Actor/game show host/former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein published a love letter to the soon-to-close Hollywood eatery Morton’s in Sunday’s New York Times. A splooge sample:
My wife and I and all of our friends are devastated. I guess we’ll eat seaweed at Mr Chow. But as far as I know, there now is no Hollywood-center-of-power cafe. Mr Chow would be the closest, especially for the music business. Yet for television and movies, it’s a sad, sad time. For those of us who considered Morton’s as much of a home as our own kitchens, it’s tragic.
Dana Harris had a markedly different take, writing up the closing on Variety’s The Knife blog in May:
But have you been to Mortons lately? I don’t think we’re going to be missing much. Nothing is wrong with the restaurant, but beyond its storied reputation, there isn’t much right. The booths are comfy and the servers are pro, but the menu is as dull and innocuous as its French-vanilla walls.
The two paragraphs above seem to reveal an evolution in the notion of Hollywood public space.
Ben Stein seems like the last person to complain about about an “innocuous” menu, and in fact, if he wrote word one in his piece about Mortons’ food, then I missed it in my power skim. The larger takeaway from Stein’s story is a lament for the decline of Hollywood’s social centers.
This is a cyclical thing, of course–each generation has their own hotspots and, established in 1979, Morton’s represented a different era than long-shuttered landmarks like Ciros and Schwabs. But Stein’s story gives the sense that Morton’s may be one of the last vestiges of institutionalized, industry-on-industry people-watching. In bringing someone like Stein into the same lunch service as studio execs and lawyers, not to mention Britney Spears and Jennifer Aniston, the Mortons of the world reinforced the notion that anyone with a glimmer of star power (or power wrangling stars) belonged to the same private club.
This notion holds little water in a day and age when Paris Hilton and Perez Hilton are hanging at the same Coffee Bean. Stein is of a generation in which Hollywood players had to Be Seen in preordained “hotspots” in order to remind the rest of the community of their existence. Today, it seems like a rarity that a “real” star would be seen at a place like Hyde, a nightclub best known to most of us as a frequent shooting location for The Hills. Harris’s quote is more reflective of the new truth of Being Seen: somewhere in between Defamer’s Hollywood PrivacyWatch and TMZ’s live feed from The Grove, the line dividing public space from private in Hollywood has disappeared. At that point, if you’re going to go out to eat, I guess you’d hope for the menu to be more boudin noir and less white paint.
