Herman's Place

"It's like this," explained Giro's Proprietor Herman Hover last week, adjusting his hand-painted cravat (tropical birds). "You've got to get a room jumping. You've got to fill it with hep people. If you haven't got a jumpy room, you haven't got a Hollywood nightclub."

Enhancing Milady. If anybody knows about Hollywood nightclubs, and how to get a room jumping, it's Herman Hover. When he took an option on the famed Giro's six years ago, he was taking on the town's No. 1 white elephant. When a fire gutted it shortly afterward, his prospects looked even worse. But four years ago this month Hover started up again: the place has been jumpy ever since. It didn't seem to matter what happened to Hollywood--congressional investigations, hirings & firings, falling box office--so long as people could hash it over at Giro's.

There are several general rules for the successful operation of a nightclub. The room must be small and, on crowded nights, tables the size of telephone stands must be jammed together like jackstraws. The dance floor must be intimate enough to make people feel they are really rubbing elbows and posteriors with the great. To these rules, Hover adds a few of his own. Recently he has installed over the dance floor a new lighting fixture designed to enhance milady's makeup. As the evening (and milady's Pancake) begins to wear, the parabolic light slowly dims till by 2 a.m. faces can hardly be discerned at all.

Hover gets yeoman assistance from the daily gossip columnists. On occasion, they have reported enough celebrities in Giro's to fill a large section of the Hollywood Bowl. Hover encourages these exaggerations by spending $125,000 a year to promote the legend that anyone seen at Giro's must, of necessity, be a member of Hollywood's higher echelons.

Bettering Girls. In his tireless pursuit of jump, and on the theory that his patrons are easily jaded, Hover redecorates Giro's every two years. The cigarette and hatcheck girls, fetchingly attired in black-net hose, ballet skirts and tight bodices, are breathtaking and don't last long. If a girl hasn't "bettered herself" in three months, she is likely to be dropped. Betterment usually means getting some kind of movie job. One former Giro's girl, "Sunny" Ainsworth, married Tommy Manville (his seventh).

Despite its high prices and exalted clientele, the club itself doesn't make Hover as much money as his sidelines: Giro lipsticks, cigarette lighters, ashtrays, glassware. He makes his own ice cubes, carbonates his own water, and runs annual concerts--starring Xavier Cugat--in the Hollywood Bowl. Even juicier dividends come from the off-premises liquor sales and a catering service which runs many of the major studio parties. "I have found," Hover says, "that people will buy anything with the name Giro's on it."

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