A Hip but Controversial Hangout Spans Eras

It survived bootleggers, Prohibition, carousing movie stars, tattooed bikers, the rise of yuppie pool halls -- and a decades-long battle stemming from an anti-gay slur posted over the bar.

Now, nearly 80 years after it opened, Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood remains a hip hangout, combining tourist glitz with biker cool.

The joint, with its low ceilings and wood-beamed simplicity, evokes the days of Jean Harlow and W.C. Fields. Rusted out-of-state license plates line the bar, and yellowed newspapers decorate the ceiling.

With a menu that includes breakfast burritos, chili cheese dogs and Dom Perignon, Barney’s has always been a chic roadhouse. And the owners have been as loyal as the customers; there have been just four owners in 79 years.

The original, John “Barney” Anthony, was a Los Angeles native who attended UC Berkeley before joining the Navy in World War I. As a Navy cook, he served sailors French onion soup and his special blend of mouth-watering chili burgers.

His shipboard recipes were such a hit that, in 1920, he opened the Beanery in Berkeley. The modest hamburger and chili stand included a sign that read: “For Men Only.”

Anthony was a rough-and-tumble character who perhaps didn’t think women had the cast-iron stomachs to handle his chili.

Warmer weather and the newly opened Route 66 encouraged him to move back home, where, in 1927, he purchased a small shack in the tules surrounded by a poinsettia field.

With an electric trolley running down the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard, the 1880s railroad town of Sherman was emerging as a tidy suburb of sprawling Los Angeles and a neighbor to the free-spending movie-industry crowd.

Anthony was betting on America’s migration west via the year-old “mother road” from Chicago to Los Angeles. On this stretch of the highway near La Cienega Boulevard, he opened Barney’s Beanery.

Its popularity was swift and destined to survive the trolley’s eventual demise.

“It is a little wooden shanty, with a whole row of cheap floor lamps illuminating the counter, and a dinky little bar down at one end,” said a literary film magazine, Rob Wagner’s Script, in 1942. Times reporters from the 1950s and ‘60s called it “wholesomely crummy” and a “hilarious little mecca for bigwigs and bums.”

Barney treated his famous customers as if they were Navy buddies. He offered free advice, lent some of them money and took out-of-state license plates as collateral on dinner bills, according to a 1945 article in Hollywood Nightlife magazine.

Clark Gable and Errol Flynn kicked back in the shadows there. Steve McQueen shot pool and drank beer. Janis Joplin drank her last screwdriver there and carved her name in a tabletop that now hangs from the ceiling. Jim Morrison and the Doors hung out nearly every night.

Singer Linda Ronstadt was sometimes seen sneaking through the kitchen door to meet her boyfriend, then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who waited inside sipping Irish coffee. The French onion soup was a favorite of former California Gov. and Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren.

Film-industry types routinely rented the place for Oscar-watching soirees and wrap parties. And in 1951, a week before the Academy Awards, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin held an Oscar spoof there called the Mickey Awards.

“It was the first time in years anybody dared to laugh at Hollywood out loud,” a Herald Examiner reporter wrote in 1951. “One irate press agent said the whole thing was ‘anti-industry’ and demanded it be called off.”

The awards were the brainchild of Ezra Goodman, a Time magazine correspondent who, along with other film-industry reporters, felt that he was treated as a second-class citizen.

Studio producers told Lewis and Martin that they couldn’t spoof the Oscars, said Johnny Grant, Hollywood’s honorary mayor, in a recent interview.

But the show went on. Searchlights pierced the sky and wide-eyed fans filled the temporary bleachers outside.

Grant, then working as a disc jockey, welcomed stars as they arrived. “The press used to get together and pull off some real doozies,” he said.

For the occasion, emcees Lewis and Martin rented the antique automobile -- an Isotta Fraschini -- in which Gloria Swanson was chauffeured by Erich Von Stroheim in “Sunset Boulevard.” (The film was up for 11 Oscars that year; it won three.)

Von Stroheim accepted the Mickey for best performance by a foreign convertible. Burlesque legend Tempest Storm won for the “best two props” in a black and white production -- her breasts.

The restaurant’s more recent notoriety stemmed from the infamous sign and matchbook covers that proclaimed, in coarse language, that gays weren’t welcome. Anthony posted the sign over the bar in the late 1940s.

The slur raised no eyebrows for years. But in 1964 a Life magazine photographer immortalized Anthony and his sign, and controversy grew.

Anthony ignored objections to his sign, which he said originally had been a joke. But by the late 1950s, as beatniks and rock ‘n’ roll types began to supplant his Hollywood clientele, Anthony became considerably less tolerant of the bohemian culture and homosexuals.

He was immune to the protests but not to aging: He died in late 1968, at 70.

His family sold Barney’s to Irwin Held, who kept the sign and matchbooks. Activists unsuccessfully tried to prevent the transfer of the liquor license and, in 1970, held a three-month demonstration outside and inside the restaurant.

Led by gay minister Troy Perry, who had founded the Metropolitan Community Church in 1968, and Morris Kight, co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front, protesters marched on the sidewalk and occupied tables for hours, drinking cold coffee. (Management refused to refill their cups after the first serving.)

The Gay Liberation Front sued, but Held prevailed. He defiantly proclaimed that the sign and matchbooks would stay because they were part of Barney’s history.

Perry vowed that he would never set foot in the restaurant again. “I only went in there once before to see the sign I had heard so much about,” he said in a recent interview. “That sign set it all off for me, and we started planning the protest.”

When West Hollywood incorporated in 1984, the Barney’s sign helped prompt a city ordinance banning discrimination against homosexuals. In 1985, facing a $500-a-day fine, Held reluctantly removed the sign and jettisoned the matchbooks.

“For the first time in my life, I know how MacArthur must’ve felt at Corregidor,” he moaned to a Times reporter, referring to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s 1942 retreat from Japanese invaders on the fortified Philippine island.

In 1991, even with the offensive sign long gone, Barney’s became a target when Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed a gay-rights bill.

“Protesters banged on and threw bricks through the windows,” Held said in a recent interview.

In 1999, poor health forced Held to sell Barney’s to David Houston and Avi Fattal, who kept the place virtually the same. That applied to the joint’s notoriety too, which wasn’t exactly what the pair had in mind.

Houston said that when he bought Barney’s, he naively thought the word would get out that there was a “new sheriff in town” with a different attitude. But gays still refused to go there.

One might say that resolving this long-standing dispute required divine intervention. Last year, Houston invited the original protester, Perry, into Barney’s. Perry accepted and shook Houston’s hand.

“I believe in redemption; I’m a clergyman,” the minister said in the interview. “I felt like [Houston] was really genuine. He didn’t have to do this.”

The relieved Houston said in an interview: “We hope to exclude no one and cater to anyone who has an appreciation for fattening food, good chili, beer and loud rock ‘n’ roll.”