A Dance and a Dry Martini

It ended with a dance and a dry martini, a celebration rather than a funeral, and I guess that’s the way it should have gone. Eras deserve noisy departures.

I’m talking about the closing of the Beverly Hills Bistro and a weekend of goodbyes that occurred just before I took a brief timeout to recharge my battery and restore my moral vision.

The Bistro went out of business for a lot of reasons, none of which really matter now. Time has a way of eating up all kinds of eras, and it ate the one that flavored Kurt Niklas’ wilting garden off Wilshire.

I was there on a Saturday night, smothered in a fog of noise that made conversation impossible. I sat amid the clanging decibels and howls of laughter sipping a dry martini and trying to define what this was all about.

Then I saw Mike Silverman.

He seemed surrounded by beautiful women, his white hair glowing under the diffused lighting like some kind of special effect, an aging romantic caught up in the departure of an era he once owned.

Silverman has been a real estate broker in Beverly Hills since God was a kid, dealing in multimillion-dollar palaces and hanging out with the kinds of people that made the era a dazzler.

It is said of this tall, trim, elegant man that he’s slept with more beautiful women than most men even see in a lifetime, and he is not one to deny it. Legends grow around guys like Mike Silverman.

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After that night at the Bistro I met with him at a penthouse he’s trying to sell for $5 million, a 6,000-square-foot king’s aerie 22 stories high that overlooks just about anything worth seeing on the west side of L.A.

It was an odd setting for a kid born in a tenement. Silverman was raised in the Bronx, the son of a sweatshop tailor, and came west for the same reason everyone else does, money and glamour. He ended up in real estate, and his cool good looks thrust him into the middle of the Hollywood vortex.

“I was at a party one night when in walks the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” he says with a stammer that somehow enhances the aura of sophistication he projects. “It was Joan Crawford. Right away it’s clear she wants me, so I let her have me. After that, doors opened.”

He says it with a laugh, but it is also clear that there is a kind of triumph in it all, a pride of collection that characterized the old Hollywood and probably characterizes the new one too, but in a different way.

Later he would show me yellowing copies of magazines like Filmland, Movie Mirror and Rona Barrett’s Hollywood, with pictures of Silverman escorting the beauties of the day: Joan Crawford, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Anita Ekberg, when they were young and his hair was black.

Too busy romancing many women to connect permanently with one, Silverman never married but kept up a long “weekend relationship” with a beauty from whom he is now parting.

When I ask if it was all that much fun, he responds with a kind of faraway look that remembers the parties and the perfume, drifting like glitter through his yesterdays, and says, “It was colorful.”

*

A fading era notwithstanding, Silverman remains in the whirl. He is still listing big properties like the $5-million penthouse and a $22-million estate in the Santa Ynez Valley which he shows by helicopter, and women still regard him with special interest. Cher and Bo Derek are among his friends.

His flare and his history have put him most recently on “60 Minutes” and the Barbara Walters show. Publications as diverse as People magazine and the Wall Street Journal seek him out.

They talk about the celebrities he’s known and the foreign potentates he’s represented and the most expensive private residence in the world he once listed in London for $58 million.

Silverman tells anyone willing to listen that he sells the sizzle, not the steak, and he does it with a showmanship of champagne and helicopters difficult to deny. Big money is always accompanied by big egos and he appeals directly to them, because he’s got one too.

He once sold an outrageously expensive hilltop house to Charlton Heston by convincing him that Moses deserved a home close to God, and sold another by gift-wrapping it with red ribbon and a giant bow.

So there he was on the last weekend of the Bistro, a prince of the era he ruled, still celebrating beauty, his good looks mellowing with time into a softer focus.

Walking through the noisy room, past the dancers and the dry martinis, he left no doubt of his presence, smiling, joking, greeting. It was Mike Silverman selling the sizzle, and the sizzle he was selling was him.

Al Martinez can be reached through the Internet at [email protected]