There were dozens of nightclubs operating at various times along the Sunset Strip in its early years-the 1920s through the ’50s. Among them, however, three were so popular with celebrities that they achieved household-name status nationwide and became famous around the world: Cafe Trocadero, Ciro’s and Mocambo. The first two clubs, Cafe Trocadero-“the Troc”-and Ciro’s, were launched by Billy Wilkerson, a nightclub impresario and the founder and publisher of The Hollywood Reporter.
The building that would house the Troc had been occupied by La Boheme, a cafe at 8614 Sunset in Sunset Plaza. La Boheme was closed by authorities in early 1934 because it had offered both cross-dressing performers on stage and illegal backroom gambling downstairs. (It had also sold liquor illegally, but Prohibition had ended that year.)
The location was ideal for the celebrities Wilkerson intended to attract. It was in Sunset Plaza on the Strip, [map], about halfway between Beverly Hills, where they lived, and Hollywood, where they worked.
Billy Wilkerson acquired the building, remodeled the interior in his trademark Hollywood Regency Moderne style and readied it for a grand opening on Sept. 17, 1934. The name was a reference to Trocadero Plaza at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Wilkerson’s favorite city.
The Troc soon became the top A-list place to be seen in Hollywood-movie stars could be assured Wilkerson would publish photographs taken at the club in THR’s next issue. Wilkerson viewed the club as the special reserve of the rich and famous. He did not book unknown acts. Billy Wilkerson was an inveterate gambler, so he set up a room in the back of the lower floor for high-stakes games.
In May 2006, Jim Heimann described the interior of Cafe Trocadero in article for the Times titled, “Those Hollywood nights; There was a time when stars of stage and screen enjoyed spending a night on the town rubbing shoulders with the city’s rank and file — and without a bodyguard in sight”:
The scene at the Cafe Trocadero … gives us a taste of what Hollywood high life was all about. Housed in a stylish Colonial- inspired building at 8610 Sunset, it catered to continental tastes. Guests entered through a lobby surrounded by a frieze of Paris and a row of striped satin settees, handing their wraps to a pert coat- check girl before moving into the cream-and-gold main dining room.
The walls were padded, Heimann wrote and at the rear of the building, picture windows looked out across the twinkling lights that lined the Los Angeles Basin’s street grid. A top-name dance band played on a stage at center on the west-facing wall, while celebrities in evening attire rumbaed on the shiny dance floor. “The menu,” Heimann wrote, “was ’30s elegant: blini au caviar Romanoff, green turtle amontillado soup, alligator pear salad and chateaubriand.”
Writing in the Dec. 7, 1997, Los Angeles Times, columnist Cecilia Rasmussen described the genesis of the club:
In 1934, [Hollywood Reporter publisher Billy Wilkerson] reopened a former roadhouse as the Cafe Trocadero, a smart French-themed late-night club at 8610 Sunset Blvd. Soon, agents began moving their offices to the Strip, where they were not only closer to their favorite tables, but also exempt from city business taxes, because that part of the street traversed unincorporated county territory.
Stars such as Lana Turner, Sonja Henie, Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, Fred Astaire, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby and William Powell sat in the dining room with its painted panoramas of the Parisian skyline, drinking champagne, before taking to the dance floor as Nat King Cole sang or Harl Smith and his Continental Orchestra belted out a rumba.
Celebrities of another sort also frequented the club. Hollywood mobsters like labor racketeer Willie Bioff, Tony Cornero, Mickey Cohen, Bugsy Siegel and Wilkerson’s good friend Johnny Roselli dined, drank and danced at Cafe Trocadero, adding to the glamorous atmosphere.
But the real action at the Troc was on the lower level of the club. Downstairs, tucked away behind the oak-paneled main room with its overstuffed booths and a copper-topped bar, in a smoky back room, Billy Wilkerson hosted high-stakes gambling on Saturday nights. Few actors or directors could afford the ante, so the players were all studio moguls like MGM’s Irving Thalberg, Fox’s Darryl Zanuck, Universal’s Carl Laemmle Jr., Joseph Schenck of United Artists and Fox and Sam Goldwyn, an independent.
On Sunday nights, the Troc hosted “Amateur Hour,” where stars like Mary Martin, Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason were introduced to Hollywood. Judy Garland performed there at age 13, not long after she’d signed with MGM.
“Everyone was invited” to Cafe Trocadero, Jim Heimann wrote, “but the cost of such an evening – around $18 in 1936, when the average hourly wage was around 25 cents – might set back the average Joe a couple of weeks’ pay. Less extravagant but more within reach, you could also just go to the Cellar, have drinks and $2 dinners for two and get out with only a $6 charge. But that was still three days’ pay.”
Despite his club’s success, Billy Wilkerson was never satisfied with the Cafe Trocadero’s aesthetics. In the nearly three years that he owned the club, it generated $3.8 million in revenue (about $89 million today), but he remodeled it three times at a cost of $271,000 (approximately $6.3 million today). After all that investment, he sold it to gambling impresario Noah Hahn in 1937.