Word: romanoff
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...framer of this apothegm is the proprietor of both a good restaurant and an unusual personality. He is the self-styled Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, once a Brooklyn-born orphan boy named Harry Gerguson, who spent half his life amiably panhandling the rich of two continents. But in Hollywood, where Mike Romanoff settled after being immortalized in a five-part New Yorker profile, he finally cashed in on the fact that he is one of the few genuine, 24-carat phonies in a city where thin plating has often been known to pose for the real thing...
...years since his friends John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, Darryl Zanuck, the late Robert Benchley and others lent him $7,500 to go into business, Romanoff's restaurant has become much more than just a place to eat good food. There, Hollywood has clinched its big deals, dreamed its Technicolored dreams, made and broken careers. With its "dress circle" of favored dining booths, Romanoff's is a precise measuring stick of whether a star is rising or falling. Waiting for a table at Romanoff's is a good indication that a star has faded...
Except during the summer, when he bakes himself to a burnished mahogany on Santa Monica's beach, he weekends at his Palm Springs estate, 100 miles from Los Angeles, where the Zanucks usually entertain 12 to 16 guests. Among the regulars: Elsa Maxwell, Restaurateur Mike Romanoff, the Louis Jourdans, the Reginald Gardiners, Clifton Webb, Agents Charles Feldman and Fefe Ferry...
Columnist Johnson, a professional funnyman, has also interviewed mind-readers to get a line on prospective Academy Award winners (it was a wobbly line), examined Greer Carson's knees after an Eastern stocking designer called her knock-kneed (no knock), inspected the redecorated ladies' room at Romanoff's restaurant (Hedy Lamarr was surprised to meet him there) and played bit parts in six movies. For his brash, brisk reporting about these unlikely activities and more consequential news of Hollywood, 39-yearold Erskine Johnson has become one of Hollywood's most widely read male columnists, earns about...
Afterward came the studio's biggest protocol headache: a party at Mike Romanoff's restaurant, which can hold only 250-of the very best people, of course. When it was time for comments about the film, everyone seemed to have enjoyed it. There was no need to fall back on the standard gambit of those who are forced to comment on a bad new movie: "What a picture! What a performance!" Fox figured that, all in all, it was well worth...