Buffet Supper

In Hollywood's Clover Club one night last week cafe society saw the nearest thing yet to a man biting a dog. Pretender Extraordinary Mike Romanoff, of Vilna, Russia, and/or Hillsboro, Ill., after some 20 years on cafe society's cuff, threw a party. The formal invitation, engraved with a big Imperial R, read: "To discharge his social obligations past and future, we have received commands from his Imperial Highness, Prince Michael Romanoff, to invite ( ) to a buffet supper on Saturday evening, June the tenth, at the Clover Club."; and continuing: "Guests will please bring their own liquor and fee the servants."

"Gentlemen in attendance" signing this Dutch-treat invitation included such prime Hollywood good fellows as Robert Benchley, James Cagney, Charles Chaplin, Gary Grant, Mark Hellinger, Herbert Marshall, Frank Morgan, Robert Riskin, Edward G. Robinson, Randolph Scott, et al., to the number of 22.

To Hollywood Mike is a magnificent stooge in a place which can afford magnificent stooges. They laugh at his good-natured Oxonian pomposity, chuckle over his full assumed title, Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, never use his real name, Harry Gerguson.

Three years ago, after a long career of dodging immigration officials and rubber-checking rich and high-born speak-easy acquaintances, Mike's luck ran out. After a short spell in jail, he skipped Manhattan.

Next year he turned up in Hollywood with a screen story to sell about Ellis Island. It was a flop, but since then Mike has been getting $50 a week from Twentieth Century-Fox (he says $150), sometimes working as an extra for other studios (Cafe Society, Fools for Scandal). He lives thriftily with his ikons in a modest flat in Beverly Hills, drives the right people to the right places in his two-year-old Cadillac, owes only a minor tailor bill, which is disappearing by installments.

Saturday's Clover Club celebration was a great success. Mike's current patron, Jules Stein of the Music Corporation of America, donated an orchestra. Mike himself showed up with $25 in his pocket which he pyramided to $125 at the gaming tables before the party broke up at 6 a. m. Missing from the guest list were a great many familiar Hollywood partygoers, including fat Elsa Maxwell, cafe society's coast-to-coast whoops-a-daisy. Explained the host: "No phonies."

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