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Perino's
Perino's was a restaurant located on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. The original location at 3927 Wilshire Boulevard was opened in 1932 by Italian-American restaurateur Alexander Perino, immediately becoming popular with Hollywood's elite. In 1950 it moved to a larger location at 4101 Wilshire, where it remained until it closed in 1986. The restaurant was a Los Angeles landmark which, like the Brown Derby, Chasen's, and Romanoff's, was famed for its celebrity clientele during the Hollywood Golden Age. Despite its closure, the restaurant enjoyed an afterlife as a filming location for film and television until the building was sold and demolished in 2005. History Alessandro Bruno Perino was born in Brusnengo, Piedmont, northern Italy in 1895; as a nineteen-year old pastry cook, he emigrated to the United States as a steerage passenger on the S/S ''La Lorraine'', which arrived at the Port of New York in February 1914. With $2,000 in savings, Perino opened his famous Los ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brown Derby
Brown Derby was a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles, California. The first and best known was shaped like a derby hat, an iconic image that became synonymous with the Golden Age of Hollywood. It was opened by Wilson Mizner in 1926. The chain was started by Robert H. Cobb and Herbert K. Somborn (a former husband of film star Gloria Swanson) in the 1920s. The original Brown Derby restaurants had closed or had been converted to other uses by the 1980s, though a Disney-backed Brown Derby national franchising program revived the brand in the 21st century. It is often incorrectly thought that the Brown Derby was a single restaurant, and the Wilshire Boulevard and Hollywood branches are frequently confused. There is a non-related chain of steakhouse restaurants founded in 1941 in Akron, Ohio, and franchised in 1962. This chain was founded by Ted and Gus Girves, and the full name of these restaurants is "Girves Brown Derby". , five of the Girves chain are still in business. Wils ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chasen's
Chasen's was a famous restaurant frequented by film stars, entertainers, politicians and other dignitaries in West Hollywood, California, located at 9039 Beverly Boulevard on the border of Beverly Hills. It opened for business in 1936 and was the site of the Academy Awards party for many years. It was also famous for its chili. Elizabeth Taylor had several orders of Chasen's chili flown to the set of ''Cleopatra'' in 1963 while filming in Rome, and to Oroville, California during the filming of ''The Klansman'' in 1974. Many of the restaurant's regular customers had booths named in their honor. The Ronald Reagan booth is now on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and was where Reagan proposed to his actress wife Nancy Davis. Well-known celebrities with their own booths included Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, and Groucho Marx. The restaurant suffered a decline in business over the course of many years and closed permanently in 1995. History Comedi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilshire Boulevard
Wilshire Boulevard is a prominent boulevard in the Los Angeles area of Southern California, extending from Ocean Avenue in the city of Santa Monica east to Grand Avenue in the Financial District of downtown Los Angeles. One of the principal east-west arterial roads of Los Angeles, it is also one of the major city streets through the city of Beverly Hills. Wilshire Boulevard runs roughly parallel with Santa Monica Boulevard from Santa Monica to the west boundary of Beverly Hills. From the east boundary it runs a block south of Sixth Street to its terminus. Wilshire Boulevard is densely developed throughout most of its span, connecting five of Los Angeles's major business districts and Beverly Hills to one-another. Many of the post-1956 skyscrapers in Los Angeles are located along Wilshire; for example, the Wilshire Grand Center, which is the tallest building in California, is located on the Figueroa and Wilshire intersection. One Wilshire, built in 1966 at the ju ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cole Porter
Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in film. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather's wishes for him to practice law and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics as well as the music for his songs. After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 1930s, but in 1948 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, ''Kiss Me, Kate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dean Martin
Dean Martin (born Dino Paul Crocetti; June 7, 1917 – December 25, 1995) was an American singer, actor and comedian. One of the most popular and enduring American entertainers of the mid-20th century, Martin was nicknamed "The King of Cool". Martin gained his career breakthrough together with comedian Jerry Lewis, billed as Martin and Lewis, in 1946. They performed in nightclubs and later had numerous appearances on radio, television and in films. Following an acrimonious ending of the partnership in 1956, Martin pursued a solo career as a performer and actor. Martin established himself as a singer, recording numerous contemporary songs as well as standards from the Great American Songbook. He became one of the most popular acts in Las Vegas and was known for his friendship with fellow artists Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., who together with several others formed the Rat Pack. Starting in 1965, Martin was the host of the television variety program ''The Dean Martin Show'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films, many of which are still widely watched and studied today. Known as the "Master of Suspense", he became as well known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing the television anthology '' Alfred Hitchcock Presents'' (1955–65). His films garnered 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins, although he never won the award for Best Director despite five nominations. Hitchcock initially trained as a technical clerk and copy writer before entering the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer. His directorial debut was the British-German silent film '' The Pleasure Garden'' (1925). His first successful film, '' The Lodger: A Story of the London F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe (; born Norma Jeane Mortenson; 1 June 1926 4 August 1962) was an American actress. Famous for playing comedic " blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $ billion in ) by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a major icon of pop culture. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her sixth on their list of the greatest female screen legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited Monroe as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in a total of 12 foster homes and an orphanage; she married at age sixteen. She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cary Grant
Cary Grant (born Archibald Alec Leach; January 18, 1904November 29, 1986) was an English-American actor. He was known for his Mid-Atlantic accent, debonair demeanor, light-hearted approach to acting, and sense of comic timing. He was one of classic Hollywood's definitive leading men from the 1930s until the mid-1960s. Grant was born and brought up in Bristol, England. He became attracted to theater at a young age when he visited the Bristol Hippodrome. At 16, he went as a stage performer with the Pender Troupe for a tour of the US. After a series of successful performances in New York City, he decided to stay there. He established a name for himself in vaudeville in the 1920s and toured the United States before moving to Hollywood in the early 1930s. Grant initially appeared in crime films and dramas such as ''Blonde Venus'' (1932) with Marlene Dietrich and '' She Done Him Wrong'' (1933) with Mae West, but later gained renown for his performances in romantic screwball ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tony Accardo
Anthony Joseph Accardo (; born Antonino Leonardo Accardo, ; April 28, 1906 – May 22, 1992), also known as "Joe Batters" and "Big Tuna", was an American longtime mobster. In a criminal career that spanned eight decades, he rose from small-time hoodlum to the position of day-to-day boss of the Chicago Outfit in 1947, to ultimately becoming the final Outfit authority in 1972. Accardo moved the Outfit into new operations and territories, greatly increasing its power and wealth during his tenure as boss. Early life Accardo was born on April 28, 1906, in Chicago's Near West Side, the second of six children of shoemaker Francesco Accardo and Maria Tilotta Accardo. One year prior to his birth, the Accardos had emigrated from Castelvetrano, in the Province of Trapani, Sicily, Italy to America. At age 14, Accardo left school and started loitering around neighborhood pool halls. He soon joined the Circus Cafe Gang, run by Claude Maddox and Tony Capezio, one of many street gangs in the poor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack Dragna
Jack Ignatius Dragna (born Ignazio Dragna, ; April 18, 1891 – February 23, 1956) was an American Mafia member and Black Hander who was active in both Italy and the United States in the 20th century. He was active in bootlegging in California during the Prohibition Era in the United States. In 1931, he succeeded Joseph Ardizzone as the boss of the Los Angeles crime family after Ardizzone's mysterious disappearance and death. Both James Ragen and Earl Warren dubbed Dragna the "Capone of Los Angeles". Dragna remained the boss of the Los Angeles crime family from 1931 until his death in 1956. Biography Early life Dragna was born to Francesco Paolo Dragna and Anna Dragna in Corleone, Sicily, on April 18, 1891. On November 18, 1898, Dragna came to the United States on the S.S. ''Alsatia'' with his parents, older sister Giuseppa, and older brother Gaetano. They stayed in East Harlem, in Manhattan, with his mother's cousin Antonio Rizzotto's family, also from Corleone. It is un ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johnny Stompanato
John Stompanato Jr. (October 10, 1925 – April 4, 1958), was a United States Marine who became a bodyguard and enforcer for gangster Mickey Cohen and the Cohen crime family. In the mid-1950s, he began an abusive relationship with actress Lana Turner. In 1958, he was stabbed to death by Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, who said she did it to defend her mother from a vicious beating by Stompanato. His death was ruled as justifiable homicide because he had been killed in self-defense. From 1953 to 1955 Stompanato was married to actress Helene Stanley. Early life John Stompanato Jr., was born into an Italian American family in Woodstock, Illinois. His father, John Sr., owned a barber shop and his mother, Carmela, was a seamstress. Both parents were born in Italy but were married in Brooklyn. They had moved to Woodstock in 1916. Stompanato was the youngest of four children: he had two older sisters, Grace and Teresa; and an older brother, Carmine. Six days after his birt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bugsy Siegel
Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (February 28, 1906 – June 20, 1947) was an American mobster who was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip. Siegel was not only influential within the Jewish Mob, but along with his childhood friend and fellow gangster Meyer Lansky, also held significant influence within the Italian-American Mafia and the largely Italian-Jewish National Crime Syndicate. Described as handsome and charismatic, he became one of the first front-page celebrity gangsters. Siegel was one of the founders and leaders of Murder, Inc. and became a bootlegger during Prohibition. After the Twenty-first Amendment was passed repealing Prohibition in 1933, he turned to gambling. In 1936, he left New York and moved to California. His time as a mobster during this period was mainly as a hitman and muscle, as he was noted for his prowess with guns and violence. In 1941, Siegel was tried for the murder of friend and fellow mobster Harry Greenberg, who had turned in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
