The Real Tinsel

In Hollywood, institutions do not crumble; they deflate. On New Year's Eve, a loud whistling sigh will develop at Prince Michael Romanoff's fabled restaurant as it sags into extinction. After 23 years in business, the instant prince this week held a command cocktail party in order to tell selected courtiers that he is through.

Perhaps the trouble with Romanoff's today is that its proprietor has gone straight. Hollywood accepted him in the first place because an actor of Romanoff's caliber could not go unrewarded in a city of actors. "Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath," said Oscar Levant. Mike Romanoff was the real tinsel, a phony who wore his phoniness with such transparent innocence that it turned away wrath.

Never in Public. His name was Harry Gerguson alias Arthur Wellesley alias Count Gladstone alias Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, cousin and occasionally half brother of Nicholas II, last Czar of all the Russias. After preparing at Eton, he had been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Heidelberg, Oxford and Cambridge. Since, in fact, he was born in the New York area of indeterminate parentage, he always refused to speak Russian in public. But he was scrupulously elegant, with a camel's hair accent and a mill-racing brain. He lived on both coasts of North America and made occasional trips into what he called "the interior" in search of funds. During his numerous sojourns in jail, he carried a walking stick during exercise hours. Because he said he had once escaped from Ellis Island by trudgen crawl, he was celebrated as a swimmer until the day that he fell into a swimming pool before dozens of surprised witnesses and sank without a bubble. Hollywood understood him. His life deserved an Oscar.

The stars rewarded him with their patronage. John Huston took Evelyn Keyes to Romanoff's one night, and the dinner went off so well that Romanoff sent out for a ring and chartered a plane. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons buried one of their perfumed hatchets under a Romanoff's table. Admiral Bull Halsey. as best man, emceed the wedding breakfast celebrating Myrna Loy's marriage to Gene Markey. Gable guzzled champagne at Romanoff's with an indiscriminate palate. Errol Flynn naturally threw his suckling-pig parties at home, but Romanoff's catered them.

Besides, the food was passing fair. The prince's snob appeal was pure, being unfettered by real connections. And Romanoff's became one of the best-known restaurants anywhere. The shadow prince became just another honest Boniface. A businessman. A tradesman. A merchant. A non-fraud! Even the glitter of the real tinsel had worn off.

Empty Beanery. Romanoff naturally offers other reasons. Popular TV shows have often kept so many people at home, he claims, that "you could throw a bomb in here and injure no one but me and the waiters." Modern, unwashed actors prefer hamburger joints to glossy joints like Romanoff's. (And the washed, if in search of chic, pop off to Paris or Rome instead.) But mainly. Prince Mike complains of the Internal Revenue Service, whose new attitude toward expense accounts has already been reflected, he thinks, in empty tables at the royal beanery. "Democracy is synonymous with mediocrity,'' he snaps. "Our little boys in Washington are catering to the envious who have no expense accounts. It is the end of an era."

What will he do now? "I'm going out and find myself a nine-to-five job somewhere." he says, with all the easy grace he once used when describing his childhood romps in St. Petersburg's Winter Palace. "Actually, the only thing I ever wanted to be was a farmer. No one believes it, of course, but I never impose on anyone's incredulity."

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