Hollywood Institution

All Hollywood knows that Restaurant LaRue is the fashionable place to dine. Every evening some 280 fortunate film colonists jam the pistachio-&cocoa-striped booths, patiently wait their turn in the ebony-&-red-leather bar, or crowd the overflow tables on the flower-boxed French terrace. Every evening hundreds of disappointed latecomers must take potluck elsewhere.

For by last week, in spite of OPA food ceilings, $7-a-day dishwashers and a $175-a-week chef, William Richard Wilkerson, LaRue's proprietor, could be reasonably certain that his $44,000 investment will pay off. In its first ten weeks, LaRue had grossed $109,000; it was averaging $14,000 weekly.

The qualities which make a smart Hollywood restaurant click are as fragile as the promise in a starlet's eye. The essentials for success--more subtle than LaRue's Royal Squab Diable ($2.25) and the decor which Hollywoodians describe as "chichi like crazy"--are Billy Wilkerson's secret. Smart as LaRue may be, it is less smart than its proprietor.

Smart Operator. Proprietor Billy Wilkerson is a suave, natty Tennesseean with drooping lips and a dark mustache. At 49, he is still as toughly handsome as a Central Casting Corporation gambler. On the Hollywood scale of business he is a midget; yet even in that hyperbolic community, he is regarded with respect. He is the editor-publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, in whose columns it pays, as all Hollywood is aware, to advertise. He promoted and operated the prodigiously successful Trocadero, a nightspot which took in $3,800,000 in two years and eight months. He is a confessed onetime friend of the once influential Willie Bioff, the racketeer now in jail who tried to dominate the industry. He has married and divorced four young, handsome wives. He owns a $6,500 custom-built pale blue Cadillac, allegedly bulletproof, which formerly belonged to Tony Canero, the gamblingship proprietor. As the U.S. Board of Tax Appeals once expressed it, Wilkerson's "life has been a successful though precarious one."

Billy was born in Nashville, Tenn. on Sept. 29, 1894. When Billy was seven his father won, at a poker game, the bottling rights for Coca-Cola in 13 Southern states, foolishly swapped them for a movie theater, and sold the theater for $4,000.

In his teens, Billy went to a school run by Benedictine monks in Cullman, Alabama. When he began to think seriously of studying for the priesthood, his horrified father rushed him off to St. Mary's in Maryland (B.A.) and to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Just before Billy got his M.D., his father died. Billy discarded the idea of medicine when a Philadelphia friend bought a theater. Billy became manager.

During the Prohibition '20s Billy had a connection with an exclusive "Club" on the corner of Manhattan's 52nd Street and Park Avenue. The club involved an initiation fee of $1,500 but people with money still filtered in. Finally police filtered in through the skylight. Billy, of course, had been gone for three days.

How to Pay Debts. Billy's lifework began in earnest in 1929. He took over a half-interest in a faltering Manhattan tradepaper, pumped some life into it, sold out for $20,000--just before the famed Crash. Shortly after he ran into a Wall Streeter who advised him to play the market at rock bottom. Billy borrowed $25,000 more, went into the Exchange at 10 in the morning, came out 45 minutes later without a cent in the world. Nonetheless, in July 1930, Wilkerson formed the Wilkerson Daily Corporation with Manhattan Broker Herbert Sonn, to print the Hollywood Reporter.

In the early days of the Reporter, Wilkerson's somewhat impetuous handling of news got him barred from the studios with metronomic regularity. Once in 1931 he was locked out of all the lots. One of the things that worried Partner Sonn was Wilkerson's habit of borrowing money from the corporation. By July 1936 he owed $69,930. But by March 1938 the president of the corporation (Wilkerson) had paid off the corporation.

Billy later explained to the Federal Government--which probed the corporation's tax payments--that the loans were used to build (in part) his $160,000 Bel-Air home. It was a necessary corporation expense, he argued, so that he could "conduct business at the dinner table." Some of the money also went to buy up Sonn's stock, pay off personal debts. To raise the cash to pay back the loans, Billy simply raised his salary and declared dividends.

How to Influence People. Publisher Wilkerson has almost overdeveloped an ancient publishing technique: that of rewarding advertisers in direct ratio to the extent of their advertising. In his heavy, slickpaper "yearbooks," those who decline to appear in the advertising columns are very likely to be missing from the text. To cinema bigwigs who live in dread of what an editorial lacing from the Reporter will do to an expensive production, Billy has sent suave circulars: "Naturally, there never has and never will be any penalty for anyone not advertising, but if you can see your way clear, particularly right at this time, my organization and myself will appreciate it. . . ."

At LaRue, Billy hopes to curb his passion for remodeling. While he ran the Trocadero he remodeled it three times, each time more disastrously, and at a total cost of $271,000 until it "looked just like the inside of a Frigidaire."

Billy's ex-wives and ex-in-laws remain friendly and look upon him indulgently as a sort of institution. A few onetime relatives, including Edith Gwynn, Wife No. 2, still work for the Reporter as if no Wilkerson family life had ever existed. "Y'know," drawls Edith, "Billy's real mistress is his work."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.