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Customers said they felt like it was going to a friend’s house. “Everyone who worked there stayed forever. “Don really made the place,” says Mark Ryan, who manned the bar for almost 30 years. When the owner wanted to sell the place in the late 1980s, he figured he’d either have to buy it or find a new job. By the time Cranford made his way there for a job, it was already a permanent fixture for Canyon and Palisades locals. In 1949 it became a Billingsley’s Golden Bull - there were several Billingsley’s around Los Angeles, including the original on Pico Boulevard, which still stands today. The brick building on the corner of West Channel and Short Street had been a restaurant of some sort since the 1930s. I always joked that you could get a steak and a will done on the same night.” One server put herself through law school working there. I learned more dirty words from those women. When I started working there, the waitresses were all older and wore white cowboy boots and short skirts. “ I always felt everybody that worked at the Bull had great personalities and really got to know the customers. “Phyllis Diller would have a couple Beefeater martinis, and she’d practically put on a floor show in the dining room,” he recalls. Cranford, who started working at The Golden Bull as a bartender in 1968, remembers most of them. The list of merrymakers, gay icons, and famous faces that reportedly hung out at The Golden Bull is long: David Hockney, Rock Hudson, Steve and Edie Gourmet, Phyllis Diller, Betty White, Bea Arthur, Steve McQueen, Peter Fonda all the way to brothers Luke and Owen Wilson. The Canyon inspired them, and they in turn inspired many to flutter around the tree-lined streets, circling through their favorite local bars and restaurants. Bachardy, Isherwood’s partner for more than 30 years, still lives and paints in the same house the two shared. In a 1952 Harper’s Bazaar article, Isherwood called the Canyon “our western Greenwich Village,” filled with “Bohemianism and unpretentious artiness.” He alluded to a bar similar to the Friendship in his novel “ A Single Man” (in the Tom Ford-directed film starring Colin Firth, they used Santa Monica’s Chez Jay as a stand-in). Just the type of place someone like Ishwerwood could hold court with fellow famous writers like Capote and Williams. The Golden Bull was everything a neighborhood dive should be: A totally unassuming spot frequented mostly by locals, many slipping into their favorite table or seat at the bar for good steaks and even better martinis. He lived in four different houses around the neighborhood over the years and was an extraordinarily powerful presence.” Photo courtesy The Golden Bull Later, Isherwood really solidified the roots of the gay community. “There was a brothel called The Golden Butterfly, known to attract people like Greta Garbo, who was supposedly having an affair with several women. “The Canyon was a pillar of debauchery,” says local historian, photographer and longtime Canyon resident Randy Young. At some point in any evening, everyone made it to the Bull for dinner or a drink. Cafe Caravelle, a French restaurant on the corner of Channel and the Pacific Coast Highway, turned into a piano bar after 10 p.m. Friendship, a few doors away from The Golden Bull, with the bow of a boat as part of its facade, was a raucous watering hole. There were also brothels and speakeasies, and notorious house parties well into the 1960s and 1970s. Berthold taught screenwriting to Isherwood, who followed his mentor, the gay British philosopher Gerald Heard, to the Canyon.
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That fact that it bordered Pacific Palisades, founded by Methodists, made it all more salacious in a way.Īccording to the LGBTQ National Archives, the stories go as far back as the 1920s into the late 1930s, when creatives like Austrian screenwriter Salka Viertel, said to be the lover of Greta Garbo, and her husband Berthold settled in the neighborhood.
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Parties raged, people skinny-dipped at Will Rogers State Park and its gay-friendly patch of sand known as Ginger Rogers Beach, and many cocktails were had at bars and restaurants within walking distance. The beach-adjacent enclave filled with winding roads and steep canyon walls was somewhat secluded from the Hollywood studio machine, and it became a safe haven for the bohemian elite. Long before the Stonewall Riots in New York, or the raids and protests at the Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake, when West Hollywood wasn’t known as Boy’s Town yet, Santa Monica Canyon was one of the few pockets of openly gay life around Los Angeles.