The dorman had turned away difficult people before. It was part of the job at a place like this, a glam managing the egos of men who were not accustomed to hearing no. He had learned to do it with a specific kind of firmness that left no room for argument while still preserving the other person’s dignity. He was good at it.
But when Paul Newman and Robert Redford walked through that door together on the evening of April 9th, 1973, he understood immediately that this was going to be different. Not because they argued, not because they made a scene. They did neither. Newman listened to him carefully, nodded once, and said something quiet to Redford.
Redford looked at the room behind the dorman, the tables, the people, the whole institution of the place, and then looked back at Newman. Same thing I was thinking, Redford said. They turned around and walked back out into the street. What they did in the next two hours didn’t just embarrass one of the most exclusive private clubs in Los Angeles, it made it irrelevant.
April 9th, 1973, Los Angeles. The Pacific Club occupied the top floor of a building on Wilshshire Boulevard, one of the most exclusive private institutions in the city. Membership required sponsorship from two existing members, approval from a board of seven, and a waiting list that had averaged four years since the end of the war.
Its membership was drawn from the upper layer of Los Angeles finance, law, and old industry money, the people who own things rather than the people who made things, which meant that Hollywood had always existed at a slight remove from the Pacific Club’s understanding of itself. Newman was a member sponsored by a producer friend in 1968 on the theory that an Oscar nominated actor with a serious investment portfolio was precisely the kind of person the Pacific Club needed more of.
He used the club occasionally for business dinners, appreciated the kitchen, and had found it a useful place for meetings that required discretion and good food in roughly equal measure. On April 9th, 1973, he had arranged to meet two producers for dinner. The Sting was still in post-prouction. Butch Cassidy had generated $37 million on a budget of 6 million and had left every studio in Hollywood trying to understand what they had witnessed.
The producers wanted to discuss what came next. He had invited Redford. This was natural. The meeting concerned both of them. He had also invited a man named Calvin Webb. Uh Calvin Webb was 31 years old. He had grown up in Watts, attended UCLA on a scholarship, and had been trying to break into the film industry for six years with a specificity of focus that Newman found when he encountered it genuinely impressive.
Calvin had written three screenplays, two of which Newman thought were among the best unproduced scripts he had read in a decade. He had the meeting with Newman, not through connections, he had none, but through a letter he had sent to Newman’s production company that was direct enough and smart enough that Newman’s assistant had put it on the top of the pile. They had met twice.
Newman wanted him at the dinner because the screenplay being discussed was partially Calvin’s, a project that Calvin had originated and that Newman was considering producing. Yet, the three of them arrived at the Pacific Club at 7:15. Newman first, then Redford, then Calvin. Frank, the dorman, who had worked the club’s entrance for 11 years, greeted Newman with the practiced warmth of a man who recognized the difference between a member and a guest.
His eyes moved to Redford. not a member, but the kind of face that required no introduction. And then to Calvin. Frank’s expression did not change. He was too experienced for that. But something shifted in the quality of his stillness. Good evening, Mr. Newman. A pause that lasted precisely one second too long. I’m afraid there may be a situation this evening. Newman looked at him.
What kind of situation? Frank’s eyes moved briefly and involuntarily to Calvin, then back. The club has policies regarding guests. Certain standards for the dining room. Newman was quiet for a moment. The quiet of a man who has understood something immediately and is deciding how to respond to it. “Calvin Webb is my guest,” he said.
“He’s here for a business dinner.” “Of course.” Frank’s voice was genuinely apologetic, which made it worse rather than better. Unfortunately, the policy applies regardless of the nature of the visit. I’m sorry, Mr. Newman. I don’t make the rules. Newman turned to Redford. Redford had been watching Frank with the particular expression he used when he was being very still on the outside and very active on the inside.
Newman said something quiet, too quiet for Frank to hear, just a few words. Redford looked past Frank into the dining room. He looked at the tables, the crystal. The members settled into their evening with the comfortable permanence of people who had never doubted their right to be exactly where they were.
He looked back at Newman. Same thing I was thinking, Redford said. Newman turned back to Frank. Tell the producers we’ll be in touch, he said. And tell the manager, he paused. That I’ll be writing to the board, not threateningly, as a statement of effect. the way you note that you will be doing something that needs to be done.
Then he turned and the three of them walked back to the elevator and the doors closed and Frank stood alone in the entrance hall with the specific discomfort of a man who has just done his job correctly and feels terrible about it. On the street outside, Calvin said, “Yep, you didn’t have to do that.
” “Yes, we did,” Redford said. “Uh, there’s a restaurant down the block. I can wait.” “You’re not waiting anywhere,” Newman said. He had his hands in his jacket pockets and was looking down Wilshire Boulevard with the focused expression of a man running calculations. Do you know how many people in this city are having the same evening you just had? Trying to get into a room and being told the room isn’t for them.
He looked at Calvin. We’re going to fix that. Not permanently, not tonight, but tonight we’re going to fix it for as many people as we can reach in the next hour. He pulled out his phone book. He carried it everywhere. a small leatherbound book dense with names, numbers, addresses accumulated over 20 years in the industry. He started walking.
Redford fell in beside him. Calvin, after a moment, followed. Four blocks west on Wilshire was a restaurant called Benadetis. It was not exclusive. It had no membership requirements, no policies about guests, no board of approval. It had good food and large tables and a private room in the back that could seat 30 people if you pushed the tables together.
Newman had eaten there twice and remembered the owner’s name. He walked in, asked for Tony Benadeti, and when Tony appeared, a compact man in his 50s who recognized Newman immediately and showed it by becoming very still. Newman explained what he needed. A large table, the private room if possible, dinner for an unknown number of people, and the understanding that people would be arriving throughout the evening.
Tony gave him the private room without hesitation. Then Newman started making calls. The first calls were practical. The two producers from the Pacific Club who agreed immediately and expressed with genuine feeling their discomfort at what had happened. More calls followed. Newman worked through his book methodically, calling people he knew who were in the city that evening, directors, actors, writers, producers.
The message was simple. We’re at Benadetis on Wilshire. Come for dinner. Bring anyone who’s been trying to get a meeting. That last part was deliberate. Newman and Redford both understood something that the Pacific Club’s board had not considered. That the most valuable thing two men in their position could offer was not money or connections in the abstract, but access, the specific, direct, an in-person access that the industry’s informal networks systematically denied to people who hadn’t yet broken through.
Redford made his own calls. Younger names, more directors, more writers, people he had met through his growing involvement with independent cinema. A documentary filmmaker from Utah, a woman named Sandra, who had been trying to direct her first feature for 3 years. Two writers whose script, Three Studios, had passed on without being able to clearly say why.
By 8:30, the private room at Benedetes had 15 people in it. by 9:22. By 9:30, Tony Benadeti had opened the doors between the private room and the main dining area, and the party had expanded into the larger space, claiming tables in a loose perimeter around the original group. Yet, Newman sat at the center of it with Calvin Webb on one side and one of the producers from the Pacific Club on the other.
They talked about Calvin’s screenplay with the focused, practical attention of men who had decided something was going to be made and were working out how. Calvin, who had arrived on Wilshire Boulevard two hours earlier, expecting to spend the evening waiting in a restaurant by himself, found himself across a table from two of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, being asked detailed questions about his second act and listening to Newman defend a structural choice that Calvin had not been sure about himself.
Redford was at the other end of the table with Sandra and the two young writers who had brought their script. He read the first 20 pages while Sandra talked and asked questions when he finished. So he had the specific kind of attention that people remember. Fully present, no performance of interest, just the real thing.
Sandra would recall years later that she had walked into Benedetes that evening with the particular exhaustion of someone who had been told no so many times that the yes, when it finally came, was hard to believe was real. Redford did not say yes that evening, but he read 20 pages of her script with the seriousness they deserved, and that was enough to make the evening feel like something other than another closed door.
[snorts] Across the city, on the top floor of the building on Wilshire Boulevard, the Pacific Club’s dining room was at 2/3 capacity. Three tables were empty that were normally occupied by members who had called to cancel. One member had appeared, sat for 20 minutes, and left without eating, pausing only to tell the manager he was reconsidering his membership.
The manager called the board chair at 9:15. The board chair made his own calls. What he learned was this. Benedetti’s private room and surrounding tables held at peak 34 people. Among them were two of the three most commercially successful actors in America. Four producers whose combined output represented roughly 15% of the previous year’s major studio releases.
two directors whose recent work had generated significant critical attention and a collection of writers, filmmakers and industry professionals who had between them been trying to get meetings for a combined total of somewhere north of 40 years. In two hours uh without a phone tree or a publicist or a plan more elaborate than an address and the words come for dinner, Newman and Redford had assembled a room that functioned as a kind of alternative industry.
Not a protest, not a boycott, not a statement, but simply a gathering of people who made things held in a place that had no rules about who was allowed to make them. Calvin Webb’s screenplay entered formal development 3 weeks later. He received his first produced credit the following year. Sandre directed her first feature in 1975.
It was financed by a production company whose principles had been at Benadetis that evening. The two young writers sold their script 6 months after April 9th, 1973 to a producer who had sat across from them while Redford read their first 20 pages and had formed it on the basis of watching Redford’s face as he read a strong opinion about whether the script was worth his time.
Newman wrote to the Pacific Club’s board the following week. Four paragraphs, no threats, no demands. The final paragraph enclosed his membership card. I would rather help build something better than argue about the terms of something that no longer serves the purpose it claims to serve. Six other members sent similar letters.
Three enclosed their own cards. The board met twice in the following month. The policy was changed at the second meeting, not because of legal pressure, but because empty tables cost money and empty tables with newspaper reporters asking questions cost more. Newman and Redford never publicly discussed the evening.
When asked about it, and they were occasionally asked in the years that followed, uh, as the story circulated quietly through the industry, they deflected with the practiced ease of men who had long ago learned which questions did not require answers. Newman’s standard response, when pressed, was something close to, “We had a good dinner.
” Redford, when asked, would shrug in a way that communicated nothing and everything simultaneously. What neither of them ever commented on publicly was the exchange that Frank had witnessed, the 10 seconds in the entrance hall that had determined everything. Newman saying something quiet, Redford, looking at the room. Same thing I was thinking.
People who knew both men well would note that this was characteristic of their friendship at its core, not the banter and competition of the public version, but the private version that operated in the pause before the argument started uh when both of them were simply arriving at the same place without discussing the route. The Pacific Club still exists.
It has been integrated since the summer of 1973. Few of its current members know about the evening of April 9th, though the story has been told in various forms in film schools and industry circles for 50 years. Always slightly differently, always with the same shape. Two men turned away at a door, a decision made in 10 seconds, 2 hours of doing something better. Newman died in 2008.
Redford, in the years since, has talked occasionally about what he misses, the specific texture of a friendship that ran for 40 years. He has mentioned the arguments, the competition, the silence that was as much a part of their language as anything spoken. He has not mentioned April 9th, 1973. He has not needed to.
The people who were at Benadetis that evening remember it clearly enough for everyone. Calvin Webb in an interview given in 1998 was asked about the night his career began. He described arriving at the Pacific Club. He described the Dorman’s expression. He described walking back to the elevator and the street outside and Newman’s phone book in Benadetis.
He described the dinner, the conversation, the moment when the producer across the table shook his hand and said they would be in touch about the screenplay. The interviewer asked what he thought of Newman and Redford after that evening. Calvin was quiet for a moment. I’ve thought about this a lot, he said finally.
And what I keep coming back to is this. They didn’t make a speech. They didn’t start a campaign. They didn’t put out a statement. They just decided that if a room wasn’t going to let people in, they’d go build a better room. And they did it in 2 hours. He paused. That’s the thing nobody talks about when they talk about power.
The question isn’t whether you have it. The question is how fast you can use it to make something useful when the moment arrives. He looked at the interviewer. Newman and Redford answered that question in about 45 seconds. standing on a sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard. The dorman’s name was Frank Delano. He worked the Pacific Club’s entrance until 1981 when he retired to Pasadena.
He was not a public figure. He gave no interviews, but he told the story to his daughter once when she was old enough to understand it, and she told it to her children. Uh, and it filtered down through a family the way stories do when they contain something that doesn’t fade with repetition. Frank had told her that the moment he remembered most was not the refusal and not Newman’s four paragraph letter to the board and not the changed policy.
It was the 10 seconds in the entrance hall. Newman’s quiet words. Redford’s look at the room. The single sentence. He said, “Same thing I was thinking,” Frank told his daughter. And then they left. They just left. I stood there thinking, “These are two of the most famous men in the country.” and they just walked out of here because I told them no and they didn’t look angry.
They looked like they already knew what they were going to do, like they’d been waiting for a reason. He paused. I’ve thought about that a long time. He said, “My whether what I did that night was enforce a policy or give them a reason.” I think maybe it was both. If this story stayed with you, if it made you think about what you would do when a door closes, whether you would argue with the door or go build a better room, share it with someone who needs that reminder today.
And if you want more untold stories from the lives of the people who shaped an era, subscribe because the moments that tell you everything were never the ones that made the papers. They were the ones that happened on the sidewalk in the 10 seconds before anyone spoke.
