universal chief Ron Meyer still wears the ‘fro he sported in the ‘70s. John Travolta still fits into his white “Saturday Night Fever” suit. Sonny and Cher are still together. And the feathered-haired Fawcett is the most beautiful woman on Earth.

Asked what her caricature means to her, Fawcett said, “Inside it makes me smile. I smile appreciatively to myself.” She also smiles when she orders her favorite meal there: the filet (“charred on the outside, medium on the inside”), creamed spinach, onion rings, the Gigi, (minus the shrimp) and Roquefort dressing.

Fawcett’s caricature is bigger than most and occupies a choice location just east of the door. Other folks who aren’t so lucky are tucked into corners or put on the ceiling. No one wants to talk about it on the record, but some powerful people have tried to wield their influence to improve their positioning. Aging A-listers have demanded to have their pictures spruced up. Top executives have been known to beg for prime real estate.

“I was shocked how important it was to them where they were on the wall,” Ganzi said, choosing his words carefully.

Larry King, who eats at the restaurant two or three times a week, insists that he didn’t lobby for his key location right by the door. “I walked in one day, and it was up,” he recalled. “I guess people think of it as a status symbol, but I didn’t think about it.”

Then there are the civilians. As it turns out, you don’t have to be famous to get on the wall. “You just need to be hungry and loyal,” said Josh Mankiewicz, a reporter for “NBC Dateline” who has been coming to the Palm for decades and enjoys a prime position at eye level. Provided you’re a regular, Mankiewicz explained, you can petition current maitre d’ Tommy Saboni for a spot.

Which helps explain the three Wheaton terriers -- Megan, Murphy and Mickie -- whose fuzzy mugs peek out from near the bar.

“They eat here more than most people,” said their owner, Mark Kurzius, a design consultant who estimates that he and his wife spend more than $30,000 a year at the restaurant (and take their leftovers home for their dogs).

The process of producing a caricature has changed over time. When the restaurant opened, the pictures were painted directly onto the walls. Then, for a spell, local illustrator Bill Lignante was hired to create the portraits off-site. He worked from head shots and other photos, then delivered the cartoons to the premises.

Since 1995, a family-run company in Philadelphia has created the art for all the nation’s Palms -- thousands each year. When completed, the drawings are pasted onto the walls. In West Hollywood, they use a pizza roller and Elmer’s glue.

As at any exclusive club, it is the rare member who gets the boot.

Bruce McNall, the former L.A. Kings owner who spent four years in federal prison for bank fraud, is conspicuously missing from the hockey team’s panorama on the east wall. After his conviction, his face was painted over with the Kings logo.

“I wasn’t too thrilled,” said McNall, although he still stops in at least once a month.

There’s also an odd figure staring out from the west wall of the main dining room. The body of an African American footballer, with a jersey emblazoned with the number “32,” looms large. But atop O.J. Simpson’s coiled, muscular body sits the head of some white guy: Fred Croshal, the former general manager of Madonna’s Maverick Records.

After Simpson was accused of killing his wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, the Palm’s staff had resisted removing his caricature. He was a frequent customer and always polite. But then, a female customer began stabbing Simpson’s caricature with a steak knife during the dinner hour. Delmaestro asked Croshal if he’d mind being pasted atop the famed running back.

“I just didn’t think twice about it,” Croshal said.

Now that the Palm is planning to move, probably in 2008, its managers have held off on additions to the wall. Orders for caricatures of such regulars as Matt Damon, Ben Stiller, Enrique Iglesias, Vin Diesel and Adam Sandler are kept in a stack, awaiting head shots from their agents.

As for the folks already on the walls, most everyone is guaranteed a place in the new digs -- though where, exactly, is not yet known. With almost every inch of the Palm covered in caricatures, each wall will be cut down in sections and rehung.

“They’ll basically figure out what the power tables will be in the new restaurant,” said David Middleton, the Palm executive in charge of the move. “Then we will figure out how the jigsaw is taken apart and how it will go back together.”

No matter where Hollywood’s puzzle pieces end up, one thing is certain: At the request of management, artisans will be on hand to blur the lines between old and new.