Column: Santa Anita barkeep recalls when sport of kings drew Hollywood greats

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Just ask Santa Anita barkeep Frank Panza, a link to the days when horse racing was about the only game in town, before the Dodgers came along, then the Lakers, then the edge-of-nowhere casinos the youngsters seem to prefer over this elegant, gorgeously muscled, still-thrilling sport.

There’s no accounting for taste or trends. “Everything popular is wrong,” said Oscar Wilde. Amen to that.

This Panza guy’s still a beautiful thing, though. Look at the hair, thick as a turf course. The smile, full of Italian twinkle. And listen to his stories, gleaned from a half century as Santa Anita’s resident Damon Runyon.

“Cary Grant was a $2 bettor,” Panza says as he pours a beer. “He said he worked too hard for his money to bet more than that.”

If a sport could blush, it wouldn’t be horse racing, stronghold of gamblers, grifters, cheats, liars, high-rollers, lowlifes, bag men, drummers, drunks and debutantes — the kind of real folks who fill jury pools and saloons. It would seem perfectly suited to today’s tatted-up, Vegas-loving bad boys and girls. Maybe racing is too locked up in its past glories. Or maybe it requires just too much mental math.

Way back, horse racing was the province of the gods, of gossamer-haired movie queens and their loudmouth boyfriends, who’d come for the races and stay for the show.

“I don’t think there’s a saloon in the world that had that kind of clientele,” Panza recalls. “I was like a kid in a candy store.”

He ticks off the names: Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Howard Hughes, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Dean Martin, Jackie Gleason, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau.

“The greatest? Sinatra,” he says, “He used to call me Frangi. My Italian nickname.”

“George Peppard used to come in with these beautiful women,” he says. “You think he’d introduce them to me? No!”

But, mercy, Panza seemed to meet everyone else.

“There’ll never be another bar like that,” he says fondly. “I couldn’t wait to come to work.

“They would come in minks, dressed to the hilt,” he says. “Elizabeth Montgomery used to bring me ties.”

Back then he also tended bar at Hollywood Park, an actors’ retreat as well, and at the starry Villa Nova restaurant on the Sunset Strip. At Santa Anita, he was a mainstay at the famed Turf Club, now renamed the Chandelier Room and open only for major events such as the Breeders’ Cup.

These days, you’ll find Panza at Santa Anita’s Clubhouse bar, opposite the sandwich carving station. He still has his posse though, a fan base of horse lovers he’s developed through the decades by serving up the best combo a barkeep can pour — a story and a smile.

“What really impresses me is people walk by, and he remembers all their names,” says Craig Poletti, one of his regulars.

“Frank is an institution at this racetrack,” says horse owner Phil Daniels. “The protocol is that you always stop here and have a drink, even if you don’t want a drink. He makes everyone feel like friends.”

“A truly remarkable life that has touched so many people,” says regular Rob Blakeley. “I wouldn’t come to the track as much if it wasn’t for him.”

Panza was bred for distance over speed. The native Ohioan is up at 4:30 each morning to make the 65-mile trip to Arcadia, then back home to Laguna Niguel each evening.

A SAG member, Panza is also a working actor, taking bit parts in movies and TV. You might spot him in “Ray Donovan” or behind the bar in “Shameless.” He worked next to Elliott Gould in “Dexter.” He was an extra in “A Star is Born,” in the scene in which James Mason gets knocked to the floor (though his stuff was later cut).

But where Panza really stars is at Santa Anita, the place that helped put his son through Notre Dame, and L.A.’s most-venerable gin joint where, each racing day, he makes sure the wonder and wisdom of the good old days are never completely forgotten.

“So I ask Greer Garson one time, ‘Why don’t you make movies anymore?’ ”

Panza says with a tilt of the head, “And she says, ‘Frank, sex is a beautiful thing. It belongs in the bedroom, not on the big screen.’ ”

And, Frangi, you belong right here.

twitter: @erskinetimes