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Jimmy Jimmy Murphy, the Irishman behind the iconic Beverly Hills restaurant, a favorite among Hollywood’s elite for over twenty years, tells his story to Patricia Danaher. or more than 20 years, Jimmy’s was the place in Hollywood where the good and the great, the rich and the very famous came to let their hair down, secure in the attentions of Jimmy Murphy and his Mullingar-born wife, Anne. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were regulars, as were Maureen O’Hara, Mitzi Gaynor, Bob and Dolores Hope, Paul Newman, Henry Kissinger, Burt Lancaster, Farrah Fawcett, Roger Moore, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and many, many others. To Marlon Brando, he was “Il Patron.” To Angela Lansbury, he was a regular dance partner. To Old Hollywood, Jimmy Murphy was the keeper of the most elegant salon and restaurant in Beverly Hills, where anything could (and did) happen. It was thanks to a combination of good taste, charm and serendipity that Kilkennyborn Murphy, who left school at the age of 14, found himself and his restaurant at the heart of where Hollywood came to do business and came out to play.
F
various small hotels and then at the Carlton, until he landed a seemingly fated job at the Savoy Hotel in London. This marked his first introduction to waiting on celebrities, including Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona O’Neill, the
dancing. Her sister was a nurse in California, where they were looking for English-trained nurses. Anne was already planning to go to Los Angeles when we met in February 1963. We dated in London for three months and
The Salad Days “I never knew where the story was going to end, but I always felt from a young age that I was going to be a success,” he recently told me – 73 and as charming as ever. “I was one of eight children from an ordinary working class family. After I left school at 14, I went to Waterford and started my career in entertainment working in Dooley’s hotel.” In fact, he cycled to Waterford from Kilkenny to start work and learned the basics of catering and hotel management. After a couple of years he took the boat to England, where he worked in 90 IRISH AMERICA OCTOBER / NOVEMBER 2012
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Jimmy and Anne Murphy with Bob Hope; Jimmy with Za Za Gabor; with Angela Lansbury; with Ethel Kennedy and friend.
daughter of Irish American playwright Eugene O’Neill. Murphy was happy in London and gained experience that was to open doors down the line for him in then unimaginable ways. Fate intervened further when he met his future wife Anne Power at a dance at the Café du Paris near Leicester. “Anne was a nurse and she loved
then she moved to LA and kept sending me photos of convertibles and bikinis and sunshine! We kept corresponding for about nine months and during the following winter, which was one of the worst in Europe in decades, I made the decision to go to LA.” Getting visas and Green Cards was pretty straightforward in those days, and